Posts Tagged ‘teaching’

the sleeping alone review of books: Teaching the New Writing

Jun 16th, 09 / 1 Comment

Summary: Awesomeness reigns at the house of NWP

I’m only giving you the first three paragraphs, and then you have to read the rest at the real live journal that published it online. brb turning into pile of graduate student joy confetti

ok back

the link is here. The journal is THEN (the name stands for [t]echnology, [h]umanities, [e]ducation and [n]arrative). The review begins below.

The National Writing Project is perhaps the most enduring teacher development network in the country. Started in 1974 as the Bay Area Writing Project, based at the University of California, Berkeley, the project quickly grew, both in funding and popularity, and today the NWP has nearly 200 sites nationwide.

Many have argued that a significant reason for the ongoing success of this program is its decision to host NWP sites at local universities. According to NWP supporters, this pairing allows for stability, ongoing professional development opportunities, and a higher degree of buy-in from faculty at local schools and at the university. One wonders if this model limits access to NWP involvement to the teachers who work in and around colleges; these are the teachers who already have the most access to research and university resources, and traditionally underserved rural or geographically isolated teachers and their students are, prevented access to this resource.

Still, it’s hard to argue with success, and the NWP is nothing if not successful. The pairing of K-12 teachers with higher ed faculty makes for an interesting and fruitful partnership, as evidenced by the NWP’s new book, Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st-Century Classroom.

The editors of the book represent … [to read the rest of this review, go to http://thenjournal.org.]

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on multiculturalism and diversity (or lack thereof) in the media literacies movement

Jun 8th, 09 / 0 Comments

***UPDATE, 5:30 P.M. 6/8/09***
This conversation was picked up by LiveJournal user Ithiliana, who takes up this issue from the perspective of a queer feminist scholar focusing on women of color (as she clearly explains in her blog, “if you tell me I am being reverse sexist, you will be banned”) in “Appropriation, New Media, Currriculum, a Whale of a Post.”
***OK END OF UPDATE.***

This morning Henry Jenkins posted a response to my response to Liz Losh’s response to Project New Media Literacies’ presentation of its Teachers’ Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture. In his post, Henry argues this:

[Multiculturalism] is not a question we ignore in working with these materials. We are trying to bring these issues front and center in the language arts classroom, just as we are trying to get teachers to engage with new forms of creative expression — including remix in hip hop and techno — that build upon materials borrowed, snatched, stolen from the culture and put to new uses. We see these ethical concerns as central to our definition of appropriation which stresses “meaningful remixing” of existing cultural materials, just as we are also introducing issues around fair use, copyright, and creative commons. I am proud of the work our team has done in this area. It’s certainly not above friendly fire and constructive criticism. And if our presentations of these materials don’t do justice to the nuance and care with which we treated these issues, then we have some more work to do.

In support of his argument, Henry cites materials we included in the “Expert Voices” section of the curriculum. He highlights material we included from Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, who is, as Henry explains, “an African-American play(wright) and director, who has staged a contemporary, multiracial version of the classic novel.”

Here’s a snippet of what Ricardo said (the rest is available at Henry’s blog):

When I came in contact with the new media literacies, many of the concepts were new to me, like the fascinating concept of remixing and appropriation. That’s an incredible choice of words to use in this new field: appropriation. I have spent much of my creative life trying not to appropriate things…..

So when I came across the word “appropriation” in the new media literacies I thought to myself, I’m a product of a black culture where so much of what we’ve created has been appropriated and not necessarily for our benefit. The great jazz artists were not necessarily making money off of jazz. The record companies were making money. Our dance forms, our music, our lingo, all of those things have been appropriated many, many times and not necessarily in a way in which we profited. So when I saw the term used I had a lot of concern about it. I still have a lot of concern about it, because does that mean that everything is fair game whether or not you understand its value? Can you just use whatever you want because it’s out there? Before you take something and use it, understand it. What does it mean to the people? Where was it born? It doesn’t mean that it’s not there to be used. It’s like music in the air: it’s there for everyone to hear it. But don’t just assume because you have a computer and I can download a Polynesian rhythm and an African rhythm and a Norwegian rhythm that I don’t have a responsibility to understand from whence they came; if I’m going to use gospel music I have a responsibility to understand that it’s born of a people and a condition that must be acknowledged.

In expanding on what Ricardo says, Henry writes that

the decision (to focus on Moby-Dick) was inspired by the growing body of scholarship which looks at Moby-Dick as a representation of the whaling ship as a multicultural society where sea men of many different ethnic, racial, and national backgrounds came together and worked towards a common goal. As Wyn Kelly, my collaborator, points out in our guide, Melville does not depict a world without conflict but he is honest to the multiracial composition of 19th century American culture.

The focus was also inspired by the imaginative and transformative interpretation of the book constructed by our creative collaborator, Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, and his passionate belief that Moby-Dick and some of the other classics taught through schools have something to say to current generations of readers and offer resources through which minority students can make sense of their current experience. Certainly there is an ongoing debate about which novels should be taught in schools, but the result of that debate should not simply be the replacement of Melville by Morrison. Ideally, both would be taught in dialogue with each other so that we have a richer understanding of how debates about race run through the American literary tradition and ideally, multiculturalism doesn’t just shape which books we teach but also how we teach them. Someone like Pitts-Wiley can teach us to read Moby-Dick through new eyes and in doing so, help us to better understand what it means to live in a multicultural society.

