Teach and learn

Chapter 2 (Currently under construction - NOT A FINAL DRAFT - Your ideas and comments are welcome)

Chapter 2

In the previous chapter I described why I have chosen this topic as my Capstone. In this chapter I will discuss the state of the practice as it is now. I will include sections on the absence of juried research on the topic, how dynamic the field of blogging is, the attractions student have with technology, the Read-Write Web and digital literacy, the richness of the field, and finally I will discuss a new learning theory emerging because of the changes brought about by today’s technology.
Absence of research

While researching a topic such as this, one finds few juried articles regarding the development of reading and writing skills and blogging. However, there are many voices supporting the use of the internet in general, blogging specifically, which support and promote blogging as a tool for just those things. Most of the research is purely informative, explaining what a Weblog is and how someone would go about starting and managing one. In my search I have not found any articles written about developing of reading and writing skill using blogging as a tool.
The voices that decry the benefits of blogging are found in a few books and other teacher written blogs. The absence of juried voices is, from what I have observed, courtesy of the practitioners devotion to the art and practice of blogging. It is an environment where someone may publish for the world to see and in so doing, the world can reply in the form of a comment. The sharing of ideas through blogs seems to me as the most honest form of juried writing because it follows the theory that things are growing and changing so briskly in this field that within months, weeks, even days, from the moment a thought is published it may well morph into an entirely different thought or enhancements because of the opinions and ideas of the readers who shared their comments with the author. Open one of the few books, now available, about blogging and education to its bibliography, say…Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms no underline please by Will Richardson and you will see that well over the majority of the references are from online blogging sources.
Will Richardson, a practicing leader in the field of Edu-blogging, supports the use of blogs for reading and writing development because even after an idea is published, or posted, on a blog the conversation never ends and deeper insight continues. He puts it very simply “Writing stops; blogging continues. Writing is inside; blogging is outside. Writing is monologue; blogging is conversation. Writing is thesis; blogging is synthesis.” Bloggin allows students to read first and then link what they have read to their own interests through writing to and dialogue with others. Reference page number or other ways in which you will cite Richardsons’ work.
How dynamic the field is

In 1989 the world was got its first taste of a tool that would change the way people live their lives. The internet was created by Tim Berners-Lee with the specific intent to create “a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write.” (Carvin, 2005) This tool has grown from being a place where a small group of people with connected computers could simply read and write notes to each other, to a world wide, interactive filing cabinet.
Keep in mind that only 15 years ago an internet server was introduced to the public. In those years the internet has grown and changed very rapidly. These changes and developments are what gives the internet it the value. For these same reasons even sub-sections of the internet, such as blogging have become rich with applications and applicability to our world (Richardson, 2007). A stand out value is the impact the internet has on social collaboration. This partnership between people to develop a body of knowledge is where blogging fits in.
Blogs are merely one tool available to teachers to enrich their practice and engage their students (Ray, 2006). The opportunity to include such changes into our classrooms gives teachers and students the opportunity to collaborate with one another and the world at large. It seems clear, that the invitation for students to become valuable contributors to the large body of knowledge that exists today on the internet only echoes the dynamism of blogging as a field.
Just providing an opportunity for students to be exposed to the myriad of opinions in this world and letting them find their place within those voices is nice. In the book Coming of Age: An Introduction To The New Worldwide Web Alan November explains, in his chapter, that to provide the opportunity to allow students the freedom to access information easily, appropriately and safely is ideal. November makes it clear, “It’s imperative that we be able to teach our kids how to use the tools effectively and appropriately because right now they have no models to follow.” The following tools are only a few examples of ever growing applications that can turn a simple Weblog journal into a conversation between a person and the world:
RSS feeds

