Bud the Teacher

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.

Today is the National Day on Writing, which is the reason for this podcast, recorded as I headed home thinking about the writing I’ve been up to today. I’m so grateful for this time to think about writing and its place in my life. What a wonderful expression of the power of language and words and composition. How and when and where and how do you write and celebrate writing, both yours and others?

Direct Link to Audio

In the podcast, I mention these slides, which I promised I’d link to.

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. [↩]

I’m spending some time today with the folks at Flagstaff Academy in Longmont and digging into an old bag of tricks. Can you guess which slide is the yarn slide? Flagstaff folk – I hope we can continue some of the conversations that we started today here in the comments.  I’d love to hear your thoughts and reactions.  Thanks.

PS – Terri, the link to the video you saw is here.

I’m sitting in today on a session at one of our elementary schools where the group of teachers is looking deeply at inquiry and how it works at school.  We’ve just been given a copy of Michael Klentschy and Laurie Thompson’s book, Scaffolding Science Inquiry Through Lesson Design and have been asked to take a look at Chapter One and write about our reading.

I have long been interested in Klentschy and others’ work with science notebooks, tools for thinking, questioning, gathering data and making meaning from the data gathered.  I think my blog serves a bit like my science notebook, and I think that blogs could be fine science notebooks for students and teachers to think, question, record observations and use to make meaning from those things, too.  But the first chapter of their book discusses a three-phase approach to lesson planning that’s not a bad model to keep in mind:

Phase 1 – Intended Curriculum – The big ideas that are expected to be taught. (Perhaps standards, benchmarks, big questions)

Phase 2 – Implemented Curriculum – The plan for getting to those big ideas.  In their model, this begins with a focus question, a question that “leads to construction of knowledge about lesson content goals” (page 4).  PRedictions, data collection and recording in a notebook, and making meaning of that data follow.

Phase 3 – Achieved Curriculum – A measure of whether or not what was intended and implemented actually resulted in student learning of those elements and ideas.  The science notebook, as a place to record most of the thinking and questioning and collection that occurred along the way, becomes a big piece of the assessment – and a place to discover where, if it happened, learning went off track.

I think this is a pretty handy way of thinking about lesson design.  It meshes nicely with what I’m learning about Understanding by Design, as well.  Better than either model, though, is the systematic use of the notebook as a place to record and think and write and learn and share.  That’s how learning happens.  We write.  We ask.  We seek.  We discover.   We revise.  We share.  Repeat.

I carry a notebook and also use this space to do those things.  Any approach to learning that helps students to use actual learning tools for realistic reasons is a good step.  It’s much bigger than science, too.  I’m pleased that this school is seeking to use processes and tools across classrooms to model how learning happens.  I’m also pleased to be in the midst of this conversation occurring as teachers write and share with each other, too. Our students need to see teachers engaged in learning using methods similar to the ones they ask their students to use.

Not a bad way to spend the week before school starts back.

In this podcast, recorded last week, Karl and I continue the conversation that began in the comments to my last podcast.  I hope that he and I can keep talking like this from time to time, and that the recording of our conversation is useful to you.  And I hope you continue the conversation, too.

Link to Audio

Today’s podcast is a continuation of some thinking that came out of a roundtable conversation that I had at Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation.  Karl reminds me that I’ve been forgetting to share here on the blog lately.  I’ll try to do better.

As always, I’m interested in your thoughts.

Link to the Audio

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.)

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.