Bud the Teacher

If

local is about
places near you

and

digital spaces are
places you can go

and

access is about
getting to those digital places
wherever you are,

then

what will
local look like
when
the new geography arrives?

Or is it (t)here?

Discuss.

I spent today engaged in some work with the National Writing Project and several of their thinking partners at the Digital Is . . . Convening event, a day of structured thinking and looking and conversation about what it means to write and teach writing at a time of such profound technological change in the world and, perhaps, our schools.  It was a classic NWP event, in the sense that there was a good collection of really smart folks present as well as thoughtful processes and protocols to help us have productive conversation and inquiry time.

What follows are a collection of the thoughts and ideas that swirled around my head today as I moved from conversation to conversation. I’ll probably pick a few of these to expand on in future posts, but I wanted to get them down now before they drifted away into the nebulous space of “I’ve got some notes somewhere about something important.”  Here goes:

• It seems like many (but certainly not all) of the projects I looked at today were created in semi-school environments.  By that, I mean that they were created in after-school programs or through work that students are engaged in outside of the traditional classroom.  I think that’s interesting for several reasons, one of which being that perhaps the role of schools and teachers is changing at the moment, or we’re stuck doing the “boring bits” that help students to be ready to engage in extracurricular projects like these.  More thinking needed here, as I know that many other pieces of work shared today happened within classrooms.
• Lots of talk about the need to expand and fiddle with the definitions of “reading,” “writing,” and “text.”  Words, too, like writing might not be broad enough to encompass skills like making movies and extensive digital projects.  “Composition” continues to be my go to word for the common skills of making meaning that I see across genre, medium and mode.  I like the way that Pat Fox said it this afternoon in one conversation: “We need to renegotiate the terms that we use.”
• Many of the tools that I use every day in my work and with students allow us to turn our processes into texts and to continually take apart and easily republish our final products.  Examples of “process as text” are recordings of classroom conversations, considered temporary and fleeting, that become something more than a passing conversation when they exist as video or audio recordings.  These types of texts stay fixed – we can’t really go back and change the flow of a conversation – but our finished products, when published digitally, are easily and perhaps even secretly editable and revisable after publication.  So we’re able to fix the temporary and fiddle with the permanent.  That seems interesting and worthy of further exploration.
• Is “digital” a new skillset, or do we need to refocus on, as Chris Lehmann said this evening, “Teaching tool and teaching audience is nothing unless we teach thoughtfullness (sic) and wisdom?”  To say it differently – is there anything terribly different about what students can do today with the digital tools they have available to them?  If there is, what is it?  I think there are differences, but reaching for them is difficult.  (This is a question that I’ve been thinking about for a very long time.  It came up multiple times today, particularly in tweets I passed back and forth with Paul Allison.  I wrote a little bit more about it just before lunch:

This morning I was in a pretty fantastic session on the Youth Roots work in Oakland, California. What it reinforced for me was that so much of this work that we’re doing with digital texts and tools is sooooooo not about anything other than what we’ve been trying (often well, often not) to do in schools for a very long time – help people to be better people, preferably together.

What I mean by that is that we might’ve had a very good conversation fifty years ago about “Analog Is” – although we wouldn’t've known to call it that, because we didn’t have the other space of digital to compare it to. In that conversation, we would’ve talked about the tools that we had and how they helped us to better connect our students to the world and the world to our students. And we might’ve talked about the importance of honoring our students as people, and their passions as important. And we should’ve talked about what was happening in the world that wasn’t school, and what was worth bringing in to our classrooms, and what wasn’t. We would’ve had a great conversation about how the media of the day were reshaping the world, and what that meant, and how we could push back as we attempted to better understand that.

And now, we’re talking about what CAN happen in school, and what IS happening out of school, and how the two are or aren’t connected. And we’ll always be talking and writing and thinking about this, and I’m okay with it.

But as we sit here at the beginning of an explosion of writing and composing and making, I’m reminded of our humanness and our deep desires to connect and to be heard and to make a difference, to matter. And I’m excited because the tools have never been more accessible and never more powerful. Our work is as it was and as it will be, but still – there’s something new here, I think.

