Knowledge Tree Paper: Part 1

From HISP305

How Did a Couple of Classroom Teachers End Up in a Space Like This?: Extraordinary Intersections between Learning, Social Software, and Teaching

Abstract:

As teachers in the twenty-first century, we are witnessing and embracing a period of transition and transformation, a period of chaos and of order, which has given us an opportunity to examine what it is we do with our students, why we do what we do, and to question how we might be able to do it better. We ask what it means to teach in a world where everyone and everything is interconnected, or as Ted Nelson calls it, “intertwingled.” What tensions present themselves in the classroom when we invite into our teaching spaces the user-centric social software tools our students are already using to communicate, collaborate, and play with their peers? What possibilities and what impediments are created in this highly participatory, creative, mashed-up hyper-networked world that parallels, encircles and interconnects with our face-to-face teaching space? How is our teaching transformed when we engage with each other and the world without boundaries, borders or hierarchies?

This article will explore the six-year classroom blogging adventures of two teachers participating in the metamorphosis of the learning experience, a shedding of the cocoon of antiquated, teacher-centric models of teaching and learning. We will demonstrate how an emergent learner-centric, community-focused teaching and learning model provides a boundary-less series of places where the teacher and the student, the class and the community outside of the classroom, create and transform knowledge together.

I. Introduction

“…many teachers who do not have difficulty releasing old ideas, embracing new ways of thinking, may still be as resolutely attached to old ways of practicing teaching as their more conservative colleagues. That’s a crucial issue. Even those of us who are experimenting with progressive pedagogical practices are afraid to change.” ( bell hooks, TtoT, p.142)

Karin, a Japanese student blogging in an American university Spanish course, blogged in Spanish about the upcoming elections is Guatemala, something he thought he knew about because the father of a former roommate was running for office. And then it happened: the outside world came crashing through the door. Karin received a comment on one of his posts from an angry Guatemalan, accusing him of being an ignorant American with a very superficial knowledge of the Guatemalan reality. Although the comment was hard to digest, it was also thrilling: in working with Karin on ways of responding, the class experienced a real-world opportunity to use their Spanish, to think about the voices we project to those who do not know us, and to examine the assumptions others can make about us through those voices.

With social networking and media-sharing practices rapidly assuming a critical role in our professional and personal lives, teachers have a responsibility to bring these practices into the classroom. Indeed, connection is perhaps the key word in our early 21st-century lexicon. Kids are connecting. Families are connecting. Businesses are connecting. The world is connecting. To combat the problems of illegal logging, the government of Brazil has announced a plan to provide free internet access to remote villages along the Amazon to enable them to share local knowledge and information. Community wikis and blogs are cropping up around the world to strengthen communal ties. (Global Voices) Museums are addressing “semantic divides” between curators and the public by inviting museumgoers to help tag their digital collections. (NYT) Increasingly “our sense of continuity and belonging,” as W. J. Mitchell writes, “derives from being electronically networked to the widely scattered people and places [we] care about.” (Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, p.17)

But change, real change is disruptive. We stumble on our fear of the new, of disequilibrium, of technology. We stumble on the fear that our youth already squanders time online, in sometimes questionable, even unsafe or unethical, practices. In one ear, technology opponents amongst our colleagues whisper that our communities are breaking apart as we sit in front of computer screens instead of each other, that children are becoming disconnected from the natural world as they immerse themselves in the virtual. (Monke, Orion Magazine) In the other ear, technology uber-fans may rush to embrace every new gadget, technology and practice, affixing computer-driven activities onto factory-model teaching practices as shiny appendages, resulting in a "technology façade"([Tomei]http://academics.rmu.edu/~tomei/facade/), or privileging “the cult of the amateur.” (Keen) These teachers, in not transforming their teaching practices, actually stoke the Luddite fires. (Ganley, [AoCNilta 2006 Keynote]http://mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganley/bgblogging/2007/04/beauty_and_implausibility_my_s.html)

Yes we have felt the seductive tug that beckons us to fall back upon the known, the tried-and-true, the safe way of teaching our classes. How easy it would be to teach to the test or the textbook. There is a palpable tension emerging between what we have taught in the classroom in the past and what the world outside requires our students to know in order to grow and be productive contributors in this new "intertwingled" world. This does not mean that traditional literacies of critical reading, thinking and communication must make way for emerging literacies of collaboration, online communication and multimedia navigation--it does mean that we have to transform our teaching to accommodate them all effectively. If, in the language classroom, for example, there is a disconnect between the language taught and the language spoken in the outside world, we have, indeed, failed our students. Social software allows us to fling open the doors and the windows of our isolated classroom environments and forces us to connect with the real world all while attending to traditional literacies.

