Writing in Public

Posted on November 9, 2012 by Bud Hunt

It happened to me again last week, as it does from time to time. I wrote something that I felt needed to write, to say something I felt needed to be said, and as a result, some people’s feelings were hurt.

I don’t like to hurt people’s feelings. I suspect you don’t either. But it’s tricky to move in directions that always result in happiness for all. In fact, when it comes to issues of change and reform and fiddling with the essential elements of a system built by people, it’s likely that suggesting that something change results in someone taking it personally.

I try not to do that when the change suggested is directed at me. That said, I feel like we collectively are too nice to one another in our public discourse, or we are completely monstrous. The middle ground is narrow and slippery and tricky to navigate.

It’s always easier to talk about big problems at a global level, to suggest change for all, but not change for a specific system, like our own. But I find that the global comments directed at everyone are also too often directed at no one, and that’s no good, either.

I am reminded as I write this of the Four Agreements, a text that my friend and colleague often reminds me of. Those agreements are:

1. Be impeccable with your word.
2. Don’t take anything personally.
3. Don’t make assumptions.
4. Always do your best.

I suspect we all struggle to live up to those in all that we do. And I try to always expect that folks are living by some version of them. But I fail to not take things as personally as I’d like all the time, and I know others struggle with that. I also know that I do make assumptions about the folks that I work with – I try to always, in the words of Adaptive Schools language, presume positive intentions in others, even when I’m not sure. Especially when I am not sure.

But change breaks eggs. And can hurt feelings. And it’d be easier to not act for fear of causing harm. I’ve always been a big fan of the Society for Professional Journalists’ code of ethics, specifically their call to those seeking truth to work, as they aim to tell that truth, to minimize harm. They advocate that this looks like this:

Ethical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect.

Journalists should:
— Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage. Use special sensitivity when dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects.
— Be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.
— Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance.
— Recognize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than do public officials and others who seek power, influence or attention. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy.
— Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.
— Be cautious about identifying juvenile suspects or victims of sex crimes.
— Be judicious about naming criminal suspects before the formal filing of charges.
— Balance a criminal suspect’s fair trial rights with the public’s right to be informed.

And they recognize that, while you might cause some harm, there’s often a greater good at work. Tread carefully, but don’t not tread.

There’s paralysis in the moments after words I’ve written cause someone harm, and that paralysis is poisonous. It sends my stomach on every roller coaster I’ve yet experienced, costs me sleep, and incites a healthy pile of self-doubt.¹ But I realize there’s work to be done, and things to explore and wonder out loud in public about. Many times in the almost eight years I’ve been blogging, something I’ve written has led someone to question my motives, or to suggest that it’d be better if I didn’t share in public. Maybe, I’m often told, it’d be safer to not say anything.

And I think that’s wrong. We don’t share in public enough. We avoid action too often because we want to play safe and nice and not bother anyone. That’s not the world I want to live in. That’s not the person I want to be. That’s not the world I want my children to enter into. I want them to be agents for something, rather than passive participants in their lives.

And that’ll cause hurt sometimes. Okay. I can live with that. Right now, at least. At just this second of understanding. Which I’ll do my best to preserve and protect.

How do you work to minimize harm while you also work to advocate for the change you believe in? And what do you do when you cause harm, unintentionally or otherwise?

I’m in the middle of doubting myself right now. I’m writing right now to try to free myself a bit from that. [↩]

Follow Up to Today’s (Well, Okay, Yesterday’s) Blogging Conversation

Posted on September 28, 2012 by Bud Hunt

It was a real treat to get to spend an hour in conversation with some of my blogging and writing teachers on Thursday. We were assembled at Connected Learning TV by Jabiz to talk about student blogging. I hope we get to have round two soon – there was plenty more to talk about. Here’s the recording:

And a few further thoughts. If I had to give my stump speech for blogging, the talking points would look something like this:

Blogging should be a habit, not a unit. Multiple blogging units for students as they move through an institution makes for a really creepy digital graveyard of barely begun texts. Better to build the habit early on and practice as you go. Therefore . . .
Blogging should be buiit into the infrastructure of the learning institution, not up to the whims of a particular teacher or teachers.
Blogs can be really interesting containers – you can put pretty much any digital stuff into a blog that you’d ever want to – but they should also be playful playgroundy spaces. Blogs are much better as places of play rather than places of expectation.
Of course, the thing about toys and choices is that sometimes you’ve got to be able to choose not to play at all. Otherwise, you’re not really playing. Well, you are, but you’re playing a game that isn’t blogging. It’s called school. And that game isn’t always all that fun to play.

I said during the webinar that I felt like the infrastructure that we build, support and maintain should feel more like an invitation than an obligation. We should make spaces and places on the Web where we’d actually like to spend time, and we should be working to bring other folks in to the party. I think that’s the kind of work that Jim and Alan do. They play in public and invite others to play along. I think that Jabiz does that in his classroom.

Maybe I’ve been forgetting to do that lately.

But Suppose They Don’t Care

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Bud Hunt

I had the opportunity today to visit with a class at one of our high schools. It’s a neat class where students are exploring the digital world that their schooling happens within. They’re looking at electronic resources and portfolios and other things. They asked me in to talk about blogs and blogging in light of my recent thesis work as well as my overall interest and experience in the topic. They’ll be starting a blogging project soon, and I’ll be visiting with two more sections of the course tomorrow.

I shared this with them, a distillation of some of the descriptive and prescriptive ideas I’ve written about blogs and blogging and bloggers. I tried to emphasize that good blogging, is a simple set of skills: reading, writing and thinking, although not necessarily in that order. Good blogging is a continuation of the tradition of good writers and folks from pre-digital times, too. Good blogging is paying attention and asking good questions. Thomas Paine’s name came up.

Good blogging, too, is hard to do well. It’s play dressed up to look like work.¹

My comments were nested in some of my thinking over at P2PU about the Common Core standards and what they have to say about reading and writing. I dropped the s-bomb a few times. Not because I wanted to, but because David Coleman, one of the architects of the standards, who’s now out on the road teaching folks what the CCSS are about, did in a talk a while back. The larger talk he gave was about how the CCSS shifts the focus from some areas of literacy² to others, namely more emphasis on informational text and close reading and writing.

I don’t mind that shift. And I think some others have over exaggerated it. But what I do mind very much is when he says this:

Do people know the two most popular forms of writing in the American high school today? Texting someone said; I don’t think that’s for credit though yet. But I would say that as someone said it is personal writing. It is either the exposition of a personal opinion or it is the presentation of a personal matter. The only problem, forgive me for saying this so bluntly, the only problem with those two forms of writing is as you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think. What they instead care about is can you make an argument with evidence, is there something verifiable behind what you’re saying or what you think or feel that you can demonstrate to me. It is rare in a working environment that someone says, “Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.”³

While Coleman’s right about needing to be able to make an argument, or at least to use evidence and be verifiable⁴, he’s certainly wrong that no one cares. As I told the students today, I’d say that the trick to writing with voice and passion and agency and with owning your learning is that people will give a shit about what you have to say. But you’ve got to make them. And that’s what a good writer, or blogger, does. She makes others care and shows them why they should. A blogger, at least in the Richardsonian ideal⁵ is the embodiment of a close reader and attentive writer, or, as Coleman describes as the aim for students through the standards, a good blogger should:

Read like a detective and write like a conscientious investigative reporter.

Yeah. Bloggers should be like that. Good crap detectors making interesting stuff.

Sounds great, and there’s only one problem.

Suppose the students whom you want to blog and write and bleed their passions on a digital page somewhere as a way of learning to read and write and think just don’t care?

Suppose they’re indifferent about learning? Or at least appear to be. What do we do about that? And what did we do to make that happen?