• Media literacy continues to be vital.  But like so many things, we’ve never gotten that as right as we could at school.  Making media seems more and more to be the best way to help students see how media influences audience.  So, making media becomes the way to teach media awareness and literacy.  Yes?
• A short movie, scripted and shot and edited and scored, takes much more time to make than an essay, it seems.  In fact, at least two texts are created – the script and the movie – so how do we assess all that “extra” work when we give students options for projects?
• For that matter, what happens to assessment when we find ourselves in the middle of digital studios of made meaning?  How do classrooms that look like this get “measured” against schools that look more traditional in nature?
• I heard again and again today that teachers must immerse themselves in the world of digital writing and media creation if they are to teach such things well.  I agree with that, and often say that I’d never do anything to a student that I wouldn’t do myself first.  But where does the time for such exploration fit into an already over-crowded school day?
• Are digital texts necessarily more dynamic than analog texts?  (Espen Aarseth makes a good case in his book Cybertext that the answer to that question is often that the digital texts are more linear and less flexibly read and responded to than their analog cousins.  I think he’s right.)
• How do questions of power and control get fiddled with in digital spaces?  Are there different relationships between those with power and those without online?  The same?  A little of both?
• There are issues of technology here.  Many times today, I heard that “It’s not about the technology, it’s about the learning.”  And that’s true.  Sometimes.  Other times, it’s most definitely about the technology.  It’s hard to make movies without cameras.  And editing stations. Impossible to record music without recording equipment.  What sorts of purchasing decisions affect what kinds of literacies get taught?  What sorts of server connections and bandwidth considerations ensure that students leave school comfortable in networked environments?  How do those technical decisions influence the culture of schools and communities?  Culture, after all, follows structure.

Whew.  Going to stop there for now.  As always, more questions than answers.  I’m okay with that.  I’d be interested in your thoughts on any of these ideas.  If you’re interested in others’ thoughts from the day, you might want to check out the NWP Digital Is Ning.

Earlier today, I sent a link to a student’s Twitter account to a staff member in the school he attends with a request that she share the link with a counselor in the school.  I read some things that caused me to worry for him.  Nothing too extreme, the sorts of things that kids, particularly young adults in the space between adolescence and adult, say and that are important.  I like this particular student; I only met him briefly in a presentation at a school in the district, but I’ve enjoyed getting to know him a bit better from his tweets.  Smart kid.  Needs some attention.  Worth it.

I find much of value in getting to interact with many district students via Twitter, my preferred channel for such interaction. Our students are online, and they are curious about the world, and they have things to teach us, if we are prepared to listen and learn them.

But sometimes, they will say things that may make us uncomfortable.  When that happens, it is up to us to follow up.  That’s the job.

I was reminded today of a counselor that I used to work with some years ago.  I went to her one day during the semester when I really started to wrap my head around social media and the power of the subscribe-able, bring-the-world-to-you Web.  I wanted to show her what I was learning about my students by following their writings on Xanga and MySpace, their public postings coming into my RSS reader.  I saw these students as people engaged in the world.  I laughed sometimes.  Was amazed on occasion.  Worried for them others.  “What an opportunity,” I said to her, “To see a little bit deeper into our students’ worlds, to engage them as people.  Perhaps counselors could and should be paying attention to these public spaces and learning from them, maybe even catching early glimpses of future problems.”  (Thinking back – and opportunities.)

She was hesitant to invade the students’ “personal” spaces, space that they were sharing in public.  She didn’t want to intrude.

Intrude.

I don’t believe that we have the luxury of ignoring our students when they share in public.  I don’t believe that we should duck away from engaging them for fear of finding ourselves in awkward situations.  That said, I think societal climates suggest we should avoid private connections for a bunch of reasons – one reason I like Twitter as a meeting place.  I don’t encourage students to come to Twitter.  But when they’re here, I do look for them as folks to learn from and with.  And while they’re here, I will treat them the same as I’d treat any other person.  Perhaps better than any other – they’re students in my school district, and I have a professional and legal obligation to them as human beings first, students second.  We all get lonely.  We all get down.  We all worry and lose perspective and have rough moments.  Students.  Grown ups.  All of us.  And we’re supposed to look after each other.

That we avoid fumbling through awkwardness is human, too.  It is often simpler to disengage and to not know what happens in the world where our students will spend 85% of their time.  But it’s not right.

No one of us can pay attention to every utterance.  That’s beyond human. But together, we can look out for each other.  Some students will never reach out to us.  But others will.  What a gift.

I learn from and with students in a different way now than when I was a classroom teacher, responsible for the learning of a certain group of pupils.  Now we learn together wherever we can, in the informal publics of our school district, both the physical world of seminars and workshops and classroom visits and also in the virtual worlds of Twitter and the other public spaces of the Internet.  I’ve mentioned to colleagues that I follow students on Twitter and similar spaces.  Often, the response is surprise.  I always worry about that.

I want educators online and paying attention when a student exploring the public voice begins to share some things that are too often left unshared.  I want those educators and students to trust each other to handle those opportunities with respect and care.  I want growth to happen.  I want it to be good. I want positive and supportive models for students to light the way.

And, yes, I do want to intrude.  Each and every kid is worth the intrusion to keep them safe and vibrant and engaged and with us.