II. Blogging to Bridge Literacies

"Where more traditional models of literacy prepare children for a somewhat distant future at which time they will participate in meaningful ways in the 'real' world, a model of literacy matching the needs of contemporary children must take as a first principle that children are already active participants and risk takers.” (Victoria Carrington, "“New Textual Landscapes, Information and Early Literacy” in Popular Culture, New Media and Digital Literacy in Early Childhood, ed. by Jackie Marsh, pp. 23-25)

Integrating open social software practices, in our case blogs, into the heart of formal learning contexts helps us weave together essential pedagogical strands to create—even and perhaps especially within the confines of traditionally silo-ed education institutions—real opportunities for students to practice critical thinking and expression skills, to collaborate and connect, to be creative, and to integrate personal formal and informal learning spaces. By blogging effectively within classroom settings, we can mentor student forays into public spaces.

Blogs, or weblogs, or webjournals allow writers (bloggers) the opportunity to share, reflect, and comment, both on their written work (called posts). Unlike the traditional student---> teacher--->student feedback loop, blogs allow writers a multiplicity of responses. Instead of just one audience (the teacher), blogs allow the teacher's voice to become one of many voices in a chorus that gives feedback, support, and criticism to the writer.

Many schools adopt learning management systems (LMS) to organize and password-protect their constituents' work, and many LMS have blogging tools. It is important to note that both of us have made a conscious decision to use blogs that exist --outside-- of our schools' learning management systems. When we talk about blogging in the classroom, we are actually talking about blogging with our students in the classroom but also out in the open, and that we invite the outside world to come in and comment alongside our students, our colleagues, and ourselves. This is not to say that teachers confined within the walls of LMS cannot reap some of blogging's benefits; indeed, we will show how even individual blogging can improve learning outcomes.

We do wish to emphasize the importance of distinguishing between using blogs as holders of factory-model teaching practices, and taking advantage of their connectivity and transparency to deepen and liberate learning from the confines of stagnant models. Ignoring the transformative capabilities of connectivity, some teachers merely recreate offline practices online. Limiting classroom blogging to one-way transactions of information and directives from teacher to students may add convenience and efficiency to the classroom, but does nothing for learning itself. Nor does assigning and directing wooden, forced, framed discussions online, which result in little more than mind-numbing “busy work.” We are finding that students who have blogged in their secondary-school classrooms often enter our courses unimpressed by or even dreading blogging. They are suspicious of adults “co-opting” their social practices, and they are disengaged by poor teaching practices. They demonstrate our contention that using blogs poorly is worse, perhaps, than not using them at all. These students leave our classes, however, transformed by the multi-faceted, deep-blogging experience we will describe here.

What follows, then, is a detailed journey into the heart of effective classroom blogging, focusing on emerging pedagogy rather than tools. We will examine hyperlinked slow-blogging as reflective learning; multimedia, interactive blogging as action-based learning; and connected, transparent blogging as social learning.

III. A New Kind of Portfolio Slow-Blogging as a Richly Woven Reflective Learning Practice: Public, Hyperlinked, Archived Letters to the Self

III. 1. Reflective Writing as a Learning Tool

Since the 1980s’ popularizing of process-based learning, particularly in the writing classroom (Elbow, Murray, Graves, Calkins, Emig, Bishop), teachers from across the disciplines have incorporated reflective writing into their classroom practices as powerful conduits of sustained learning. Reflection-through-writing is a powerful aid to information retention, which is poor unless the lesson is repeated in a variety of contexts (Jamshed Bharucha "Learning and the Brain,' Talk at "Education the Next Generation Conference, Tufts University, February 2, 2007). The learner, in the act of writing down what she has learned, solidifies understanding and reveals areas of confusion.

Traditionally this kind of reflective narrative, found in journals and portfolios, has helped learners gain skill at meta-discourse and to take responsibility for learning. The teacher follows the progress and detects comprehension gaps while coming to know each learner’s style, context, and preference. Student-teacher interactions through reflective writing can deepen important bonds, an important indicator of effective learning. (Raider Roth)

As the writing-process movement also tells us, informal, explorative writing, by letting thoughts roam about associatively, over time, can lead learners to new and deeper ideas and to connections between those ideas. Thinking expands, critical skills sharpen, and creativity is enhanced by practicing writing in sustained informal spaces. (Elbow)