If you are not confident in what an RSS feed is do not fret, according to Pew Internet and American Life Project 26% of average Americans who use the internet have never even heard of them and 64% don’t really know what it means. Literally stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” It is a mechanism that keeps track of a multitude of websites, as John Evans says in his piece on RSS feeds in the book Coming of Age: An Introduction To The New Worldwide Web, “that have provided RSS feeds; these are typically sites that change or add content regularly.” An RSS feed allows the individual subscriber to determine and manage what he/she finds important, simultaneously. It can also be used to share the content you are keeping track of with other who may be interested in what you are reading.
Using and RSS feeds allows the subscriber to wade through a lot of information, relatively, quickly because it keeps out the information that the subscriber does not find interesting. There are a hand full of educational uses for RSS feeds. The first being, a source of information available to the student to enrich what they are finding in their classes. They can provide real life examples of that may apply to their topics of study. Secondly, they can be used by the teacher to easily manage the activity of their students blogs. By subscribing to the RSS feed a students blog provides the teacher will be kept abreast of the changes made by their students. Thirdly they provide the opportunity to receive “Up-to-the-minute content specific”(Evans:Coming of age pg 25) information in regards to your content area. This feature is especially applicable to social studies or current event teachers who may be focusing on a particular event occurring in the world. Evans explains that the subscriber can be connected to a series of sources which are continuously updated throughout the day.
Podcast
Podcasts are simple audio recording that are posted on a blog. They can be as simple as the bloggers voice or precisely crafted interviews with bumper music and commercials. People record their own voices, music, interviews and transfer them to an MP3 format to be uploaded to their web page. Podcast can be subscribed to by using an RSS feed and downloaded to a computer or MP3 player for later listening. Its name is derived from the iPod abut one does not need an iPod to listen to them. Podcasts are great tools for students to write and record radio shows, Interview experts from a field of study or for collaborative presentations, or they can add extra information from a lecture there for students to access in their own time. Other suggestions would be, courtesy of Shawn Wheeler in the book Coming of Age: An Introduction To The NEW Worldwide Web, easy remediation, clear differentiation for varied learning styles, available lectures for students before and after tests, a second chance for students to hear the information due to the speed the teacher speaks or students who cannot keep up taking notes, and when absent the audio would be easier for a student to decipher than another students notes.
Vcasts
Vcasts are relatively new on the scene. They are essentially the same as a blog with a Podcast but instead of written text they use recorded video. This tool allows teachers the freedom to give some very creative opportunities for their students.
del.icio.us/Social Bookmarking
Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, reviews, recipes, and more, and access them from any computer on the web. This allows teachers and students alike to share their favorite links with friends, family, coworkers, and the del.icio.us community.
Seeing that everything on del.icio.us is someone’s favorite — they’ve already done the work of finding it. So, del.icio.us is full of bookmarks about technology, entertainment, useful information, and so much more.
Wikis

To put it simply, a Wiki is a collaborative website that is updated by its users through a web browser by whoever may have access to it. Users can add text and links to other pages that are pertinent to the original page. You can even create links to pages that do not exist but by creating the link you create the page (Freedman)
Most of us are aware to the famous wiki Wikipedia. Wikipedia, is a series of pages that make up an ever growing online encyclopedia. These pages are managed by the community of individuals who use it. Wikis allow people to share ideas and are not designed to be very attractive. Their simplicity and ease of use is what allows them to be an essential tool for a group trying to develop an idea or a project.
Creating your own wiki takes only a few minutes and has many uses. Using it in a classroom does create a variety of issues. You must firs discuss with your Technology department if the schools server can handle the added burden of information. If it cannot, there are many services that can help you create one.
Students attraction to technology Digital Natives

