(the new) bgblogging

I’ve steered clear of them, I have to admit–online conferences, that is.

I read the descriptions, which usually sound interesting, and what’s better, you can come and go at will, deciding what to follow and what to ignore–you can surf the sessions, in other words, until you light on something that holds your interest. In other words, you won’t embarrass anyone by ducking out of a session, and you can alway come back at leisure if the sessions are archived. You can return again and again, in fact. Most significantly, (at least in theory– if the online conference costs are minimal) online conferences bring together people from across the world (again in theory — if the participants have online access and share a language) in dialogue about shared interests and research, giving participants access to speakers, information, and opportunities to discuss the subject that in the past may have remained out of reach. The conversation can be shifted to embrace multiple cultural perspectives. In the best of these formats, no one person is the show or dictates the conversation. Sounds pretty ideal.

But I still don’t like them.

For one, I find it difficult to juggle various channels and chatrooms, listening & watching & responding, asking questions, attending to side conversations all at once. I really don’t like listening and talking at the same time, and chat rooms can get distracting. There can be too much to absorb–I can’t hold onto it all, or remember who said what. It can feel like a perpetual waterfall of interruptions. Hmmm…sounds like the kind of environment that feels natural to my daughters. My students. It’s what I read in the literature about emerging childhood literacies. I am fascinated, and I enjoy giving these settings a shot, but I feel completely wrung out, strung out after such a conference (even more than I do those BIG cattleshow national conferences). I inevitably have to go back and read transcripts and watch the screencasts, so I can think about the things I have heard without distraction.

I am, I realize, contradicting a statement I made earlier this year in reference to a Jay Cross online presentation–and yes, I do like having screencasts linked to from my own blog entries, and lists of conference presentations and transcripts to study. Maybe I just need more practice. But, I wonder, if I have a hard time navigating these conferences, what about people who don’t normally spend as much of their lives in the blogosphere as I do? Perhaps conference pods could be set up so people could get together locally to discuss and participate in online conferences much as my husband as a teenager in Milwaukee would go to a movie theater to watch European soccer matches, where he would shout and swap soccer stories with the other fans. He did not watch a screen in the isolation of his own living room.

And much as I hate to admit it, I miss seeing people in their rumpled conference wear, or like Will today as one pair of jeans in a sea of suits (ha–good for you, Will, though my guess is that Dave Weinberger was right there with you in attire. In an online conference, would you have sniffed out their suits, and they your jeans? Probably.) I miss the experience, the story of the in-person UNconference–the meeting, conversation, the face-to-face talk that used to happen between sessions but now happens in the kinds of professional get-togethers I try to attend these days. I find myself at the end of a technology saturated school year looking forward to these conferences, meetings, workshops and retreats I’ll head to this summer. I want to see the people. I want to go from the blogs to the in-person conversation to the blogs again.

Another set of contradictions: This morning, I found myself inordinately joyful to hear my sixteen-year-old daughter’s voice on the phone, from Ladakh, after a week–just one week– of no contact as she was out in the mountains, out of range. Although when I traipsed across the world, I never spoke to my parents for months and months, and postcards and aerogrammes limped continent to continent finally to reach them when the news was weeks old, I have grown accustomed to reading her emails and hearing her voice from across the world frequently. And this morning I realized how much I count on it, how it is so much easier for me to let her go winging her way about the world because I know she can pretty much contact us from wherever she is–I can hear her voice as though she’s in the next room, instead of in a place about as far from here as you can get (in so many ways). This morning she spoke about how she’s learned so much about the pressures and pleasures for the Ladakhi of modernization, and the beauty –for a plugged-in girl from the USA–of quiet, of sitting around with her host family night after night swapping stories, knitting, even just sitting there close to the warm stove, looking at the stars out the window. They inhabit and share memory and experience, turning them over and over. Every night. They may yearn for cellphones, we for silence and relief from the clatter of machines. My daughter gets that tension and sees how crucial media literacy education is for those moving towards technology, and for those trying to get away from it. We hang up the phone, and I marvel at her, and I laugh at myself for writing this post whining about something like online conferences when there are so much more interesting things to think about in the world.

But of course it is all so much more complex than all this, and something keeps nagging at me about my online world, and so, as usual, my conflicting thoughts have pushed me back into books, books this time covering new research and theory about early childhood and digital literacy, the Web as community conduit, and storytelling in the information age. In my search for some answers, I find myself once again reaching for that word, BALANCE.

I dove back into Pierre Levy’s Collective Intelligence and Dave Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Popular Culture, New Media and Digital Literacy in Early Childhood (Ed. Jackie Marsh, 2005), and Stuart Selber’s Multiliteracies for a Digital Ageand Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World. And I also journeyed back into Charles Baxter’s 1999 essay, “Shame and Forgetting in the Information Age”.

