Bud the Teacher

I’m writing this morning from the National Writing Project’s web presence working retreat, an event I’ve been fortunate enough to have been involved with as a facilitator since its inception last year.  This is the second time we’ve run the event, which is an attempt to provide some time and structure for teams from writing project sites who wish to think strategically about their web presence.  We’ll spend the weekend thinking through the identity of our respective organizations and what we can do online to both reflect and support that identity and the good work that all of us are trying to do in our various locations around writing and teaching and learning. That means lots of things to lots of people, but there’s plenty of intersection in the general trends.

The event is pretty intense, and, while designed for sites to think about their organizational web presences, is very helpful to me as I think about my personal and professional life online.  One of the big questions that we’re asking people to think about is how their web presences are a reflection of and a lens into their work.  My personal web presence should be like that, too.  But I’m not sure that it is.  I’ve got content spread around the web in a variety of places, everywhere from Flickr to Twitter to this blog to my wiki (which is desperately in need of an update or seven) to my work with other groups and schools and people.  There’s plenty of personal mixed in with the professional, and I think the boundaries between those two areas of my life, never truly separate in “real, offline” life, continue to blur and fade and shift from day to day, week to week, month to year.  (That’s a good thing, I think, for the most part.) How do I, as a blogger and a teacher and a learner and a father and a husband and a citizen, do my best to ensure a consistent presence across the Internet that reflects what I believe to be important?  Just as essential - how do I bring all of that content that sits all over the place into some sort of a coherent whole?  Or do I need to, so long as all that content in all of those places, and others, reflects the message(s) that I want so desperately to convey - that learning and writing and thinking and engaging and passionately working for the benefit of others are essential habits and skills for everyone, regardless of background, culture, or profession?

I think, too, about what “web presence” means.  Having a presence and creating a presence are not necessarily the same thing.  Being and doing aren’t necessarily the same, either.

These are some of my thoughts as I head into a pretty intensive planning process, where, if last year is any indication, I’ll learn as much, and probably a great deal more, than I’m hoping to facilitate.  This summer, I’ll be doing a three-hour session on presence tools, a class of software that are about making one’s presence known in some formal and informal ways, Twitter being one of the tools that I’m most curious about at the moment.  I also would like to explore more about digital identity, a conversation I sort of started here a little while back.  My work this weekend will continue to influence that work.  Lots to learn.  Luckily, I’ve got plenty of smart folks here to learn from and with.  We should all be so lucky.

This podcast, recorded on my way home from Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation, is just a stream of consciousness reflection on the day.  I am humbled to be in community with so many wonderful , talented and devoted educators, both here in Colorado as well as around the world. 

    I’m teaching several courses for my district next week, including one on blogs and wikis.  That makes this video very, very timely.   Thanks, Louann, for the pointer.

Click To Play

    Ben shares a frustrating experience he’s having with a collaborative partnership torn asunder by parental concerns in a different state.  Lots to think about here, amidst the perceived parental overreaction, but I’m particularly interested in the comments from students on their collaborative wiki about the issue.  They’re frustrated — but are communicating, too, the value of their learning via wiki.  One comment in particular struck me as very astute:

Seriously, I never even got a chance to talk to them, and   
do you know why? Because I was working and learning and writing! What
does that tell you! That tells you that by them not being on here they
are being deprived of something they could have learned from. I just
hope whoever the parent is that called that attorney something
knows how much they have affected.  And that they have deprived an entire class of kids of some of the learning they needed!

Another student is a bit more practical about the situation:

.  .  .  we can still use wikimail and make our own wikispace.

    Hmm.  After school wiki work?

Ben concludes his post with several excellent questions for moving forward:

The question I kept thinking about after reading this e-mail is,
“Who failed?” Was it the teacher who didn’t set up enough rules and
guidelines for the students that were written down? Was it the parent
who failed to work with the teacher and understand the nature of the
collaboration? Or, was it the students who couldn’t grasp the public
nature of the internet?