Sometimes, with footnotes. Footnotes look much too workish to be fun, right? [↩]
Read: the personal. [↩]
Link to the video – about 8:30 on the time code. The unofficial transcript I’m quoting from is here. The off the cuff reference to not giving a shit, surprisingly, isn’t in the “official transcript.” [↩]
One concern I do have about the CCSS is the same that I do about education policy in general right now; who decides “what counts?” [↩]
Which I think is the right model to aim for. [↩]

Ruminations on Implications: Notes from the Thesis

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Bud Hunt

I’m taking a break from writing up the implications portion of my thesis by coming over here to write some more. I’m beginning to get to the place in my research that I have some definite things to say about what I found out. But I’m having some trouble saying them. Not because I know what they are – but, I think, because of what I’m using to write. Word is not where I go to think. It’s where I go to comply. When I need to think about something, I come here, to a WordPress window in my browser¹.

So maybe I’ll just try to do a little bit of freewriting here and see how it goes. Here’s what I think I know right now as it relates to my research.

To start with, here are my research questions:

What does reading and writing for school-related purposes look like in school-sponsored online writing spaces?
Who is doing the writing in these spaces? The reading?
Are the new tools and affordances of online digital writing, tools like hyperlinks, and affordances like immediate publication and world-wide audience, a factor in these spaces? If so, how?

While it’s certainly not a definitive collection of all the writing that’s happening in my school district, I’m going to take a guess and say that the three weeks of blog posts from the beginning of this school year that I’ve looked at in the course of my study are a good-sized sample of the public writing happening in my school district.

And, to start with, there’s just not enough of it. In three weeks, I can count on both hands the number of classrooms doing public writing in this space. And that leaves me with three fingers left to count other things.

Are students and teachers blogging or writing online² in other spaces? Certainly. One of the limitations of my study, one that I knew would be a problem for some of what I was wondering about, was that I am limited to public stuff. If I wanted a fuller picture of what the writing that’s happening online in my school district looks like, I need to interrogate our district’s Moodle. I need to peer into our district implementation of Google Docs. On Thursday, a teacher in our district started sharing a Google Docs collection with me from one of his classes. He was excited about the number of texts they were producing together. I’ve not yet opened the folder – but I’ve watched a hundred or so documents enter into my document list. Sometimes in real time, I’ve seen them drop into place.

Writing is happening. But why not here?³

Here’s what I know about the writiing that I am seeing:

Students and teachers aren’t talking to each other, for the most part, via the blog engine. I suspect they are talking in class, but they’re not writing back and forth in these spaces. Three quarters of the posts I saw during the period of the study contained no comments. Of the ones that held comments, only another large handful could be considered any sort of conversation – back and forth between the author of the post and the commenter(s). If these students are writing because they expect an audience, well, then they’re still waiting.
Because no one’s responding, there’s a sense that no one’s reading. Multiple times, I saw little snippets of text, clearly put up as tests, or left behind as mistakes, that weren’t taken down or adjusted. Why bother, if no one’s looking – or it doesn’t seem like anyone is?
The kind of writing that’s being asked of students in these spaces? Well, it’s interesting – I can break it down into three types – daily summaries, written collectively by elementary school classes; reflective essays about various topics; and responses to teacher questions. Lots of it is writing that doesn’t require a blog. And it’s writing that involves very, very, very little source material. Very few quotes. Very few links. And the links, when they’re present, are not embedded in the text. They lie naked and open in the text. And that seems problematic to me⁴
The writing that staff are doing is a little bit better⁵ – like students, they’re writing reflective essays, and sharing lots of newslettery information. But I can’t be sure, from this data set, if the folks they want to reach are being reached through this vehicle.

In short, the blog engine seems to me, in this data set, at least, an ~~utter failure~~ underutilized tool.

And perhaps that’s an okay place to stop for right this moment.

