A New Ethic for Digital Composition: Cosmopolitanism
Do youth need thoughtful, guided practice composing for potentially global audiences?
Recently, a friend on Facebook posted a question asking what age it is appropriate for a child to have an email account. About 29 comments later, it had became apparent that in the 3rd and 4th grades in this school district, teachers were setting up email accounts with students. Many of these comments were ones of frustration over the lack of parental notification and participation in this activity, but one in particular stood out for me. One person asked: “What possible reasons could there be for a 4th grade child to have an email account?” I don’t typically engage in Facebook conversations, especially emotionally-charged ones, but I felt that I could contribute a few “possible reasons why” youth should be participating in digital communication in thoughtful, guided ways.
Even with the digital divide present and growing, the nature of composition has changed in the digital and networked age in such a way that the capability to be producers and critical consumers of knowledge is now more widely available. Take social media outlets: More people of all ages, nationalities, genders, and socio-economic positions produce news, comment on social issues, and even stage revolutions. These possibilities disrupt our existing societal power dynamics, and in turn, necessitate a new ethic of exchange with distant, unknown, imagined others. Critical reader-writers must take into consideration not just the interpretations they have intended as authors, but also the possible interpretations of audiences previously unimagined and out of reach.
Poll: Up for Conversation?
I take the idea of “conversation” seriously.
#phdchat Breakthrough! Noticed how these never happen when you're all alone staring at data? Only in relation to & in conversation w/others.
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anna smith (@writerswriting) February 10, 2012In fact, I just tweeted about it this week. For a whole week I was stuck trying to figure out how to frame a very small passage of my dissertation. It wasn’t until I was talking to a friend about his dissertation —> that led me to read something —> that got me thinking about a whole new framework for another section —> that I bounced off my chair in an email —> that resulted in an exchange with another regarding another project. So incredibly productive.
I actually started this blog once my first book was published—not as a publicity stunt, but because the words—and more importantly, all the ideas and conversations and teaching and learning moments those words embodied—were sitting still on those pages. I wanted to breathe them back into life. And although I can see the great number of readers and clicks and shares (thank you!), I’d love to get more of you commenting…and in turn, us conversing!
‘Invented Adolescents’ & Classroom Activities
Guest Post from Lucia Brockway, a preservice English teacher working toward her Master’s of Education at New York University. Lucia is part of the #teachread project within which her work with The Perks of Being a Wallflower can be found.
This post is response to Mark Lewis and Robert Petrone‘s article “Although Adolescence Need Not Be Violent,” published in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. In this article, the authors talk about the “invented adolescent,” or the image of the teen teachers have in our minds as a product of the assumptions often made of adolescent students. These students are unfairly categorized as being in a tumultuous, hormone-fired transitional stage, one that is accompanied by poor decisions, angst, and a pervasive exposure to dangerous influences.
School curricula is often designed to reflect this imposed state of being; books rife with risky adolescent behavior are assigned and students are urged to construct parallels between “unruly” characters and their own selves. It is also assumed that adolescents are unfinished adults, searching desperately for their own identities. By homogenizing adolescents in this way, teachers are denying students of their own varied personal histories.
2′s Day Post: Internet 1996 vs 2011
There’s much to say about the changed nature of the Internet circa 1996 and that of Internet 2011, and this infographic from Online University captures several aspects. In this blog, I’ve talked about a few of these aspects quite a bit, such as access, global usage and its role in composing practices in the 21st century. What struck me in this infographic was in the bottom portion labeled: “Websites Then & Now,” which displays the differences in design and inherent logic apparent when setting websites from 1996 next to those from 2011.
Here’s a few thoughts, and below, the infographic that spawned them…
Reading the World Wide Web circa 1996 was much like reading pieces of paper—the 8×11 kind—on a screen. Not many people were writing the web, really only those with programming knowledge and server access. The GoDaddy.com site displays this well: In 1996, the site was basically it’s catalog on the screen.
Digital Tools for 21st Century Content Area Classrooms
A group of us trying the "Getting to the Heart of the Matter" activity.
This is a Guest Post from class members of Language Acquisition and Literacy Education in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts, who are all content area pre-service teachers in math, social studies, music, Chinese language, and sociology at New York University.
This week we discussed the characteristics of communicating in the digital age and how shifts in online communication impact teaching and learning, as well as what it means to knowledge creation and sharing in our content areas.