Because of one or a combination of these factors, these students are
being shut out of an avenue for self expression and learning. What can
we do so that this doesn’t happen to us?

    Head on over to his place and share your thoughts.

    I’ve had a quick peek at FunnyMonkey’s new flavor of Drupal, soon to be DrupalEd.  It’s pretty dynamically fantastic, despite the fact that it’s in alpha/beta.  Here’s the annoucement:

    One of my great frustrations lately as a teacher is that I am not having more success teaching blogging, as in blogging the verb ala Will Richardson, to my students.    The value of blogging, as I’ve come to learn, is in the way that it requires that I interact with source material, either another blogger or any other text that I can find to quote and think about.  That interaction with sources is what I think is so, so, so essential in the education of students.  If we are to teach students to teach themselves, we must focus our efforts on areas of basic communication and areas of interacting with other information.  I know that statement is probably preaching to the choir, but maybe not. 
    Lots of the "successful" uses of blogs out there are those that aren’t really about interacting with sources.  Posting homework online, unless the homework is source-specific, isn’t blogging, although it is a step in the right direction. 

    I’ve had some small successes here and there, but I’m finding it funny and sad that I am unable to successfully share the one best learning tool in my personal arsenal with the students that I work with.
  I could bemoan that the problem isn’t with me, or with my methods, it’s with the community/school/students/parents/etc.  But what good does that do?  Such excuses would make me feel better, but they wouldn’t be me teaching — they’d be me giving up.  As I step back from day to day writing instruction while my very able student teacher steps up, I’m thinking again about how to teach blogging rather than writing with blogs. 
    For two different quarters in two different school years, I have been attempting to better incorporate blogging into my speech course, English 10B, a standard course for students in the tenth grade in my district.    I figured then, and still think now, that using a blog as both a research log as well as a tool for reflection while preparing for a speech was a good idea.  To that end, I encouraged students to write three kinds of posts.   I’ll admit that we all got a little stuck as we learned how to navigate between our own blogs and the blogs of our classmates.  We used Bloglines as our aggregator and Blogger as our blogging tool.  Too much software.  Elgg has mostly solved that problem, as it serves as both blog and aggregator.  Too cool. 

    While I was pleased that my students began to tentatively share their ideas with the world, I felt that my instruction was not as thorough as it might have been.  I understood that one of the powers of blogging is the ability to connect to the writing of others in some pretty tangible ways.  But I don’t know that I communicated that to my students as successfully as I would have liked.

    This isn’t a post about tools.  It’s a post about content.  But the tools and the content are beginning to, or have always been, running together and affecting the other.  My students, or me, or you, or anyone can’t learn how to write connectively without first learning how to make those connections.  I’m not an expert, but I think it makes sense to try to articulate the different types of links that are possible in a blog post.  I recognize that such a list is limiting, but I need to wrap my brain around these ideas a little bit.  (Here’s a wiki version of my list, which is by no means complete.  Feel free to make it better.)  I see several different types of linking that I should be explicitly teaching:

1.  Connecting to locations.  The simplest of links.  When we write, we might write about specific places, people or events.  Often, those events or places have websites.  A very basic form of connective writing, then, would include creating links to those places.  (Ex. I like the Denver Broncos; Bob Ross was a great artist.)

2.  Connecting to ideas.  This is a basic citation.  Alan Levine calls it a linktribution.   One of my pet peeves about teaching blogging and hyperlinking is that so often, people will link to the parent page of a website rather than the page where they got their specific information.  The best part about linking to specific information is that it’s very transparent.  I can trust you as a writer right away if I can see that your links are accurate and that the quotes that you use are reproduced accurately. 

3.  Connecting to self.  Sometimes the best ideas that we can find are ones that we had in the past.  The advantage to keeping and archiving a blog is that you can almost literally travel back in time to visit with the old you.  One way to connect with the old you is to quote yourself and respond. 

