As I wait to board my plane and anticipate the work ahead, I’m reminded of my conflicting thoughts on what composition looks like today. Howard Zinsser wrote in his book, On Writing Well, that:

“The new information age, for all its high-tech gadgetry, is, finally, writing based.”

I found that quote in a new report exploring what writing looks like in several classrooms today. In that same report, the authors write that:

Writing has never been more important than in this digital age. It is almost inconceivable to achieve academic success without good writing skills. And, while the fundamentals of good writing remain constant, new forms of writing are quickly evolving. Words are now regularly joined with images and voices.

Writing, or composition, isn’t all that different from the writing of generations past.¹ Since we first started making markings on clay or stone or paper, we have been trying to capture thoughts in a way that would make them understandable to ourselves as well as others. We write to remember, to share, to understand. We compose to be heard, to stand up and say “This is True,” or “I am here,” or “This was scary” or “hard” or “dangerous” or “exciting”, or “emotional”, or whatever we would like to convey.

And although I make my marks today on an iPad,² a device that makes the making of marks very easy, and almost immediately shareable to anyone who can get to the Internet, I am reminded of just how hard it is to say something in a way that accomplishes my goals as a writer, that captures what I am, or was, thinking, that lets you into my head and thoughts.

That we now have more tools for making marks, and that we have new kinds of marks – photographs, videos, complex visualizations – doesn’t make the essential task of making meaning any easier. In some ways, as our options for composition increase, it gets harder to decide, to choose which way of making marks will get the point that we wish to make across.  Harder, too, is what we must do in classrooms to convey the power of language and to help make our students critical participants in the literacies and literatures of our/their/our futures/our pasts.

And what counts as “writing,” or “composition?” Is a tweet a text, or a piece of a larger text?³  Is a rambling audio podcast, recorded from the driver’s seat of my car, a composition on par with a Master’s thesis, or an essay? So long as a test or assessment or evaluation of a text occurs within a limited finition of what counts as writing, are these other forms valid? How do we who is a “good” writer?  What is “good” writing?

Is “connective writing,” a term that Will and I and others use to describe blogging, a new form?((The more I think about it, it isn’t.  But it’s a useful way to talk about and describe some types of “good” writing.))  What’s new? What’s different? What’s useful? What’s good? Who gets to decide such things?⁴

And how in the world does a language arts teacher, sitting in an airport tapping away on a virtual keyboard, find himself in a place to ask such questions, or to attempt to answer them for others via this particular project?

Just a few questions, questions I always wonder about, that are surfacing for me as I prepare to embark on this work.⁵

1. Is it?  Would love to hear your take in the comments.
2. Finished and published on a laptop, because the iPad isn’t quite the writing device I need it to be.
3. I’d say yes to both.
4. And how does federal education policy muck with these questions, in sometimes good and sometimes not so good sorts of ways?
5. I am humbled, as always, when I think about the power and majesty of language and teaching and learning and the fact that even a guy like me can use the Internet to talk to the world about these big ideas.

Direct Link to Audio

The event itself was pretty straight forward – get a bunch of smart people together and talking with each other, as well as sharing some suggestions for how we might best move forward in our various leadership capacities.  Prime folks ahead of time and invite lots of folks to come along in various capacities.  The frame of thinking about leadership as communication I thought was a good one, although perhaps understated.

Of course, at the Leadership Bootcamp, “leader” was defined pretty broadly.  As it should be.  There were teachers in the room.  Superintendents.  IT staff.  Librarians.  Plenty of other folks.  Point being – leaders aren’t just the folks running the ship there’s plenty of leadership for all of us to be engaged in and doing, no matter our roles and/or job titles.  Jeff Piontek got the day started, but I didn’t feel like we were in high gear and rocking and rolling until the first presenters got going.¹

From there, it was a non-stop roller coaster ride of content and conversation across several strands.  Of course, the best part of the day for me was the fact that twice folks were put into roundtable groups to process what they were hearing, seeing and thinking about.  I don’t think a formal “Stop.  Write.  Reflect.” component makes it into our professional learning opportunities.  But, as Chris reminded us during his lunch keynote, if you believe something’s important, but you don’t have it built into the structures and schedules of your organization, then you don’t really think it’s terribly important at all.²

The protocol for the roundtables wasn’t too complex, but it’s worth sharing.  So here it is.  Help yourself to it if you find it useful.  Here’s the graphic organizer that we used to help structure folks’ reflections.  Just a few minutes in a very busy day, but I think those were pretty important minutes.  If you were there, I’d be curious as to your take on that portion of the day, specifically.