Define Urban, Please
Recently, Emily Pendergrass tweeted a request:
Define urban, please.—
Emily Pendergrass (@Dr_Pendergrass) October 14, 2011
‘Urban’ has been on my mind for a while—most recently on my trip to Peru where I took this picture. And sure, I have opinions based on my work and research in large cities and small—even areas that actually look quite a bit like this Peruvian Zona Urbana—but I want to keep my mind open and engaged in this issue. I don’t like to take things for granted. I‘d love to hear your definitions. I promise to comment with my working definitions, but you first. And yes, I promise to pass them on to @Dr_Pendergrass.
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What is ‘urban’ in the educational context?
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How do you see ‘urban’ playing out in the lives of learners?
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What are the boundaries of ‘zona urbana’?
Welcome to the United States, Developing Writers!
Although only the hardback version (a.k.a. expensive collectors’ item) of our new book, Developing Writers: Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age, shows up on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, the Buy Now and Desk Copy buttons at Open University Press, U.S.A. are now functional! (Amazon does have a Kindle version.)
With Richard Andrews, Dean of Faculty and Professor of English at the Institute of Education, University of London, I argue that although existing theories of writing development have provided insights into the teaching and learning of writing, we need to bring such theories up to date in the digital age—an age in which, among other things, writing needs to be re-conceived as one crucial component of communication among other modes.
In the book, we review and compare existing models of writing pedagogy, and invite readers to discover for themselves their working theories for how writing and development happen. The theories with which we make pedagogical decisions are the driving force behind why we do what we do; however, they are often tacit, working in our lives unnoticed and unarticulated—making them very hard to be reflective about. In the book, we offer a new theory and model for understanding writing development in the multimodal and digital age. The last few chapters are all about how this model would work in teaching practice and policy.
I can’t wait to be able to discuss it with teachers, teacher educators, literacy researchers, digital scholars, policy makers and writers of all ages!
2′s Day Post: The Digital Divide Goes to School
As of late, I have been enamored with infographics—the epitome of “a picture is worth a thousand words.” So, beginning this week and running indefinitely, I will be posting infographics that have caught my eye and made me think on Tuesdays under the heading 2′s Day. (Get it? Yeah. That was a crowdsourced title. Thanks, FB.)
The inaugural infographic comes from an information brief from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development with the original link for the pdf here. Take a look and then let’s chat:
Recently, @digitalmaverick posted this question on Twitter, and I think it makes a pretty important point:
Current 17yr olds started high schl in a pre-iP@d pre-Facebook pre-YouTube pre-iPh0ne pre-Twitter world what's an equivalent from the 80's?—
Digital Maverick (@digitalmaverick) October 03, 2011
In era in which innovation and constant change are the norm with digital technologies, the access to and experience with digital devices, broadband Internet and composing softwares is paramount. In this infographic, ASCD not only proposes the digital divide in terms of individuals, but schools in comparison to, I assume, industry and business.
We Learn With & With is Messy
I was in Duluth, Minnesota the week school was starting. I was standing out on the lighthouse pier on Lake Superior enjoying the summer evening air and the full moon reflecting on the water when an eight year-old girl walked up with her family. We hadn’t even greeted or nodded when she looked up to me with two things to announce: 1) This is the most beautiful thing ever! and 2) I am wearing school clothes! We just bought them!
The exclamation marks were definitely hers. Her excitement was contagious. And I couldn’t help but to begin to anticipate her first week of school. Would she have a mini-project to make the first morning to get her active and engaged? Would reading time be established early on with great selection, choice and time for interaction? Would she do the science fair or maybe even a language fair this year?
And then as she skipped off, my grin and optimism waned:
Would she fill in a lot of worksheets?
Would that first worksheet be an “All About Me” card complete with questions to try to get at whether reading is done at home or one or two outside interests that her teacher could bring up if she wasn’t engaged. That is if the teacher had the time to read and memorize which info went to which cherub face.
Take a Poll on Plagiarism in the Digital Age!
A poll in preparation for an upcoming guest post from Roey Ahram, expert in education equity issues and urban school reform, as well as photographer extraordinaire (featured in The Local East Village New York Times). His post is in response to Imposters and Doppelgangers: Plagiarism Remixed.
Multimodality is Old News: The Incas and Khipu
I have been off the grid for a bit, but more importantly, I have been on vacation.
With some old and some new friends, I hiked the Inca Trail through the Andes mountains from outside Cusco, Peru to the oft-photographed Machu Picchu. Machu Picchu and its location were impressive—as expected. The trek, however, which covered about 25 miles of elevation gains of up to 13,000 feet at Dead Woman’s Pass and losses and gains again across several passes, was the personally satisfying portion of the trip.
The following two photographs show a bit of the extent of this trek: The first, where we were going on Day 2, and the second from the other side while atop the next mountain range still on Day 2. We continued hiking that day.
