1.  They might not be “teaching.”  He’s showing what he does.  Modeling of a sort.  But you can’t find the value in something like that until you have some knowledge of what and why he’s doing what he’s doing.  So beginners, don’t apply to the James Taylor School of Guitar – not because it’s not fascinating, but because you’ll have to be an advanced player to see what it is he’s up to. #

2.  If you’re teaching somebody something, you’re not really teaching it to them unless they can follow you.  So be thoughtful about where your students are coming from before they got to you – and what you need to send them off with so they can make sense of the next class. #

3.  Sometimes, a master doing his thing can be wonderfully and usefully illustrative.  The camera angles on his videos – designed to give us a really, really good view of what he’s up to with his fingers – are handy.  Just look at that picture up at the top of this post – plenty of angles there.  But I’ve been playing guitar for 20 years.  His modeling is, for me, a useful teaching tool, because I know most of the stuff I need to know in order to make sense of what he’s doing.  Your mileage may vary. #

4.  He’s teaching.  But is anyone learning?¹  Does that matter? #

1. But how do you know?  Are you assessing the learning in any way?  Are there tests?  Performance assessments?  Is it enough to watch and say “huh” or “wow” or “hot dawg?” I think, plenty of times, those noises of adulation or delight or wonder are perfectly fine summative assessments.  In this case, acknowledge, and move on.

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– Meredith Stewart, “Double Vulnerable: The Paradox of Disability and Teaching,” English Journal 100.2 (2010): 27-30 #

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I just want it to be sexy for Colorado educators to be reflective about their practice. #

I want the ones who get the glory to be the men and women toiling in cramped office spaces, working through complex arguments, ideas  and situations.  I want the big shots to be the ones who are actually wrestling with ideas and opportunities and setbacks and successes.  The heroes are the folks who are struggling to help children to realize amazing³ things.  And are wrestling with the ideas that emerge from such work.  I want the reflective teachers to come through in the lead and with the praise and admiration. #

Are you with me?  Let’s make thoughtful sexy.  Again. #

1. Another view on value-added.
2. A good score on a crummy test is still a crummy score.
3. And I don’t use that word lightly.  I actually expect to be amazed.  Enthralled.

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In particular, I found the frank discussion of youth risks, while not new, to be refreshingly written.  Here’s a taste: #

So, based on the research and the opinions of several experts, one of the biggest risks to children may be adults who try to shut down the informal learning involved in their use of Internet technologies at home or school. (p. 18) #

There’s lots to like here.  I hope someone in a position to do something about the working group’s recommendations is taking good notes as they review the report. Anne’s got a full wrap up of coverage on her site.  The report’s below. #

Online Safety and Technology Working Group Final Report #

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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. #

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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.” ? #

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? #

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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. #

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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? #

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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. #

“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. #

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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. #

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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. #

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