Defining Purposes for Using Web 2.0 Tools

Defining Purposes for Using Web 2.0 Digital Tools Presentation at the 2009 Minnesota Council of Teachers of English conference, Rochester, MN Richard Beach University of Minnesota

Kathy Yancey: 21st Century Writing
This 21st century writing marks the beginning of a new era in literacy, a period we might call the Age of Composition, a period where composers become composers not through direct and formal instruction alone (if at all), but rather through what we might call an extracurricular social co-apprenticeship.

30,000 students: Facebook site:
Students write “THIS IS SPARTA” on AP tests and cross it out
Extra points: “THIS IS MADNESS”
“ As the country slid deeper into the Depression, it became clear that drastic change was needed in order to save the American banking system. Fortunately,Franklin Delano Roosevelt, after taking office, immediately declared THIS IS MADNESS and established a four-day banking holiday.”

Jeff Uteckt: Literacy Curriculum Models

NCTE: Twenty-first century readers and writers need to:
Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts
Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

NCTE Poll: 900 language arts teachers
Top three abilities for student success
seek information and make critical judgments about the veracity of sources
read and interpret many different kinds of texts, both in print and online
innovate and apply knowledge creatively

NCTE Poll: 900 language arts teachers
62% reject notion that basic language, reading, and writing skills must be mastered before critical 21st century literacy abilities can be cultivated

Teachers: Student writing
3%: students spend at least an hour a week in school writing in an online social network environment.
52 percent said that their students spend at least an hour a week outside of school writing in such environments.
17% of teens enjoyed school writing “a great deal.”
49% said that they enjoyed non-school writing
“ a great deal.”

Teaching tools versus uses of tools to achieve purposes
Typewriting
Handwriting
Blogging
Wikis
Podcasting
Digital video

Purposes for uses of tools
Tools
User Purpose/outcome

Students: OTX study: Social purposes
Most popular: hanging out with friends, listening to music, and seeing boy/girlfriends
48 digital communications a day
“ They are only interested in technology as a means to an end. The traditional world remains the go-to destination for meeting their friends and entertainment and real, offline destinations and pastimes still rate higher than the online space.”
Only 16%: written on a blog
Only 21%: uploaded a clip to YouTube

Web 2.0 tools: Affordances
Interactivity: both read and write
Students as consumers and producers
Multimodality
Combine images, video, music, text
Hyperlinked
Connected texts

Purposes: teacher vs. student initiated
Phase I: Write an essay for the teacher on a blog
Phase II: Write an essay for teacher and peers on a blog
Phase III: Self-initiated writing using classroom tools
Phase IV: Self-initiated writing using tools outside of the classroom

Mega-academic purpose: Engaging students
What activities are most engaging for your students?
Display competence to peers
Imagine/create alternatives
Enhance sense of agency
Build social relationships

Fostering fluency: Just getting them to write
Writing for authentic audiences
Sharing online writing:
Destinations : Where do you want to go? Why do you want to go there?

Acquiring/subscribing to information
RSS feeds
subscribing to Bloglines, Google Reader
Bookmarking and sharing links
Diigo or Delicious
Information/search literacies

Accessing online literary texts
Literary Archives
Lit2Go
PBS Online Video
http://www.pbs.org/video/

Gathering information
online surveys/
SurveyMonkey
digital note-taking
Evernote

digital mind-mapping --> defining topics/connections
Inspiration, Bubbl.us, Curio 2.4, VUE, IHMC CmapTools, Spark-Space (3-D maps), Compendium, Gliffy, Visual Mind, Mind Genenius, Freemind, OpenMind, Kdissert, VYM (View Your Mind)

Purposes for using blogs and wikis
Blogs:
Individual expression of ideas/personal accounts
Hyperlinking of texts
Comments from peers
Multimodal writing
Wikis:
Collaborative writing of reports/essays
Shared revision
Hyperlinking of texts
Multimodal writing

Blogs: Individual vs. classroom?
Individual: Ownership
Classroom: Community sharing
Rachel Tholen , Edina High School

Blogging: Paul Allison: questions to students:
What are you passionate about and how do these interests fit with other students’ big questions?
What voices or sources of information do you think are important to include in your search for answers?
How do you become an effective online networker and get people with shared interests to value your voice online?
How can you use our social networks as personallearning sites that lead to social action? (p. 110) .

Google Docs --> Collaboration texts
Compose texts offline—while not being connected to the web—using Google Gears

Wikis --> collaboration
PBwiki, WikiSpaces, JotSpot, wetpaint
Organize projects
Katie Bruhn: World literature
Wikibooks: First year college students, St. Cloud State University: Rhetoric and Composition Wikibook
Create/edit Wikipedia entries

Wikibooks: constructivist learning
Invite an activist versus passive stance
“ I can add to or improve this text”
“ I can participate in constructing knowledge about media”
Foster collaborative sharing of ideas
Requires negotiation of competing perspectives in constructing knowledge

Texting
Talk about code-switching
Differences in audience and purpose
Translate texting text into prose
Lingo2Word
Hope that you are doing well today. I will see you later.
Hope dat ur doiN wel 2day. Ill CU l8r.

