Final Notes (for now): Tinkering with Video Editing in a Major Way

The final product HERE.

I've never tinkered so hard or so much as in trying to complete the final inquiry project - and I have a feeling most of my classmates shared a similar experience.

Before attempting this video poem, I'd never worked with any kind of video editing or screen capturing software.  With only two days to really work on the example, I originally thought I'd focus on using PowerPoint in ways that would make it perfect for the creation of an Illuminated Text:  I was familiar with PowerPoint (or at least with its presentation-related features) and so my project in its initial conception would have allowed me to work within a familiar framework while trying to manipulate it in new ways to produce a new result.

However, I soon realized that film would make an important contribution:  I wanted images of wind (since a primary theme of the poem is ephemerality, and what better symbol?), but wind only really manifests itself with its effects on other objects.  And immediately after this realization, I found a link on the site I used for Creative Commons-licensed images to a site that provides Creative Commons-licensed HD video clips.  So, I set myself to exploring iMovie with the goal of creating a clip to export to PowerPoint.

This involved figuring out A) how to import a clip; B) how to edit clip length; C) how to superimpose text upon a movie frame; D) how to change the font on the slide to make it identical to the font of my PowerPoint; E) how to vary frame duration; F) how to save my project (apparently Apple has done away with the banality of "saving" a project on iMovie) and start a new one; and E) how to embed video into my PowerPoint.

I had a little bit of a headache with iMovie and more of a headache with screencast-o-matic, which is what I used to "film" my movie so that it would seem more like a film and less like a PowerPoint with bells and whistles on.  My computer had initial issues with Java (enabling plug-ins, allowing it to run on the screencast-o-matic site) and I had initial issues with synchronizing PowerPoint and the iTunes music that plays in the background.  Every attempt at recording had some kind of flaw:  sometimes the  "play" button for the movie clips refused to appear when I hovered my mouse over the appropriate site, while at other times I clicked too quickly and moved ahead a slide too fast.

By early Wednesday morning I had a movie.  My biggest headache, however, turned out to be exporting the video to an external site so that I could post it on the Wiki site and my blog:  initially I tried just adding it here as the file on my computer, but the video ended up being fuzzy and small. I didn't want to post it to YouTube, so I tried Flickr; my computer stalled for a good half hour trying to upload.  Finally, right before class, I managed to get it onto Flickr.  And, in class, when presenting, I discovered that Flickr (unbeknownst to me) has a video upload limit of 1'30".

Now the video's on my Vimeo account (I'm accumulating online accounts with startling alacrity; this is something I'll have to stop and think more seriously about later).  I liked this project because it ended up forcing me to explore tools I'd never otherwise explore.  Even more, however, I liked this because I ended up spending so much time on it.  Why?  I found it meaningful.  I found it vital.  And this is a good indication that maybe some of my future students might find it equally as important.

Notes from Everywhere: Tinkering as the Minutes Tick Away

I hear people say things like "I can't believe it's already July!" or "Is it really Wednesday?  The week's flying by!" all the time.  Such remarks are insubstantial but reassuring, the conversational equivalent of literary cliche; they remind us that we're civilized members of a society, literate in its basic conventions.  For example, "Hello, how are you?--I'm doing well.--Have a good night" is the "conversation" I regularly have with the security guard who lingers outside the doors to my residence hall at night.  Is it substantive?  No.  Even if either of us was suffering through an objectively hideous day--having been caught in the rain on the way to work, then having dropped the house keys down a storm drain--our exchange would remain pretty much unchanged.

I'm aware of the artificiality of many person-to-person exchanges, the formulaic nature of many stock phrases.  And yet--unable to convey my disbelief in any other way, I find myself asking:  do we really only have three classes left?  Is tomorrow really the first day of August?

Despite the progress each of us has made in class, I've been feeling more inundated with information than ever.  Since I joined Twitter, especially, it's been coming not as the slow, manageable river Karen described, but as a torrent of water gushing from a widening crevice in a collapsing cave.  A tsumani of hashtags, links, and blogs.  A veritable hurricane, a threatening wall of water--

My way of putting on a safety vest and picking up an oar is to A) remind myself to take a deep breath.  Of course I'm not going to master the internet in a six-week summer course; it's enough to have started to familiarize myself with tools that could be useful in future, and contacts who can continue to keep me appraised of the latest trends; and B) to use this tinkering blog to explore three (a concrete, manageable number) tools I've been hearing about for the past few weeks but haven't yet had the occasion to check out.

Since (A) is mostly an internal process, it's not here.  But (B), my brief account of experiments with Edmodo, Goodreads, and Evernote, is split into three respective summaries below:

The tagline for Edmodo is "make your classroom a community."  Although I'm more than enthusiastic about anything related to classroom-as-community, I was a little skeptical after watching the introductory film. At first, Edmodo seemed like it was offering a glorified class website:  teachers with accounts can post assignments, quizzes, and alerts.  These capabilities are nice, and maybe streamlined, but not innovative enough to justify the site to me in Web 2.0 terms.  After giving it a little more time, however, I came to see that Edmoto proposes to do for classroom management tools what Google has done for tools used by the social and private sectors:  consolidate them.  It offers a cloud-based storage system for document, picture, music, and video (like Google Docs) which perhaps makes my Dropbox redundant; teachers can share documents and other media with students this way.  A site calendar (like Google Calendar) allows teachers to share events with both students and their parents; a site gradebook presumably makes grades available to select parties as well.  What may be coolest about Edmodo, however, has less to do with students and more to do with professional networking (for which a parallel doesn't quite exist in Google, though I know Google+ has represented the most recent attempt).  Certain features permit educators to convene, via the web, in "Subject Area" and "Partner" communities for support and feedback.  If my future district were to join the site, teachers in all subject areas could participate in what the site calls "district-wide collaboration." Finally, Edmodo offers different methods of data-crunching to determine degree of program effectiveness and level of classroom engagement, making it useful for teachers as well as administrators.  Like every site, I suppose, this is one that can be used as intensively or as lightly as one desires.  But I think I'd use this in the classroom quite frequently to consolidate my reaching-out to parents, students, and colleagues.

I thought to explore Goodreads after reading about what Jen has done with it in the ninth grade classroom, a project she describes on her blog.  I'd heard of the site before but hadn't visited it:  since I generally operate on limited time (who doesn't?), I prefer to spend it actually reading.  However, the site seems great, and I might use it if I'm ever in need of a good book recommendation or even a chat with other book lovers (though usually I can get plenty of those in person, since many of my friends are/were English majors or are affiliated with English as a discipline in some way).  The best thing about Goodreads might be its sly literary evangelism (Alex, you gave this word its currency for our class).  From what Jen describes on her blog, all kinds of students potentially become invested in the site, which allows students to list the books they've read, review them, find similar titles, and take a peek at the virtual bookshelves of their friends.  It seems like a great way to build a reading community within the classroom--and outside of it.