I absolutely agree with everything included above, and I largely agree with the arguments Henry sets forth in his post. Our effort in designing the Teachers’ Strategy Guide was to highlight and grapple with the issues of race and culture around a canonical text like Moby-Dick, and as Henry writes, “if our presentations of these materials don’t do justice to the nuance and care with which we treated these issues, then we have some more work to do.”

Where I think the new media literacies movement is faltering somewhat is in how it works to address these issues–mainly, that the movement is primarily populated by members of what Jim Gee calls the dominant Discourse of our culture. We’re mainly white, mainly middle- or upper-class–and while our intentions are good, there’s something a little…icky about the fact that we’re the ones guiding conversations about multiculturalism. In designing the Teachers’ Strategy Guide, we worked, it’s true, to include the voices of people like Ricardo and Rudy…but we served as the spokespeople for them, the filters of their words. We made the final decisions about what to include, and how to include it, and which pieces of what they said, did, and wrote mattered most to our work.

This isn’t intentional, of course. I can’t help being a white kid from suburban Detroit. (Even coming from the 313 doesn’t make me less white, less suburban–I mean, just look at me over there.) I can’t help that I care about and want to grapple with racism and multiculturalism despite my whiteness. But in the best-case scenario, I’m grappling with these issues alongside a variety of thinkers, writers, and practitioners who come from multiple ethnic, cultural, and economic backgrounds.

Despite its best efforts and a lot of headway in this aspect, the media literacy movement–at least, the part of it that works at the intersection of new media and education–is still struggling to attract people from these backgrounds. Until we can find authentic ways to authentically open up conversations that include and integrate multiple and diverse voices, our good intentions will fall short.

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things i’ve done for a living

Jun 5th, 09 / 1 Comment

because I subscribe to the “list” approach to blogging, because I subscribe to Jim Gee’s notion of “shape-shifting portfolio people,” and because it’s high time for a short, self-absorbed post. Or, at least, for a self-absorbed post that’s also short.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FyFS5kFZ7w&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

This is the list of things I’ve done for money, some of which I’ve also done for love.

key:
unionized employees
defunct
things i’ve also done for love
awesome
lame
n/a

  • blogger [the guardian]
  • curriculum specialist [project new media literacies]
  • outreach coordinator [project new media literacies]
  • billing coordinator [vca south shore animal hospital]
  • receptionist [vca south shore animal hospital]
  • adjunct instructor (composition, literature, creative writing, business
  • communications) [suffolk university, bridgewater state college, newbury college]
  • groundskeeper [city of fort collins, colorado]
  • graduate research assistant (composition, creative writing)[colorado state university]
  • writing tutor [colorado state university writing center]
  • administrative assistant [colorado poet laureate]
  • telephone operator [quest diagnostics]
  • reporter (sports, education, local politics)[holly herald, fenton independent,
  • spinal column newsweekly]
  • assistant director local nonprofit [public interest research group in michigan]
  • groundskeeper [city of grand rapids, michigan]
  • used book purchaser and seller [barnes & noble]
  • cashier [meijer, inc.]
  • receptionist [dean of students office, grand valley state university]
  • fast food employee (4 hours) [mcdonald's]

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on answers that question the wrong claims

Jun 3rd, 09 / 3 Comments

An engagement with some interesting critiques of Project New Media Literacies

I’m the kind of person who’s paranoid about having something stuck in her teeth or toilet paper trailing from her shoe, so I always appreciate friends who are willing to point these things out to me. As a member of Project New Media Literacies, then, I’m grateful for the impetus of blogger and author Liz Losh in pointing out places where our hem appears to be showing.

Liz, a self-described friend of NML who attended our recent conference, Learning in a Participatory Culture, admits to “hesitation” when it comes to criticizing NML. But, she explains, pointing out a faux pas is the responsibility of a good friend. She writes:

On the plane flying over to the Boston area, I saw a woman whose blouse had come open to expose her undergarments and a man who was trailing toilet paper on his shoe. I didn’t say anything. These people were not my friends. We had no reciprocal understanding.

It’s her duty, then, she argues (and I agree), to offer up her critique of NML’s conference. “And if I’m wrong about this criticism,” she writes, “I’ll look forward to the NML telling me that I have spinach in my teeth.”

I’ll go this far: Liz, I think you’re wrong about this criticism, but not wrong in the critique. Your arguments point to significant weak spots in the new media literacies movement in general, spots that will need fortification as NML and projects like it move forward. In other words, we need friends like you to keep us honest.

But before I get to that, please permit me a moment of self-defense.

On NML’s stance with re: schools
Reflecting on the conference, Liz writes that:

In defining the scope of their work, the group was careful to emphasize their engagement with “learning” rather than “education,” which they defined as being about “institutions.” Yet it might be worth asking why institution should be a dirty word? I might agree that “generativity,” “participatory design,” “flexible and multiple uses,” and “open content” may be worthwhile, but I also think that institutions provide structures of civic permanence that foster ongoing and stable citizen participation in communities. As Geert Lovink has observed, the pyrrhic organization of many artist and activist groups based in the Internet often makes them difficult to maintain.

