(the new) bgblogging

I’m lucky enough to have my office in Middlebury’s new library (yes, it’s quite a wonderful mix of books and computers–my kind of place), and this afternoon, as I walked through the stacks, I noticed the crush of students staring at computer screens–cellphones, notebooks and textbooks strewn about the desks and tables–hammering out those last papers before racing out of here for Thanksgiving in front of tomorrow’s forecasted snowstorm. My own daughter, a senior in high school, was one of those students, sitting at a carrel piled high with dictionaries, concordances, and a Bible, wrangling with the differences between Luke and Mark for a paper for her college course, Introduction to Biblical Literature taught by one of Middlebury’s most esteemed professors. As she and some four dozen other students scattered about the library tried to figure out what the subtle shifts in language and focus reveal about these authors, who centuries ago were telling the same old story according to their own agendas, I went back to my office nearby, where in between appointments, I read a recent article in The Guardian (via Dave Weinberger) about why ownership of ideas is all wrong. And then a few minutes later I was paid a visit by a young woman just hired, mid-semester, to teach English at our local high school, seeking my advice about a creative writing course she suddenly found herself teaching two weeks into the new quarter. She was working hard to come up with an effective syllabus and needed help.

The correspondances and the ironies between these moments and these worlds fairly ricocheted off the walls: the many versions of the old stories (as my daughter says, “If there had been such a thing as intellectual property rights back then, Mark would have been one rich guy…”), the many scientists working through similar experiments to test their theories, and teachers trying out the same syllabi, teaching the same writers and ideas–moving through the old ideas, trying them on for size before exerting their own thinking on the world just to have those ideas considered and either built on or rejected by the next thinker to come along. Is this kind of sharing doomed?

I sure hope not. I just gave my students an assignment to find a magnificent paragraph written by any writer published or not, to read it aloud, to copy it onto paper, then to write their own paragraph repeating the patterns of the grammar. (Aaron’s example). We’ll talk about these paragraphs tomorrow, about what they have learned by “copying” the greats. This is how writing has long been taught–we stand on the shoulders of those who came befoe us–knowingly, and we converse with them in our work. This is what, I believe, T.S. Eliot was talking about when he said something along the lines of, “Everything good I wrote, I borrowed; everything great, I stole.” ( which brings to mind the great writer-editor relationships of Pound and Eliot, and Carver and Lish–would we have Eliot without Pound, Carver without Lish?)

I want my students to try on the writing of those who have come before them; I want my daughter to feel the differences between Mark and Luke; I want this young teacher to feel free to use my teaching ideas in her class. This is how we learn; this is how we find our own way–through looking and sharing freely, dreaming big, putting our ideas out there to see what comes back.

Maybe I’m writing this post because I’ve just finished teaching a research unit in my writing course, and I’ve talked long and hard about giving credit where credit’s due, how to cite properly, scaring the students as they try to draw lines between what they have absorbed through the generalized world and what they have gleaned from a particular thinker’s work– I am exhausted by all this attention to intellectual property in class, in the news, and on the blogs. I am shocked when teachers will not share their syllabi (all of mine are linked right here off my blog). Aren’t we working here to educate our young? Aren’t we trying to embrace ideas and chew on them and build on them in ways that shed light on the past or move us into the future?

That to me has been the beauty of the Web, (what I have been blogging about lately), and of Thanksgiving when we’re at least supposed to be thinking of sharing, of embracing the contributions of the group to the common good. I love the free spinning out of ideas, the way they ripple out from blog to blog and come back again in new form. When have we ever been able to gather the expertise, the imagination, the potential from so many minds and experiences together with our own flawed, individual musings? Blogging lets us float ideas–sometimes half-baked–however we want. Take a look at Worldbridges recent three-day online conference on EFL teaching and learning practices across the planet— this is free, open sharing of ideas, all to improve the teaching of second languages for as many students as possible. There’s no personal gain here. No one is going to get rich.

So, I have issues with intellectual property, I really do. I’m all for the Creative Commons, and now the Academic Commons. Tell the world where your ideas originated, who else is playing around with them, and then play around with the thoughts. I ask my students to take responsibility for their ideas–the flip side of intellectual property–privacy. We don’t use pseudonyms on our course blogs. If they write something, then, well, the students need to stand by that writing.