4.  Connecting for attention.  When students are writing for specific audiences, they sometimes need to get the attention of the folks that they are writing for.  One way to do so in an online environment is to include a link to a site or blog or wiki or something that their intended audience might be keeping an eye on.  When the audience searches for references to the link the writer uses, then that writer will discover the piece of writing.  Most bloggers that I know are aware of this, and they maintain an RSS feed (or several) of searches for specific links or terms that relate to them.  For example, I use Technorati to provide me with an RSS feed of any reference to the URL of this blog.   When someone writes about, and links back to,  something that’s been posted on my blog, I find out about it and can go check it out.

    This is certainly first draft thinking; please keep that in mind.  How are you teaching your students to link?  What have I missed?  Is there a better list out there?  Again, here’s the link to the wiki version of this list — help me improve it.  I’m eager for some feedback, as well as conversation, about how to teach blogging and not writing with blogs. 

Barbara, can you tell us anything more about the Middlebury College’s history department faculty barring the use of Wikipedia as a source in academic work?  (I’m sure you’re busy — but any insights or pointers would be much appreciated.)  (Thanks to Dave Winer for the pointer.)

David Jakes gets it right when he writes about who should have the ultimate say in who gets to decide whether or not certain schools should have access to particular tools:

The community makes the decision. 

Yes, it’s probably the only answer that makes sense-the values, the
beliefs, and the moral views that the community holds determines the
call. Schools are responsible to the communities they serve, and that
responsibility is managed by the board of education. If the school
board directs the IT coordinator or the IT staff to block such sites,
then I’m good with that. Again, it is my belief that the philosophy of
what to block/not block must come from the school board and should not
originate from a set of personal beliefs of an IT director or
coordinator.

Now, that’s not to say that the community shouldn’t have all (or at least the best possible) information and opinions from educators and parents and others when it comes time to make such decisions.  Or that the community will always be right.  But we’ve got mechanisms in place in our communities to ensure the rights of the minority aren’t trampled when these types of decisions get made.

    Allowing the community to be involved in such decision making isn’t easy, nor does the ideal of everyone coming together to agree on what’s best for a group of students always work; nor do the mechanisms always work in our favor, if at all.  Responsible and intelligent adults who have the best interests of students in mind often disagree when it comes to what’s best for schools.  And losing a battle always sucks, no matter what side you’re on. 

    In fact, it’d be far easier if one person in an office somewhere gets to make all of the decisions about what gets into schools and what doesn’t.  But it’d be wrong, even if I was the person who got to have the final word.

    In an abrupt possible topic change, and perhaps the first openly political statement I’ve made on this blog (I try to be very careful with those, as I’m not a politician), DOPA is a bad piece of legislation that is being debated and decided largely by people who have no interest in dialoguing with those of us in the education community.  It’s the perfect example of how a "representative" body (i.e. the U.S. House of Representatives) has mistakenly identified a "problem" that isn’t and is attempting to craft a solution that ignores the needs and voices of the community that it will affect.   Do we need to help children be safe on the Internet?  Certainly.  Does DOPA help?  Nope. 

    I hope the U.S. Senate does a better job of listening to the voices of our communities and realizes that this is strongly misguided legislation that will solve no problems and will actually create more problems, as "social networks" will move into the underground and we won’t be able to help students and parents and families, the communities that we serve,  to successfully and safely navigate them.

    Whew.  It felt good to get that off my chest.  So ends the political soapboxing. 

    I discovered that Geoffrey Chaucer’s blog has been added to the fictive blog section of my wiki.  This is an impressive text, certainly a labor of love, and well worth five minutes of your precious surfing time.  (Not that y’all ever surf the Internet anymore, of course.)
    If you know of any other blogs purportedly by people who aren’t real, please add them to the list.

    I’ve created a sandbox wiki for ideas that I’ve gotten from Phil’s presentation.  I’m calling it a "sandbox" because you can also use it to play around with wiki editing.  You’ll need to create an account to edit — but it’s really easy to do.  Check it out and add your own ideas.