The very best such uses of reflective journals also bridge informal and formal learning spaces by inviting learners to contextualize the learning within personal experience, thereby making the learning their own (Greene Landscapes of Learning). Authentic learning—learning that is not merely an abstract exercise that might one day lead to a real-world application but learning that has real meaning for learners now—is accomplished when students have the time to connect the classroom lessons with their own life experiences. (Scapps in bh, TtoT p.148) In ongoing narrative reflection, students can link the relevance of classroom experiences to their own lives and to the world beyond. Such an awareness often deepens student engagement with learning and, as a result, improves learning outcomes. (Ganley Blogtalk paper)

III.2. Blogging and Reflective Writing: Old and New

“…the commingling of traditional culture and its digital descendants should be seen as a cause for celebration and not outrage.” Steven Johnson

Employing blogs’ unique combination of flexibility, connectivity and transparency can enhance the outcomes of a reflective learning practice. At the very least, a blog provides a convenient, easily accessible, effective space for such ongoing, age-old letter-writing to the self and/or to the teacher. But if limited to the kinds of practices achieved offline, while efficient and convenient, and affording keyboarding practice, this use ignores new literacies of connectivity, collaboration, communication and multimedia expression.

Exploiting the blog’s connectivity-- through archiving, tagging and hyperlinking –-introduces opportunities for new-literacy practice AND deeper learning unattainable through print-based journaling. Although a blog organizes itself ordinarily and on first view in reverse chronological order, the latest post being most prominent, tagging and hyperlinking allow for more associative, lateral ways of organizing and connecting thoughts. Even the novice learner can transcend the limits of time and linearity in linking nascent ideas, discoveries and meta-discourse on the learning, moving beyond "the essentially linear, fixed methods that had produced the triumphs of capitalism and industrialism with what are essentially poetic machines that capture and create the anarchic brilliance of human imagination,” (Landow on Vannevar Bush's prescient thinking in the 1930s in Hypertext 3.0 p.13)

Hyperlinks connect the reflective learner to earlier pieces of her thinking, revising, extending, remembering, allowing associative thought to flourish not only because all pieces are held together within the same blog, but because they are directly linked to one another actively within the text. The writer spirals back as she moves forward, “[e]lectronic linking shift[ing] the boundaries between one text and another as well as between the author and the reader and between the teacher and the student. It also has radical effects on our experience of author, text, and work, redefining each.” (Landow p.52)

Screenshot here

The reflective writer can also, of course, link directly to posts of other students in the class, to outside sources referred to in her text, and to other thinkers on the subject, thereby extending the reflective practice into synthesis and analysis. While the blogging voice may be emphatically her own, the reflective blogger announces her understanding that no thinker writes in a vacuum, that no artist creates alone (Levi Strauss in Davenport). Indeed, increasingly writers can link directly to texts to which they are responding and excerpting, mashing up the old, bridging tradition and present, other and self. Through a linked reflective practice, she is, in essence, conversing with the discipline as well as her own developing relationship to that discipline. She takes a stand and her place. And when the blogposts are open to the world (or at least to the class), there is a self-consciousness about the writing, an implicit understanding that the writer is engaging in a conversation with the discipline itself, not just with a private reading of the discipline. If we know we are being read, that our writing has value out in the world, we tend to take more care with our writing and our thinking as communiqués to the Other as well as to the self. (see Section V on blogging as social learning practice) The teacher, in turn, can scan the posts before class to assess learning progress and to teach to the moment, to the level of student understanding and engagement. From student posts, she can bring in models and questions. Learning deepens, writing strengthens: these successes in turn pull the writer back to the blog again and again, to reflect and to improve thinking and expression skills. (see Section V for more on connections).

Screenshot Examples in Literature and Language Classrooms

That these letters to the self (and by extension, to the class and the world) are archived by date and category (or tag) allows them to take their place in an ongoing narrative of the learning. This reflective, reflexive writing, then, solidifies learning, by engaging the learner, giving her back her own voice while contextualizing and developing it. As George Landow argues through a Bahktian stance, "Complete read-write hypertext …does not permit a tyrannical, univocal voice. Rather the voice is always that distilled from the combined experience of the momentary focus, the lexia one presently reads, and the continually forming narrative of one’s reading path.” (p.56) Mark Amerika describes the phenomenon of hyperlinked, open blogging “as inventive remix machine placing value on what it sees, what it links to, how it appropriates the other and strips it of its isolation.” (Meta/Data p. 418) Linking out connects us to more than ourselves. So, in this time of crumbling communities and the cult of the individual, our students can, through active hyperlinking within a reflective learning practice, become more self-aware rather than more self-absorbed.