Evernote operates, like Edmodo, on the cloud platform:  like Dropbox, it promises to store your documents (and pictures, and music, and video) wherever you are, synced to all of your devices.  It's quickly becoming clear to me that soon, saying things like "I forgot--that document's saved on my home computer" will be as archaic as saying something like "We can't watch that home video now--the tape untangled from the feeder and we have to wind it back in" (remember the days?).  Anyway, Evernote seems like something I'd use personally rather than professionally (if a niche in my web bookmarking list still exists, at that point, for the personal).  Some features unique to Evernote:  "Evernote Clearly" proposes to make reading online "distraction-free" by clearing away the "clutter" that exists, as a rule of the internet, synchronously with text on most pages.  "Evernote Web Clipper" seems to function much like a bookmarks bar or bookmarking site like Delicious or Diigo--meaning I could take it or leave it--but "Evernote Peek" seems like it could be a cool study aide (if one limited to the iPad), and "Evernote Hello" a wonderful phone app to organize contacts and events and pictures related to those contacts.

Speaking of contacts and social interaction--I think we've come full circle.  As we've learned in class, it's not the technology that makes a lesson great.  Similarly, I guess, tools meant for building community in the classroom can't ever be guaranteed to do so on their own, simply by virtue of existing.  I'm still eager to learn tips and tricks for educators intent--with or without technology--on fostering a sense of community in the classroom.  Part of this, I know, means living by example (my Philosophies of Education had a good discussion about this today using Nietzsche, although his definition of living by example was more of a "let your inner essence emit itself" philosophy rather than a "let your actions speak louder than words" type of thing).  Which means that part of this means relying on convention as a means for conversation as infrequently as possible.  So, yes--it is really Wednesday.  The week's going pretty fast.  How are you, and--oh, here, I found these--did you drop your keys?

Notes Regarding the "Transgressively Industrial" in a Post-Industrial World: How Fifty Shades of Grey Blurs the Line Between Appropriation and Autonomous Creation

Were I to place myself on the spectrum of people who have any kind of opinion about Fifty Shades of Grey (my opinion based on principle alone rather than on any exposure to the books themselves), I would say that I agree with Katie Roiphe from Newsweek who, in a review of E.L. James' bestselling trilogy, wrote that what is “most alarming about the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomena, what it gives it its true edge of desperation, and end-of-the-world ambiance, is that millions of otherwise intelligent women are willing to tolerate prose on this level.”  Usually I refuse to pass judgment on books until I've at least sampled them myself.  In this case, however, I trust what I've heard:  the writing is trite. The themes are cliched and even antithetical to the rights modern women proclaim they deserve. I can't think of any redeeming study of the trilogy besides maybe a horrified investigation into what, exactly, in our culture makes these books so appealing.


No matter how much I dislike the series itself, however, it turns out that the nature of its origin has some surprising connections to what we've been discussing in class re the post-industrial web (this is the only reason, I think, James' name would ever appear on my blog). I stumbled across this article from The New York Review of Books (the lead to the post having appeared on my Twitter feed) about the connection between the multimillion-dollar-grossing series and fan fiction, which illuminates the ways in which James' profit transgresses the unspoken social mores of the fan fiction community.


Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that the first incarnation of Fifty Shades of Grey appeared as a fan fiction story on a Twilight forum, a series I similarly loathe on principle alone. But I suppose I am:  no matter how poor the prose, I guess I'm still used to the author/reader binary. Self-publication via services such as Lulu is becoming the industry norm; more and more frequently, publishers of popular fiction will offer contracts to books only after they've gained a substantial readership independently. This practice at once removes the red-tape involved in publishing (knowing a guy who knows a guy from your MFA program) and maintains its essence, which is networking (knowing a guy who knows a guy who has stumbled across your writing in the vast literary desert of the web and thinks it's quality stuff). While the latter depends heavily on chance, it may be more egalitarian. Web 2.0, if nothing else, is all about egalitarianism (at least initially):  Facebook brags that "anyone" can create a profile.  "Anyone" can sign up for Twitter. Then, as internet users, we trust in the democracy of the web:  more popular figures on Twitter gain followers because they post uniquely funny or informative tweets, not simply what they've had for breakfast.  More innovative or interesting websites, such as Postsecret, rack up hits; others without quite as innovative or interesting a premise fade away.  


Sometimes this democracy of the web works phenomenally.  At others, it results in Fifty Shades of Grey, the popularity of which (over ten million copies sold) most critics ascribe to praise of the most democratic nature:  word-of-mouth. Whatever the quality of the outcome of the democratic process of the web, however, it's hard to deny that the critic/reader relationship is changing in a way that subsumes the traditional cultural authority of the critic to the authority of the reader. As Emily Eakin writes in her article, "It’s tempting to argue that the Fifty Shades trilogy marks the apotheosis of a new industry paradigm, in which power has shifted from high-status cultural arbiters—agents, publishers, and professional reviewers—to anonymous readers and fans" (Eakin).  Is this resurgence of mass culture (versus "high" culture) for the better, or is it, culturally, for the worse?*


But I'm getting off track.  What Eakin argues in her article, and what I'd like to complicate using chapter 3 of Lankshear and Knobel as well as our most recent reading from Jenkins, is that there is a problematic divide between the collaborative, "resolutely anti-commercial" nature of fan fiction and the attainment of commercial success in the publishing industry.


In a definition of fan fiction that could just as easily have appeared in Jenkins, Eakin writes that "Fan fiction [...] exists in a state of dependency, borrowing not only a source work’s fans, who provide a ready-made community of readers, but its characters (and frequently its settings and basic plot) in order to tell the story in a new way" (Eakin).  In other words, fan fiction relies on appropriation. A fan fiction story is a work which takes already-extant characters from books like Harry Potter or movies like Star Wars and places them in new stories, rewrites of a particular scene, or uses them to create alternate endings to the "official" book.  In Twilight fan fiction, Eakin specifies, "Edward [...] is variously reconceived as a surgeon, a high-school principal, and a cat, and his teenage human love interest, Bella, as a wedding planner, a divorcee, a US Army sergeant, and an assistant pastry chef. There are children and car accidents, creepy government experiments, divorces, disappearances" (Eakin).^ Because it so explicitly borrows from published works, using the characters, worlds, and situations "property" of the works' authors, fan fiction supposedly cannot be sold; to protect themselves from intellectual property lawsuits, fan fiction authors place disclaimers at the beginnings of their stories in which they acknowledge appropriation of intellectual "property" from the original author.


I used "supposedly" purposefully in the previous sentence.  E.L. James' work is apparently an exception; so, too, are books like Pride and Prejudice with Zombies (seen but not yet sampled) and many other Pride and Prejudice cult favorites--published!--that follow Mr. Darcy and his new wife to Pemberley. But if we consider the examples Jenkins gives of the cultural history of appropriation, in which Homer "remixed" different Greek myths and tragedies to produce his works and Shakespeare similarly "borrowed" plot threads and themes from his contemporaries, what is the limit?  Where is the line demarcating "autonomous authorship" and "creative collaboration"?


