Teach and learn

Chapter 1 (Currently under construction - NOT A FINAL DRAFT - Your ideas and comments are welcome)

I have always been a bit sympathetic to students who are forced to stay in their classrooms all day long because I remember being frustrated in my young school days. Not so much that I wanted to be outdoors in play, but because it was “Out There” where my real exploring and learning happened. In school it seemed only rote learning with little applicability to anything, practice practice practice for what I could not connect, and write, write, and more writing of that which I was not interested, with what appeared to be only a focus on sentence and paragraph structure, intro, subject and closure, etc., not communication. Very infrequently was there a comment to what was written, but god for bid if a comma was misplaced. I, as many students, disliked writing, but I loved communicating and my venue was not writing. I was a talker.
I’m not altogether sure that college preparation for the Teaching of Composition has changed much at all over the years. There still remains the prevalent idea that writing is taught in a very structured, organized and systematic method. I make no real comments to this, but I do want to discuss that there has been a great change in the vested interest of our students in writing that has been stimulated by the advancement of internet technology and that if viewed positively, managed well, and openly encouraged by the educator may well achieve with greater results the teaching of writing.
Writing no longer is something disconnected from our students, they have now become writing machines because of technology and this change alone has influenced our culture in the ways we can not fathom. Weblog, Blogging, Ipod, PDA, My Space, Instant Messaging are all new technologies and communication platforms being used by our students and all are principally writing tools. MySpace is a Weblog, a platform for blogging. If you were to Google search “MySpace and Education, you will receive 64,400,000 hits. It is a blogging site that millions of students use for communicating with and making new friends. Of those 64,400,000 hits the first four are for websites with instructions on how to access the normally blocked service from school. Schools blocking rather than encouraging a writing platform, who would have thought!
Simply put a Blog is an easily updatable website used by people to share their ideas and opinions with the world. Essentially it is the new version of the journal or diary we all tried to keep hidden as a child. The very nature of blogs though is that they are open to the public for reading, commenting on, and connecting to other people’s opinions and thoughts. This desire to share ideas and connect to other people and their ideas reflects a new attitude about communication. Bloggers are as interested in expanding their understanding of a topic and/or helping others in their understanding of an idea as they are in simply having something to say.
For example, below is a short list compiled by Will Richardson in his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, outlining where simple journal ends and real blogging begins. Notice that there is an emphasis on the bloggers need to use their metacognitive skills and develop their critical reading and thinking skills.
1) Journaling, i.e. “This is what I did today” (Not blogging)
2) Links with descriptive annotation, i.e., “This site is about….” (Not really blogging, but getting close depending on the depth of description)
3) Links with analysis that gets into the meaning of the content being linked (A simple form of blogging)
4) Reflective, metacongitive writing on practice without links. (Complex writing, but simple blogging, I think. Commenting would probably fall in here somewhere)
5) Links with analysis and synthesis that articulate a deeper understanding or relationship to the content being linked and written with potential audience and response in mind. (Real blogging)
6) Extended analysis and synthesis over a longer period of time that builds on previous posts, links and comments. (Complex blogging).
Having spent time as an ESL teacher with students who have limited oral English much less writing skills, I was intrigued to learn that they spent a great deal of time outside the classroom reading and writing, a good thing. I was even more surprised when viewing one of my student’s MySpace message boards that his writing was almost error free, while his classroom work was perplexingly poor. It was then and there that I decided to try and use blogs in my classes as an interest scaffold for reading and writing assignments. It worked marvelously. I started in two classes and I found that students took more time checking and re-checking their work in the hopes of making as few mistakes as possible. In both classes the blogs were used as a tool to include voices into our discussions that would have other wise never been heard. We had participants from other states and from one different country.
From the beginning of the project, I began to see a difference in my student’s intellectual progress relative to their time on the computer and the time in class. First, my students were very motivated and excited to use in class a technology that they used outside of class. Secondly, they were much more conscientious of the quality of their final project. Despite the few people who were bent on “chatting”, most of the students read critically and connected to what they were writing. Thirdly, the students seemed to take the time to search out relevant, interesting information that dealt with the topic of our class. It also encouraged them to more thoroughly analyze what was being said by their sources and critical analysis of each others writing.
I am not exactly sure as to why this happened - I’m not a neurologist nor do I fully understand the development and activity of our brains synapses. However, I do have some thoughts. Today’s students spend all of their time getting what they want when they want it. Today, students seem to be able to simply hyperlink between ideas, subjects, and concepts, just like they were clicking on a web page, whereas, I as a student was taught and learned along a time line, so to speak. It is as though time and space has merged for my students and is now simply a “Mouse Click”. The ability for the student to publish, in real time, is a huge draw for students. Simply give them a topic, an issue, a writing prompt that encourages critical thinking, or links to a few sources about a topic and in a half an hour you can watch the magic happen.
The inception of the internet was intended to be a harbinger of communication and conectivism through reading and writing. It has reached that goal many times over. Blogs are a tool for people, students in this case, to read, write, speak (pod cast), share videos (vod cast), and to connect to global ideas and issues. Blogs are a way for our students to leave their physical classroom and enter the classroom of the world without the threat of detention, the principals office, or suspension. Blogs can take students places far from the confines of the classroom where a text book may reign supreme and to the world where ideas rule. Those ideas can be brought back to classroom to enrich their classmates.
I feel that the reason most teachers have not incorporated blogs into their curriculum is not that they are unable to do so. They just do not know how to do it effectively and not take hours and hours of their own time developing something new. There are a few books available that discuss how to develop a blog for the classroom. These books are interesting and inspiring but do not give clear curricular examples of how exactly they can be used in a class. I hope that the following pages will explain the importance of blogs.
Specifically, I will address 1) how to create a curriculum that leans heavily on blogging 2) Safety concerns teachers and families have about blogs 3) the state of the practice as it exists today 4) the absence of juried research on the topic 5) the dynamics of the blogging field and its attraction to students with its technology. As the second chapter comes to a close I will touch on the idea of the Read-Write Web, digital literacy and the emergence of a new learning theory brought on by todays technologies.