RCWP AI tech blogging community

Hi all,

A quick thought from Ottawa, Canada where I'm with family (coincidentally celebrating Canada Day; the streets are packed). These are the fireworks from on top our hotel parking lot.

Here's the thought I'm reiterating from our last day together: some of us talked about continuing our "tech team" through a blogging community, which for me is an exciting and potentially promising platform to share and dialogue about ideas that got started during the AI.

Consider this if I didn't successfully convert you during the week. :) Subscribe to each others blog (you can find them on our wiki http://rcwp08techai.wetpaint.com/ by clicking on the RSS icon (typically the little orange icon to the far right of the URL) and adding it to your new RSS reader (Bloglines or Google Reader). New posts will by like reading a local community digital newspaper. You can do the same with Flickr accounts, wikis and any other website you find valuable that has an RSS feed.

What a tremendous institute from my perspective. I'm wondering if in fact I gained more than the participants; I'm as enthused as I remember being leaving Chico last year after NWP's Tech Matters institute. Thank you all.

And you'll have one reader for sure. :)
John

Advanced Institute for Technology and Literacy

My first post to this blog in months. We've started our RCWP Advanced Institute for Technology and Literacy using a Wetpaint wiki as our primary tool of communication together. Check it out if you have time http://rcwp08techai.wetpaint.com

This is a test blog...

This is a test blog for my firm(?) on the way to work. listen

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Digital documentaries at Apalachee

We're in our 5th week at Apalachee High School doing a digital documentary project with high school juniors and seniors. Some things are going really well, we're using a blog to post drafts of our projects, both as a way to document our project together and as a tool to articulate our ideas for our pieces and receive some written feedback from students and teachers.

One thing thing I've learned--get acquainted with the lab you'll be working with. I won't spend too much time talking about the frustration of having sites like Flickr and Google blocked by the school, but we've shared some frustration together about having limited access to media and research sources. That said however, I've been impressed with the patience and the resilience these high school students have exhibited during the process.

One thing I've been struggling with is that many students are using so many various devices to capture digital video, audio and still images that we're spending significant amounts of time troubleshooting conversions for files compatible with Movie Maker. I admit, I wish we had a set of devices we could share that work consistently in the way we're able to upload digital media into our Movie Maker projects.

Still, the messiness is a learning process, and I'm proud of the way the students are taking it in stride. It reminds me to foreground the learning process above the product, at least at this early stage.

Preparing for NWP

Valorie Stokes at Prairie Lands Writing Project and I are in the process of planning together for an NWP workshop about designing summer tech camps for youth. It's already been valuable for me just to see the different ways camps can be run--PLWP has been holding month-long camps for several years now. Valorie and I have had success sharing documents and writing together with Google docs, and I'm wondering if we might simply add to it the resources we've found valuable and open it up as a resource site. The other option would be to create a resource wiki. I think both would allow others to contribute, which is what we're after--a resource page about designing tech camps that can grow from other sites who're leading youth tech programs.

Valorie has used digital storytelling in her camps, and I stumbled today on Jason Ohler's webpage through a de.lic.ious "digital storytelling" search. The 25 questions to ask about technology handout might stir some thinking about the questions we ask when considering the benefits of different technologies in our classrooms.

I'm thinking about asking some of the social context questions during our digital video workshops this week with Paige's high school students.

Movie Maker Projects

Student "poster projects" created to brainstorm and share film making ideas



If you're interested in using Movie Maker (or iMovie for that matter) in your classroom, check out the beginnings of a project that Paige Cole is doing with her high school students. They're creating short films about important issues in their lives--pregnancy, relationships, stresses of college entrance exams, displacement from Hurricane Katrina. Paige and I are trying to share resources we've found or created about both Movie Maker and using digital video as a learning tool through Red Clay Writing Project's tech team wiki. We'd welcome any new resources.