In the examples from Twilight fan fiction Eakin lists above, the situations and alternate personas for the characters in the series seem almost too fundamentally different from the author's original creation to belong to his or her original conception of them. At some point, then, autonomous authorship springs from creative collaboration.  Fifty Shades of Grey morphs itself out of Master of the Universe (James' original Twilight fan fiction) which derives itself from Stephanie Meyer's popular series. Key in the legitimization of Fifty Shades, if not the noncommerical aspect of fan fiction (which obviously becomes irrelevant as soon as any volume is published) is autonomous authorship:  Eakin notes that "Fan-fiction writers and legal scholars have argued persuasively that the genre meets the legal criteria for fair use, because it is [...] “transformative” (it adds novel insights or meanings to the source work)" (Eakin).  In other words, Fifty Shades is a work of fiction in its own right (technically, if not aesthetically) because it has taken Edward and Bella from vampire-land and made them so unrecognizable that they can masquerade as Christian and Ana in your typical corporate America.  But it had to start with Edward and Bella.


I think what fan fiction is forcing us to confront is that the line between appropriation and "autonomous creation" (term Jenkins') is often much messier than we often believe.  And, in this, I find a historical study of appropriation in general is a valid practice in the classroom.  Students may often feel inhibited when writing because they're not the "experts"; when they look at Shakespeare, they see a man who sat down in an day or two and wrote Othello while sitting alone at a desk.  In fact, collaboration and "borrowing" are essential for most writers (Proust is the only one I really know of who managed to write truly excellent books while sitting alone in a cork-lined room). But students don't usually see how many books most writers read in order to become good writers, nor how most of writing is the act of participating in a conversation that is already taking place by using allusions and generic forms common to the conversation to scaffold original thought.  Writing, like most other practices, is less about invention and more about innovation. And that reminder, if nothing else (in this case, there really is nothing else), is why Fifty Shades of Grey might ultimately be valuable in some capacity.


*It's worth noting that this high culture/low culture divide is not a new concern.  The Beat poets caused such consternation way back in the '50s; now nearly every college survey of contemporary poetry includes a study of "Howl."  
^I hope, in at least one story, Edward as cat gets together with Bella as assistant pastry chef.  And that they're in a spaceship.

Notes from the @Twitter(verse): #news, #networking

I come in peace from the year 2008.

That's the year I remember Twitter developing into the cultural phenomenon it is today.  That's the first year I remember hearing "tweet" used not only as a verb ("I tweeted about it last night, yo") but as a verb used by "legitimate" forms of media (such as when a phrase such as "Barack Obama tweeted..." or "Sarah Palin made a statement on her Twitter account today..." appeared in The New York Times or The Washington Post).

I remember noting a dissonance between the conception of the internet I'd had then, which was probably more Web 1.0, and the conception of the web that was developing at that time with Web 2.0 as the expert/novice binary began to fracture.  Facebook allowed college and high school kids to speak to their friends and share photos, videos, and links.  I used it.  Twitter, it seemed, operated on what seemed simultaneously to be both a more personal and more global level:  the platform allowed college and high school kids to interact with presidential candidates, "following" their instant updates and, in some cases, being "followed" back by the campaign.

I remember feeling left out of that electoral conversation, yet reluctant to do anything about it. Sources such as the PEW Research Center mention that younger teens have been, and remain, more likely to use Facebook than Twitter.  For me, at least, that was true--although I can't say why.  I've always been a little bit of a news junkie, so it's not as though the political access Twitter affords didn't appeal to me when I'd previously considered creating an account.  It's also not as though none of my friends have Twitter accounts.  In all likelihood, I think I was resistant to Twitter because it was Twitter, and therefore representative of the new technology to which I continue to remain wary of being "tethered."  After all, barely a week goes by without the publication of a new report declaring the demise of person-to-person interaction.  I can't say those reports are entirely false:  often my college friends would pull out their phones and absently thumb through their new Twitter updates while we'd be watching a movie or hanging out over drinks.  I've caught myself participating in such activity, Twitter account or not, and hated myself for it.  The technical term for what could be termed an unhealthy attachment to one's cell phone is called "nomophobia," and I'd be surprised if I and my friends didn't all have it to some extent.  Last Monday I left my phone in my room from about 4 pm until 11 pm while I went from class to a running club meeting to a restaurant; I found myself worrying the entire time that someone would text me and not receive a response for hours, leading them to wonder where I was.  When I got home, the first thing I did was to check for messages.


Maybe I'm succumbing to being "wired."  Maybe being in a new place with few acquaintances has made it OK for me to spend my time with people (and, interestingly, organizations) who aren't physically in the same room as I am.  But, as in my last post, self-awareness is key--and I think a responsible use of Twitter has far more advantages than disadvantages.  Twitter is where news, and scandal, and, as in the case of the Arab Spring, revolution, often first erupt.  It's also where future colleagues of mine might be having conversations from which I'd be excluded without an account.  Maybe this means I'm joining to compensate for what will otherwise be a knowledge deficit; maybe I'm giving in to a cultural movement that weakens the kind of culture I prefer (which privileges the personal, not the virtual).  


But I'm trusting, again, in the power of self-awareness.  So, to make this more of a tinkering blog (and less of a personal grappling blog) let me tell you what I've achieved on Twitter.  I have a username, a picture, and a profile that is appropriately impersonal.  I have "followers" and people and organizations I "follow":  a sampling of these includes  Education Week, The Paris Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The Huffington Post.  I also follow The Met, NYC event organizations like TimeOut, the feed for the Olympics (London2012), etc.  On the technical, discourse-knowledge-specific side of things, I've figured out the "@" symbol and hashtagging (to a certain extent).  I know what "trends" are and where to find them; I know how to retweet a post and reply to one.  


Etc, etc.  I promised Jordyn my posts would be shorter, so here's the final paragraph:  I'm excited to see what I can do with Twitter in terms of maintaining a professional network.  I'm already getting great articles from Education Week; when I make friends who teach, I'll follow them for what will hopefully be content-specific tips and tricks and even conversations.  No one can predict whether Twitter will be around in two or five years from now, the internet being what it is--but if it is?  And if I manage, in that time, to cultivate a network of educators with whom I can trade ideas?  #awesome.  #righton.

Notes from a Podcaster: On Technology and Innovation

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Let me get right down to what will be a deeply personal entry, if one that also attempts to reflect upon the more academic implications of Lankshear and Knobel’s theories. 

I found our Skype session with Paul Bogush on Monday so perspective-altering that I felt almost as though I couldn’t contribute to it because there would have been too much to ask. I wanted to know more about “unschooling” techniques, and ways to reach particularly restive students, and how to tailor approach to demographic.  I wanted to find out what happens on the first two days of Mr. Bogush’s class that draws the students together into a community, and whether it’s simply meaningful assessment that invests students so much in their work that they’re willing to work harder than they do in any other class.