The day ended with a panel where we were challenged, and rightly so, to figure out how to keep building momentum and moving forward to make the positive changes that we believe we should be seeing in education.  Chris even suggested that it might be time for a string of little events, Educons everywhere, as a way of keeping things moving.  I like that idea, and it’s one reason why we began Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation three years ago. ³

I hope that little events like the Leadership Bootcamp keep happening.  I hope that folks who attended saw that, yeah, they might could organize such events, too.⁴  The resources, in terms of schedule and process, are freely available.  They need only be used. ⁵  Again, if you were there, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the event.  There will be a follow up webinar to talk through what folks did with the day in October – I’m looking forward to that.⁶

Thanks to all of the presenters and facilitators and behind the scenes folks who made the day a useful one.  Special thanks to Michelle Bourgeois and Alison Saylor for co-ordinating the entire event. There were aw awful lot of really smart folks in the group. Let’s hope it, or something even better, happens again.  Lots.⁷

If you were there, let me know how it went and what could’ve been better.  Or tell ISTE directly – they’ve set up an evaluation survey for your feedback.

And now, on to ISTE.

1. And, I’ve got to be honest, I still don’t understand the “I wrote a book on blogging, but I don’t find it to be valuable and so I don’t do it” position that I’ve now heard Jeff articulate a couple of times.  I hope that I can hear more from him on that at some point, not because I think everyone should have a blog, but because I think if you’re going to value something enough to write a book about it, specifically one that encourages folks to use that thing, then perhaps you should be engaged in that thing, at least from time to time.  Help me understand that if you can.
2. And writing as a learning tool is terribly and wonderfully important, which is why I’m sitting here writing right now rather than heading off to visit or do something else.
3. Maybe it’s time that event became Learning 2.0: A Colorado Educon, instead.  I’d be okay with that.
4. “No one is coming to save us,” Chris says.  He’s right.
5. Which is, of course, the hard part.
6. Although, I worry, as I usually do, about whether or not folks will attend.  Seems to me like as much as people say they want to engage in longitudinal PD, it doesn’t happen much.  We seem to have “one shot day” stuck in our brains, and may, by then, have moved on to other things.  Let’s do better.
7. And, heck, across the street was another group of really smart folks at EduBloggerCon – it was too bad that the events were held at the same time – but it was neat to see so many people moving back and forth between the two.  I was one, if only briefly.

Looking forward to your thoughts, as always.

Direct Link to Audio

On Twitter this week, Ben has pulled me a couple of times into the question of whether or not learning is social.  And both times, one time in conversation with David, and another time, earlier today, in conversation with Dave and George and Claudia and Rob and Will and some other folks, I had to say that, yes, it is.  Allow me to explain, as Twitter is just not the place for such extended thinking.

As best as I can figure, we’ve got to start with some definitions.  Let’s start with social.  I think Wikipedia’s definition is a fine place to begin:

The term Social refers to a characteristic of living organisms (humans in particular, though biologists also apply the term to populations of other animals). It always refers to the interaction of organisms with other organisms and to their collective co-existence, irrespective of whether they are aware of it or not, and irrespective of whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary.

In the next paragraph, the article, at least as it exists today, pretty much makes my entire case:

In the absence of agreement about its meaning, the term “social” is used in many different senses and regarded as a fuzzy concept

See, my contention is that learning is communication, and that communication requires language, and that language is socially negotiated. By that, what I mean is that words are just sounds.  Sounds that convey meaning.  And they are arbitrary.  We call cups “cups” not because they possess any inherent cupness, but because, over time, and due to popular usage, the word “cups” came to be linked with the concept of a particular kind of container that you put things, usually liquid, but sometimes cakes and other things, into.