Creativity in schools (part 2)

A friend told me yesterday that blogging was my way of procrastinating from dissertation research. First, I wish I blogged enough to warrant that accusation. More importantly though, it reminded me of a common perception about the value of blogging. It isn’t as important as dissertating. Unless, of course, it is dissertating.

Met with Paige Cole last night and brainstormed the design of a creative multimedia project for high-schoolers, one that combines deconstructing mass media portrayals of identity and the possibility for self-representation through digital narratives. Good timing, since I’m still reeling from Ken Robinson’s argument that creativity is as important in education as literacy. I’m excited about the possibility for high school students to imagine and re-present themselves in ways that might run counter to what’s available through mass media.

Thinking about the project, I revisited photographer Alec Soth’s comments early this morning about art education. He writes, citing personal experience, about a conflicting dichotomy between “doing art” and “teaching art,” a polarization I find troubling. Not without a hopeful ending however, Soth points to Peter Schjeldahl’s lecture, Why Artists Make the Worst Students,

A lot of education is like teaching marching; I try to make it more like dancing. Education is this funny thing. You deal for several years with organized information, and then you go out into the world and you never see any of that ever again. There’s no more organized information. I’m trying to establish within my seminars disorganized information, which students can start practicing their moves on.

Creativity and education

A friend just sent me a link to Ken Robinson’s talk about creativity and education on the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) website. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a listen.

Being wrong isn’t the same thing as being creative. But what we do know is that if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, we stigmatize mistakes, and we’re now running our national education systems like this, where mistakes are the worst things you can make. We are educating people out of their creative capacities.

Reminds me of conversations I’ve had these past few years with undergraduates during their student teaching experiences. The culture of learning at schools often rests primarily on students learning to respond to questions that separate right from wrong, that show if students can recall very specific types of information. Like Ken alluded, I’m sure this is in part a reflection of national legislation. A great joy for me, as a teacher educator, is seeing preservice student teachers (and their mentor teachers in the schools) also using questions that open up space for students to take risks with their thinking. Questions that help create an atmosphere to celebrate the learning potential of “being wrong.”









Dad lifting me on the forklift to photograph the barn. Click here to see the barn.

Poetry and Podcasting in Arizona

Got an email yesterday about Red Clay Writing Project teacher Denise Heagle who’s now working in Arizona. She shared a recent project entitled “Poetry and Podcasting” from her ELL classroom (English Language Learners) in which students created “I Am” poems and recorded themselves reading the poems. Her class includes Somalis, Sudanese and Liberians, and a large number of her students have been living in refugee camps for the last ten years. Though many don’t have family photos, they found images online to accompany their written poetry and used the application Photo Story to put it all together. Look under “Language Program Poem #1 or #2” on her school’s preliminary website to view some of the student work (http://amphipodcast.podomatic.com). Many of these students were at the first grade reading level with their English skills. Denise wrote, “It was amazing how it took on a life of its own and the students were SO invested in it.”

I’m excited about these types of projects, and what makes kids, as Denise said, “so invested.” There’s this one phrase I’ve been carrying around with me since NWP’s Tech Matters Institute—compelling communication. After viewing the photo stories, I’m imagining Denise’s students were experiencing a compelling type of communication, one that allowed them to make meaning with images in addition to words, to explore new digital tools, and to share their texts (and get some comments) with others outside their classrooms.

Two questions come to mind: 1) What types of conversations are teachers having with students about publicly sharing their work (and their personal lives) online? and 2) How might other teachers gain from the thinking and planning behind Denise’s “Poetry and Podcasting”? I’m still thinking about the way Red Cedar Writing Project shared their tech camp plans via a wiki. I’m guessing there are some databases online for teachers to share their literacy/tech activity plans, etc., I just haven’t found them yet.

Thanks for sharing this Denise, and we miss you around here.