And so I’m urging high school and college teachers to post their syllabi, let other teachers, old and new alike learn from one another, mentor one another here on the Web and in the schools. Young teachers shouldn’t be left to their own devices but given all the syllabi, all the wisdom of their colleagues to consider as they make their own way into teaching. Schools employ us to teach, not to own our teaching ideas. We want our students to grow up bold and passionate and community-spirited, yes? Then we need to practice what we preach here on the blogs, in the classrooms, and with our colleagues.

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Just when I think that I’ve blogged myself, presented myself, taught myself out for the month–yes, it’s that insane time of the semester–something pulls me back onto this space. Today it’s a couple of things: Ewan McIntosh’s question following my recent podcasting post and David Warlick’s posts yesterday and today, and Will’s follow-up on Connective Writing .

Ewan’s question: “I wish examination boards would accept electronic essays so that students can make their work more media rich. But does this take away from the skills involved in conveying emotion and sentiment in writing?”

This is one of the questions I am frequently asked in my own college as well as during presentations. And it’s a good question reflecting the widespread concern that if we encourage students to move between various media in their heretofore strictly text-based essays, then, well, we also–perhaps inadvertently–allow them to avoid the necessary apprenticeship involved in using written language to convey “emotion and sentiment.” Parents, school boards, government officials, boards of trustees, students themselves, fellow faculty might wonder if these multimedia modes of expression take time away from lessons in writing and perhaps even damage the writing by making it more about the shiny surfaces offered by image and sound than about clear and convincing written expression. And we should ask that question.

My sense is, after years and years of teaching writing and some four plus years of having students write with text, sound and image, that sure, absolutely–if we do not teach the grammar of image, sound and word, and their relationships to one another, then we will not guide our students towards a sense of how to use each separately and in combination with any power or substance. But if we have our poets use cameras and iPODS, say–and then examine the repercussions of a photo inserted within or in stead of a poem; or our filmmakers use poems and dance; or our composers use stories and video–and we do so with intention as well as a willingness to let them run free with their experiments, following up with close reflection throughout the process–well, then. then we will grow more powerful writers, musicians, choreographers, painters, and filmmakers–not because they will necessarily take to the variety of media, but because they will then understand more about their own ways of communicating and the world beyond their own individual expression. In my classrooms, my students have become more aware of language precisely when I take it away from them and make it strange. It’s what happens when you read one of John Berger’s image-laden essays–the words become charged beyond their ordinary meaning.

After all, I am a teacher of writing, and so all of the podcasting, stories-without-words and multimedia work I have my writers do is to get them to understand what happens when we push words up against one another. We can then talk about words being the writer’s paint or clay –and that collaborations between word, image and sound should, if done well, intensify the experience of each medium for the creator and the viewer. The new, interactive virtual means of expression–with links, pop-ups, discussions, mixed media–can lead to deep learning and effective writing off-screen as well as developing skill with Web-writing.

But I am also a realist. People worry about watering down the curriculum, about getting lost in the flash of the new. People also worry about a world in which everything and everyone is “clickable.” As both teacher of college students and mother of a nineteen-year-old and a sixteen-year-old, I was sucked right into David’s post, Insights from a Techie, in which he explores the implications of Vinod Khosla’s contention that for our children, “Everything is clickable.”

David posits that if indeed, teachers are clickable:

I agree with him that we are moving in the direction of instruction-on-demand, which James Duderstadt has been getting at, the kind of free-range learners we’re finding in our midst who want hybrid courses they design on their own (I see it in the way students show up at my office fully expecting me to be prepared to deliver whatever it is they need–I am indeed clickable in their minds). But I have to say that yesterday when I read the post, I was worried about the implications of the teacher-as-clickable if we do not include the learning community in our discussions of the changing face of education, if we for one moment get carried away with the tool and not the connection. The promise of the Internet, of Web-based teaching is on the potential to work beyond ourselves as individuals, as Howard Rheingold contends in SmartMobs: “The most profoundly transformative potential of connecting human social proclivities to the efficiency of information technologies ia the chance to do new things together, the potential for cooperating on scales and in ways never before possible.” And so of course, David gets at this in“target=”_blank”>his post today about education as CONVERSATION.

