:Connecting the Dots

As a former English teacher, I’ve always been a big fan of the visual thinking software Inspiration.  What a forward-looking application, just about the only one from the early nineties (with the possible exception of Geometer’s Sketchpad) that was open-ended, constructivist, multi-disciplinary, fun.  When everyone else was doing “drill and kill,” these guys recognized that computers could be a platform to support and scaffold thinking, writing, and collaboration.  Even now, 15 years later, I still sing Inspiration’s praises to English teachers, although in this age of the web, those songs had begun to sound a little tinny over the last few years.  New web-based apps like Google Docs, PBwiki, and Mindomo had a little more sheen and could support all kinds of collaboration among students and teachers.

Well, yesterday I learned that the online version of Inspiration, mywebspiration.com, is in beta and I’ve been playing with it on and off all day.  So far, I’m impressed by its responsiveness and its almost slavish adherence to the UI from the Windows/Mac version.  And they’ve added a slew of collaboration features, including versioning.  One of the problems with Inspiration has always been that kids can’t continue working on it at home.  No more, if MyWebspiration becomes a reality.

On the downside, it looks like a number of features from the Windows/Mac versions have been left out– at least in this phase in the beta.  Most notably, I couldn’t find any way to export my diagrams as image files or my outlines as RTF documents.  This is a huge omission, as I always argue that the ability to brainstorm in Inspiration and then quickly shoot it all into Word and start writing is one of the software’s main benefits.  Also, I didn’t see any “arrange” buttons to clean up my diagrams and it is way more difficult than it needs to be to paste text into a diagram.  But hopefully they will work these wrinkles out.  I know I’ll certainly be watching as this product develops in the coming months and I hope they’ll offer a reasonable upgrade price for current customers.

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I spent part of this evening helping my mother sort through the many belongings that I unceremoniously dumped on her upon my return from college 16 years ago.  What a fascinating thing it is to look at those old papers and photographs, but it’s the letters and cards that are really getting me.  There are many from the junior year when many of my best friends studied aborad while I stayed back in Medford, MA.

I can’t believe how much we wrote, how well we wrote.  In the card I just put down, my friend discussed at length the difficult decision she was struggling with over whether to continue her study of Russian and reacted deeply to news I had shared with her about goings-on in my own life.

Do kids still write to one another like this?  Or does the fact that students in far-flung places remain in constant contact through cheap and ubiquitous electronic devices reduce their dialogue to a shallow ongoing and ephemeral social hum?  Will they be able to retrieve those messages 16 years from now?  More importantly, will they be worth retrieving?

While I welcome new ways of communicating like Twitter, SMS, and e-mail (ok, that’s not so “new” anymore), seeing these letters reminds me of how improtant it is to really be able to think through one’s writing, to develop and explore an idea fully.  This is something that I don’t want to see us lose – in the general discourse of our culture or in the schools that enter children into that discourse.

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Perhaps districts will un-block MySpace when teachers and their students start to look at a new MySpace/Harper Collins site designed to showcase student writing and to support peer-to-peer collaboration. To prepare for my upcoming PD course on “Technology to Support the Writing Process,” I’ve been researching online spaces designated for publishing student writing, like Writing the City. Now I have another one to add to the list, one with a little brand name recognition among high schoolers. I think this is one worth watching over the next few months…

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