Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Audience Awareness


I'm feeling engaged with this blog project after talking with Dr. Jing Lei today. Because my work is with English Education and her work is with technology, this experience has been a reeses peanut butter cup commercial where peanut butter meets chocolate.

I've become very interested in the concept of "audience awareness" through research I'm doing in another class. It occurred to me that one of the primary ways "blogs" are good is the audience. Who is it? Why is it? Where is it? How does this change the writing process of students when they know the reader/viewer will be "beyond the teacher"? I think it means a world of difference when a piece of writing transcends a classroom.

Lee (2000) and Garthwait (2007) agree. Both wrote about how audiences changes with hypermedia opportunities for students and, as a practitioner and researcher, they were able to come to different conclusions.

Lee (2000) writes that technology is sexy and sees virtues being extolled (p. 24). In the reality of classrooms, access to technology is often a major stumbling block. She notes that computers transcend the idea of "expensive typewriters" (p. 25) and notes that in her classroom students found voice from creative writing and technology. Ownership of the work was more apparent. Lee (2000) does not address blogging as an outlet for writers, but concludes, "I've discovered that the authentic audience found on the Internet has a profound effect on the quality of student writing in all grades." (p. 30).

Garthwait (2007) conducted a qualitative case study over six months with a 7th grade hypermedia unit. Giving me several leads for future readings, he addresses how "space" (p. 359) is utilized differently by strong writers and this is true for the students who use technological space to express themselves. Because web writing melds verbal, visual and auditory communications, "a see-saw between abstract (lingual modes) and intuitive (graphic arts modes)," teachers need to rethink the way they guide student writing. She found that through conventional cueing device: Naming, Context, & Strategy/Responses used to connect to audience were present.

I'm looking forward to reading more.

Garthwait, A. (2007). Middle school hypermedia composition: A Qualitative Study. In Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 16, No. 4. pp. 357 - 375

Lee, G. (2000). Technology in the language arts classroom: Is it worth the trouble? Voices from the Middle. . Urbana: March, vol. 7, Iss. 3, PP. 24 - 32

Monday, February 25, 2008

Cummins, J. & Sayers, D.



Before I begin this post, I have a question. Using the link provided from Blackboard only allows partial viewing of the text. Looking up the text, online, I found that it has different publishers and publishing dates. Why is this? I'm unsure of the exact citation, because the online community seems to have variations. Even so, here are my notes from what I could partially comprehend from the pages the link allowed:

Cummins, J. & Sayers, D. (1995). Brave New Schools; Challenging Cultural Illiteracy
Through Global Learning Networks. St. Martin’s Press, Ch. 3

Key Points:

Inequity in technology resources mirrors every other inequity in distributions of human and material resources, between school districts and between industrialized and Third World countries.

the network of networks, however, provides the possibility of communicating a rapid speeds anyone who wishes to be “connected” (18).

“Unlike academics, researchers, commercial enterprises, and even nonprofit organizations, classroom teachers confront a formidable and often daunting task in their attempts to link students to the Internet” (19).

Communication that transcends class to class boundaries can be advantageous to participating classrooms.

“Distance, in the context of class-to-class exchanges, creates the possibility of collaboration with an unknown but knowable audience, principally through written communication” (32).

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Looking at Training High School Educators


Transitioning from classroom teaching to university researching has been more difficult than I expected. Why? It falls along the line of "Publish or Perish" and "#'s and Perish." As a classroom teacher, my intent was to do great work at the pace I was able to keep with the hundreds of students on my roll for six hours a day and the volumes of keeping up with my expectations for them. This, coupled with State crack-down on scores (which I'm proud to say I found success), a more diverse student population every year and then a hit or miss administration style, was cause for a lot of stress. Now, the stress is not as physical as it is mental. At the University, one must "Know" their "field" enough to "profess" it to others in written form. Keeping up with such truth is difficult.

I bring this subject up as it is my intent to be a trainer of teachers and to best prepare them for English classrooms. For this reason, I found R.G. Sultana (2005) to be extremely interesting. His review of initial teacher education programs covers the debate between what is best in preparing teachers. Should the preparation exist more on campus with experts in the research field professing knowledge onto students or should the experience occur in professional development schools where students will get experience in the field to reflect on?

Where I stand on this issue is not the purpose of my post. Instead, I wish to connect a few of Sultana's observations with my thinking on "blogs" as a teaching tool. He writes, "The fact remains that education must be responsive to new societal realities, trends, and "needs" (while remaining critically sensitive to the fact that "needs" are anchored in socially constructed discourse that in never politically innocent" (237). He continues to note that Initial Teacher Education should make "efforts to help prospective teachers make a shift from insular to connective specialization and to socialize them into the habit of lifelong learning...." (237). Perhaps, teacher preparation cannot ignore the changing communities of online interactions, because such cyber-communication is growing normal.