This criticism seems unfair, and I say that as a core member of the NML team that spent two years designing and piloting a teachers’ strategy guide for use in the formal ELA classroom. Liz perhaps misinterpreted my opening presentation, in which I used this quote from Clay Shirky as a launch point to argue for the value–indeed, the very necessity–of working in schools to support innovative teachers:

“[W]e are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations.”

As I explained in my presentation, we work from the assumption that this quote is not only inaccurate but also unfair to the role of good educators throughout history. “We work from the assumption,” I said, “that it’s not true that all innovative practices are happening outside of traditional institutions.”

Indeed, we know that historically, teachers have always been on the cutting edge of identifying and engaging with innovative resources and practices, and this is no less true with the emergence of new media. What often stands in the way is not teacher intransigence but the whims of administrators and politicians, which means our job is to find ways to not only support innovative teachers but to work for change at the policy level as well.

Far from refusing to engage with institutions, I believe that schools–as the only compulsory learning environment we have–offer an essential venue for working to narrow the participation gap that prevents many young people from engaging with participatory practices and cultures in authentic, productive ways.

Here was my slide on this from the presentation:

Liz is absolutely correct to point out that “institutions provide structures of civic permanence that foster ongoing and stable citizen participation in communities.” In my view, however–and please note that I speak only for myself and not for NML as a whole–the type of ongoing and stable citizen participation that’s fostered by schools, at least schools as they currently exist, is in some ways almost worse than no structure of civic permanence at all. Schools are designed to socialize (inculcate) learners into a value system that benefits our culture’s dominant social group: Middle- and upper-class whites.

Educational researcher Lisa Delpit, whose work has focused on how schools undermine and devalue the abilities of cultural minorities (mainly black children), identifies five aspects of what she calls “the culture of power”:

  1. Issues of power are enacted in classrooms.
  2. There are codes or rules for participating in power; that is, there is a “culture of power.”
  3. The rules of the culture of power are a reflection of the rules of the culture of those who have power.
  4. If you are not already a participant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring power easier.
  5. Those with power are frequently least aware of–or least willing to acknowledge–its existence. Those with less power are often more aware of its existence.

(These principles come from Delpit’s book Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. It’s a scathing critique of the school system’s role in furthering the interests of the dominant culture and oppressing those who do not agree or do not know how to play by its rules.)

I believe, deeply and honestly, that integrating new media literacy practices into the classroom is a matter of social justice. In a culture that increasingly values the kinds of practices enabled by computers and connectivity, we fail our learners and our culture if we resist offering these experiences to students who don’t have access to and support for engaging in participatory practices via technologies in their homes. Indeed, I think I carry even more of a social justice agenda than almost any of my coworkers at NML. Just today I was mocked at a staff meeting for using the word “hegemony” one too many times. So any time I’m accused of supporting the status quo, I automatically get my hackles up.

Yes, it’s true that school provides cultural stability. But it’s not necessarily true that the stability school offers is what we need. In my view (and again, I’m speaking for myself and not for NML as a whole), it’s high time we threw the institution of school into disarray. There is a deep, deep need to work within institutions, is what I’m saying–we’re in agreement there–but not in support of the institution as it currently exists.

On racism and classism
In fact, Liz herself points to exactly this issue in her critique of our decision to work with traditional curricular content (Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick). In doing so, we’re heeding Henry Jenkins’s call to be “conservative in content so we can be radical in approach.” Liz’s concern is that focusing on traditional materials

could be read as a defense of the conservative canon that has excluded many from literary recognition and their place in the historical record. This impression might be further supported by the group’s assertion that they were emphasizing “multidisciplinarity” rather than “muliculturalism.”

If this is how we have presented ourselves, then we have failed utterly to communicate our rationale. Working with conservative content, at least in this case, allowed us to get a foot in the door of the traditional classroom. Working with culturally valued materials gives us space to offer, at our best, revolutionary approaches to the material in question. It gives us space to help learners develop metacognition about what they’re required to read, how they’re supposed to read it, and why the powers that be might like it that way.

I’m worried that we have also failed to adequately convey the impetus behind working with that word “multidisciplinarity.” In our view, a participatory culture enables–indeed, necessitates–communication across traditional disciplinary boundaries, and we need to equip learners to find ways to communicate with people across multiple disciplines, instead of simply focusing on “what good literary scholars do.” This in no way negates the need for a multicultural approach; in fact, it serves to complicate the issue further by adding a new layer to the definition. It’s not “multidisciplinarity rather than multiculturalism”; it’s “multidisciplinarity as another part of multiculturalism.”

Where the Spinach is
If I disagree with Liz’s criticisms of the message Project NML has attempted to convey, this is not to say that I think she’s precisely wrong in the critique she brings to our work. As she points out (and as Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, a playwright and collaborator on NML’s Teachers’ Strategy Guide–over there on the right–also asserted at the conference), appropriation has often been used as a tool by the more powerful to steal from the less powerful.

This is what Liz calls the ‘Vanilla Ice Problem’:

although appropriation may be celebrated in remix culture, there may be some forms of appropriation that represent and potentially reify the exploitation of people of color and the repression of their calls for social justice. After all, even the most racist minstrel shows claimed to be appropriating aspects of black culture that white performers had observed. When Elvis and other white singers popularized material from the “colored” entertainment spectrum, the lack of compensation to the original creators of that music stung many black musicians badly…. I believe that rap music presents a powerful form of social critique that often engages with controversial issues about police abuse, urban abandonment, narco-economics, and family disintegration. Rap music has also been appropriated by vacuous white performers, such as Vanilla Ice, who chant inane, innocuous lines to pap melodies in chart-topping hits.