And you are, too.¹

1. A gracious thank you to Michelle Bourgeois, who kindly read and responded to an early draft of this post. [↩]

In today’s podcast, I talk about a little collaborative writing experiment that I began last week, what I think worked, what perhaps didn’t, and share some of my thinking about why such things might be important.  Certainly a first draft thinking podcast.  Here’s the original EtherPad document, still available for editing and revision, as well as a PDF copy of the text as it exists at the time of this post.  I’d be curious as to your thinking about the value of tools like these and how we might use them to create and converse.  I like that Stephen expands the idea of writing as creation very much.  He’s right, of course.

Direct Link to Audio

EtherPad & Collaborative Writing – An Experiment

I’m writing this post from the back porch of a family beach rental in South Carolina.  The breeze is ruffling the pages of the paperback Ive just put down, and will soon pick back up.  The ever-present hum/roar of waves hitting the beach drones on, in a most delightful way.  My father’s swimming in the pool below me, and my children are upstairs napping.  They have every right to be tired, because they’ve been exploring the ocean and the house and the pool and the greater Charleston area for the last several days and have plenty more exploring to do.

I try pretty hard to take a few technology breaks a year, to distance myself completely from the devices that rule my work week and can dictate, on occasion, priority.  (Well, at least, I allow myself to believe that devices, and not the people connected through them, or my own agency, or lack of it, can determine priorities. But I know that’s not the case.)

This trip, I’ve found myself taking my “break” in a slightly different way.  Today’s a good example.  I made pancakes for my daughters with a few Twitter friends.  Then we dined on the porch, about three feet from where I’m sitting now, and I announced the view.  The girls and I then hit the pool for several hours, and returned for a late lunch.  In their pre-nap stupor, as they “rested” on the couch, I caught up with several colleagues attending a conference and chatted with a couple more friends/acquaintances/people I (don’t always) know.

Some of the folks I’ve interacted with today are folks that I work with.  Many are not.  Most have no business being “here” on a family vacation.  That said, I’d have it no other way. My world’s at my fingertips on my own terms mostly all the time now, and I’m nowhere close to prepared with how to deal with that.

I feel like I balance work and personal responsibilities fairly well, sometimes leaning one way, other times the other, and I still don’t think I’m anywhere close to certain about how best to handle the blending of personal and professional that we’re smack in the middle of.  It’s new.  It’s different.  It’s awesome.  And it’s tricky.  And I rather enjoy it. I’m not quite sure why I’m choosing to think about it on a day like today, except that I’m aware that my normal “power down completely” relaxation strategy isn’t comfortable today.  Balance is important.  But balance isn’t binary.

I’m an hourly employee in a world where schedules are less and less important at a time when time’s never been more precious.  My friends and my colleagues may or may not be on the same short list of people, but they’re always close and reachable.  And that’s a fine paradox for such a sunny afternoon here at the ocean.  As I head back to my novel, I’m going to take a few minutes to ponder the point further.  Whatever’s happening at present to my nomal routines, I’m still getting some rest and relaxation, and I’m not going to squander it.

Will writes this week about some thinking inspired by a tweet from John Pederson:

So when John Tweeted “Community building is the new professional development” it really resonated, because it suggests that unlike most so-called pd that schools offer, getting our heads and our practice around this is a process, not an event. It’s learning, not training. (I cringed a couple of weeks ago when a principal said “Wow, our teachers are going to need a lot more ‘training.’” Ugh.) It’s not something we can “deliver” in a four-hour PowerPoint-like session. As Linda Darling-Hammond suggests, “…teachers need to learn the way other professionals do—continually, collaboratively, and on the job.” If that’s not a description of what I see most of us doing in these spaces I don’t know what is.

The thing about trying to argue that network/community building should be the goal of 21st Century professional development  is that there’s an assumption in that argument that community building as a piece of professional development is a new way of doing things, that that building community is a 21st Century idea.  And, perhaps with the technology, there are some “new” things there – but there might also be some “good” things there that are done in new ways. (I don’t think that John and Will make that assumption, for what it’s worth.)

“New” and “good” are not synonymous.  Neither are “new” and “bad” or “old” and “bad.”  Or “old” and “good.” Plenty of new things are bad, plenty of old things are good and so on.  I would like it very much if people working on teaching and learning projects, people studying and thinking about and implementing tools and practices, would separate the age of something from its value and attempt to make decisions based on that thing or idea or tool or practice’s value, rather than its age.

I understand why the “21st Century” whatever label gets put onto things.  It’s sexy.  It sizzles.  It’s “new” and shiny.  And yet – good professional development has always been about community building.  Professional organizations in the 19th and 20th Centuries were about community and conversation and collaboration. And they and we should be in the 21st Century, too.