The session was as rich on a pedagogical level as it was troubling on the personal level.  Our class conversation forced me to confront what is a deep crisis for me regarding teacher predisposition and effectiveness. 

I don’t think anyone enters the teaching profession expecting to be a mediocre teacher.  I could be wrong, of course - but I think that, more often than not, teachers who are ineffective may think they’re doing a great job when they’re not.  Like members of other professions who may not perform at the top of their fields, they may have settled:  settled into a certain, static type of pedagogical orientation or settled into the practice of absolving themselves of student disinterest. 

Part of “settling” in the teaching profession, I think, is failing to recognize (or losing the ability to identify in the first place) the ways in which “baggage” limits an individual’s practice. Mr. Bogush mentioned that he became a teacher because he was dissatisfied with the way the majority of teachers went about the business of teaching. Namely, Mr. Bogush specified that many people who become teachers do so because they were the students who were “good” at school.  The baggage of this type of teacher is the baggage of a comfort zone reinforced by the educational establishment. These teachers were the ones for whom the current system worked, and works, perfectly:  because they were good at reading, writing, and listening carefully to an authority figure in class, these teachers model their teaching practices and expectations for students on this model while failing to recognize that this model is neither the most effective nor the most comprehensive—nor, most importantly, innovative in the way that pedagogy needs to be innovative. As Ken Robinson so effectively and artfully explains in his RSA Animate video, the current educational system is ill-adapted for the 21^st century in many ways.  Yet many teachers are complicit in the system. They may write solid lessons structured around curriculum-based assessments, but they fail to revolutionize current practices.

There are a few reasons I’m hesitant about heading straight into teaching next year at 23, but this is the main one:  I have been nothing but a “good student” my entire life.

Part of my reluctance to share my Animoto video in class on Monday was because it was personal and, like Pat, I tend to shy away from sharing too much.  My five-word memoir for the presentation, interspersed between admittedly formulaic and crappy default pictures, is “Is this the right continent?” (I wanted to use “What if this isn’t the right continent?”—but while the rules admit memoirs that consist of less than six words, I don’t think Smith Magazine would tolerate seven).  Many of my friends are doing radically different things this year:  those who have chosen to stay domestic are getting their first jobs, moving into their first places, relishing their first paychecks.  Those who are going abroad, as many from my college traditionally do, are teaching English in Thailand and South Korea, or else doing scientific research in Germany or working to promote public health in Rwanda or starting their own nonprofits in Cameroon.

And I am in school—albeit a very good school—doing exactly what I’ve always done, which is to complete all required reading and annotate it thoughtfully and write essays which synthesize several articles or complicate one in particular.  I’ve gotten better at contributing to class discussion, but I remain most comfortable with listening intently and following class procedure. 

This is why our class conversation with Mr. Bogush affected me so much, I think.  I would like to say that “school” qua institution has done this to me, but in reality I think that it’s me who’s done this to me.  I had other options this year that would have forced me out of my comfort zone:  theoretically, like my schoolmates, I could have taught in Seoul or Hong Kong. I could have worked on a vineyard in California, or tried to get into the publishing industry. I was actually placed as a Teach for America corps member in Newark, NJ, before receiving my acceptance at TC.  I declined the position because, after much internal debate and conversations with professors of education at my college (which nonetheless continue to leave me conflicted regarding the purpose and effectiveness of teacher education programs), I felt that I would ultimately serve my students better if I pursued traditional route certification. In doing so, however, I gave up a chance for self-discovery and growth that I sometimes regret.

The best teachers are innovators.  There is no question about it.  The best teachers—the life-changing mentor types—are the ones who find authentic ways to invest students in their work, to see both its personal and societal relevance, and (most importantly) to change their approach if students seem unresponsive. They’ve probably done many things and learned enough about themselves in the process to rely on their own judgments and ideas; consequently, they’re able to identify problems within the system and develop visions appropriate to fixing those problems.  Complacency fosters neither anger nor innovation. 

And technology is integral here, not only because it more fully prepares students for the collaborative nature of the professional world they’ll be entering, and not only because it allows students to publish to a (theoretically) worldwide audience, but also because it depends on innovation of the tried-and-true for effective use. The justification for technology in the classroom shouldn’t be to “engage students”; learning doesn’t need to be “fun,” and standards should never be lowered to “cater” to students. What learning does need to be is meaningful. The implications of work in the classroom need to be real and immediate, which is why I believe blogging can be so effective and why it is an example of a technology essential to the English classroom. Nothing needs to be sacrificed to integrate it into the classroom, and the class as a whole stands to gain more than can be measured in terms of motivation and investment when students write conscious of reception by their peers and communities.

Only some technologies, of course, facilitate true innovation.  Those that fail to enhance the curriculum in meaningful ways can be abandoned for their old-fashioned counterparts without repercussion. It might even be better if they are:  efficiency is not always key, and it should never be the key justification for the inclusion of technology in the classroom. On the personal level, I can only hope that I’m not relying too much on the innovation the right technology promises to save my classes from banality:  there are certainly many ways (probably a majority of ways) to be innovative in the classroom that don’t require new technologies.  

But—to return to the concept of “baggage”—the dangers of ignoring new technology consist of much more than depriving students of the knowledge of how to create a podcast or web video, much more, even, than of depriving them of authentic assessments. The danger is for the teacher, who without due consideration of new possibilities (digital or not) risks complacency in a day and age when complacency is unacceptable if the educational establishment really is as troubled as it seems to be.  It is a personal danger as well as a societal one; it is a difficulty that requires constant self-awareness and assessment to combat.  It’s a danger that, as a “good student,” I feel particularly prone to, but one which I plan to fight tooth-and-nail.

Notes from Henry Clay: Determining Technology's Place in the Classroom

Some crazy stuff's coming out of MIT.

In addition to standard scientific frontier-expanding inventions, such as that of an algorithm enabling robots to scan the hulls of ships for mines (also, apparently glasses-free 3-D TV  is pretty imminent), this past spring the university offered a 150,000 student class on "Circuits and Electronics" which was profiled today in an article in The New York Times.

This class is part of a larger free online education initiative by Harvard-MIT called edX.  Although free lectures from major colleges and universities have been available since the launch of iTunes U in 2007, the Harvard-MIT initiative is remarkable for one reason:  it proposes to offer actual interactive and collaborative classes.  While online classes have been available since 1989 (way back in the day, as far as the internet's concerned), they have typically been the purview of for-profit institutions.  EdX proposes to offer a free and coherent education, complete with instructor, TAs, required texts, and peer interaction (albeit through forums).  In so doing, it also proposes to make an Ivy League education more completely a function of merit rather than lottery or connection. 