Liz offers up a performance by a white nerdcore rap artist, MC Lars, as an example; Lars himself has addressed this issue in various ways, both in his music and in interviews (including this interview with Henry), so I won’t address it more here except to acknowledge that this particular issue is complicated, fraught, and thorny.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al5-bU8DUAg&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

The larger point, though, is well taken. Our goal in focusing on appropriation and remix practices is to get at the heart of what makes the social revolution so possible and so exciting: new media affords new opportunities to transform a canonical work; new opportunities to transform and to participate in a cultural conversation about what’s meaningful; new opportunities to speak and to be heard. In glorifying the remix practices made possible by new media technologies, our project (and media literacy projects in general) can overlook the dark side of this social practice, and thereby fail to equip learners with strategies for addressing this issue.

A second critique, and in my view by far Liz’s most important point, is this:

In giving examples of their work with young people, the group showcased examples of what Ian Bogost has called “the rhetoric of failure”: Darfur is Dying and Ayiti: The Cost of Life. Yet I might argue that this pessimistic rhetoric is fundamentally different from what the NML panel called “creating challenges” by creating a “fail and fail often” educational model that is designed to strengthen the individual rather than critique the system.

If I read this right (and I’m not a hundred percent positive I am), the critique is that we’re not putting our money where our mouth is. We say we align with the “fail and fail often approach” that’s intended to foster creative, potentially subversive thinking but in practice we present “challenges” that are easily conquered. In other words, we offer the “rhetoric of success” but mask it with the language of approved failure.

There is a struggle, I think, within the hearts and minds of many who work at the intersection of media and education. We want all learners to see how much “fun” participation can be (and by “fun,” I mean how kids describe a tough game of tag that leaves them sweating, panting, and drop-dead exhausted: fun), and we want participation to foster a healthy sense of outrage, an interest in and desire for taking down the status quo. I wonder if both are always possible; if both are ever possible simultaneously. Perhaps greater minds than I have worked this out; I don’t know. I do know, though, that it’s something that we struggle with every day, in designing and presenting materials that we hope will be both fun and educational, in the revolutionary sense of both terms.

As readers of this blog know, I’m a huge fan of the social revolution. Clay Shirky writes that “it’s not a revolution if nobody loses”; he adds that it’s not a revolution if everybody loses, either. In my view, everybody loses if we fail to get the tools, mindsets, and skillsets of the revolution in the hands of every learner; everybody loses if we give up on the spaces where we can provide access to these things; everybody loses if this revolution, like so many revolutions before it, is won by the members of the dominant Discourse that has guided so much of our thinking, our action, our will and reason to act.

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on social networking guidelines for teachers

Jun 2nd, 09 / 3 Comments

I was recently directed to a recent post on a blog called “Blogg-ed Indetermination” offering a first pass at a set of guidelines for using social networking tools in the K-12 classroom.

The blog’s author, Steve Taffee, points out that while young people are taking to social networking “like ducks to water,” adults are more conflicted about the appropriate uses for social networks in schools. He offers up a set of nine guidelines, not intended to be the final word but intended to start a conversation “in the best of social networking tradition.” With this impulse in mind, I’ll repeat the proposed set of guidelines and offer my suggestions for refinement.

Proposed Guidelines for Use of Social Networks by School Faculty and Staff*

New technologies, such as social networking tools, provide exciting new ways to collaborate and communicate. Nevertheless we must exercise care to be sure we use such tools with students in ways that are both age-appropriate and consistent with the mission of the school.

School faculty and staff are expected to behave honorably in both real and virtual (online) spaces. Activities which are improper, unethical, illegal, or which cause undue discomfort for students, employees, parents, or other members of the school community should be judiciously avoided in both physical space and cyberspace.

To that end, we offer the following guidelines for school employees who use online social networking applications which may be frequented by current or former students.

1. COURSE USE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING: In order to provide equal, age-appropriate access for students to course materials, faculty should limit class activities to school-sanctioned online tools. New social networking tools and features are being continually introduced which may or may not be appropriate for course use. The same care must be taken in choosing such tools as other tools and support materials.

2. MODEL APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR: Exercise appropriate discretion when using social networks for personal communications (friends, colleagues, parents, former students, etc.) with the knowledge that adult behavior on social networks may be used as a model by our students.

3. FRIENDING ALUMNI: Accept social network friend requests only with alumni over the age of 18. Do not initiate friend contacts with alumni.

4. UNEQUAL RELATIONSHIPS: Understand that the uneven power dynamics of the school, in which adults have authority over former students, continues to shape those relationships.

5. OTHER FRIENDS: Remind all other members of your network of your position as an educator whose profile may be accessed by current or former students, and to monitor their posts to your network accordingly. Conversely, be judicious in your postings to all friends sites, and act immediately to remove any material that may be inappropriate from your site whether posted by you or someone else.

6. GROUPS IN YOUR SOCIAL NETWORK: Associate with social networking groups consistent with healthy, pro-social activities and the mission and reputation of the school, acting with sensitivity within context of a diverse educational environment in which both students and adults practice tolerance and accept competing views.

