Beyond School

Carolyn Foote wrote this week about the new Pew study on the effects of technology on teen writing. An article about the study in eSchool News (free subscription - well worth it - required) pulls out a few details that for me, at least, suggest some weird thinking. The “news” that

[t]eens who communicate frequently with their friends, and those who own more technology tools such as computers or cell phones, do not write more often for school or for themselves than less communicative and less gadget-rich teens

seems hardly news at all, doesn’t it? Is it me, or does it imply that some people think that The Vast Percentage of Teens Who, Like the Vast Percentage of Adults, Do Not Enjoy Writing will suddenly, because somebody plops a laptop, tablet, or cellphone in their hands, have some Road to Damascus experience that magically converts them to the Cult of Writing?

That implication seems embedded in the “finding” above, and it’s about as silly as expecting people to all become economists when they’re given their first checkbook.

If you go into a 1:1 program with fantasies that all students are going to become writers because of it, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Nothing makes a writer but the self-compelled need to write. And that’s a limited commodity now as always.

The eSchool news article continues with this further bit of non-”news,” which this time, though still making me chuckle, also quickens my pulse and gets my dander up a bit:

Teen bloggers, however, write more frequently both online and offline, the study says.

–check that language out, that loopy logic: “Teen bloggers,” we’re told, are teens who write frequently “both online and offline.” I’m no expert, now, but why are we calling teens who write a lot, with and without blogs, “bloggers”?

Any of you adult bloggers out there, are you with me in wanting to correct people who call you a “blogger” - some person who “makes blogs,” apparently, like a designer makes designs and a reporter makes reports - by telling them: “Actually, I’m a freaking writer. I just publish my own writing online on a blog. I don’t buy those daily word-counts on my blog at Wal-Mart. I write them.” Such sloppy language!

(Note that I didn’t say “good writer.” Mediocre and bad writers fill the ranks of bloggers as much as they do of newpapers, magazines, and books.)

It’s been a pet peeve of mine for a long time, this word “blogging.” The label cheapens the practice. Writing bloggers are writers, photo-bloggers are photographers, podcast-bloggers are audio producers, vloggers are video artists, etc, in teenhood as it is in adulthood.

So let’s revise that last excerpt for clarity:

Teen writers, however, write more frequently both online and offline.

Talk about a report from Captain Obvious. Give any writer a journal and pen, s/he’ll scribble away. Give him or her a blog, s/he’ll type away. There’s no mystery here.

Things get weirder here:

Forty-seven percent of teen bloggers write outside of school for personal reasons several times a week or more, compared with 33 percent of teens without blogs.

What, exactly, does that unidentified fifty-three percent of “teen bloggers” who do not “write outside of school for personal reasons” actually write on their blogs, then? Wait — hold it – I think I’m getting a whiff of something. Do you smell it?

Bad air! Bad air! It’s a homework blog! Another moronic oxymoron brought to you by Schooliness, Inc. Let’s cross this 53% off the Book of Writing, and focus on that lovely, remaining 47% who blog write on blogs, not because schools make them, but because they’re writers. Breathe in the perfume, folks - we’re in the rose-garden now of flowering young writers.

They’re the ones I want to teach - because they’re the ones who probably want to be taught about ways to improve their writing.

There. I said it: I’m an elitist as an English teacher.

I’m not a democrat when it comes to teaching writing. Just as Thomas Jefferson believed that all people are born equal, but natural differences create a “natural aristocracy” - one having nothing to do with money and everything to do with spirit (and I mean that naturally) - I believe the same is true in the classroom. A rich kid can’t pay me to want to help him become a better writer if he doesn’t show me, through the evidence of steady, self-impelled production, he has a writer in him. A working-class kid who does have a writer in her - who can point to hundreds of blog posts or journal pages having nothing to do with homework - will find not only my door open during lunch and after school, but also my Skype and Twitter at home. As I said in a comment on Carolyn’s blog, it’s

the bloggers mentioned in the survey above . . . who interest me, . . those who have the will to write, the seed of a writer, in them.

Those “kids” aren’t mere students. They’re writers.

Let’s keep looking at that Pew Garden, and try to find the prize roses. I think I see them hidden in this statistic:

Sixty-five percent of teen bloggers believe that writing is essential to later success in life.

Pop Quiz: Who are the “teen bloggers” who are the true writers?

a. the 65% of “teen bloggers” who “believe writing is essential to later success in life”

b. the 35% of “teen bloggers” who do not believe this.

If you answered “a,” I give you a zero.

To me, the answer is “b.” Because it implies that these young writers are writing not, as most of the consumerism-drugged “school is for money” customers in our classrooms do (and as the students in answer “a” seem to do), “to get a better GPA, go to a better college, get a better job, so I can buy a better house, car, and handbag.” This 35% in “b” wins my vote. They’re the prize roses. They write for the pleasure in the present, not the payoff in the future. [Update: Freshman Arthus trumps me in his comment. He gets an A+, I get a B.]

They’re writers.