R.G. Sultana leads his readers to the following: "It is nevertheless critical to emphasize the point made by Papert (1987) that the more quickly new technologies of communication have been integrated into teaching/learning nexus, the more easily they seem to have become co-opted in the mainstream educational paradigm, that is, top-down delivery systems that fail to recognize real differences among learners" (239). He makes this point after recognizing that technology has been used to create interdisciplinary learning communities.

My point with this posting is that educators preparing future educators cannot ignore the ebb & flow of technology in the ecosystem before us. With this said, paying attention to blogs this semester hasn't been a waste of time.

Papert, S. (1987). Computer criticism vs. technocratic thinking. In Educational Researcher, 16 (1), 22 - 30.
Sultana, R.G. (2005). The initial education of high school teachers: A critical review of major issues and trends. In Studying Teacher Education, Vol. 1, no. 2, November, pp. 225 - 243.

Monday, February 18, 2008

Creating Agentive Selves


OAKLANDDUSTY.ORG

Hull, G.A. & Katz, M. L., (2006). Creating an agentive-self: Case studies of digital storytelling. In Research in the Teaching of English, volume 41, Number 1. August, pp. 43 - 81

Although Hull & Katz's presentation here is not on blogging, they present a theoretical framework that is interesting to my current blogging curiosity. An overview of this article is a two person study of creating a multimedia sense of self at the DUSTY project in Oakland, California. The authors look at a twenty year old man and an adolescent girl as they make sense of their "story" and its relation to their agency.

..."how we represent ourselves in storied worlds depends on who we are trying to be in relation to others in the present." 45.

"...we argue that people can develop agentive selves, using the unique repertoire of tools, resources, relationships, and cultural artifacts -- the semiotic means, if you will -- that are available at particular historical moments in particular social and cultural contexts. Traditionally, primacy has been given to narrative in oral and written forms as the semiotic means most central for the creation and enactment of identities. However, other semiotic systems can be primary as well -- dance, music, images."

Multimedia story telling, like Blogging, is a way of incorporating semiotics into the story creation of the self. The difference is that "journaling" that used to be private can now be public for real-world audiences and spaces. From "diaries" to "blogs," the nature of writing to construct the self changes -- no longer under lock and key and shelved away where no one can see it, the "blogger" takes a risk of exposing their "truth" to all.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

The Blogolympic Games


This just in: China and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has approved "blogging" for Olympic athletes, but there will be guidelines and limitations.

Let the games begin.

BLOGOLYMPICS

Friday, February 15, 2008

Web, 2.0 -- it can be quite wonderful.


PBS Frontline has been doing a series on teenagers in cyberspace. Their footage is available online. I post it for anyone who'd like to screen the documentary. Just click the hyperlink and you'll get there.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Education Changes Needed?




Associated Press, 2008. Technology demands ed. changes. In Teacher Magazine
February 10.
http;//www.teachermagazine.org

In a brief overview of the 2006 Pew Internet & American Life project, this article estimates 64% of those ages 12 - 17 have created online content. Also, 8% of adults have created a blog, while 28% of teens have. Boys post more video files, but girls dominate the blogosphere and photo postings.

I guess I'm girly for enjoying online blogging (but then again, I've always kept writing journals, which my Danish friends always say is a very middle school girl thing to do). Whatever.

It is interesting that teens from single-parent households, and lower income teens are more likely to blog than those from affluent backgrounds. Any idea why this might be?

The #'s of bloggers doubled in the elapsed two years of the Pew study. Over 89% of teens said they've responded to an online posting.

Teens are labeled here as "super communicators."

Blogoholics Anonymous



Emmet Rosenfield's work came to me on a National Writing Project listserve. As a Virginia Writing Project consultant, Rosenfield is currently keeping a once-a-week blog entitled "Eduholic" where he sits down and writes about his teaching practice.

Oh, P. 2008. Eduholic: Blogging teacher-consultant gets national attention. On the National Writing Project website:
http://nwp.org.


Rosenfield admits the blog, "gives him an opportunity to reflect on his practice and make those reflections available to the world." In addition, the blog has made him a better writer. The risk-taking and real-world audience has informed his teaching, connected him better with his student and parental communities, and offered him feedback from teachers around the world.

Blogging is a "brave new world," because audiences are responsive. Rosenfield writes, "It's time to 2.0, as I wrote last post. At least, time to take another few baby steps towards integrating the best of today's technology into my teaching repertoire...I can't in good consciousness continue to teach digital natives without employing tools that are the most effective available."

His blog, Eduholic, is written more journalistically than as a diary-type posting site. As with all writing, knowing the audience and purpose for the material is key, and it is wise to think about who will read his postings: teachers, parents, students and inquirers like me. Traveling on the frontier of the profession, work like Emmet Rosenfield's sets a pace for education in the future. It's worth a visit, for sure.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Leveraging Web 2.0
















Oliver, K. (2007). Leveraging web 2.0 in the redesign of a graduate-level technology integration course. In Tech Trends, Volume 51, Number 5

As an assistant professor of instructional technology, Kevin Oliver is interested in the instructional design of web-based learning environments and their effect on student-thinking skills.