7. PRIVACY SETTINGS AND CONTENT: Exercise care with privacy settings and profile content. Content should be placed thoughtfully and periodically reviewed to maintain this standard.

8. MISREPRESENTATION: Faculty who use social networks should do so using their own name, not a pseudonym or nickname.

9. PUBLIC INFORMATION: Recognize that many former students have online connections with current students, and that information shared between school adults and former students is likely to be seen by current students as well.

===

*Some of the ideas for this list come from a Facebook group I belong to, Faculty Ethics on Facebook. It is geared towards higher education, and so if you stumbled upon this post and really want to read about colleges and universities, head on over to Facebook. I also appreciate colleague Matt Montagne’s feedback via Google Docs on an earlier draft of these ideas.

In general, these guidelines offer a strong starting point for discussing the ethical dimensions of participation in social networking sites, both in the classroom and outside of it. The drive toward modeling honest, responsible networking activities makes good sense, especially in a world where faculty can lose their jobs and their careers for the material they post online. But these guidelines present strategies that have the potential to limit teacher and student access to authentic participation in online social spaces. Specifically, the slant against “misrepresentation” and toward using only approved social networking sites in schools present significant participation concerns. For teachers, the issue is about their right to engage meaningfully in a public sphere that may offer the potential for inappropriate or damaging material. For students, the issue is more drastic: It’s a matter of social justice. Students who don’t have access to new media technologies and can’t experience the authentic online social spaces in the classroom will be ill equipped to experience those spaces when they leave school.

On “Misrepresentation”
The push toward “honesty” goes perhaps a few steps too far, overlooking the fact that engagement with media platforms that are increasingly persistent, searchable, and replicatable call for new approaches to disclosure. I’m pointing here to guideline 8, which Taffee labels “misrepresentation.”

Anonymity and its close cousin, pseudonymity, have a long and storied relationship with the politics of identity performance. We’ve come a long way (we have, haven’t we?) from the time when speaking up against a tyrant could lead to personal, financial, or social ruin. (We have, haven’t we?)

But until recently, “misrepresentation” was generally viewed as the domain of the whistleblower, and members of everyday culture were expected to act in their own names. In a participatory culture, however, where people can increasingly engage with identity play in a wide range of online spaces, psuedonyms, nicknames, and even complete anonymity serve as a buffer against repercussion. Indeed, it may be the case that a teacher wants to use Facebook or a similar site to engage in NSFW conversations, photo sharing, and precisely the kind of social networking that these sites afford. In that case, the teacher might choose to design a “fake” profile in order to prevent students or students’ parents from encountering this material. It’s not “misrepresentation” so much as it’s a version of protected self-presentation.

As our social lives increasingly occupy online spaces in addition to offline, in-person relationships, we need to
offer new strategies for engagement with these sites–strategies that afford full participation in addition to protecting people from the risk of having material intended for one audience dragged into the public light of a different, unintended audience.

On Course Use of Social Networking
The impulse driving guideline #1 is a valid one. It is, as Lynn Sykes, a teacher and friend, pointed out to me, a great big social networking world out there, and the minute we introduce social media into the classroom we also introduce the risk that learners will stumble upon material that is inappropriate for the classroom setting.

But ignoring this risk doesn’t make it go away; indeed, it leaves many students ill-equipped to make intelligent decisions about what to do when they encounter this kind of material in real life, as they are certain to do. Learners who have access to social media and adult support for reflecting on their engagement with it in their homes will be prepared, of course. It’s the learners with less access and less extracurricular support–in other words, the poor, the disadvantaged, the learners who have historically been left behind in school, in work, in life–who can most benefit from the experience of engaging with social media in the classroom.

This isn’t to say that the concerns about inappropriate material aren’t valid concerns. This is why we need to work in two distinct directions:

  • Working at the policy level to develop regulations that allow for safe and guided access to the authentic social media experiences that will prepare learners for engagement with the participatory media, practices, and cultures that are becoming increasingly essential to success outside of school;
  • Working in the classroom to establish norms that can govern students’ ethical participation in social media, such that they can immediately identify, and know how to respond to, material that’s inappropriate for the school context.

Steve, I would recommend including the above guidelines into a revised version of these guidelines. I’m looking forward to continuing this important conversation.

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sadhappy, anxiouscalm: on career transitions

Jun 1st, 09 / 3 Comments

Today is the first day of my last month at my day job. For almost two years, I’ve been a team member of Project New Media Literacies, an educational research project based at MIT. It would be a lie for me to say that every minute was exciting, fun, and exhilarating; anyone who’s done this kind of work knows that it’s often exhausting, frustrating, and stressful.

That’s because to do educational research well, you have to care, and you have to care deeply. And this means facing some difficult realities: That the institution of education is deeply flawed in some important and fundamental ways; that educational innovations are often stymied by policy issues and bureaucratic red tape; that most of the time, educational research–even at its most valuable–has a minimal impact on education as a whole.