Words gain their meaning through social processes.  Specifically, when people, enough people, use them to mean certain things, then they have that meaning.  Without that social negotiation of their meaning, they mean, well, nothing.¹

And all learning, all of it, as near as I can tell, comes from language and how we use it.²  If language is social, and it is, then any use of language to convey meaning that results in either a transfer of that meaning, or a new understanding of the thing you’re trying to learn about, is social, at least to some level.

So when David asked me the other day about how he can go, by himself, into an office and read a book and think about it, and if that’s social learning, my answer, even though he was the only person then in the room, is yes, that was a social experience.  Let me elaborate further.

A book is a recording of someone’s thinking about something.  To record our thinking, we use language.  Writing, a set of symbols that we use to represent words (which we use to represent ideas), is a technology³ that works with language to convey meaning.  As I write this blog post, I’m locking my thoughts into words and putting those words together to, hopefully, convey something.  Just what I’ve conveyed is a little bit up to me and a little bit up to you.  More on that in a minute.

So, working from the Wikipedia definition above, of social as an interaction between organisms, reading a book and thinking about it involves (at least) two individuals – the author and the reader.  It’s a social process.  Actually, it’s much more complicated than that, as the words the author used were negotiated during the time of the author’s writing, and perhaps even the author was attempting, through brute force, to change a meaning of a word or words.  The reader, too, exists in a social construction of language that might be different, or very similar to, the author’s – but it’s not the same.  Our interactions with language and with each other color and shape our interactions with words.  I think of a house as the first house I lived in as a little boy, a yellow, ranch-level house.  You might think of something different when you think of the word “house,” but there’s enough overlap between our two conceptions of the word – a place with rooms and probably a kitchen and a place or places to sleep – that we can have a reasonably meaningful conversation about houses.

Heck, in the example of reading alone in one’s office and thinking about one’s reading, there’s another set of social forces at work, too.  As I wrestle with an author’s ideas, I’m filtering them and my own thinking about them through my previous experiences – with the concepts being discussed, with my teachers and their thinking, and with my own previous wrestling with the particular topic that I’m reading about.  That side of the learning – my thinking about the reading – is a social process, too.  Saying it’s not isn’t a true thing to say.

George argued, a while back, that learning isn’t necessarily social.  I think he was wrong, largely, about that.  It’s terribly social.  He wrote:

As well, a primarily social view of learning also overlooks many of the affordances of technology. I can learn (learning defined as actuated or actionable knowledge) from a computer program, an intelligent software agent, or a contextually appropriate learning resource (i.e. when I need to do the task, the learning resource is mediated by technology).

Each of those items that he’s giving as examples of ways you might learn, are things, like books, that were made by other people.  Someone wrote the computer program, or the intelligent software agent, or the resource.  Those items, like books, were created in and of a social process.  People make technology, or learning objects, or what have you, whether they’re putting words on pages or building hardware.  These items are a conversation, to a degree, between author and reader.  George is a smart guy, and a good teacher, but I wonder if he forgot that when he wrote that post.

Many smarter people than I have written extensively about how reading is a social process.  Folks like Louise Rosenblatt, who popularized the concept of the transactional theory of reader response, is one of them who I think about a lot.  She postulated that a reader takes from an author an experience that is colored by the reader’s experiences as well as the context in which the reading occurs.  Reading is social.  Writing is social.  Learning is social.⁴

Mikhail Bakhtin, too, is worth mentioning here.  He wrote about the idea that language is a response to other language.  He used bigger words than that, but basically, he argued that language exists in the context of the language that has come before.  Unless you were the first person to ever speak, then you are to some degree influenced by what was said before you spoke.  You might be responding to one of those previous utterances, and you might not. ⁵ You are, whether you are aware of it or not, influenced by what came before.

What about writing a note to oneself? Is that social?  This is where I get confused and curious.