Of course, there are disadvantages to this type of program.  It's reasonable to guess that any applicant offered a physical seat at either MIT or Harvard with the means to afford it will take it, online option or no.  Most students still prefer traditional education, primarily for the enhanced academic experience but also, perhaps, to avoid the social stigma associated with online education, which for years has been associated with practicality at the collegiate level (think working single mom or dad seeking new career) and introversion or behavioral disorders at the secondary level.  Additionally, the 7,157 students who actually passed "Circuits and Electronics" will not receive any sort of certificate of completion.  Though the president of edX speculates that a longer and more comprehensive program of study could eventually result in the awarding of an honorary certificate by the university, which may be an acceptable form of accreditation for some employers, I imagine few would want to invest their time and energy into Ivy League-level work for a sustained period without anything to show for it.

Certificates aside, however, what edX proposes to do is ultimately a very good thing.  As this article from The Atlantic points out, physical constraints related to available classroom seats (and not a dearth of qualified applicants) are typically what limit class sizes at Harvard to 1000.  "Our goal is to change the world through education," Professor Anant Agarwal says.  EdX's utilization of the web to reach students in Brazil, China, and Mongolia as well as those stateside in lower-income communities and various stages of life means that the platform is a tool of democratization for education at its finest.  The withholding of a degree in the potential advent of a full degree program is potentially problematic:  since so much of the cultural capital of any Ivy resides in its selectivity, MIT and its peers may idealistically "support" free education without being willing to cede a degree rightfully earned.  However, the creation of edX may be an important step in affirming that the acquisition of knowledge, if sought, is a human right.  This may be a compromise worth making.

Just as online education technology has its advantages and disadvantages, so too do the new technologies used within the physical classroom.  Often new technologies allow us compromised access to things that we would otherwise have no access to.  In some cases, this compromised access is to education; in others, it's to experts and Discourse communities.  I was impressed with some aspects of the video conferencing technology we used in class discussion on Wednesday:  we were able to gain access to professionals in the field of technology and English education who would have otherwise remained inaccessible.  The chat discussion allowed everyone to participate, and often the responses to students' questions came as much from us as they did from Teresa and Gary.  Other aspects made me reluctant to rely too exclusively on such technology:  on the affective level, I was too self-conscious on camera (before we turned our cameras off due to bandwidth issues) to fully absorb what Teresa and Gary were saying.  I also regretted that we didn't get to address some points as fully in the chat as they probably would have been addressed in discussion (i.e. my example in class regarding the links posted in chat without further comment, though I understand now that there's a convention - a Discourse-specific knowledge! - that I lacked knowledge of).  The constant attention I had to pay to the chat stream and to the video discussion was exhausting after a while, especially when the discussion centered around one topic and the chat around another.  


I think my choices regarding the use of new technology versus old technology in the classroom will often rely on a consideration of the pros and cons of each.  Despite my discomfort with some aspects of video conferencing, and despite how much more preferable it is to have a discussion with someone in person, I would ultimately rule in favor of utilizing video conferencing in my classroom if it permitted my students to access authors and critics that they would otherwise never get to meet. I appreciate the collaborative nature of blogging and the interpersonal connections students can discover when they're sharing their writing with each other and reading their peers' thoughts in the comfort of their home environments rather than in the data-driven, outcome-focused atmosphere of school. 


However, I also think that advocates of new technologies should compromise with advocates of the old:  though technology may permit us to do things more quickly, more cleanly, and with greater precision, it doesn't always mean we should.  There is a certain joie de vivre in using a real paintbrush on a real canvas to create a picture that can hang on the wall beside your bed.  Likewise, there is an aesthetic beauty and personal character to handwriting that cannot be replicated in any font.  I love the instantaneous nature of emailing, and I don't know how I would maintain all of my close friendships as well without texting and Skype and Facebook, but I still don't know if there's anything better than opening an old shoebox and finding a pile of old letters from friends inside.  


In sum, I think it's dangerous to base any pedagogy completely on computer screen or print text.  Students should learn the nonlinear thinking required of them on the web by participating in fast-moving chats and moving from article to article by clinking on link after link.  However, they should also learn to immerse themselves in a good book for an hour, two hours, even five or six.  They should learn to listen to a multitude of others' voices, then sit quietly and listen to themselves.

Notes from Joey Chestnut

This is the hardest tinkering blog to write yet.

I think this is because I've reached the point where my knowledge of the web is broad but not specific.  Last week I took the time to explore Google, as well as all of Google's "extracurricular" functions such as Google Docs and the like; as far as search engines go, I have at least one (at least partially) figured out.  In the past two weeks I've also had the opportunity to finally determine how Wikis and blogs work and how they can be used in the classroom.  As a class, we've explored a major photo sharing platform (Flickr) and a site for  web video creation (Animoto).  I guess I should be feeling quite accomplished, but - as with knowledge in general, the more I know, the more I realize I don't know.

This makes it difficult to choose what to explore.  Should I focus on finding sites that relate specifically to the wealth of free English literature available online, such as Poetry Daily or the extensive archive of The Poetry Foundation or Project Gutenburg?  Should I search for more sites to share with students like Born Mag that integrate poetry and art and animation?  Or - should I focus on finding classroom tools that will help me to generate collaborative and meaningful projects for students?  Should I explore how to make a video on Animoto or on iMovie, or how to make a podcast, or how to create a digital story or a picture presentation?  I could make my exploration personal and focus on sites similar to The English Companion Ning that would connect me to the Discourse community of English teachers, but I could also devote the limited time we have to exploring bookmarking sites like Diigo and Delicious and sites for WebQuests, sites that provide rubric generators and digital gradebooks and ePortfolios--

Fortunately and unfortunately for me, I decided this week to explore a site which fractures my knowledge even further.  Delicious is a site on which users can post things (websites, photos, tweets, viedos, etc) from around the Web that interest them.  These things are grouped into related categories, or "stacks" (which presumably attract and form different Discourse communities), for easier exploration:  there's a stack for favorite cookie recipes, a stack titled "Getting Around" that features links to the MTA, stacks for compiling effective ab exercises and stacks in different languages.  It reminds me of a site like Pinterest, albeit with a more general, less Home and Garden focus.

Under the "Education" header, there's a stack for educational resources that could be quite useful in the classroom.  There are also stacks which propose to collect links related to technology in the classroom (and even a stack which concerns itself solely with iPads in the classroom).  As with many other collaborative sites (Flickr comes instantly to mind), users can participate as much or as little as they desire; I was able to access all of the posted links without a Delicious account, though I'd need one if I wanted to contribute to the community as an active member by posting links or comments.  In addition to offering links and comments, users can "follow" Delicious feeds that cater to their particular interests.  They can also "like" a particular stack on Facebook and post the link to their Twitter feeds - meaning that the Web continues to tangle itself tighter and tighter, organizing itself around distinct Discourses, even as it fractures into increasingly specialized sites.  