And, yeah, I suppose that means that I’ve a significant bias about blogs and the power of blogging that, if I haven’t yet, I need to be sure to disclose somewhere in the thesis. [↩]
Oddly, in my world, and perhaps in yours, the word “blogging” has come to mean anything written in a Web browser that isn’t an email, no matter where it ends up. Isn’t that interesting? I might be a blog snob, but that bugs me. And it probably shouldn’t. It’s less of a problem for me than it used to be – I don’t correct people now when they say that. I used to. [↩]
That’s not one of my research questions. So what? [↩]
But, again, I may well be a blog snob. But if the potential of the “writing of the 21st Century” is that it happens online and organically and is connected to other texts and blah blah blah – suppose it’s not. Is that *bad* or *problematic* or just unfortunate? Or is it just so? As I’m in the middle of arguing that we need to make sure students have the tools to do this sort of work, a body of data that suggests, nah, it’s not so important,” is a little bit problematic. [↩]
Oops – judgement again. Might need a better word than, ahem, “better.” [↩]

“Pummeled by a Deluge”

Posted on August 22, 2011 by Bud Hunt

Rebecca Blood, a lifetime ago in Internet time, wrote of weblogs:

We are being pummeled by a deluge of data and unless we create time and spaces in which to reflect, we will be left with only our reactions.

And when I read Dean yesterday talking of owning one’s space to share one’s words, and then Tony’s post about the value of Twitter, I am reminded that I lean on Dean’s side of this conversation. Twitter is to relationships as wheel decals are to roller skates. Nice to have and to use, but far from essential.

Twitter is the spice that flavors what you’re putting on the table. It might be the after dinner snack. It may well be the connective tissue that flavors the stew¹. But it’s not the meal. It’s part of the deluge², and we must push against it, building spaces where we can be thoughtful.

Because you just needed one more awkward meal metaphor in there, didn’t you? [↩]
At least sometimes. [↩]

#ISTE11: On Longitudinal Web Presences for Writing, Learning, Being

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Bud Hunt

I had the opportunity to hear Paul Allison, one of my favorite teachers, talk at length about his work with Youth Voices yesterday. Usually, Paul’s asking about others’ work, or showcasing the work he’s doing – but not talking about the thinking behind the work. And I like it when he does so. I hope he’d do that more.

He said that the pedagogical and philosophical¹ recipe for Youth Voices was something like:

James Beane and his work on breaking down the curriculum barriers and asking good questions
plus Paulo Friere’s thinking on asking learners to look for generative themes
with a dash of Peter Elbow who reminds us of the power of making things through free writing.

I need to return to all three of those folks and dig back in to some of their thinking.

But he said something, off the cuff, that I thought was really important. He mentioned that he’d been in the Youth Voices work for eight years², and that students who started in tenth grade were able, in eleventh and twelfth, to return to the space and pick up where they left off. They didn’t have to learn a new space, and their work from previous years was right there.

That’s powerful and important and worth unpacking a little bit. Teachers who are using interesting technology with their students find themselves too often in the setup and infrastructure business – and that’s fine sometimes. But not every time or every lesson or every year.

One of the reasons I went to work for an IT department was because I wanted to help make spaces that had a life beyond one classroom. A student shouldn’t create one blog to suit the needs of every teacher that asks for work to occur in such spaces. Students create short term tools for what should be long term work, and they find themselves create blogs every time they start to do interesting work. The assumption becomes that the work they’re doing in these temporary spaces is throwaway work. When the unit, semester, or year ends, the space dies and the student is asked to create the next one.

That’s not how it should work.

What I love about Paul’s work, and the work of other folks who are thinking about the long game of educational spaces where work lives and breathes and mingles with other work, is that they’re building what I call³ longitudinal Web presences. Spaces where the portfolio happens as the collection grows. Places where the stuff a student made yesterday and the stuff a student makes today will be around for a student to add to tomorrow. Places that don’t die every few months or are subject to Teacher A or B’s personal web tool preference.

When Karl or Michelle or I talk about digital learning ecologies, or Paul talks about Youth Voices, I think that’s what we’re talking about. Teachers shouldn’t have to be in the creation and infrastructure business all the time. Nor should they be helping kids to cram important work into temporary places.