Indeed, what helps my students in their learning more than anything else is the sense that they are in this with others, others who care about their well-being, their ideas, and their contributions. This is efficacy in action. A teacher who can establish an open, trusting learning collaborative, encouraging students to develop a social imagination (a la Maxine Greene) will necessarily replace the hierarchical model of education with the Socratic and emergent model, with the teacher as question asker, model and guide, and the student-seeker as fellow explorer within a community. And so in my teaching, I am constantly throwing my students into groups online and off, into considering the impact of audience and connection and reciprocity, which David gets to at the end of his post yesterday:

If we nurture the group as well as the individual through learning collaboratives, connecting the learning with human relationships and with the world beyond our own tiny sphere, then we’ll help our charges move into adulthood and its attendant responsibilities. That’s what education has always been about. As educators, we must consider carefully how we engage with technology in our classrooms and how we help our students become critical and creative thinkers about their world. Social software and the Web can enhance and facilitate the growth of our students into educated citizens of the world and skilled communicators or they can nurture the selfish competitive instincts of the self-absorbed individual. It takes a mindful teacher to put the collaborative up front, to get students to think about learning as a social activity, and then to let students explore emerging technologies as expressive tools and examine the resulting relationships and outcomes. This is why I’m enthusiastic about the potential of such tools as using Suprglu and 43Places, and Skypecasting–these are opportunities to connect to and to learn from the world–but I won’t actually pull them into my teaching until I have thought carefully about how and why. It is a balancing act.

Our focus as teachers has always been effective communication and thinking. Now that we have the Web and social software and multimedia tools, our students can be a part of the larger conversation right now, even as novices. In such an open, “clickable” classroom with a teacher who is eager to learn and is self-reflective alongside the students, the students will learn the pleasures of commitment and collaboration, and the learning will be profound and dynamic, and the writing–well–the writing will surprise you.

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Okay, the secret’s out–I’m not a techie.

I’m a teacher who has integrated social software, digital storytelling, video and audio into my teaching for pedagogical reasons–because computer technology has offered me ways both to do what I already did well–but better–and to prepare my students for an increasingly multimedia online world . Before I ventured onto my first blogs some five years ago, I barely knew how to organize my email folders. And even now that I am fully immersed in this social software world, I am still stretching just to keep up with RSS and wikis and podcasting and the rest of the emerging technologies. I’m just now considering the possibiities of gaming.

Indeed. This weekend, before I could participate in the Edtechtalk.com Webcast, I needed help to figure out Skype and to prevent the headset from turning Dave’s and Jeff’s locations into echo chambers. I couldn’t tap away at the keyboard in the Chat room while I was talking on the Webcast–and as I peeked in at the Chat Room, I marveled at how Dave was tapping away as he talked. I’ve got a long way to go before I am really comfortable with a wide array of tools used all at once. (It reminded me of Blogtalk2 a couple of summers ago, where kind souls like Suw Charman, and Lee Bryant, and Roland Tanglao and Cyprien Lomas showed me how to backchannel –repeatedly–and last May’s Social Software in the Academy Workshop in Los Angeles where Justin Hall was able to Google-jockey, ask questions, back-channel and move between some twenty-odd windows on his screen–all at once, gracefully (thanks, MEB, for the photo). It was dizzying. It wasn’t my world.

I have shied away from IM and multiple simultaneous experiences on the computer. I’ve always been a one-at-a-time kind of thinker even if I am restless and curious and bold. I love blogs and wikis and podcasts–all asynchronous, all open to revision, to quiet reflection and to the return. They make such sense for the teacher of critical and creative thinking and writing.

But Sunday’s experience has me rethinking real-time applications. It was a blast sitting there at my computer talking with people from all over the world about social software in the classroom, watching them tap away in the Chat Room. Dave and Jeff are onto something pretty fabulous. Talking with Will and his students in real time but knowing our conversation would also be podcast, instead of writing to and about them at some later time, added something valuable–yes, an obvious immediate, present in-the-moment experience. It’s what the classroom gives my students–that time together. Interesting to feel it with a headset and a computer screen and noone else in the room.

I could see the real value of inviting the world in to comment and ask questions and listen in right then as well as later via the podcast. And I’m wishing I could get my abroad bloggers set up to do some webcasts right now. I see all kinds of applications within the classroom and the college as a whole–what a great way to bring alumni into conversations, or for Admissions to conduct information sessions. In addition to experts joining written discussions on the blog, I could see bringing them into the classroom so simply via webcasts. What a great way to connect students from several institutions–or students doing internships, or–

Okay okay, so I’m slow, but I get it, I get it.

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