I don't know how or if this site would be good for students to use in the classroom (I don't know if any of the links would be particularly relevant to what we'd be studying), but I do think occasional visits to the "Educational Resources" stack would improve my practice.  When this class ends, I'd also like to visit the stack related to technology in the classroom to keep my toolbox fresh and to stay abreast of the latest trends.  At this point, I feel like Joey Chestnut - if a Joey Chestnut who's hungry for new websites rather than for hot dogs.  I guess I'm lucky that one of my first was Delicious.

Notes from a Googler (n.) - one who Googles

Like many others -- even my friend's 97 year-old grandmother, on occasion -- I have Googled.  I have Googled essential information ("how to get gum out of hair") and inessential information ("who is the wife of Johnny Depp" (and how did she get so lucky?)).  I have Google Image-searched for images (like the one in my first post, below) to use in school PowerPoint presentations, poster projects, and, when I was 12, neighborhood flyers advertising my availability as a petsitter.  I have Google Mapped my way from Pittsburgh to D.C. and back again, among many other destinations, after checking my Google Mail (Gmail) account; I have used Google Translate more than once to double-check my Spanish grammar in emails to professors and to make sense of webpages in Russian or Farsi.  During past final exams weeks I have Google Scholared and Google Booked myself out of very tight spots, then used YouTube (now a Google affiliate) to relax after every paper was handed in.  I'm even using Chrome, the Google web browser, to compose this Google blog.  


Despite how familiar I thought I was with Google, however, my recent discoveries of Google Reader and Google Presentations (today!) have revealed to me how little I know about the full capabilities of the search-engine site.  Should we cut to the chase and call a spade a spade, meaning a monopoly?  There's Google Finance and Google Product Search, Google Alerts, even a Google Patent Search; there's Google Calendar, Google Docs, and all of the subcategories of Google Docs.  When I figure all of this out, I'll probably feel so triumphant that I'll have to share my accomplishment with my friends on Google+.

I think Google's simplifying the Web in a beautiful (and perhaps dangerous) way.  I know that many of us spent the first two weeks of classes feeling overwhelmed with all of the cool, creative platforms that exist for us to utilize if we only know how to do so.  It seems tempting to rely on Google for all of our internet needs (especially because it seems like it's extraordinarily able to handle them), but I do think it's important to remember that there are excellent photo sharing, social networking, and mapping sites beyond Google.  After all, which search engine appears in the new Amazing Spiderman?  Bing might be making a comeback (or getting its start, depending).

Since we're working with Google Presentations to compose our 5-photo narratives for class on Monday, however, I wanted to see with which sub-sites of Google I could tinker (and manage to emerge alive).  Specifically, I wanted to try using Google Docs, since before this class I'd only used it once or twice (and never to take notes in conjunction with another student while actually in class).  The first feeling I had upon clicking on the drop-down menu "Create" was one of deep regret for the $119 Microsoft Office software I bought just a week and a half ago.  What Microsoft's done for $119, Google has done for free:  Google Docs is, in many respects, like a collaborative version of Word.  Users can create tables, control font size and line spacing, insert images, and use Word Count to see if they've written the 5,000 words their professors have asked for (or to see if they simply need to add more really really really (really) imaginative adjectives and/or adverbs to reach quota).  Google Presentations seems to work exactly like PowerPoint (without maybe all of the designer slide options), while Google SpreadSheet seems poised to perform every task required of Excel (or at least the most common and pedestrian uses -- which are, incidentally, my uses).  Google Docs even has applications Microsoft lacks, such as Google Form.  I opened this and still don't know definitively what it could be used for, though the options under "Add item" suggest that it could be useful in creating assessments (some of the options for "items" listed are Multiple Choice, Paragraph Text, etc).  If my guess is correct, I'll probably use Google Form quite frequently as a teacher.  Google has its own version of more-expensive drawing and composition software that appears if a user selects "Drawing" from the drop-down menu in Google Docs:  this application features a grid, multiple tool sizes and colors, ways to insert images, text, and WordArt, and much more.  "Script" also appears in the drop-down menu in Google Docs, though this is definitely not an application for screenwriters or theater buffs.  Instead, Google's Script belongs wholly to the information age:  it allows users to write their own code for websites.  

Google has created an astonishingly comprehensive and user-friendly web of sites and internet services.  I know they're tracking my every search term in order to display user-specific ads for new Mizuno running shoes on my browser--but with how helpful and accessible they've made themselves, is it any wonder that Google's Googolplex of users continue to Google?

Notes from The Video Game Facial Hair Blog Without A Funny Or Clever Title: Collaborative Projects and the Post-Industrial Mindset of Web 2.0

As I mentioned in my last post, the internet is a place of playful and often quite bizarre specialization.  It seems the Web hosts a site to indulge every interest:  apostles of Lynne Truss who carry permanent markers in their back pockets to X misused apostrophes from grocery store signs should visit the Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks (or "Blog" of Unnecessary "Quotation" Marks) to simultaneously enrage and entertain themselves when the signs in every produce section within a 10-block radius have been correctly changed from "banana's" to "bananas."  If you've watched enough hip-hop videos to have noticed an unusual trope--that of the "flaming garbage can"--there's a blog dedicated to the phenomenon called (can you guess?) Flaming Garbage Cans in Hip Hop Videos.  At press time, this blog boasts 16,665 views - making it about a billion times more successful than mine, which (so far as I can tell) has one page view from Karen, one from my friend Arielle, and 117 views from my parents (thanks guys).

There are far more unusually-focused blogs than I can post here, though if you want a more extensive sampling you can visit the same site I did.  This is, ironically (and purposefully so), a Blog of Extremely Specific Blogs.

I was going to use this post to describe my tinkering on Flickr (it was prompted by my wanderings on the Flickr blog, which spotlights a "Dogs on Roofs" photo group), but after some reflection I realized that the increasing specialization of the Web is a great example of what Lankshear and Knobel pinpoint in "New Literacies and the Change of Mindsets" as the importance of Discourse communities to the post-industrial mindset of Web 2.0.  So I'd like to focus on grappling rather than tinkering, at least for the time being.


For background purposes, the duo explain that using Web 1.0 meant using new technology (like various commercial internet services to buy products) but not yet skills related to new literacy (such as blogging or posting a reader review of a book on Amazon.com).  Pre-2001 (the year Lankshear and Knobel identify as paradigm-shifting), computer technology was used "to do 'the same process you've always done, but just more efficiently.'"  In education, this might have meant typing the notes to use on an overhead projector rather than writing them in dry-erase marker.  Here, technology allows a neater presentation but doesn't change the process of lecturing in any notable way.  


According to Jeff Bozos, the emergence of Web 2.0 meant the emergence of an entirely new conception of the Web.  This conception relies upon the idea of worldwide, instantaneous, free collaboration between members of Discourse communities.  The social networking sites that recently added tinder to the spark of the Jasmine Revolution arose during this period; so, too, did concepts such as personal blogs (instead of personal websites), the invitation of user content by major news outlets (such as CNN's iReporter), and YouTube.  We might note the indebtedness of the Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks to this internet revolution.  Only with Web 2.0 did the internet become a communal site where user "commenting" could be encouraged (and even solicited, nowadays) on articles in The New York Times.^  The Blog of Extremely Specific Blogs, to cite another example, seems to have relied on user recommendations for specific blogs to then share with the larger Blogger community.  