In this study, Oliver looks at distance learning courses for teachers and how Web 2.0 is used to acclimate teachers to the web as a teaching tool. Web 2.0 is an umbrella term for many of the online, free tools for web collaboration, sharing, etc. on the web, including Blogs. "Blogging tools are perhaps the most familiar example in the Web 2.0 realm with purported education benefits, allowing students to post reflections, book reports, and stories online, and then receive written comments from teachers, other students, or parents within their log space" (55).

The use of Web 2.0 tools replaces the "budget" concerns of most schools in having to purchase software. These tools are free.

Blogs are used often to promote thinking about one's practice -- a diary of sorts for sharing with other professionals and receiving feedback. They create an online community. From Oliver's work, "79% of teachers who created blogs" found blogging useful. The other 21% did not. (56).

Going with Gardner's "Multiple Intelligences," it would be presumptions to think 'blogging' would be helpful to all learners. They are a tool for learning and not a panacea.

Of note, Oliver addresses the 1974 Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to note that the information trail left by blogs posits many ethical implications. "Appropriate behaviors" must be addressed for what is posted and ethical conversations must occur -- including fair use, plagiarism and personal information that might not belong on a classroom blog.

Thursday, February 7, 2008

Commenting on a Commentary



Dawson, K. & Ferdig, R.E. (2006). Commentary - Expanding notions of acceptable research evidence in educational technology: A Response to Schrum et al. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education,
6(1), 133-142

Kara Dawson and Richard E. Ferdig review and expand on the research agenda conversation regarding technology education. I found their commentary interesting for our present place in "yet" another paradigm shift. They pit the "research or perish" motif at Universities against "usefulness for practitioners and policy makers" and call for a "code book" to unify the language being used to discuss educational technology in research. They also note that there needs to be further research on teachers' beliefs on technology in their practice, and a move move away from self-reporting and more teacher in practice studies. They also call for a more interdisciplinary approach and to use ideas, terms, and concepts from psychology and other disciplines for the development of a common heueristic.

At my juncture as a scholar-in-training, I wrestle with the deeply felt practitioner part. My work as a classroom teacher allowed me hands-on, in the trenches, every day experiences. This new work, University work, has me wrestling with the validity of publishing for researchers and not for teachers who can use all the help they can get. Most of my reading thus far has been playing "catch-up" to the conversation I never had the luxury to hear as a classroom teacher. In fact, I feel cheated that so much scholarly work occurred in the academic world, but never trickled down to my public school practice. This is not good.

Even so, I feel this commentary has a place on my blog because it gives me ideas for audiences and what needs to be said next.

Dawson and Ferdig spend a lot of time discussing the importance of mentoring doctorate students. I have a funny thought: what if it was NDLB (No Doctorate Left Behind) and University teachers were governed by how well they made all doctorate students successful, and financial sanctions fell on those places that couldn't do it. I believe the way academics write and deliver knowledge might change drastically. But, this is only an aside.

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Flying under the Wings of KCO


My advisor, Kelly Chandler-Olcott, wrote a review of J. Inman's and D. Sewell's text, TAKING FLIGHT WITH OWLs: EXAMINING ELECTRONIC WRITING CENTER WORK. From her review of this text, I've learned that OWL translates as Online Writing Lab, and as KCO notes, such online writing lab practice comes in a variety of sizes and are situated in a # of 'habitats'. I wish to include this notion of 'habitat' because it follows in Zhao's discussion of a classroom's ecosystem and how technology is now a part of a school's life network.

Kelly C-O refers to D.J Leu's review in the Handbook of Reading Research where he addresses that computer technology has been integrated into many writing centers so quickly that research and evaluation have not been able to keep pace.

KCO recognizes that OWLS makes her more conscious of how she provides feedback on writing through emails and the course website, but also how students are to respond to one another's work digitally. She points out that she MUST model her own process in composing online replies to the work of others --- in other words, she must TEACH how technology is to be used to communicate professionally. (p.190)

Issues of face-to-face time and screen-to-screen time are a reality for the digital age.

Online Writing Labs are catalysts for collaboration among diverse people. (Another use for blogs). They are places for assistance with writing.

"...we cannot ignore the fact that many members of the next generation of writers may find online tutorials more attractive, not less, than proximal ones." 194.

"...the next generation of writing center clients may need facility with a different kind of composition---one that is more multimedia in nature---than current OWL clients do." 194.

KCO questions the use of writing tutorials around traditional print texts, alone, and challenges thinkers to address how Online Writing Labs may be used beyond traditional text means and into multi-mediated representations.

How this connects with the blog-osphere is, again, an indication of how quickly the technological world works. Beyond OWLS, the invention of FACEBOOK, Blogger.com, MySpace, etc, not to mention the interactive communities arriving from web-based communities around the globe, make such a discussion old -- fast.