Yes, we are in community when we blog and tweet and share and read and write and learn together.  This is how I learn and sometimes how I teach.  Of course the technology changes (some of) the nature and the speed of those interactions.  The power of collaborative technologies is certainly “new” and, often, “good.” (Not always, though.  Plenty of “bad.”) But the networking itself, social or professional or otherwise, isn’t the new bit.  It’s the good bit.  Rich.  Rewarding.  Powerful.  Sustaining.  Rooted in professional conversation. Really, really good.

But not new.

How might you punctuate the words below in ways that create different meanings? Might hyperlinks serve as punctuation, too?

I haven’t a clue, just thinking out loud, but I can think of at least three ways to punctuate those words below, each creating very different meanings, not including hyperlinks.

You?

The words in question:

I don’t write well like you do

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

EduCon 2.1 is coming up in about three weeks, and with it, for me, comes an exciting (and downright scary) opportunity to facilitate a conversation that I’ve been having off and on for a very long time. Here’s the description of the session:

The Internet as a medium, or way of communicating, is dynamic, complex, exciting, amazingly diverse, and, in plenty of substantive ways, pretty much nothing new. We have made connections through printed texts and oral stories for generations, other media have filled the gaps between peoples and cultures. There is, to quote a rather old text, “nothing new under the sun.” And yet there’s something about the nature of the Internet, and how it functions, that helps to flesh out a vital component of the writing process that was never quite visible before. Call it connective writing, or hypertext, or what you will, but the almost tactile connections we can make between texts and folks online are dynamic and significant. There’s nothing new about making text to text connections, but there’s sure something powerful in the representation of those links as semi-tangible things.
As we move forward into the new read/write web, I think it’s of value to reconsider both the “reading” and “writing” sides of the equation. We’ll save the reading for another conversation. Come to a session where we will revel in, and experiment with, writing and the power of language, thought, diction and connection to create and discover the world and ourselves. We’ll use some very 1.0 methodologies and some very 2.0 basic tools to think about how we write, what we write, and what we do and don’t do when we write and when we ask students to write for school.

I’m really interested, through the conversation, to move back a step, at least as far as my own self and career and knowledge of teaching and learning is concerned, and to refocus myself and my work around why I got into technology work in the first place – namely, because I saw computers as excellent creation and publication tools – they were and are very good for composition of all shapes and sizes.

I dig writing, and all the interesting writing’s being done on computers these days (or at least it’s being published via computers – Moleskines are still full of really excellent stuff).

One sideline, and perhaps even tangential, conversation that I keep thinking about is the shift to mobile devices. I’m writing this post on an HP Mini 1000, a netbook with a decent keyboard. I didn’t get interested in ultra mobile computers or smart phones or the like until I saw that I could use them to thoughtfully communicate in my favorite mode – text. (My XO is another story – while I’ve learned to type pretty well on its little keyboard, I own that machine more out of a desire to better understand a philosophy of product development and learning than out of a desire to have a tiny laptop for me to use. Oh, and supporting what I believe to be a good cause didn’t hurt, either. You could also argue that the XO created the market for the device I’m typing on. But I digress.)

I’ve written blog posts and e-mails and tweets and lots of other types of messages, posts, and whatnots on all sorts of devices. Cell phones, computers, typewriters, word processors, etc. And I just can’t function as a digital writer without a full sized keyboard.

What I worry about, in our rush to take everyone and everything mobile (and I am very much interested in mobile technology myself, don’t get me wrong) is that we’ll end up with tools that won’t really do what we need them to do. The tools themselves, as always, have the potential to shape what we think about, how we thinking about it, and what we do with those thoughts.

When I think about school and learning, I think about writing. Our learning tools need to have easy and useful ways for putting words and ideas into them as well as getting those words and ideas back out. Right now, I think mobile tools are more about consumption than they are about creation. (Thanks to Chris Craft for the right tweet at the right time to help me figure out that phrasing.)

And that scares me. In our conversation, I hope we get to talk about this notion I have that I’m certain that much of what we’re trying to do with technology today is work that we, or our predecessors, were trying to do with their technology yesterday – teach writing well. We all should be helping students develop the ability to draft and revise and edit and be their own crap detectors and learn to think about whom they were writing to, and to tailor their compositions to that/those audience(s). That basic framework works for text, video, audio, still pictures, and any combination thereof.

I hope you join me in some time spent writing, thinking, and talking about how writing remains so essential to learning and how technology, specifically the read/write web, assists us in fulfilling the promises and opportunities of strong writing communities and might be altering our societal reading, writing, and thinking paradigms. (One question of many for me on that front – What does it mean when the text that you are reading not only suggests that you consult another source, but it can take you to that source? In real time?)

I’m looking very much forward to it. I hope you are, too.

(You are coming to EduCon, right? It’s not too late to register – and if you can’t be there in person, the plan is to stream all of the great content from the event – so you can still participate.)