“The computer gives me a contact to all the people I need to talk to,” Fear says. “It’s a gateway to the world.”(Portrait of a digital native – Tom McHale)
Prensky describes the Digital Native as students who want their information immediately and who are experts at multitasking between one thing to another and networking with others to get work done more expeditiously.
As has been pointed out by the likes of Prensky and Brown, the students of today are not the same as the students who sat in the same classrooms in the past. The students sitting in our classrooms today are the first generation of students to have had classroom computers for the entirety of their educational careers. These students have developed the ability to be continuously multi-processing. They can do work , talk on their cell phone, use the computer, listen to music all at the same time.
This ability to do so many complicated tasks at once is new to their generation. In his article Digital natives, Digital Immigrants: Part 1 Marc Prensky postulates that Digital Natives’ brains were likely physically different than Digital Immigrants brains due to the amount of digital information they process in their childhood. It has been thought though that people brains do not physically changed because of stimulation it may receive from the outside.
“Incorrect,” exclaims Presnky, in Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Part II: Do They Really Think Differently. Prensky sites Neurological research that shows human brains go through a variety of physical changes and re-organization throughout a lifetime in reaction to outside stimulus. This constant change in reaction to outside stimuli is technically known as “Neuroplasticity”.
Research by social psychologist Dr. Richard Nisbett, cited by Prensky, describes how people who grow up in different cultures don’t simply think about things differently in their lives, the way they actually think is different. The cultural environment in which one is reared greatly effects, even determines their thought processes.
There was a time when people believed that the brain worked in one consistent way for everyone (Prensky 2001). Despite the deep roots of this thought scientists are making the argument that the cognitive process human brains go through are much more flexible than traditional psychology believed them to be.
The changes that Prensky describes in this article do not just happen over night. It takes a lot of concentration and hard work. It is now known that “brains that undergo different developmental experiences develop differently, and that people who undergo different inputs from the culture that surrounds them think differently” (Prensky 2001, pg 3). For example the difference between the Digital Natives childhood; 10,00o hours playing videogames, 200,000 e-mails and instant messages sent and received, over 10,000 hours talking on cell phones, over 20,000 hours watching TV, and over 500,000 commercials seen all before the age of 18. This is an entirely different “culture” than that the Digital Immigrants experienced as children.(Prensky part II)
The Digital Natives have spent the entirety of their lives programming themselves for high speed connections and interactivities. Their ability to process and relate mass amounts of information is very different then their Digital Immigrant teachers and parents. Who, adjusted their brains as children to accommodate television, much like early mans adjustment to the written word.
With the above in mind the thought begs “how do they think differently?” It appears that they have developed a “hyperlinked” thought process. Where Digital Immigrants, whose thought process is like a file cabinet. Meaning, they have to finger thought, in order, all the mental files they have to access information, is a linear sequential way, Digital Natives do not. Imagine a web-page with traditional text and hypertext, text that if clicked on takes you to another web-page, possibly with entirely different thoughts and information. Their thoughts are riddled with “hyper-thoughts” or “hyper-connections” and they are able to navigate seamlessly between one thought to another without having to sift through all the information that would be found sequentially between the two thoughts. For example, thinking skills enhanced by repeated exposure to computer games and other digital media include reading visual images as representations of three-dimensional space (representational competence), multidimensional visual-spatial skills, mental maps, “mental paper folding” (i.e. picturing the results of various origami-like folds in your mind without actually doing them), “inductive discovery” (i.e. making observations, formulating hypotheses and figuring out the rules governing the behavior of a dynamic representations), “attentional deployment” (such as monitoring multiple locations simultaneously), and responding faster to expected and unexpected stimuli.
Read – Write web and Literacy today
Literacy today involves not only text, but also image and screen literacy. The ability to “read” multimedia text and to feel comfortable with new, multiple media genres is decidedly nontrivial.” (Brown)
For a long time we have downplayed the value of this type of literacy. We have been about the thought that computers was for entertainment and needed no real skill. Over the past 15 years our Internet has made leaps and bounds away from simply a genre of to a genre of content navigation. Meaning, for someone to successfully use the it they have to have the cognitive ability to navigate through literally millions of sites, and be able to able to discern the value of each and everyone in regards to what you are searching for.
This type of thought process and content value recognition is a skill developed by the Digital generation.
A study done by Monica Lucian of the University of Minnesota she discovered that people brains had the ability to self-organize itself up to the ages of 16-17.
