I’ve assigned many research projects in my time as a teacher. Perhaps you have, too. Research, the process of looking and re-looking at the way an issue or idea has been explored, is a vital part of learning.
Perhaps you, like me, have assigned research projects that required that students cite their sources, and perhaps you, like me, wanted to make sure your students went deeper than a quick Google search and the top five hits for whatever search term or terms they happened to type in the first time they went looking.
So maybe you, like me, made a requirement of the project that students had to include one or more “print sources,” materials that couldn’t be downloaded from the Web.
If so, maybe you have this question, too:
What does “print resource” mean anymore? Has it become a meaningless term?
Let’s consider for a moment what used to count. An article from a newspaper was, in my classroom, considered a print resource. How about now? I’m more likely to read my local paper online than I am to read the print edition. Is an article from the newspaper still a print resource?
How about a magazine article? When I was in middle and high school, one of the great resources at the local library was a collection of magazine articles on CD-ROM databases. Even then, a magazine article wasn’t a print source, but it counted as one. Maybe because I was required to turn in a printout of the article with the final draft of my papers.
Encyclopedias? By high school, encyclopedias shouldn’t be cited by anyone, much less count as sources. But they did, and often do.
So might I humbly suggest a small change to any assignment that requires students to provide a “print” resource? Ask them for a primary source instead.
The print/electronic binary is over. Dead. (And I do so dislike saying that something’s “dead.” But the difference between print and electronic is a meaningless difference, at least when we’re talking research. ) The transmission medium that delivered the message might not be the most important consideration in student research. And print stuff still matters – but not if it’s included solely because it’s on a piece of paper.
Ask students to think, instead, about primary and secondary sources. And later, after you’ve mastered that, ask them to think about the difference between citationality and attribution, and why that might matter in their research. And yours.
Do you ever want to say to folks who scream they don’t want their private lives online: “Maybe you should just try to be a better person.” ?
And I realized that I didn’t quite say what I meant there.
I believe that pivacy is important and special, and that there are plenty of moments in my life that are my business and perhaps my family’s or close friends’ or colleagues’ business. That said, I think anything public is fair game for public. And I think my public persona, the person I am at work and in the world, be it the store, or church, or at the park or anywhere else, should be the same public persona online.
Because that’s who I am. Or who I’m becoming, at least.
I made a choice when I went online in 2005 that I was going to be the same grown up online as I was in the physical public. For the most part, I’ve kept to that. If I’d say it in a classroom, I’ll post it to the web. If I wouldn’t, I tend to keep it to myself. Sure, I’ve stumbled and posted in anger or frustration, but not as a habit. (Maybe. You’re certainly welcome to disagree with me here.) And I’ve made a trade – I don’t say everything that I might wish to say.
Modeling is perhaps the greatest teaching tool that we have. The actions that we engage in say as much and more about us than our directions to students ever will. I’ve never asked a student in one of my classes to do something that I wasn’t willing to do myself. And I’ve constantly sought out ways to show my students that I am engaged in the world in the ways that I want them to be – my students caught me reading and writing and thinking about things all the time, just as I asked them to read and write and think. I went to math class and struggled through geometry tests. I participated in science experiments. I got excited about things.
I tried to model for them what learning looked like. And I try to do that in my online public persona as well. So when people say to me “I don’t think I want my students to see my [insert online profile], I wonder what it is that they’re uncomfortable about.
We all stumble as people and don’t quite do the things we’d like to do, or behave perfectly. That’s human. And there are boundaries between personal and professional, between public and private. But those boundaries are far from hard and fast lines.
I’m sure that I’m not anywhere close to where I’d like to be in my actions. But I think it’s worth it to struggle to be a better person. And I think that struggle is human and worth sharing. We can all be better people, and education is a big piece of how that happens. And modeling is a big piece of education.
These ideas are still developing for me; I wonder what you think about them. What stays private? Public? What do you do online that you wouldn’t want your students to know about? Why not? As more of ourselves finds its way online, will these conversations stop being binary in nature?
Ever since we opened up lots more of the Internet in our school district earlier this year, the district has received several requests from teachers and other staff to block resources that are distractions in the classroom. I’ve written a stock response to those requests that I thought might be worth sharing. It’s my hope that their requests and the conversations that come from this response lead to changes in classroom practice.
Here it is:
Thanks for your question. When we implemented our new filter this school year, we looked at all the things we were currently blocking, what things were required to be blocked by law, and what we were blocking that we shouldn’t be.
What we’ve decided is that we will no longer use the web filter as a classroom management tool. Blocking one distraction doesn’t solve the problem of students off task – it just encourages them to find another site to distract them. Students off task is not a technology problem – it’s a behavior problem. It is our intention that we help students to learn the appropriate on-task behaviors instead of assuming that we can use filters to manage student use. Rather than blocking sites on an ad hoc basis, we will instead be working with folks to help them through computer and lab management issues in a way that promotes student responsibility. We know that the best filters in a classroom or lab are the people in that lab – both the educational staff monitoring student computer use as well as the students themselves.