A Revised Position Statement on Classroom Blogging, Two Years into the Fray:

And this brings me to the latest position-statement in my evolving views, after two years of experimenting with it in the classroom, of the value and place of blogging to teach writing in schools:

It should only be required in an elective “advanced blogging” class. But we need a better word than that tuneless aural trainwreck of a word, “blah - geeng.”

“Advanced writing,” though I’ve restricted this article to writers because the Pew study does the same, is no better a title, because “blogging” invites the natural talkers and interviewers, singers and raconteurs through podcasting; the natural symbolic and visual communicators through photo and computer graphic, fine arts and video blogging. So “advanced digital communication,” then?

You tell me. But I think you see what I mean, don’t you? Simply a workshop of the thirsty, the hungry to improve - the natural aristocracy of self-expression and communication.

Over the door I would post a big sign:

ROSES ONLY. NO STUDENTS ALLOWED.

Then we’d set to working - making perfume.

Images:

• De Petale, by Christiane Michaud
• untitled, by rosemary*
• rose for you…, by Lyubov

Relevant posts:

• 21st Century Education: Thinking Creatively by Anthony Chivetta, Students 2.0
• Dialogue with a New Student Blogger on the Question of Classroom Blogging

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I’ve been up all night catching up on my reading, which these days means feed-reading, more than anything.

Two that struck a chord:

1. That LearnerBlogosphere Idea

Sylvia Martinez on the red-hot GenYES blog writes several posts about getting teens to use Web 2.0 independently - like we adult edubloggers do - to develop their literacy skills in ways that classrooms typically cannot match.

One reason I love Sylvia’s posts is that she references reports and data that I don’t have the will or temperament to seek out, but which speak almost always to my own priorities as an educator. A case in point: the goal of creating a “LearnerTalk” (but that sounds schooly) of student edubloggers to give us teachers lessons on how our Classroom 2.0 attempts measure up. Sylvia writes that this is already happening spontaneously, which encourages me to seek ways to harness and shepherd that trend into this arena. Here’s Sylvia:

Students report that one of the most common topics of conversation on the social networking scene is education. Nearly 60 percent of online students report discussing education-related topics such as college or college planning, learning outside of school, and careers. And 50 percent of online students say they talk specifically about schoolwork. (Read her “Web 2.0 - share the adventure with students” post as well)

Does anybody else read into this that the students are stuck, like we adults are, in their own separate echo-chamber? And that combining the student and teacher discourses in one truly universal “edublogosphere” has the potential to steer our shared enterprise into fertile territory sooner than the current “parallel echo-chambers” situation we seem to have right now?

Scott McCleod’s offer to host a “LearnerTalk” type thing a month or so ago has not been forgotten.* Life and work have been too fast to focus on generating interest in that. Last week, before we began our week-long Chusok holiday, I pitched blogging to my Web 2.0 activity club, and many of my students seemed to get a glimmer from that sermon of the power of real-world blogging. I think a few will bite.

2. The War on Teaching Bad Writing

Anybody who’s taught high school English should know why most students hate to write in schools. It’s because they’re taught to write badly.

If I assigned any of you to write about ideas that aren’t self-selected, in forms that aren’t self-expressive, for an over-worked audience of one that puts two or three words, random red hieroglyphs, and a permanently-branded number into a ledger that threatens to determine your fate, face it: you would learn to hate writing (and school) too.

Like Sylvia, Jeff Wasserman of When the Hurly-Burly’s Done shares some hard data and classroom anecdotes to help us teachers of real writing wage the war against teachers of the poisonously schooly 5-Paragraph Essay [*jeers and hisses*]. I replied to Jeff’s post,

Jeff, this makes me want to make my AP Lit class Ning public. We’re having forum discussions about Organic Form v. Mechanical (5PE and all that garbage).

I’ve been making them write timed essays without outlining, trusting that an organic form will come from simply responding to the prompt and writing from there.

I modeled it for them by writing an old AP Lit exam essay about a poem, under timed conditions, in a screencast here, for what it’s worth. Interesting to be able to let them into my interior writer’s monologue as I read, annotate, and write a response, recording voiceover all the while, to the same exercise they did.

My best student responded to watching it by saying, among other things, “I didn’t think you could make a one-sentence paragraph in the body of an essay.”

One last tidbit: I took an AP Lit workshop from UCLA this summer - a waste of time, mostly - but got this from the College Board/APL celebrity who taught it: AP Lit exam graders appreciate organic form, “as long as it has a beginning, middle, and end.”

I like that: beginning, middle, end. None of this “introductory paragraph, body, conclusion paragraph” drivel.

Then, instead of sleeping as I’d intended, my mind shifted into overdrive. Sylvia’s and Jeff’s post led to these fantasies of how we can teach real writing (based on real reading in this “infinite book” we call the internet) with web 2.0:

First, students would write self-directed blogs. No homework assignments allowed in terms of subject matter, though standards of style and conventions would be set;

Second, assessment would be based on readership, comments, subscriptions, visitor stats, Technorati authority ranking (with safeguards against fraudulent links, which are easy enough to spot), self-assessment, and other non-authoritarian, teacher-gives-grades assessment styles. (And yes, as usual, it’s the institutional but otherwise counter-educational imperative to grade everything that presents the biggest obstacle to this approach to learning.)