If you’re a tech director or a CIO, I hope you’re thinking about how to create these spaces. I also hope you’re thinking about how to help students return to them over time and to think through what they’ve made and how it resonates, or doesn’t, as they expand their knowledge and experience. In St. Vrain, we’ve built a few tools that help with this, but we’re nowhere close to figuring it out.

We do, know, though, and have been charged by our school board, that we are stewards of the work our students produce. That’s an important word – the IT department is responsible for looking after the students’ work. We’ve got to make sure it’s well taken care of and preserved and saved until they leave our care. And that they can take it with them when they go.

That’s what a portfolio should be. That’s worth making. Thoughtfully.⁴ I continue to be inspired and pushed by the work of folks like Paul who are building places of learning that last on the Web.

My words, not his [↩]
Eight years. How many writing spaces do you have that last six months. Learning, folks, is a marathon. [↩]
Probably incorrectly, but playing with words is fun. [↩]
Sometimes, the curbs matter and the making of the containers are essential, in no small part because the traffic on the road and the stuff in the boxes is precious and worth looking after. The road needs to last for a long, long time. [↩]

The Parenthetical

Posted on May 26, 2011 by Bud Hunt

I’m spending more and more time in the spaces between the lines. Or, at least, my thoughts are. In my writing lately, I’ve been gravitating to the parenthetical, to the notes in the margins that surround the text.¹

Whatever it is, I find myself seeking some middle ground between the tweet and the blog post.² So I’m trying out a new feature here on the blog called an “aside.” These are posts that aren’t quite posts and aren’t quite tweets – they’re something in between. This might be a foolish idea, one that is meaningless to readers and is unclear to boot. And I may well abandon the idea twenty minutes from now.³

~~This post is an aside. Let’s see what it looks like.~~⁴

UPDATE: It appears that asides break my footnotes. Which is ironic and appropriate. So my next post will be an actual “aside,” WordPress speaking.

Perhaps my love of footnotes is a symptom. Or part of the problem. Not sure. [↩]
Perhaps, if Twitlonger were still nicely integrated with my Twitter clients, I wouldn’t feel this itch that needs scratching. Then again, perhaps not. It’s a silly need, the need for middle ground in writing – write what you need and then stop, right? [↩]
But, hey. What fun’s having a blog if you can’t fiddle with it from time to time? [↩]
And, I’m realizing, conversations about topics like this would make for a really interesting podcast series on writing. At least to me. [↩]

Digging In

Posted on December 14, 2010 by Bud Hunt

If you’ve been following along on what I’ve been up to lately, you know that I’ve been facilitating, along with Michelle and some colleagues from the Colorado State University Writing Project, some teacher research projects in my school district. It’s good and important work, and I’m trying, as we facilitate, to be engaged in my own teacher research along with the group. It’s one thing to say that a practice is important. It’s a better thing to model its importance by doing it.

Earlier in the year, I wrote about my proposed research topic, and about how I thought I might proceed. Tomorrow, I’m digging into the work in earnest.

I’m curious about how we, in our school district, are actually using our blogging engine, a WordPress installation that’s coming up on three years old. I read what gets posted there, but I’ve never taken a real hard and descriptive look to see what’s there. So tomorrow, I’m going to sit down and take a close look at a three week window of the blogging engine from this year, and I’m going to try to read, annotate, and classify every posting that appears there. Then, based on what I see, I’d like to follow up with some of the authors, both teachers and students, and see if I can learn more about what they’re blogging about and why they’re blogging at all.

Why am I looking ? Well, in large part because I want to see what’s happening in the space, and to go after promising practices that are present. And, to be brutally honest, I’m looking because I expect that what I’ll see is a great deal of using blogs, rather than blogging, and that’s worth knowing and quantifying.

So I’m digging in. I suspect it’ll be an interesting look. And, as with most teacher research, I suspect my questions will change a bit as I get into the data and see what there is to see.

Wish me luck.