This opens up possibilities for students and staff using websites for instructional purposes that in the past were blocked due to broad category blocks. It requires that staff and students manage their technology use rather than relying on a third party solution that can never do the job of replacing teachers monitoring students.
That said, we will still block sites that are discovered to violate CIPA requirements. If you discover one, please do not hesitate to share it with us. Also, if you discover a site that shouldn’t be blocked, please pass that along so that we can open it up.
I hope this makes sense. I’d be happy to speak further with you if you have further comments or questions.
How do you talk to folks in your districts about your Internet (un)filtering?
I’m doing some work next month with some folks on social networking, and one of the elements that I’m thinking a great deal about, thanks to a colleague’s suggestion, is how we can help educators to read social networks as texts.
I have a hunch that one can read a network like one reads any other text. That said, though, I’m finding that it’s a bit harder to see a network than it is to see a simpler, perhaps more linear text.
Specifically, I’m trying to design an activity that encourages some rhetorical analysis of the networks that educators and others are using to share information.
In layman’s terms, I’m hoping to generate a list of questions that folks can use as they read through networks to help them identify what the networks are communicating, how they’re communicating what they’re communicating, and how those messages are delivered.
I’m wondering what questions you would ask readers/participants to think about or look for as they work their way through a particular network or networks. What do you think we should be helping our students to think about as they read and create their own networks? I’d also be curious to hear your response to this general idea. I’m discovering that as I try to draft questions, I find myself using language about networks that I think is better used to describe group or community characteristics. Worth doing?
Here are a couple of questions that I think are pretty important – I’d be really curious to hear yours in the comments:
1. Who are the nodes in the network that you are reading/analyzing? Where do you see boundaries of membership in this network? How do you know they exist? (Self-identified or apparent to readers?)
2. How are they connected? From what perspective are you reading the network – how are you seeing the connections? How might another reader see those connections? The same? Differently? How do you know?
3. What practices or beliefs are communicated through the network? Are these explicit? Implicit? What methods of communication are privileged in the network? Under or unvalued? How do you know?
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.
I am sitting in the lobby of my hotel in San Antonio, waiting for the shuttle to take me back to the airport. For the first time since I arrived here, I am sitting at a full keyboard to write instead of frantically thumbing words into my iPhone keyboard. Here in the lobby, I have free wifi access, something that just wasn’t an option for me at the NCTE Convention.
I enjoyed very much having the opportunity to share work that we’ve been able to do with students in my district, as well as talking about the possibilities and logistics of tools like uStream, Mogulus, Twitter, Plurk and many others. The value of these particular tools, of course, is in modeling and demonstrating possibilities. We have so many options available to us, in theory, and we need to know what the barriers are to access so that we can begin to, or continue to, knock those down.
The Tech-On-The-Go kiosks, brainchildren of Kylene Beers and the product of a great deal of hard work by Sara Kajder and others, were a window for the conference attendees into the world of the shift that Karl and Anne and others talked so eloquently about in sessions all over the conference. Well done, y’all.
These kiosks, too, were windows into the conference for friends and colleagues and network connections of mine via our uStream and Chatterous sessions, opportunities to mix the friends that were here with the friends who were not, at least physically.
But it was just a taste, a frustratingly flighty, teeny tiny taste, of what it should have been. It should have been that we were able to make those connections in sessions and hallways, bringing in colleagues to share and think with as we learned together in conference presentations and conversations. (And, for $13 a day, I could have done so, although paying extra for what should be a piece of the puzzle for everyone rubs me the wrong way.)
I think NCTE is in a wonderfully frustrating place at the moment, looking at its almost 100 years of work and thinking very seriously and strategically about what is next, and how teaching and learning is changing and has always been changing. They are embracing the shift, as Karl has said, and it’s time for them to continue the push that they made this week.
Many of us within the organization (and plenty of folks who aren’t yet members) are willing, interested, and able to help with some of the geeky bits, as the legions of volunteers in the tech kiosks and several of the presenters in the sessions demonstrated. But it’ll take some support from the organization to make that happen.
One thing I hope next year’s organizers are already thinking about is how to provide meaningful wifi access to conference attendees so that we can not just see the possibilities in sessions and at kiosks, but can begin to practice with them in sessions and hallways. My computer, my favorite learning tool these days, sat unused in my bag as I relied upon my telephone and its connections to the outside world to bridge the gulf between myself and my learning networks who, although not all physically present, were here with me, and continue to provide me with questions and support and kind words and pushback. Through that connection and my networks, my NCTE conference, while physically situated in downtown San Antonio, reached literally around the world and all across the country.