–Wait, you say. That’s not fair. Some students who are not blessed with verbal intelligence will not attract subscribers, visitors, comments, and so forth. But not so fast: the art of compensation with other intelligences is so much more possible on blogs. Not a great writer? Then compensate by communicating through images (see Diane Cordell’s blog), podcasts (see Wes Fryer), films (see Marco Torres and Mabry Middle School), graphic novels and comic strips (see ToonDo). Carve out a niche doing Google Earth productions (see Google Lit Trips) as your blog’s specialty. Find some skill you have, or some passion you want to extend, and adapt your blog to exploit that.

Really: What form of multiple intelligences does blogging exclude?

Third, grades would be weighted toward the end of the year or term, to allow for experiment, dead ends, learning - through - failure, and other writerly discoveries afforded by real-world blogging. (I’m more and more fascinated by the fact that my own blogging has been a real-world case of what we call “project-based learning” in school, and more and more convinced it’s the way to engage young writers to naturally want to hone their skills and excel.)

I shouldn’t have tried to write this right now. Too tired. But these holidays are short, and I love them for allowing this type of reflection.

–

*I’ll probably just buy the domain and host it alongside the Project Global Cooling site anyway, since I’m already adminstering WordPress MU for my school - and soon will train students to administer these sites themselves. It’s so hard to let go of the reins and give them to the young, and so easy to forget that they’re more than capable. But I will ask Scott to boost, support, read, seed, reply

Photo credits:
Writing by oskay
Borg Drones by Dunechaser
Bible 2.0 by jeff w brooktree
Looking by eskimoblood
Fusion Festival 2005 by Udo Herzog

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This TED Talk [update: about "Redefining the Dictionary"] is a must-watch for 20th Century Students (there are more of them than we realize) who are as reactionary as their parents about Why 2.0:

And Graham Wegner’s presentation about Personal Learning Environments makes great use of metaphors to sketch out the bewildering shape of our attempts to transform Learning 2.0. I found his critiques of e-portfolio’s particularly interesting: too much work for teachers, not enough audience for students. In Shanghai recently, I was asking about the value of online student work without actual (as opposed to theoretically possible) audiences. (Non-Aussies and Kiwis, are you grokking my drumbeat about the value of Antipodean perspectives on education yet?)

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My last post failed to mention in its title that student reflections (only in response to the first of six questions) on the 1001 Flat World Tales flat classroom project were posted at the bottom. So now you know: they’re there. (Barbara, I’d promised this to you, and will post the rest–Hawaii’s and Seoul’s–within the next few days.)

More soon, including the website with the selected stories for publication on the “blook,” as well as the literal book publication through Lulu.com.

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Visual Tour: 20 Things You Won’t Like About Windows Vista Annotated

1. Little originality, sometimes with a loss of elegance

Everywhere you look, Microsoft has copied things that Apple has offered for quite some time in OS X. The User Account Control features, especially with the Vista Standard log-in, look a lot like Apple’s user interface design. Too bad Microsoft doesn’t let you lock and unlock things (leaving those settings permanent) the way Apple does. More than 15 years later, Microsoft is still following Apple in operating system design and bundled materials. With some notable exceptions (including IE7+, where it copied Mozilla, and the Windows Sidebar, where it bests Apple, Google and everyone in user-interface design), Microsoft is belaboring the point by reinventing the wheel, often with an overall reduction in productivity and usability.

I have no problem with Microsoft copying Apple’s or any other company’s best interface designs. We all win when that happens, and I wish Apple would steal the best things Microsoft does right back. What’s really strange is when a company lifts good ideas and makes them worse, not better.

• Note: Reduced productivity.
  - post by cburell

Visual Tour: 20 Things You Won’t Like About Windows Vista Annotated

Visual Tour: 20 Things You Won’t Like About Windows Vista Annotated

Visual Tour: 20 Things You Won’t Like About Windows Vista Annotated

• Vista compared to Mac OS X Leopard.
  - post by cburell

Technology Review: Uninspiring Vista Annotated

• MIT reviewer becomes ex-Windows lover because of Vista, switches to Mac.
  - post by cburell

Technology Review: Uninspiring Vista Annotated

Jethro Carr Annotated

• This is the conclusion. The arguments are clearly laid out in the full article.
  - post by cburell

Coyote Blog: The Next Milestone In Killing Fair Use Annotated

• Vista interferes with multimedia production with invasive features. Sounds like a nightmare.

  Explanation: We will be downloading and editing free, “public domain” historical audio and video to edit. Vista might decide not to function if it thinks we are violating copyright. This article explains it.

  Invasiveness is one of Windows’ biggest problems for teachers and students. It forces upgrades and restarts computers. It constantly pops up with some demand when you’re working. Apple OS X doesn’t do this. You can focus on Macs. They don’t invade.
  - post by cburell

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