Suppose I write myself a note, say a reminder to do something in the future.  I’d say, at the time of the writing, that my present self is the author.  I write myself the note so that I can keep track of something at a future time.  When I return to the note, I am approaching it as my, from the perspective of the note-writer, future self.  As a reader, I am reading a note from my past self.  Even then, I think, if I am the only audience for the note that I wrote, I am participating in a social process.  For one thing, I’m using language, socially constructed language.  For another, my self has changed in a number of ways since I wrote the note.  I’m a little bit older, I know different things, I might be reading the note many years later, in which case the changes might be much easier to see and identify.  But even if it’s a few minutes or hours later, I am reading a communication from someone else – my past self.  And I am reacting and responding as my present self.  Perhaps the conditions in which I wrote the note have changed – I don’t need to do the thing that I was reminding myself to do because I’ve since realized that it was a silly task, perhaps, or I no longer need to do it because it was done by someone else.  But my present self is reacting/responding/interacting with my past self.  I’d argue that’s a social process, too. The idea that we can communicate, in this way, with ourselves, is pretty interesting.  And social.

Well, if you’ve read this far, then you might be asking yourself, “So what?”  I wonder that, too.  Let me speculate as to why such questions of learning and sociality are important.  For one thing, perhaps we could move on to more interesting questions.  Instead of “Is learning social?’ might we ask “How does my choice of language or text change the conditions for learning?”  Or maybe instead “How does language change over time, and how does that affect policy discussions about teaching and learning?”  How does the illusion of non-socialness perpetuate hierarchy?  Who gets to frame conversations about teaching and learning, and how do they do so?  Just a few of the questions that I am thinking about lately.  You probably have better questions.  But let’s move past this “Is learning social” question – because it is. And it’s essential that we understand that.

What place does an individual have as an agent of his or her own learning since learning is a social process?  Each individual, while shaped by and working within social constructs, has the ability to shift the conditions of that sociality to support their own learning.  You can argue for a redefinition of a word, for example. ⁶ Or suggest a different frame in which a particular type of learning can and should occur.  The fact that learning is social doesn’t lessen the impact or importance of any individual.  It actually makes individuals more important.  Our individual actions, aggregated and amplified by the actions of others, shape the “socialness” of an experience.  That’s important.  Worth thinking about.

This is, clearly, first draft thinking on my part, but I think it’s worth getting down while it’s still fresh on my mind, not so much to say that I’m right, although I believe that I am, as to try to push past this question, which, to me, is a pretty obvious one, and begs some really difficult and important ones.  Those questions are more worth our time, perhaps.

I’m eager to hear your thoughts about the socialness of learning.  Learning is social.  And that’s worth talking and thinking about.  Together.

1. If you don’t believe me, then think about the word “Google.“  It used to represent a really big number.  Then a company.  Now an action.  Language changes over time as people use words differently. I find that fascinating.
2. George mentioned feral children on Twitter today.  “How do they use language to learn?” was his question.  I’m still thinking that there’s a language piece there, on some level.  But I’m still thinking.
3. Writing is one of my favorite technologies, and the one that I find the most fascinating, be you a writer with an iPad or a pencil or a keyboard or a telephone or whatever.
4. Turns out, according to folks like Rosenblatt, that rereading a text results in a different transaction every time you reread.  Because you’re a different you when you read the text again.  Isn’t that interesting to think about?
5. But you probably are.  There is nothing new under the sun.
6. You might fail.  But you might not.

If you don’t know much about teacher research, I’d recommend you start with this handy little quickread.  And, of course, here’s the definition that I work from:

So here we go.  And here I go, as well.

It seems only fair and fitting that, as we facilitate teacher research for others, I engage in a teacher research project of my own.  This is slightly unusual – my “students” in this case are the teachers and students of the school district where I work.  My classroom is spread out over fifty buildings and miles and miles of physical territory.  Further, I work more and more in online spaces, so my classroom includes those spaces, too.

What to look at?  Well, that’s the easy part, I think.  Since I went to work in technology, two spaces have consumed much of my time, our Virtual Campus, a district-wide implementation of Moodle, as well as St. Vrain Blogs, our district’s WordPress MU-powered blog engine, also open to the district as a whole.

I wonder about how these spaces change classroom practice.  I think about how writing, and more generally, composition,  becomes an extension for learning, particularly when there is a public audience for the work.  Who is using these spaces?  To what ends?  How do the use of blogs and online courseware change the experience of teaching and learning in my school district? (Does anything change?)  How are teachers using spaces like these?  Is the learning day extended? What kinds of writing are happening in these spaces? To what effect?

