:Connecting the Dots

Will Richardson is blogging about once per week now.  In April, he wrote a totlal of 6 posts.  In April of 2007, he wrote 27.  Andy Carvin wrote 1 post in February, 2009 and 7 in February of 2007.  David Jakes went from 8 (April, 2007) to 2 (April, 2009).  What happened?  Where have all the bloggers gone?

I suppose the answer is Twitter.  And that upsets me, because in the course of that transition, what has happened to the conversation?  We’ve gone from expansive, probing reflection to 140-character platitudes, from the symposium to the water cooler.  This is definitely the English teacher in me speaking, but I fear that Twitter is robbing us of a great opportunity to think through writing, a shift which will most harm students, who stand to learn a great deal through blogging.  I think there is a synergy between the higher-order thinking skills that educators so value and desire and blogging; I just don’t see that same synergy with tweets.

It’s not that there’s no place for the kind of rapid fire, conversational interchange that Twitter supports; there most definitely is.  But I hate to see it elbowing the kind of rich discourse that blogs engender out of the way.  Seeing this happen only proves what the most fervent critics of educational innovations complain about: we run to the “next big thing” before we’ve had a chance to master the last one and before it has taken hold in a systemic way in classrooms.

I hope that maybe when the excitement over Twitter dies down, some of our best bloggers – and our developing bloggers, too – get back to the longer stuff.  We need it!

Image Source: DigitalParadox, http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalparadox/16900939/sizes/s/#cc_license

2 Comments

I saw “Intellagirl” Sarah Robbins give a keynote on Friday at the LHRIC Tech Expo and she spoke a lot about gaming, how the millennials learn, and how games may offer a glimpse at new ways to engage students in schools.  As far as I’m concerned, no new news there – I’ve been a gamer myself for some time and am well aware of how cognitively challenging games can be, and I’ve read James Gee and many of the others.

Then today I stumbled across Blizzard’s creative writing contest, in which entrants will submit stories that take place in the virtual worlds of Blizzard’s computer games.  Looking at this, I see even more clearly that the things we have to force kids to do in schools are things they might otherwise do willingly if given the chance to do so in ways that are meaningful to them.  Many students read and write fan fiction.  Why is it so hard to get them to write a five-paragraph essay of any quality?  They are enthusiastic about writing a story in a virtual world but not one that takes place in the “real” world of school.  Are we to assume then that the “real” world of school is so far removed from reality as to be completely foreign and uninteresting to them, even less so than the made-up world of Azeroth?

No Comments

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.

No Comments

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.

1 Comment