Sharing Online
Youth Voices
Students from different schools
Moodle/Ning
Forums, sharing notes, posting links
My digital writing Ning (closed)

Twitter
Create a classroom twitter
Limited to students in the class
Share notes
Project onto screen

Virtual Literacy Worlds
Literary Worlds
enter into and chat about novels such as Brave New World, Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, and 1984
Create MySpace or Facebook profiles for literary characters and have them friend each other
Explore narrative development in Minnesota Stories daily videos

Multimodal communication: visual design and rhetoric
Copyright and fair use
The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education
Remixing
Adbusters, Remix America, Photoshopping, music video, FanFiction . net

VoiceThread
Audio and text commentaries of slideshows
Place-based writing
Images foster use of the descriptive details
John Wood : Roosevelt HS: Hale Neighborhood

Digital Storytelling/literature/poetry
DUSTY (Digital Underground Storytelling For Youth)
Association Digital Literature

Digital comics
Comic Life/Bitstrips
Brent Eckoff, West Jr. High:
“ I had students to a rough storyboard of what they planned to create. Some of the speech bubbles and text boxes they wrote were both surprising, and innovative. The students then exported the Comic Life presentations as quicktime files, uploaded them to YouTube, and then embedded them on the class wiki.”

Podcasting Tutorials
Finding podcasts to use in education
iTunes, Podcast Alley, Juice
Teachers Teaching Teachers
Women of Web 2.0
Recording and editing podcasts
Garageband
Audacity
Skype
Audio Hyjack Pro

Conducting interviews using Skype

Creating an online role-play: Students:
Select an issue
Formulate a primary argument
Choose roles and conduct research
Post arguments on a blog or online forum
Step out of roles and reflect

Through online role-play, students learn to:
construct a persona
employ rhetorical appeal
identify and refute counter-arguments
revise or modify one’s own positions

Using a Class Blog: "Fighting Sioux" mascot debate

Issue: Internet policies
Blocking of websites
NRA site blocked
Administrators accessing Facebook
Determining if students are drinking
Violation of the state’s athletic code

Read Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother
17-year-old Marcus, a computer hacker, takes on the Department of Homeland Security’s attempt to control society
Issues of Internet privacy/control

Ning: Blocking “educational” sites/administrator snooping

Ethos: EmoGirl: Critique of school Internet policies
I think the internet usage policies are ridiculous. The policies are almost impossible to find. I spent half an hour trying to find them and I'm a young, computer savvy person.

“ Strict Father” cultural model: Charles Hammerstein
The issue with sites like YouTube is that it is a helpful site when used correctly, but the ratio of students who would use it to the students who would abuse it would greatly favor the later of the two. R-rated sites are not ok because they usually contain information and content that may be considered offensive . T he internet policies are very clear, if your grandmother would not appreciate it, then you probably shouldn't be doing those kind of things at school.

Bubbl.us mapping to identify roles and relationships between roles

Students reflect on:
Use of arguments
Comfort in role
Targeted audiences/alliances
Who has power?
Reasons: strategies
Sense of potential change

Students reflected on the role-play:
I think it was a valuable learning experience because we actually got to argue back and forth with other people. If this had just been a writing assignment, it would have only been one-sided. You can use persuasive arguments in a paper but you can’t have a back and forth conversation on it. I really felt like it helped me get into someone else’s shoes and think like someone different from myself.

Change-based assessment: Determining effectiveness
Assess students on their use writing to attempt to affect change in actual audiences’ beliefs
Framing of the status quo
Their own and others’ beliefs
Their sense of agency to make change
Need for objective criteria
Problem: teacher’s own preferred changes

Students wrote a paper from their own point of view
Addressing status quo problems
Reasons for problems
Proposing solutions
Reasons solutions will work

Self-reflection: Achieving purposes
Learning stories/artist statements: video production
To what extent does the completed work fulfill your artistic intent?
What are its strengths and weaknesses?
How did feedback affect the development of the work?
Give at least two examples of technical problems you encountered and explain how they were resolved in the creation of the piece.

Self-reflection: Purposes in video production
Ana: in a “stop-and-go” way: play, pause, move, repeat. We also thought there could be a shot where the camera follows the lockers like a path. So the camera tilts a little to show there’s many lockers and she runs by all of them. But there is a moment where, there is a door in between the blockers, and we put Kenzie there to make it scary.

VideoAnt: feedback to videos

Podcasts: Online professional development
Teachers Teaching Teachers
EdTechWeekly
Women of Web 2.0
Digital Campus
The K12 Online Conference

Websites
Digital Writing: digitalwriting.pbwiki.com
Teaching media: teachingmedialiteracy.com and teachingmedialiteracy.pbwiki.com
Teaching literature: www.teachingliterature.org
www.coe.uga.edu/~smago/VirtualLibrary/Unit_Outlines.htm

Teaching Writing Using Blogs, Wikis, and other Digital Tools , Richard Beach, Chris Anson, Lee-Ann Kastman-Breuch, and Thom Swiss

Defining Purposes for Using Web 2.0 Tools

by Richard Beach on Apr 25, 2009

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

1 Embed 3

Statistics

Defining Purposes for Using Web 2.0 Tools — Presentation Transcript