In his section on backpacks (pp. 181-191) Dave Weinberger includes these snippets:

And I know he’s right about this and why I am not giving up on trying online conferences–and of course this is counter to what many people think, those who associate the Web only with the avalanche of information giving us “information-nausea” (Baxter). And it does do that–which is why I turn from online conferences, and say, enough–this goes beyond what I can or want to absorb on screen. Charles Baxter sees the deadening, not the “movement towards human authenticity”:

Do we bloggers sit around a stove and tell the stories of our lives and our ancestors’ lives? Is it helping us to have experiences and to remember? Blogging has made me not want to give up blogging, but to combine it with even more in-person talk. I want both. As Guy Merchant writes in “Barbie Meets Bob the Builder” in the Marsh-edited volume, the computer and the Web have transformed writing into “a rapidly changing social practice, in which a wider range of technologies are now at hand.” (p.186) Blogging is a kind of swapping-stories around the virtual campfire–but I can’t see the faces. Victoria Carrington, in “New Textual Landscapes, Information and Early Literacy” from the same volume, writes:

This is much what edubloggers are saying across the blogosphere as they chonicle their efforts within their local institutions to put pressure on our entire educational system, pushing and pulling it towards the realities of a twenty-first century world.

Beach and Bruce in “Using Digital Tools to Foster Critical Inquiry” in Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World, point out that

We teachers can’t turn away from the online world–not even, as Stuart Selber argues persuasively in Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, in Higher Ed English departments:

I want students to see me puzzling this out, in class and on the blog, feeling a tension between the worlds. Sharing, participating, narrating–experiencing a new world. Hmmm….sounds like what we want to do in English classrooms. We need not lose the in-person when we move online, just as we do not put away our books when we take up blogs. I see this in my own students on our course blogs. They honor writing traditions as they themselves move beyond them. We have moved in closer to one another as we have moved out into the blogosphere. We want the comfort of one another’s body language, facial expressions, and talk. But not apart from the blogs, perhaps because of the blogs. This social-software and digital-storytelling-in the classroom adventure I’ve been on for five years keeps shouting out lessons of balance. I am delighted by the irony, once again, that blogging and storytelling have compelled me to use the classtime ever more meaningfully. We are glad to be together, and we know one another better than classes in my pre-blog teaching days. We run to the blogs and to the class.

I couldn’t have predicted quite this when I first pulled blogs into my courses in the fall of 2001; I did so then because I sensed students were feeling the parts of themselves being spilled into separate boxes: the person in class, and the person outside of class. The two didn’t have all that much to do with one another. I thought that to bring the world to my students and my students to one another would erase those lines. It made absolute sense in a seminar on contemporary Irish literature (The original blog is now offline due to an abrupt switch from Manila to MT) to seize opportunities to invite into a virtual classroom space experts I could not afford to bring into our rural Vermont physical space. It made sense to have all of the work of the course on view, connected, in process–a working laboratory of developing skills in critical and creative thinking and, hence, writing. Students should learn from one another as well as from whatever I had to tell them. It worked. Even better than I had anticipated. Along the way, the visual transparency of the medium–how it allowed students to examine, follow, appreciate and understand their process and growth– became just as important and led me to make adjustments in the syllabus and in the way I conducted class. Assignments grew to include online workshopping and knowledge trees–the more we knew each other as thinkers and writers and community members, the stronger our learning collaborative would grow, and the richer the learning experience. I pulled in a wiki from time to time–though I could certainly do more with them–and podcasting, multimedia writing and hypertext essays. This was a natural learning curve, a developing use of social software in the writing and literature classrooms. But I didn’t anticipate that I would add another class meeting every week, more one-on-one conferences with me–I had no idea that we would move from blog to class to blog to class to blog as we did, pretty seamlessly.

And here on bgblogging I’ve been writing about those outcomes, those experiences as they unfold on my class blogs, and as I wrote in my previous post, I have found my own blogging informed by my teaching but also by the experience of participating in a blogging community. No longer was I working in relative isolation with my students–not only was my students’ work an open laboratory for them and the rest of the world, but my teaching was and is for me and others. Blogging has sent me back to writing letter-like essays, but it has sent me out into the woods with my camera, and across oceans to meet people face-to-face.

Yes, the experiences online are valid, rich experiences, but they make the in-person ones all that sweeter. And so just as the more I move outside my classroom into the world of community applications of social software and digital storytelling, the more I move back into my classroom, the more I blog, the more I want my conferences in person and not online. It’s a fascinating balance, and one that’s sure to shift as I continue to explore it.

Filed under: Classroom Blogging, Discoveries in the Blogging World, Emergence, Insights into New Media in the Classroom, Teaching and Learning | Comments Off on Memory, Experience, and Online Conferences

Over the past year I’ve posted several entries on what student blogging means for the teacher: the actual practice versus the theory of using social software in the classroom and fear’s crippling effect– I’m not talking about the fear factor Will’s been covering (schools shutting blogs down for fear of students abusing one another or being abused by the outside world via the internet) but the fear of change–the fear of free-falling, of moving away from the known, of relinquishing control and of the impact on our time and the resulting pressure on how we train our teachers. It’s one thing to talk about subject-centered, collaborative-centered, connected learning (via blogs or not); it’s another thing altogether to make it truly a reality in classrooms employing blogs in ways many edubloggers write about, including me. And if a teacher/researcher as insightful and open-minded and influential as Jill Walker is pulling away from having her students blog (also see her response to my previous post here) because blogging seems unscalable to large classes when she’s trying to balance the demands on her time (personal life, teaching, research and administrative responsibilities), it makes me stop a moment and wrestle with the topic once again.