Those are the questions¹ I’ll start with.  As for data – well, we’ve got lots to look at.  The blog engine itself is a public repository of the use of these tools.   What are the ethical implications of studying, in public, a public space where learning is taking place?  I plan to blog my research log, a tool that I’ll use to keep my reflections and observations about what I’m seeing and learning as I study these questions.  In addition, I anticipate that I’ll conduct interviews with people using these tools in my quest to understand their impact.  I intend to publish these recordings, as well, prior to my analysis of them.

One question – and it seems a silly one – but should I start a separate blog over in the district blogging engine to collect all this work, or should I separate it a bit by placing it over here, at my place? I’m leaning towards creating a space there.  But I’m still thinking.

So, um, here goes.  Wish us luck.  If we do this right, we’ll be telling lots of the stories of our classrooms that don’t get told.  And, ideally, we’ll be getting better at teaching and learning through the process.

1. They started as these.

photo credit: Grendl

Adventure (or tedium) awaits.  Your call.

photo credit: Sarah Parrott

You going?

photo credit: National Media Museum

There are spirits hiding in every album.  No, really.  Go look.

Let me show you:

Example 1 – “Texting poetry inspires students to learn”

From the article:

Chester Middle School Principal Ernie Jackson, for instance, challenged reading and social studies teacher Mel Wesenberg to find ways to use text messaging to teach poetry.

The results were surprising: Kids who used their cell phones to boil down the main points of the stanzas got 80 percent of the questions about a poem correct on a state test.

Kids taught the same poem in the traditional way – reading, reciting and discussing – got only 40 percent of the questions right.

“That’s a big jump,” Jackson said during a recent demonstration of the experiment with a sixth-grade class.

Well, yeah. When you write about something, or summarize it, then you do learn it. Writing forces the concepts into your brain in a way that discussion doesn’t. And summarizing something is a fine way to deepen your understanding of it. I suspect the student referenced in the article who didn’t have a cell phone would’ve had as much success with passing notes about the poems to her friends as they did sending texts back and forth.
Example 2 – “Teaching literacy using a Kindle”²

From the article:

She gave examples of an elementary child’s note about a character in the book she was reading: “If I were him, I’d say no way!” Such comments indicate a child is unknowingly focusing in on the author’s character development, something college students struggle with in their literature classes. Another child summarized the plot – a simple electronic form of the dreaded book report – which reinforces their understanding of the book.

I need to read Larson’s original work, which is behind an IRA paywall, but again, seems to me that the focus of the improvement wasn’t the Kindle – it was annotating and summarizing the text. Writing about what you’re reading, as well as connecting your notes to the text itself, helps readers become better readers.

The Kindle isn’t the important bit.³

Turns out, in both of these cases, the technology that helps the students to read and to understand better was a very old and familiar technology:

Writing.⁴

It’s exciting to bring new gadgets and gizmos into the classroom, to see what they can help us to do. But we can all too easily get caught up in the shiny object and forget that the basic toolset of teaching and learning, of reading, writing and thinking, is still the basic toolset. Reading and writing, meaningful reading and writing, are important⁵.

Try to write and fiddle with words regularly, be it on a Kindle, a nook, an iPad, a cell phone, or any other device you might happen to have. Teachers should be active readers, writers and thinkers, no matter their subject area. We should be reading and writing with students regularly, whatever the medium. All that practice will help you read better, and then you, too, will be less likely to fall victim to a technology du jour switcharoo scam.

Promise.⁶

1. Look! Aha! It’s true! Texting makes for smarter kids! Kindles change everything!
2. Not, I’d admit, the most useful headline. “Teaching literacy?” You mean “reading?”
3. That said, Will wrote an interesting post over the weekend on why you might use a Kindle as your annotation tool, but I’m thinking that his strategy isn’t practical for 2nd graders.
4. But we already knew that writing supports reading, didn’t we?
5. Ira’s post complicates this, but in a good way.
6. Yes, I know that “fatter” isn’t “really” a word. But it seemed like the right word. Please, no red pens here.