My work at NML has focused largely on the formal classroom setting, the educational environment that–because of its compulsory nature–offers the greatest opportunity for closing the participation gap that limit some learners’ ability to engage with participatory culture in a meaningful way. I’ve had the chance to talk with some of the most amazing, dedicated teachers I’ve ever had the good fortune to meet, and I’ve gotten to sit in on some of their classes. I’ve seen the everyday miracles they pull off, often thanklessly, without acknowledgement from students, parents, or administrators. Some of these teachers have explained to me what they’d like to do, if they didn’t have to deal with state-mandated standardized tests and the policies and curricula intended to boost student scores on these tests. I’ve heard teachers explain which ideals they’ve had to give up on, how they’ve become more cynical or realistic about the impact they can have.

So we’re back to burnout, exhaustion, and stress: This is the story of the educator who cares.

I leave NML equipped with a more complete understanding of the complexities and challenges of working in education. I leave knowing I did my best work but wishing I could have done more. I leave more confident in my own abilities but less confident in the possibility for real, lasting transformation of formal learning environments.

And yet I leave NML to begin doctoral study in education.

Despite, or maybe because of, my frustration, I have come to believe that schools are the most important institution America has for working toward social justice. This is where the participation gap is most obvious; this is where class biases–and the racism, sexism, and accompanying approaches to teaching and learning–are simultaneously most apparent and most insidious, and therefore most essential to confront.

I’ve been writing obsessively here at sleeping alone and starting out early about what I’ve started calling the social revolution. By this term I mean to suggest that we are immersed in fundamental changes to our society that are so rapid, so deep, and so transformative that we can’t yet even say exactly what this revolution will yield; but we know that a new social order is emerging out of the emergent tools, technologies, and practices of a participatory culture.

In fact, as one of my colleagues pointed out, even NML has trouble defining “participatory culture.” He argues that while we have little trouble explaining what participatory culture allows for, we struggle to explain what it actually is.

He may be right on this, and he may be wrong. It is true, however, that we don’t yet know what valued social structures, practices, and dispositions will emerge out of the participatory practices enabled by new media. In fact, it may be that one of the features of a truly participatory culture is a constant destabilization–perpetual overthrow–of dominant values, mindsets, and skillsets. Christopher Kelty calls this a “constantly ‘self-leveling’ level playing field.” Wouldn’t that be scary and at the same time so very neat?

This is the struggle of our society, and one that John Dewey pointed to back at the end of the 19th century, when he proposed development of a laboratory school where educators could try out new approaches to teaching and learning. In setting forth a series of arguments about new ways to think about knowing and cognition, he conceded that

[i]t is… comparatively easy to lay down general propositions like the foregoing; easy to use them to criticize existing school conditions; easy by means of them to urge the necessity of something different. But art is long. The difficulty is in carrying such conceptions into effect—in seeing just what materials and methods, in what proportion and arrangement, are available and helpful at a given time…. There is no answer in advance to such questions as these. Tradition does not give it because tradition is founded upon a radically different psychology. Mere reasoning cannot give it because it is a question of fact. It is only by trying that such things can be found out. To refuse to try, to stick blindly to tradition, because the search for the truth involves experimentation in the region of the unknown, is to refuse the only step which can introduce rational conviction into education.

Beginning this fall, I’ll be a graduate student in the Learning Sciences program at Indiana University. The transition makes me simultaneously sad and happy, anxious and calm. Bring it on, says hegemony. I can take you.

It’s already been broughten, says revolutionist cat, playing hegemony off.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J---aiyznGQ&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

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thank goodness the Boston Globe is shutting down

May 5th, 09 / 4 Comments

or I’d have to smack it down big-time for this editorial arguing that we shouldn’t standardize and measure achievement on so-called 21st-century skills. The op-ed offers further proof–as if we needed it–that the Globe’s editorial board has no idea how the playing field has been utterly transformed by participatory culture.

The impetus behind the op-ed is a move by the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to put its money where its mouth is. The department recently awarded a $146 million contract to the designer of the MCAS, the standardized test mandated in the commonwealth of Massachusetts by No Child Left Behind, and part of that money is earmarked for integration of 21st-century skills assessment. This is a problem, as the Globe’s editorial board will point out momentarily.

But first, it uses state MCAS scores as proof of public school rigor. As it explains,

Massachusetts stands apart in public education precisely because it created high academic standards, developed an objective measure of student performance and progress through the MCAS test, and required a passing grade in order to graduate. Students, as a result, rank at or near the top of standardized testing not just nationally but on tough international achievement tests in math and science. Any retreat from this strategy would be a profound mistake.

So to summarize: Massachusetts students are among the top in the nation because their achievement on standardized tests prepares them to…score well on standardized tests. It’s like the iconic example of circular reasoning: The MCAS is useful because it prepares them for future learning. How do you know? Because Massachusetts students do well on other standardized tests. What prepares them to do well on those tests? Doing well on standardized tests, of course.

Given the Globe’s wholehearted genuflection at the altar of bubble tests, one wonders why this editorial might oppose integrating assessment of 21st-century skills in addition to traditional subjects. It turns out their concern is less about whether we should measure 21st century skills than it is about how doing so on the MCAS will affect test scores in general. As the editorial points out,

[s]tate education officials have done a generally poor job of defining 21st-century skills – which can include interdisciplinary thinking and media literacy – or explaining how to test them statewide.

The problem for the Globe, it turns out, is that if we develop mediocre assessment strategies it’ll ruin the MCAS for all of us. Because 21st-century skills can only be measured subjectively, the Globe argues, an “objective” test like the MCAS is an inappropriate place to assess achievement. Instead,

MCAS testers should concentrate on accurately measuring math ability and reading comprehension, which surely correlate with a student’s success in the workplace.