First off, the time issue. No teacher ever has enough time. We are asked to cram whole lifetimes of learning into ten-twelve-fifteen weeks, and we wonder why we feel like zombies and our students are increasingly stressed out. Taking on one more thing, one more approach, tool, pedagogy seems like madness when we’re already teetering on the brink of losing any time to ourselves much less time to make it through the course requirements. And on first view, collaborative learning approaches that focus on each student’s ability to contribute to group according to his/her learning style and learning interests seem to demand more time on our part managing, overseeing, leading, planning, and modelling. And that’s the problem–if we only kinda sorta adopt the tools and the approaches, while hanging onto our need to be in control of the learning situation and outcomes, then we’ll surely dive headfirst into the sinkhole of the teacher-as-everything model. I do not believe that classroom blogs are more time-consuming than any other effective teaching approach–once you know what you’re doing with them. And that’s the problem–new approaches take more time initially, and are risky because we’ll make mistakes along the way. We have to look closely at the FEAR factor and find ways to help our co-horts and ourselves dare to move into teaching & learning as a collective intelligence activity.
An interesting article on the terrific Tomorrow’s Professor Blog, a collaboration between MIT and Stanford, Preparing Faculty for Pedagogical Change: Helping Faculty Deal with Fear by Linda Hodges, outlines underlying fears that make shifting to new pedagogies, including collaborative and problem-solving learning, so overwhelming to many teachers. If we want to bring about widespread reform —really do it instead of thinking we are doing it, we must address these teacher fears and help with concrete, non-threatening steps. Dave Cormier’s one-day virtual conference next weekend to fire up “a mass curriculum plan” on “how to use Social Media that uses Social Media as a core part of the teaching.” seems to me a brilliant step in the right direction. Teachers need help! Instead of adopting an attitude of, well, good teachers will get it just as they have always gotten it, and bad teachers will not or can not, I’m determined to take a page from Anne’s blog, and focus as much on ways to move into this work as on the outcomes as experienced by the learning collaboratives in my classrooms.
Conrad’s recent posting about how he has learned to comment on student writing rather than mark it because he has learned to include the student in a conversation (versus the teacher monologue), is a brave post: his transparent reflective practice gives us all a view into the impact a blogging practice can have on the teacher, even away from computers altogether. And there’s Tom Wright’s post on “Blogs and Learning Communities, that points out the difference between commenting and marking. Any teacher who has read Lucy Calkins or Donald Graves or Peter Elbow or Mina Shaunnessey, etc. knows about the conversations that must occur in writing classrooms, that the most important aspect of teaching is, perhaps, listening. The research tells as much: “The Instructional Conversation: Teaching and Learning in Social Activity, by Tharp and Gallimore, in 1991, for example. We talk about Dewey’s “learning as a social activity” but are we really doing more than holding classroom discussions that often look a whole lot like the teacher talking and the students listening, or the teacher asking pointed questions that have the students jumping over one another to deliver THE RIGHT answer? Most teachers believe they give the students a part of the conversation. And yet doing so means giving up control of the conversation and re-envisioning the way time is spent in a course. Giving up control, some believe, means time is being wasted, material isn’t being covered, we are shirking our teacherly responsibilities. And, furthermore, in a classroom that values emergent learning, you never know exactly where you’re going until you get there. With standards to meet and tests to pass, how is it that any teacher would dare bring blogs into the classroom if they mean that students might digress or even meander down the wrong road altogether? Blogs do NOT take more time; they do, however, demand a new view of how we spend our time in the classroom and out. Ah so, we teachers must reorient ourselves to the entire learning process, to our relationship with our teaching, much the way my students have, through writing with images and sound as well as text, recently shaken up their whole sense of who they are as writers and what discoveries lie just below the first outpourings of language onto a page. And that’s scary.

Here are more questions related to the topic of teachers and fear that have surfaced in my blog/email/phone and in-person conversations this week:

What does it take for a teacher to bring blogging into the course in the first place?

What keeps a teacher blogging with her students?

Is blogging scalable to a large class (versus the 15-18 students classes I teach)?

I’ll tackle these questions over the next few posts, but for now I want to point to Francois Lachance’s response to Jill, and how he reminds us that it is NOT blogging per se that is the key, but having our students “network and discuss” and taking responsibility for tracking their own development in whatever form it makes sense to do so according to the learning situation and the learner:

And this is what Dave’s idea for the mass-generated curriculum is, I think, and what I hope we all do on our blogs–begin to compile the resources and to articulate clearly the reasons for time-stressed, anxious teachers to step into this work fostering strong learning collaboratives within their classrooms.

Filed under: Classroom Blogging, Discoveries in the Blogging World, Emergence, Insights into New Media in the Classroom, Teaching and Learning | 2 Comments »