Tech Matters 07

Paige Cole with facilitator Peter Kittle and our friends Joe and Susan from Rutgers Writing Project

Howdy Red Clay,

Before too much time passes, I want to share a little about our experiences at NWPs Tech Matters institute. Paige Cole and I flew out to Chico, CA in mid-July for 4 days of mingling with other writing project folks interested in technology and writing. Heaven, right? I just wish more of you could have joined us. Imagine a summer institue about technology/writing crammed into 4 days (that's supposed to sound good, btw).

We had time to explore technologies (i.e., free online apps like Google Docs, Flickr, Wikispaces, VoiceThread) and talk about their relevance for our teaching and our lives. It's my hope that we can bring these conversations back to Red Clay and share with you some of the ideas and technologies we found exciting.


Paige and I are in the process of writing a minigrant proposal to help fund a tech learning community, and we'd like to invite you to join this tech team. If you're interested, contact me directly (johnny@uga.edu) or respond here on the blog. Enjoy the remaining days of summer!

Clarke Central's Journalism Team

Clarke Central High School, Athens, GA

I had the great pleasure of hanging out with David Ragsdale's high school journalism class yesterday afternoon at Clarke Central. It's two weeks before the official start of school and they're already working. After spending only two hours with them, I can see how their publications win awards (c.f., The Odyssey). They share with each other what they know. They solve problems together. They have fun.

We talked mostly about photography, and I brought up an issue that continues to vex me--sharing pictures of others online. With Flickr.com, for example, you can control whether pictures are private or public, but the default setting is public, and I find myself having reoccuring conversations with friends and family about the ethics of sharing photos online. David's group had some insightful comments for me to think about, namely the messiness of interpretation. I took from the conversation a good question to ask before posting: Is there any risk that this image might be harmful?

Still, I'm guessing just about everything has risk for harm. Even a seeminly innocuous image can function unpredictably in the lives of others. How do you seek balance between ethical concerns and "individual" artistic expression?





The above images were found scattered among an unsanctioned garbage dump in South Atlanta. I find them captivating and want to share them. View the whole series on my flickr account (before they come down?).

DUSTY, Digital Storytelling for You(th)

I’d like to continue an exciting conversation started in West Oakland with Michael James, co-founder of D.U.S.T.Y., Digital Underground Storytelling for You(th). He, Glynda Hull and others have been working with youth in W. Oakland for several years, namely through an after-school/summer program housed in a beautiful Victorian home in West Oakland.

One of the aims of the program, as I see it, is to provide youth with opportunities to engage in various digital literacy practices and multimedia production (i.e., digital DJ-ing, digital storytelling). Creative self-expression through digital tools is often compelling, both for youth and adults, and I’d argue these experiences carry over into our personal and academic lives.


I hope with this post to list some of the issues Michael and I talked about (including sustainability) that linger for these types of youth programs. Possibly the greatest impetus for this post is to begin looking for the overlaps between the work at DUSTY (and other programs—Dave Egger’s 826NYC for youth in Brooklyn) and the work many local writing project sites are beginning for youth (i.e., summer tech/literacy camps). My hope is that we can celebrate the excitement in this work and learn from any logistical and/or political/theoretical questions that arise.

A quick review of my notes from my conversation with Michael (mostly questions):

1. How can writing projects with youth tech camps and other youth tech/writing programs like DUSTY collaborate and/or learn from each other?

2. How can writing projects and DUSTY design programs with sustainability? What funding issues need to be addressed? What is the potential for teacher/preservice teacher professional development involving technology and literacy?

3. How can we help foster skills/practices that are “marketable” for youth? In other words, how can we acknowledge various economic/power structures youth face as they navigate through (and exit) different stages of their educational lives? How does/should our work interact with public school curriculums?

I’m butchering these questions, but I invite any suggestions for their revision and more importantly any dialogue about how we think through them. Here’s a modest (and redundant) start. Red Cedar Writing Project is sharing their plans online for a youth tech workshop for anyone interested to see. Thanks RCWP.