Let’s leave, just for now, the outrageous assumption that a standardized test could conceivably be considered “objective.” Let’s leave the assumption that a standardized test could “accurately” measure student ability in anything other than the ability to engage in the weird and peculiar game of test-taking. Which leaves just one last question:

In what world can anybody make the argument that achievement in math and reading without the accompanying facility with 21st-century proficiencies prepares any learning for any workplace worth the energy of applying for employment in the first place?

It’s such a weird argument to make, that literacy practices like reading, writing, and doing math can be somehow isolated from the 21st-century contexts that make them meaningful. It’s like asking someone if she knows how to tie her shoe, then making her
prove it by writing a detailed step-by-step description of how to do it. It’s like asking someone to prove he can build a fire: But is the fire for warmth, for signaling for help, or for burning the whole house down?

Same with math: Knowing how to “do” fractions doesn’t mean a learner is equipped to, say, resize a .jpg for a blogpost.

Arguing that we should keep 21st-century skills out of standardized tests in order to keep the tests objective is as lame as the argument that standardized tests are objective in the first place. Neither one makes any logical sense. Neither one gets you anywhere.

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Awesomeness: Project New Media Literacies’ spring conference: Learning in a Participatory Culture

May 5th, 09 / 0 Comments

There was awesomeness going on at MIT this weekend, as my colleagues and I at Project New Media Literacies put on a conference called Learning in a Participatory Culture.

If you’ve never planned a conference before, I can’t say I recommend the experience–though when one goes well, as this conference did, the stress and exhaustion that pile on top of you in the lead-up suddenly turn into a fair trade-off. All day, my coworkers and I got to be surrounded by the smartest educators and educational researchers ever, and we got to hear them say all kinds of insanely awesome things.

As part and parcel of the pure awesomeness of the day, I scored two key personal / professional victories: First, I slam-dunked an opening presentation on design and development of Project NML’s Teachers’ Strategy Guide, garnering not one, not two, but three separate thumbs-ups from the people I most hoped to impress: My sensei Dan Hickey, my boss Henry Jenkins, and my close, close friend, colleague, and fellow Fireside Moonbat Katie Clinton. I only wish Katie had received more recognition for her contribution to the project–somehow, I’ve been given her share of the credit and I want to find a way to put it back where it belongs.

I’ve included a QuickTime version of my presentation below, though it admittedly loses something without the audio. I’ll see what I can do about adding the audio in once we have it processed from the day.

A second key victory was in getting a back channel going, via a #NML09 hashtag on Twitter, for the day. We had set up a TweetGrid and the hashtag going into the conference but had no specific plans for supporting and integrating the technology, but before I gave my opening presentation I offered up a quick tutorial on how to Tweet using hashtags and my colleagues and I spent the day monitoring and engaging in a rapidfire Twitter conversation that extended participation in really nice ways. As the man Henry Jenkins himself said to me midway through the day, the fact that we didn’t need to plan for or organize participation in social media but that it worked anyway when the tools and the energies were in place proves something important about the nature of participatory culture.

This is the artifact of my tutorial:

Finally, I want to shout out to all the participants who made the conference such a roaring success. Energy, enthusiasm, and engagement were high from beginning to end. I don’t have the words to articulate what an amazing experience it was.

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the sleeping alone review of books: Opening Up Education (Part 2)

Apr 15th, 09 / 2 Comments

In a recent post, I reviewed parts of an important new book called Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge (2008, Toru Iiyoshi and M.S. Vijay Kumar, eds.). In that review, I focused mainly on a broad overview of the book and on the final chapter, which considered the future of the open knowledge movement. Today I want to focus on a chapter in “Open Educational Technology,” the first section of the book. This section, the first of three (technology, content, and knowledge), offers a consideration of various approaches to designing open learning environments. In the introduction to the section, Owen McGrath writes that “the term ‘open educational technology’ has broad meaning that extends well beyond any lowest-common-denominator definition such as ‘open source software for education’.” Key thematic questions McGrath presents include the following:

  • How should open educational technology be built, extended, and maintained in the large cross-institutional and international efforts?
  • How can the teaching and learning activities supported by the technology be evaluated in an open way?
  • How do the perspectives of teachers and learners inform these projects?

In “A Harvest Too Large? A Framework for Educational Abundance,” Trent Bastson, Neeru Paharia, and M.S. Vijay Kumar consider potential applications of open knowledge to higher education, emphasizing the value of sharing and remixing of pedagogical content, which they argue will dissolve the silos that traditionally separate content areas in higher education. They work from an assumption that open knowledge does not feel to all like a panacea; they readily acknowledge that it will feel deeply threatening to many members of our society. They offer the example of baby boomers coming of age under the shadow of parents grew up during the Great Depression. For these “Dionysian offspring,” the authors explain, their parents’ “poverty assumptions–lie low, hide your wealth lest it be stolen, do not display emotions, life is full of danger–” were more than silly or nonsensical; they directly opposed the youths’ approach to life. As the authors of this chapter write,

We now appear to be facing the same cultural fissure 40 years later: Open educational resources (OER) are so abundant that the scarcity-based assumptions of educators are challenged…. In short, we are moving toward a knowledge ecology characterized by unfettered access to educational resources, choice, and change in the context and clientele of higher education.