At this point in the entry, Web 2.0 may seem irreproachable.  Who doesn't love worldwide, instantaneous, free collaboration?  However, I'd like to examine in a little greater detail something Lankshear and Knobel seem to gloss over in "New Literacies and the Change of Mindsets" in their enthusiasm for the World Wide Web.  Much of the chapter's praise of 'new' literacies highlights the larger post-industrial mindset of Web 2.0, which (to reiterate) privileges collaborative effort and the power of the consumer over that of the corporation (at least in so far as the corporation deals in tangibles, such as products, and not in services or ideas as a corporation like Google might).*  Under such a new information and entertainment market system, Lankshear and Knobel note, "Conventional social relations associated with roles of author/authority and expert have broken down radically under the move from 'publishing' to participation, from centralized authority to mass collaboration, and the like" (L&K 52).  In other words, websites were once the domain of expert "authors" who generated content with specialized knowledge.  Websites nowadays, too, belong to groups of people who generate content using specialized knowledge; however, these users may also exclusively share content that they have not generated (see Tumblr for an example that takes the form of a whole site) and complicate intellectual property laws in ways that no one, yet, can decisively praise or condemn.  

It's clear that Lankshear and Knobel's sympathies lie with the masses and not with The Man.  "Publishing" (offset by either necessary or unnecessary quotation marks, depending on your opinion of The Man) is Web 1.0; it's physical text, outmoded.  Even worse, it seems, published texts enforce a hierarchy of expert / novice that is also outmoded and designed to maintain the social status quo.  "The world of conventional literacies," Lankshear and Knobel note, "remains closely tied to considerations of instrumental value" (L&K 61).  In contrast, 'new' literacies contain within them "a world of intrinsic satisfactions" (L&K 61).  "There are no royalties to be had there," the authors write, "or, typically, any other public recognition" (L&K 61).  Users of Web 2.0, it seems, participate in internet communities (either by producing, sharing, or reviewing content) solely for the love of the game.


The important question that this entry concerns itself with (rather late, it's true) is this:  will a post-industrialist mindset hurt or help society in the long run?  By which I mean:  doesn't everything of quality (or most things of quality) come at some kind of cost?  From an educational standpoint, how do we teach students to respect copyright laws in an age in which they're rapidly becoming devalued?

Of course, cost often relates to quality.  Though post-industrial Web 2.0 boasts many free resources (no strings attached), its democratic nature means that the range of content (in terms of quality/trash) is quite wide.  I derive great enjoyment from many free things on the Web.  See blogs above; see also Facebook, Google Reader, Google (in general) and...everything I do on the internet, actually, from looking up new recipes on Vegetarian Times to watching new music videos on YouTube.  But these (quality) operations have all developed alternate ways of financing their operations (most through user-specific advertisements for real, industrial products).  What of industries such as music and film, which lose billions of dollars every year due to online piracy?  What of publishing, which exists now in a kind of liminal space?  Sure, I like watching the YouTube video of your sister's niece singing a Christmas carol.  It's quite post-industrial.  But I also like listening to Watch the Throne in all of its platinum glory.  The problem is that, using Web 1.0, I would have paid for the tracks (having been forced to pay for them) and thus given Kanye and Jay-Z recompense for their trouble.  Using Web 2.0, I feel less compunction about obtaining that album through other means.  And if we stop paying for goods of worth (or paying for quality news journalism, or observing copyright laws for "professional" images and music), they might disappear for good.%

Lankshear and Knobel mention the "relationship revolution" of Web 2.0 as its most important--and revolutionary--attribute.  In relation to both educational uses and the social sphere of the internet, I think the prevalence of interest groups on sites like Blogger and Flickr is an overwhelmingly positive aspect of Web 2.0.  The student in the classroom is able to assume a new authority that will, in all likelihood, excite her and invest her in her work, while the willingness of people worldwide to collaborate freely in creation of new content and innovation of the old is inspiring.  I'm especially partial to Dogs on Roofs, now that I know about it, and I'd be reluctant to retreat to the old Industrial world where users like mark1230us couldn't start the chat thread "wow" -- clarifying with "what a great idea !!!" and, minutes later, "just dogs on the roof !!  i understand."  This is a real-time epiphany that I can read 22 months later and experience as though it were happening now.  Internet specialization turns out to be a very good thing:  it allows members of otherwise disparate Discourse communities to find each other and sustain a conversation by sharing photos, music tracks, samples of writing...the list goes on.

However, I also like Kanye. And The New York Times.  And I support, in contrast to Lankshear and Knobel, a version of the Web that straddles Industrial and post-Industrial mindsets - if only because I want to enjoy my collaborative blogs about flaming garbage cans in hip hop videos and listen to "published" hip hop albums too.



^Of course, as Lankshear and Knobel remind us in their discussion of atoms and bits, the preposition "in" in this sentence becomes problematic in Web 2.0.
*In consideration of recent user information vending scandals, it's debatable, of course, whether Google actually deals solely in ideas...
%It should be noted that many companies are rising to the challenge of meeting their profit margins, though in necessarily creative ways.
- Title link here (another specialized blog): http://dudekazoo.wordpress.com/
- Photo credit here

Notes from Vygotsky: Conserving constructivist practices through new technologies in the ELA classroom

Despite its tech-heavy title and intent, Paul Allison’s article “Be a Blogger:  Social Networking in the Classroom” is, in some respects, less about the effect of new technologies in the classroom than about the continued importance, in the English Language Arts, of ensuring student comprehension of the writing process as well as of ensuring student participation in constructivist classroom models such as that of the writing community.

This is not to say that technology does not modify the writing process or the dynamics of a writing community—far from it. However, Allison’s injunction to his reader as modeled in his classroom implicitly conserves “current” (as in theoretically fairly recent, if not “wired”) constructivist classroom models such as that of the writing community. Will Richardson, in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classroom, makes a grave error in ignoring such 20^th-century models, which promote many (though not all) of the values he ascribes solely to “connective writing,” or blogging. The goal of this post will be to explore to what extent new technologies helpfully enhance the aforementioned ELA instructional practices, and to determine in which ways the use of new technologies might compromise them. I find both Allison’s and Richardson’s accounts very practical and convincing.  However, my main criticism of “Be a Blogger” and the first three chapters of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms is that both sources neglect (so far, anyway) to model a successful integration of technology with older practices.  What Allison and Richardson should promote is a slightly more tempered 21^st-century re-evaluation of the writing process.