In his article titled Digital literacy: A new terminology framework and its application to the design of meaningful technology-based learning environments Yoram Eshet, explains that with the ever growing digital technologies members of, what Prensky would call, the Digital Natives have been required to develop a new skill set he calls “digital skills.” These digital skills include “the ability to access or retrieve data, to use computer programs, and to operate digital appliances.” (Eshet 2002) Ones ability to use these new technologies is dependent on ones “digital literacy.”
Digital literacy is more than being able to operate a computer or MP3 player, for example, it is a new way of thinking. Using a computer program is relatively simple, some may say, “A few clicks here. A few clicks there.” Yet, cognitively it involves an entirely new way of reading that requires the user to decipher the information embedded in the technological interface that is being used. Along with that interaction the ability to evaluate the found data and determine the relative value of each source found.
Lastly, digital literacy requires the user to effectively use hypermedia technology, which involves the use of lateral-associative thinking, which is very different form the traditional, linear reading of a book (Eshet 2002).
Eshet postulates that people who have grown up with technology in their lives have been forced to learn to read from pictures more than previous generations. He explains that writing is simply the use of symbols to communicate ideas and concepts. Computer interfaces have turned into “intuitive picture-based, easy to learn Graphic User Interfaces.” With the development of these interfaces has come and increase in technological visualization, interactivity, and a decrease in need for the user to have special skills, such as writing computer code, to use the technology.
Therefore, with that in mind, Eshet suggests that there has been an evolution to a “new kind of writing, form abstract text-based to concrete icon based communication” (Eshet 2002, pg. 3). To effectively use new technology one must be able to communicate through icons. Which, Eshet calls “photo-digital literacy.” He explains that the graphic interfaces found on all computers now have created a new “literacy that requires the ability to use visuals (icons) as messages or ‘text’.”
Developing ones photo-digital literacy, leads to another literacy Eshet suggests, “lateral literacy.” Lateral-literacy, is based on how hypermedia technology, in computers, have effected our thought patterns. In the past many web pages consisted of simple straight forward text, similar to what is found on a page in a book. To fully utilize information presented in this way one uses a more linear thinking process, following a line thought or argument from its beginning to its logical end. With the introduction of hypertext, and embedded link in the text of a webpage that takes you to another site for more information, on a computer pages learners have had to move away from traditional linear thinking. “In order to perform demanding multi-level tasks, learners must be able to think laterally and synthesize knowledge from pieces of information that are collected in different sometimes independent, domains of knowledge.” (Eshet 2002) The literacy of today and the future lies in ones ability to act as an information referee. Keeping what you need and moving past what is of no value.
The value of what we have traditionally held sacred as literacy has changed. This change is not nearly as radical as some would like to believe it is. We have all experienced a formal, authority based, lecture oriented learning environment. Due to the amazing amount of information to be found on the internet we have found a new kind of learning which is taking over our classrooms today – discovery based learning. (Siemens 2004)
Something Brown calls “INFOTAINTMENT”
The richness of the field
The Chief Scientist at Xerox and director its Palo Alto Research Center compares the effect of the internet to that of electricity. Like electricity, which when its infrastructure finally took hold, changed everything in our lives. The workplace, our homes, transportation, architecture, food, and entertainment, to name a few were never the same. Similarly the Internet has already changed the manner in which we do nearly everything in our lives. It appears, though, as if we are still at the beginning of these changes and that we have yet to see its full potential (Growing up Digital: How the Web changes, Work, Education, and the Ways People Learn – John Sealy Brown)
With the development of all the new programs and applications, one being Blogs, that at are at our fingertips we are finding ourselves creating a, as Brown puts it, new “Learning Ecology.” According to Brown there are three things that the Internet has brought to the public as a new Information medium:
1) Throughout history information media has always been one way. The main source, pushing the information at us and we, without other options, ingesting it. The Web has created a space where information is a two-way street - a place to converse and share ideas. Where the reader can become a writer and vice versa.
2) The Web is a medium that supports the idea of multiple intelligences. The typewriter helped bring in the boom of literacy around the world. As Brown puts it “It became a great tool for writers but a terrible one for other creative activities such as sketching, painting, notating music, or even mathematics. The typewriter prized one particular kind of intelligence.” Yet with the Web, participants can develop their abstract thinking skills, their musical, writing, kinesthetic, and visual intelligences.
3) It also brings together and leverages the experiences of and efforts of others who come together to share and work together. Mentoring in schools is a perfect of example of this. Brown sites the relationship Hewlett-Packard has with a school mentoring students with science and math.
Learning theory for the digital age