More and more, I rely on those networks and those connections to help me do my learning and work. As I argue that we need to provide this connectivity in our schools and classrooms, I would also argue that we need that connectivity here, when teachers gather to learn and to work together to improve the learning we facilitate with our students. Shift happens, but we can and should be helping it along.
Kathleen Blake Yancey, president of NCTE, gave perhaps my favorite presentation of the conference, a stunning mix of image and speech, of thinking about teaching and thinking about technology, specifically the technologies of composition. (I hope that it is soon in video form so that I can share it with you. She has said she has interest in producing such a video, and you need to see what she did and what she said about composition here in the early days of the 21st Century. I’ll share if it makes it online.) Just before she closed, she reminded us all that, “If you are writing for the screen, you are writing for the network.” NCTE gets the shift, has defined it, and is beginning to talk about it in a thoughtful way. I am eager to see how the organization can take the talk of shifts and begin to model through actions what it says is the case.
Won’t that be an impressive thing?
I have enjoyed my time at the convention, connecting with colleagues old and new, and helping them to connect with the wider world of possibilities. I have faith in language and in language arts teachers, in the power of the written and spoken word and all the other ways we have to create, compose and share, and I know good things are coming. I also know, though, that time is short. Let us all be renewed and restored and get back to work. There’s plenty for all of us to do.
I always enjoy a good double meaning in a title, so I’m pleased that this podcast, recorded during my drive home from NECC, is called what it is. I find myself driving at the moment, refreshed and recharged. That’s what I wanted out of the conference. I’m pleased it worked that way, and grateful to lots of folks for all the conversation and push back. It is good to be in community (or communities, or whatever) with smart folks. I wanted to get this podcast up, mostly for my own benefit, before I lost some of that momentum.
I’m off to the beach for a week, hoping to top off my batteries, and will be doing my best to be offline – but I’d welcome your comments here on the podcast as a way of keeping me driving and moving when I return.
Oh – and below is a piece of the conversation that I mentioned in the ‘cast. Thanks to Kevin Honeycutt for recording it and Darren Draper and David Jakes for facilitating the conversation. Not sure if a complete recording exists, but you’ll get the gist of the conversation, one of my favorites.
Goal: Work to build multiple and overlapping communities of learners in our district who have knowledge, expertise and/or interest in the hardware and software and services that our district is supporting. Help those communities to begin to learn from each other and to support each other in their teaching and learning. As best as I can, document and share the learning and stories of the community.
I’m aware of so much potential in our classrooms and schools, and so many new tools that are coming online in the district that can be used to help students and teachers create deep and meaningful opportunities for learning and reflection in our classrooms. These are tools like laptops (three new elementary schools, opening in the fall, will have laptops for every teacher; many more schools are investing in laptops for some teachers to be used with) interactive whiteboards, and/or clickers and document cameras, software like ActivStudio, which we’re trying to standardize on across the district, and services like Moodle, which powers our St. Vrain Virtual Campus.
There are a multitude of projects and programs that already meet and discuss some of these issues – but there’s nowhere to go to see all of those conversations, or for folks who aren’t already connected to those groups to have the opportunity to find ways into the conversations. I also know that, with so many resources out there, we need to do a good job of aggregating all of that stuff somewhere (or somewheres) and then helping people to find that space.
Also, if we can work to build and/or sustain these communities, we can work to develop leadership on instructional issues in our district. Better yet, we can help teachers to teach teachers. That’s a good thing. I believe very strongly that the answers to most of the important questions facing schools and teachers and learning and students aren’t going to come out of school districts – they’re going to come out of classrooms. It’s my job to help get the stories out there and the people connected.
Had a delightful and energizing time at the Constructivist Celebration on Sunday, a day of teacher play, experimentation and, in the words of Gary Stager, time spent with folks who have “a commitment to use computers in creative ways for the benefit of children.”
I took my XO along as my note-taking machine for the day, thinking that it was poetically appropriate to do so. Brian C. Smith did the same, and, wouldn’t you know it, there were several other XO’s in the room, too. I ended up doing plenty of OLPC and Sugar evangelism, which was fine by me. I also got to play and explore and create.
But more important than my play were the statements and commitments by Gary Stager and Peter H. Reynolds, the day’s speakers, about the importance of creation and exploration, both for my practice as a teacher, but also, and of far greater value, my growth as a learner. I hear a true committment from both gentlemen that there is great value in creating rich environments for children and that we, as teachers, need to model the creation that we want our students to do.
Our students need to see us struggle and reach and grow and try and explore and learn and fail and stand back up at the end and say, “Wow. What’d I learn here?” That’s probably the best motivation for them to get their hands dirty. And we’ve never any credibility if we ask kids to do something that we won’t do.
I thank everyone involved with the event for a special day of battery recharging play. Special thanks to my friends from IMSA, April-Hope Wareham and Scott Swanson, who brought a whole mess of XO’s and taught me plenty about them.
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