It is possible to reimagine what Allison describes in his classroom in what would have been its paper-and-pencil past.  To begin, Allison asks his students to “find something to be passionate about” (Allison 80).  He is talking, of course, about the stage of the writing process called brainstorming (although most of this stage falls under Allison’s label of “participating,” a label that particularly emphasizes the collaborate nature of brainstorming undertaken with the help of the Read/Write Web).  “In my day” (way back in the 90s), we used paper printouts of concept webs to brainstorm; we learned how to freewrite, and how to bounce ideas off of our classmates.  Though student bloggers may not rely so much on concept webs anymore (this method is either not worth mentioning in Allison’s and Richardson’s tech-specific accounts, or else no longer relevant), the collaborative aspect of brainstorming is still present in both authors’ classrooms.  The stage of “participating” precedes “producing” in Allison’s chart because blog comments (whether given or received) may spark the creativity or new realizations that students seek when brainstorming (Allison 84). Freewriting, too, is still very much an integral part of Allison’s blogging process. Most interesting to me is the fact that brainstorming retains its research component, albeit in virtual form. This does make sense:  in order to write, after all, students must seek sources to which they will feel compelled to respond.  In this respect, blogging promotes the strategy of close reading that any study of a printed text is designed to cultivate; I agree with Richardson here (Richardson 31). Initial research on the web forces students to become “information literate” or to develop what Lankshear and Knobel further explain as a skill related to the filtration of information, to discernment of what is factual and relevant and what is not.  And, because the nature of the Web is democratic, students may find themselves citing experts and non-experts alike.  Therefore, like commenting, this type of research normalizes the collaborative aspect of brainstorming, which (I have found, from personal experience) continually needs re-emphasizing.

However, I worry that too many students will fail to understand the process of brainstorming in its most complete form if their experience of it is constrained to the web, where the connections between topics and ideas are other- rather than self-generated.  Brainstorming should be collaborative, but it should be individual as well.  Students might lose much from forgetting the power of “monologue,” or internal meditation on the relationships between concepts.  In Allison’s and Richardson’s blog-centered curricula, students are able to move through hundreds of ideas in minutes; anyone who has ever played  the Wikipedia game knows this for certain.  But nothing in the blog curriculum prevents the student, once they choose an initial idea, from primarily relying on connections made and hyperlinked by others to push them past this first stretch.  While research of this type nearly mirrors traditional research, it lessens the responsibility of the student to sit and listen, for at least a few minutes, to his or her internal voice.  As students of my generation brainstormed without computers in elementary and middle school, we became lost for a few minutes in our own minds as we rifled through catalogues of potentially-relevant personal experience.  This is a unique and valuable experience, and it should not be neglected in the development of a blogging curriculum.

There are other issues with web-based brainstorming.  Constant consideration of audience (from brainstorming through publication) can be intimidating and even detrimental to output, especially for students who view themselves as “weak” writers.  Not everything that is written necessarily needs to be (or should be) published; to insist on such is to perhaps place unfair burdens of anxiety on students who need private spaces in which to experiment. This is an area where temperance may be key, and the practices of “traditional” writing communities adopted for students who express apprehension.  Additionally, the research component of blogging described by both Richardson and Allison neglects the print world entirely. While I understand that the numerous advantages of web-based sources (their currency, their accessibility) means that students are already more likely to use such sources than to use their print counterparts, web journals are, for many projects, not a perfect replacement for books. 

Both Allison’s and Richardson’s accounts of blogging in the classroom make clear that the process fundamentally alters the writing and revising process as well as traditional conceptions of the prewriting stage. In concert with these two authors, I predict that blogging will most probably increase student predisposition to revision.  As Richardson remarks, “some would argue that a true blog post is never really finished, that as long as it’s out there for others to interact with, the potential for deeper insights exists” (Richardson 30). While in the pre-Web era a student might have received instructor comments on his paper and done nothing further with the piece but tuck it away, students who receive comments on their drafts or published posts are compelled to further explain their thought processes and original intentions to their readers.  These explanations may then be edited into the post to produce a final product.  This is theoretically what occurs in traditional forms of peer revision. However, since many students disregard peer revision (again, from personal experience), this practice may actually be enhanced by the blogging curriculum, in which students feel accountable to a larger audience.  From Richardson’s account, it seems as though most blogging achieves what only some writing communities do:  that is, an investment of all student writers in a communal and ongoing conversation.  

On that note, most remarkable to me are the changes effected in the publishing aspect of the writing process.  In this respect, too, blogging in both Allison’s and Richardson’s conceptions of it seems superior to traditional writing because the stakes of publication are somewhat higher:  instead of an essay collected with other students’ essays, printed, and distributed in a booklet to the ELA class, as they would be in a writing community, blog posts can be published in real time to a worldwide audience.  While the core audience of a student’s blog may remain the same (parents, teachers, and classmates) in either case, the possibility of intercontinental connection offered by a blogging platform gives it a distinct advantage (especially with planning of the type Richardson uses in his classroom, taking advantage of personal connections to leading authors and thinkers who can maintain a virtual conversation with his students).  And, of course, the never-quite-permanent, ready-for-editing existence of a “published” post ensures that students continue to privilege the revision stage of the writing process, which is often overlooked in its traditional conception. 

Nevertheless, educators should read both Allison’s and Richardson’s treatises with temperance in mind.  Blogging seems to be a fantastic way to encourage students to read critically, write with enthusiasm and clarity, and research and cite that research effectively (Richardson 28).  However, not every assignment students encounter in school will require the same format as a blog post:  to enter college, and then the professional world (assumptions of SES rampant here, I know), students at the beginning of the 21^st century must still write and read in the old world.  This means that they will know have to cite research in MLA format as well as link to it; it also means that they, at least for the time being, will have to dig into “expert” research published only in discourse-specific journals, as well as write in discourse-specific ways.  The blog, after all, is only one genre of many, and students will have to write in many genres before their days in school are over.

Finally, I think it’s important to problematize Richardson’s proposed dichotomy of writing and blogging (maybe I should have done this at the beginning, but I think it makes for a good closing too). The writer claims that “writing stops; blogging continues.  Writing is inside; blogging is outside.  Writing is monologue; blogging is conversation.  Writing is thesis; blogging is synthesis” (Richardson 30-31).  I believe that Richardson is working with an outmoded idea of “writing”—one that excludes constructivist classroom innovations such as that of the writing community.  Richardson, when he privileges blogging, is privileging it in relation to an antiquated model of writing that excludes constructivism.  Therefore, while “connective writing” may indeed have a number of advantages over traditional writing—even traditional writing produced with the assistance of a writing community—it does not have nearly as many as Richardson suggests, because writing practices have evolved over time as pedagogies connected with them have advanced.  Writing can be outside; it can be conversation.  It can continue.  Perhaps what could be most exciting about using blogging in the classroom is what Richardson omits: blogging has the potential not only to attract students to it and invest them in it, but to change their perceptions of writing as a discipline as well.  Perhaps we will have truly succeeded in using blogging in the classroom when the elements of Richardson’s dichotomy no longer exist as a dichotomy at all.