As mentioned earlier, studies are showing that today’s student have the ability to cognitively change and organize them thinking process in ways that reflective of the technology that have used their whole lives. Leading one to believe that today’s students have developed their multi tasking abilities beyond that of past generations. It seems as if they have the ability to jump from one idea to another, much like hyperlinking on a webpage, and are not bound to the progressive nature of information recall their parents have.
Along with these technological developments have come changes in the lives of the those who use the technology. As little as forty years ago students would finish school and begin a career from which they, often, would retire. The development of information was measured in decades. Now, the life of knowledge is doubling every 18months, in some fields the life of knowledge is measured in months and years. (Siemens)
These changes have brought about a change in how people are thinking and learning. With those changes comes the need for a fresh perspective on how people learn. We see that learning in informal environment has become an important part of the general learning experience. Learning occurs in a variety of mediums all of which effect how our brains are being re/wired.
With the advent of the new technologies discussed earlier, a newly developing learning theory called “Connectivism” is revealing itself. Behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism are the three broad learning theories that most teacher subscribe to for the creation of their instructional environments. These three theories have been useful for many years but they were all developed at a time before technology left its print on education. With the advent of our worlds new technology, a need for a theory that explains, or attempts to explain, the connections between the sources of information and the individual learner (Siemens 2004).
Most learning theories suggest that learning happens, some way or another, inside the learner. Behaviorism suggests that the learning process is mostly unknowable because we could never really grasp what information actually goes on in a person. Here learning is identified in the form or frequency of an observable behavior. With cognitivism we view learning a bit like we view a computer. Information goes into the brain, is managed for short term memory and coded for long term re-call. (Siemens, 2004) Acquiring knowledge is a mental activity that calls for the internal coding and structure of the learner. It is relative to what the learner already knows and how he or she has gotten that information. Lastly constructivism, postulates that learning occurs when learners work to create meaning for them selves through the complex nature of real life. When a person creates meaning from their personal experiences learning occurs. (Ertmer & Newby, 1993)
George Siemens (Siemens 2004) believes that with the development and use of technology in our world the existing learning theories fall short of a thorough explanation of learning. As Siemens puts it “these theories do not address learning that occurs outside of people (i.e. learning that is stored and manipulated by technology)” (Siemens 2004 pg. 2) He also believes that in our technologically connected world we need to assess the importance of how, through the use of the internet, we draw on information outside of our primary knowledge (Siemens 2004).
He argues that there are underlying conditions that have been changed so significantly by technology that a new learning theory must be created in reaction to the changes. Ones knowledge isn’t held within the confines of ones head any more. Knowledge is affected by how well one is able to connect to and access information from other sources. Building in technology and connection making into education begins creating an environment for change. There is so much information available from so many sources that a single person could never accumulate all of it. Siemens puts it well when he says that “we derive our competence from forming connections.” (Siemens 2004)
In this chapter I addressed the state of the practice as it exists today, The absence of juried research on the topic, the dynamics of the blogging field and its attraction to students. This chapter also addressed the theory behind the Read-Write Web, digital literacy and a new learning theory courtesy of today’s new technologies.