The Podcast: Bloggin’ in the Rain

Posted on June 8, 2010 by Bud Hunt

On today’s podcast, I attempt to answer a series of Twitter questions from Nawal about how to promote writing environments that help students to write connectively (as Will calls it.) I also rant a bit about “blogging units” (I’m against ‘em.) Somewhere in there, I reference George Hillocks’ really excellent metaanalysis of composition instruction studies (PDF) and Stephen Downes’ recent talk in Buenos Aires, as well as Troy’s book, The Digital Writing Workshop. I hope it helps, Nawal.

Looking forward to your thoughts, as always.

Direct Link to Audio

US Dept of Education Press Office Won’t Talk to (Bud the) Teacher

Posted on March 11, 2010 by Bud Hunt

I continue to ask of everyone I can speak with in Washington and in Congressional and government offices alike: What is the rationale for eliminating funding for the National Writing Project? It is a simple question, or it seems to be. But I can’t get anyone to answer it beyond broad strokes of “local and state redundancy” and “no significant impact” on students. Since I don’t understand how a national network can exist at the local or state level, and I have evidence to the contrary on impact on students and teachers, I’ll keep asking. It just doesn’t make sense.

An added wrinkle is that one of the folks that I originally started asking the question of is now, apparently, unwilling to talk to me at all. Here’s the story.

Every day this week, before and after work, I’ve left a message with the Press Office of the Department of Education asking for an answer to my question for the rationale behind the elimination of the National Writing Project from the 2011 proposed education budget. On Tuesday morning, I had a very nice and pleasant exchange with one of the women who answers the phones at that line. She was polite as I explained my request, as she read it back to me, and confirmed my phone number and e-mail address. She asked me when I’d like a response. I told her five PM that day, which is a typical turnaround for a media response. She said someone would get back to me prior to that time. She also asked me what news organization I was with. I informed her that I was a blogger, and she said okay.

No one returned that call.

But I’m stubborn I understand how busy people are. So, Wednesday morning, I called the press office back and, as luck would have it, the phone was answered by the same person. She remembered my question, and pulled up her notes. She had my phone number right. But I didn’t get a call back. I asked her why. That’s when she informed me that, as I wasn’t a member of the press, I wasn’t entitled to a response from their office. That floored me a bit.

I asked her to explain who told her that. She put me on hold, and after a few moments, returned and explained that Sandra Abrevaya, one of the folks who manages the office’s Twitter presence, fielded the request and informed the kind phone answerer that she should “only pass along (messages) if he is a reporter.”

I asked the receptionist, who again would not give me her name, so far the only person in the entire Education Department who has actually spoken to me on the phone, if she would get a definition from Ms. Abrevaya as to what constitutes a “reporter.” (I’m thinking that I sure am “reporting” this conversation and my experience.) I have yet to hear back.

I was referred to a general question and information line, which was actually quite helpful. If you’d like to inquire about an educational issue, you may have the best results by calling 1-800-872-5327 and pressing 3. Then again, it might not be THAT useful, because I’m still waiting to hear back from the person to whom I was referred from there, too.

I guess I’d have to express my disappointment in the Department of Education’s Press Office, and specifically Sandra Abrevaya. As one of the folks behind the @EdPressSec Twitter account, she has been, presumably, receiving my replies and requests for information about the National Writing Project rationale for more than two weeks. My voice messages for about a week. And she chose to ignore them. Because I’m not a “reporter.”

We cannot accept a government that simultaneously leverages social media to get their message out but ignores the messages of its constituents. I’m not willing to quit asking my question because I’m not a “reporter.” So, again, here’s what I’d like to know:

What is the rationale for the elimination of the National Writing Project? What is the information that was used to make the decision? Who is the person or persons who ultimately made the decision, and how would they answer others’ data that suggest strong results?

Why is that such a hard collection of questions to get an answer to? Seems like they’d certainly like to hear from us, but not talk to us.

I’ll keep trying. Maybe you will, too.

photo credit: Bud the Teacher

Bud the Teacher

Inquiry & Reflection for Better Learning

Category Archives: Blogging