Interestingly, the authors see learners themselves as presenting a significant obstacle in the progress toward open education–perhaps even more so than faculty. As they explain:

[W]hile some faculty members may boldly go where open education leads them, some students, despite their expertise in some uses of the Internet and IT tools, can be very conservative in their expectations in the classroom. They may come to college expecting that regardless of the IT toys on campus, in the classroom itself, their teachers will still tell them what to know and then test them on what they have been told.

This is only one of many potential and existing barriers, of course; and the authors briefly consider many obstacles. They imagine “a vibrant Web community of learners at something called Peer-To-Peer University, or ‘P2PU.’ P2PU would not be a ‘real’ university, but rather, a group of self-learners and tutors who work together to emulate some of the functions an academic institution would carry out, in a peer-to-peer fashion.” They then consider the obstacles to realizing this dream: How can a “vibrant” eLearning community be fostered when passive learning is so much more likely? How will people react to the decentralized authority of an open knowledge learning system? And, perhaps most importantly for them, “[I]f the remixing process is speeded up and a million eyes replace ‘gatekeepers,’ then is knowledge enriched or watered down?”

It’s an interesting thought exercise to imagine this Peer-To-Peer University–and it brings to mind an important issue that’s only glanced at in this chapter: An ongoing shift in how we both think about credibility, both in assessing others’ and establishing our own in a variety of online, offline, and hybrid social spaces. I wrote about this some in a recent blogpost on the online university phenomenon, where I argued that

While web 2.0 technologies increasingly allow us to offer expertise in a variety of areas, with or without educational credentials, the desire for evidence of expertise lingers in our collective psyches. Ultimately, we still believe that when our cat’s kidneys start to fail, the single veterinarian who spent 8 years in school followed by years of field experience can provide better advice than the two thousand cat owners on a devoted forum.

And we’re not necessarily wrong to think this way, at least in some situations–after all, as I explained in that post, if my cat needs surgery, I’m taking him to the board-certified veterinarian, rabid pet owners be damned.

But at the same time, those rabid pet owners may provide valuable advice that helps me decide when it’s appropriate to go to the credentialed veterinarian. And here’s where educational technology people like the authors of this chapter could learn a thing or two from people who participate, in various ways, in a participatory culture: They exist, happily and without too much turmoil, in the space between online and offline cultures, easily crossing the membrane and increasingly failing to agree to consider that there even is a membrane. Many people–and most young people–would agree that there’s little functional distinction between friends they make in face-to-face interactions and those who communicate primarily or solely via virtual tools.

In principle, it seems, the authors of this chapter agree; writing about ccMixter, a “community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want”, they explain that the ccMixter community often rewards its most talented participants with CDs or even recording contracts “so they could receive more exposure and social credit for their efforts.” In this example, the virtual community is the real community, regardless of its physicality.


A visualization of the network of authors in the ccMixter community

The authors seem willing to bestow this gift on virtual communities that extend their reach into the physical world; but when considering physical learning environments, they seem less eager to consider a blurred line between classroom and engaged learning community. Take a look at how they describe the “typical lecture hall”:

the teacher is up front and the students sit in chairs that are fixed to the floo
r. Such physical inflexibility restricts (italics mine) how the teacher can interact with students and students can interact with each other. Software design has followed a similar pattern, favoring tools that support faculty, rather than student, management in digital space.

It’s that word “restricts” that hits a sour note. We might just as easily consider affordances of a typical lecture hall: It affords a certain kind of learning which has value in certain context, and it only becomes “restrictive” when people try to use it to achieve some purpose for which it was not intended or to which it cannot be applied. Even then, it’s not the fault of the physical space that people are trying to bend it to their will. As Clay Shirky writes, “There is no such thing as a generically good tool; there are only tools good for particular jobs.”

Followers of this blog know that I’m no fan of traditional or conservative approaches to schooling, but I do also see the value of considering what is afforded by a traditional learning space like the lecture hall or, more broadly, the brick-and-mortar university. And the authors of this chapter aren’t necessarily averse to this approach; indeed, they grant that

existing academic institutions do help to navigate through the human sea of knowledge. They organize it into majors and requirements to make the decision process much easier and more goal oriented. They provide a teacher and classmates to both guide and motivate. They provide a structure and a social context to help bridge students from beginning stages of learning toward maturity. They help students address issues of finalizing work by providing a schedule of “deliverables” (assignment sets), of matching the learner with the job market, of certifying the value of students’ learning, and the general issues of being a young person at home.

If it’s true that the traditional university has served and continues, and will continue, to serve important cultural purposes, then we would do well to consider what types of learning experiences it can afford learners who are preparing for careers that may not even exist yet. Given that P2PU is a kind of pipe dream, and a more hybrid learning environment much more realistic, we need to think of ways to not only consider what purposes the university is good for but also how to speak to key stakeholders. In times of cultural revolution, those who believe most ardently in the need for it are also often the ones whose language is the most shrill, the most strident, and most difficult to hear.

This is not to say, of course, that the affordances of traditional universities should or could not also be considered constraints. In the end, though, the constraints are more on our ability to envision new words and worlds wherein authentic learning experiences can happen and less on our ability to leverage traditional learning spaces to make these visions real.

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