While trekking we were led by Peruvian guides Marco and Roger, as well as hosted by 18 porters who packed and prepared all of our daily needs (amazing!). At each pass, Marco discussed Incan history with us (punctuating the tales with some great punchlines). At one particular pass, Marco impressed upon us the expanse of the Incan empire, which in the 1400s extended across several current South American countries and was the largest South American pre-Columbian empire. Food, supplies, building and expansion plans, astronomical predictions, and military commands were all transported across this terrain by chasquis (runner messengers) at a much quicker pace than we were keeping. (The trek had been run in 3:45 and we were taking four days!) Impressive as just that is, our guide said that at one point, the chasquis’ tongues had been cut off so that the secrets of the empire could not be shared. (I haven’t been able to corroborate this yet. If someone has a source, please let me know.)
So how did they do it? Without tongues, the only other reasonable alternative to expect was that these runners carried some type of text—a large scroll or a tiny printed words on coco leaf (implausible, but go with me). Well, we’d be wrong in such an assumption. Apparently, the largest pre-Columbian empire built stone cities with precision, expanded their reign across cultures, and managed their empire without a formal writing system.
As one of my students used to say, “Let’s let that percolate.”
From Frames to Framing
Guest Post from Richard Andrews, Dean of Faculty and Professor of English at the Institute of Education, University of London. Richard Andrews is also co-author of our newly released Developing Writers: Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age.
In Developing Writers, we use Richard Andrews’ concept of framing from his book Re-framing Literacy: Teaching and Learning in English and in the Language Arts to characterize aspects of writing in the digital age. In celebration of the release of our co-authored book, I asked Richard to introduce us to the concept of framing as applied to writing.
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I’ve long been interested not only in the verbal arts, but also in the visual arts and how the two interrelate. So book illustration, art with words (the work of Kurt Schwitters, Roy Lichtenstein, Barbara Kruger and others), and the complementarity and tension between word and image have all been areas of intellectual interest as well as enjoyment.
Channeling Barbara Kruger by Flickr user alexloyal (CC licensed)
A step back from immersion in those two modes suggests that framing is a concept that is worth exploring in terms of communication. Read the rest of this entry
Rethinking ‘Global Audience’ & Networked Digital Composition
Though not synonymous, digital composition and networked digital composition are often thought of as one and the same. In addition to the ease with which text, image and video can be manipulated digitally—especially with especially designed software for such purposes—networked digital composition explodes the possibilities for composition.
We can access information from a broader range of sources than ever before, including tapping into the flow of knowledge-building as it occurs via social media such as wikis, Twitter hashtag feeds, blogs with comments, etc. For example, recently Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki launched a digitally-born text that would result in both digital and printed text. By being not just digitally-born, but networked and available publicly, the text could be truly open-review and collaboratively composed. (I participated in the initial concept-generation phase, suggesting a chapter exploring how the processes of composing text [as opposed to the products that are the result of composing] in the humanities has been influenced by networked digital capacities, called The Composing Processes of Writing History Digitally.)
With networked digital composition, we can compose with media previously available only to programmers and professionals. Of course, we don’t have to be ‘networked’ to use software we’ve purchased, but with the Internet we have immediate access to freeware and online webpages such as Picnik for images or Aviary for music.
We also have access to audiences like never before–both during the composing process and for our finalized digital products. On deviantART artists of all skill levels can create portfolios of work, ask for feedback on pieces or pieces-in-process and can create little enclaves of similarly-minded artists. Text, image, sound can also be taken up by those who view it and remixed—or plagiarized, if you will—with ease. Not only is networked digital composition available to one intended audience, it is potentially available to any number of individuals and enclaves, both nearby and global.
It is this final idea—the potential global audience—that I’d like to pause to consider. Though the fastest adopted technology we’ve seen worldwide—doubling in the last five years—the actual access to global audiences, who can participate similarly to those within the US, is far more limited than it may sound. Only 20% of those in ‘developing’ countries are online (see the link to “The State of the Internet Now” below), and those who are mostly on their cell phones. Marion Walton’s research out of South Africa asks us to question the assumed dominance of the computer in the digital age. She describes a ‘mobile-centric’ use of digital media: books via text, tweet, or the like; links to Youtube-like sites sent via text; chatting on the phone. Not only is the access to the Internet different across countries, but their devices, forums, and thus practices are also different.
Created by: Online Schools
All of this leaves me to wonder:
- When we are composing with networked digital tools, what do we need to take into consideration regarding our potential global participatory audience?
- What influence does this have on our composing processes and products? What influence does this have when reading texts from global sources? What influence should this have?
In the comments, I’d love to hear further questions that come to mind, as well as ideas you have as to how to begin to answer these questions.
