In our academic lives, we have books and articles that we regularly return to. The dog-eared pages of these treasured readings contain lines of text etched with questions or reflections. It's difficult to imagine a similar level of engagement with a digital text. There should probably always be a place for print in students' academic lives -- no matter how technologically savvy they become.

What distinguished this atypical group was that they actually read slower when the text was on the computer than when it was in a book.

Teachers could make students aware that their ability to comprehend the assignment may be influenced by the medium they choose.

In other words, there's no "one medium fits all" approach.

But when it came to specific questions, comprehension was significantly better when participants read printed texts.

This appears to be related to the disruptive effect that scrolling has on comprehension.

Given this trend, teachers, students, parents and policymakers might assume that students' familiarity and preference for technology translates into better learning outcomes. But we've found that's not necessarily true.

Today's students see themselves as digital natives, the first generation to grow up surrounded by technology like smartphones, tablets and e-readers.

The first wave of excitement about digital politics has passed, maybe even the second wave has bit the dust, and there are many reasons for skepticism, if not cynicism, about whether social media platforms enable users to challenge entrenched authority and change the world.

We are finding young people constructing new forms of the civic imagination, using the resources of popular culture to help them articulate what a better future might look like.

internet comedy and music

Like many Americans, I still have much to learn about the conditions she faces in doing activist work in her region and like many Americans, I have stereotypes to overcome if we are to really be able to share lessons learned by young activists working in these two very different contexts.

n the course of our research, we’ve found many such stories as young people have turned to video sharing and social media sites to circulate their own stories and in the process, learned to deploy their voices toward political ends.

the video’s circulation brought it to the attention of a diverse set of audiences

shared the ways her schoolmates responded differently to her after 9/11, and discussed the chilling climate her family members faced as they went about their normal lives.

Nabela Noor

Online courses are prone to cultures of surveillance.

diversity

interface design shapes learning

Place is differently, not less, important online.

We who have signed this letter

digital citizens

We are builders at heart

We must protect and nurture the potential to do good with it.

The Copenhagen Letter

Distill

Why

Webrecorder.io

Add some more in the comments or feel free to hypothesize in the margins.

digital hospitality

My next step is to re-engage

I am trying to “ante-up” by sharing digital objects

asked to be left alone

Reflecting on our research, the American Muslim youth we encountered were struggling to balance the benefits and risks of public expression. Determined to tell their stories and challenge existing stereotypes, they have turned to new media platforms and practices as a means to circumvent perceived roadblocks. As traditional advocacy organizations have sought to censor open discussions within the physical space of their local mosques, the youth have sometimes moved these discussions online, forging a potentially supportive peer-to-peer network. As stereotyped portrayals of Islam obstruct the development of a diverse and realistic understanding of their actual lives, American Muslim youth have used digital media tools to collect and share more authentic stories. As concerns over government surveillance have grown, the youth have harnessed humor to acknowledge and ultimately alleviate some of the resulting strain. As more conservative Muslims have slammed young American Muslims for transgressing Islamic norms, the youth have sometimes turned to each other for support. Sometimes. At other times, the youth have withdrawn and chosen silence as their supportive networks faltered under pressure.

While the American Muslim youth we met certainly thought about top-down surveillance and anti-Muslim sentiment, many more were more worried about “friendly fire” from other, more conservative community members. Some of these critiques came from elders concerned about young people’s safety. Others came from youth with very stringent notions of what behavior is acceptable in Islam.

Such social surveillance can come from both inside and outside the Muslim community. Muslim peers and elders may dismiss and critique material young American Muslims share online.

many of the youth-driven storytelling efforts we observed moved away from the “good” versus “bad” Muslim binary to express more complex, diverse, and morally ambiguous (yet still nonthreatening) American Muslim experiences.

Some of the interviewed youth actively contributed American Muslim stories by creating, appropriating, and remixing content. Others were aware of such efforts and had circulated stories across their networks. Whether they told their own stories or shared others’, these expressive practices have much to teach us about the ways storytelling bridges cultural experiences and political concerns

The stories Ali and Tariq collected contributed to, and also inspired others to join, a growing but dispersed storytelling movement that seeks to counter stereotyped perceptions through the circulation of narratives about the lived experiences of diverse groups of American Muslims.

Young American Muslims’ ongoing use of new and social media as a way to connect, share, and debate topics that may not be explicitly political builds “latent” capacity to mobilize toward political goals should such a crisis arise. Such circulation prepares the ground for those “monitorial” moments when, as Hurwitz explains, “politics comes to life” because of “great dissatisfaction with a current state of affairs and finds expression in ad hoc protest movements.” While often organizationally “ephemeral,” Hurwitz’s monitorial citizenship relies on “volunteers who foresee some national … crisis” (108). Functioning as crucial nodes, these volunteers not only “monitor” situations, they are also connected to networks that allow them to respond quickly, often bypassing more established organizational structures.

Sharing media, with or without political dimensions, was crucial to maintaining these networks. The media youth shared included news reports on current events (like Michelle Bachman’s accusations against Huma Abedin and other Muslims in government that surfaced in July 2012), religious materials (motivational quotes from the Qu’ran), faith-based lifestyle topics (photos of food during Ramadan), and popular culture debates (the controversy surrounding whether or not young American Muslims chose to watch Zero Dark Thirty; see Hussein 2013).

the young American Muslims we interviewed shared their determination to navigate expression in a climate where the odds are often stacked against them. The media these youth created, the networks they fostered, and concerns they articulated have much to teach us about both the opportunities and challenges of participatory politics for an emergent, marginalized American Muslim youth community.

Many of the American Muslim youth we interviewed shared experiences of anti-Muslim prejudice growing up in America, which confirmed the findings of other studies of this population.

In fact, many of the American Muslim youth efforts we encountered were not conceived as explicitly (or even implicitly) political. Nonetheless, they often assume political meanings as they circulate and reach broader audiences.

In particular, we highlight media making and storytelling as crucial dimensions of efforts by American Muslim youth to express, poke fun at, network, and mobilize around identity politics.

he is caught in a bind: he constantly juggles his desire to connect with others through social media with the awareness that his posts may be viewed (and possibly misunderstood) by audiences far beyond his intended networks.

A zookeeper?

While you’re there, be sure to visit

Are you thirsty for a protest movement

Within these connections, there is the opportunity to educate, empower, and advocate for all learners, and for each other.

Participating in networked publics involves the need to better understand the challenges of participating and socializing in these online spaces.

We often speak to ourselves using a terminology and jargon that is unfamiliar and unwelcoming to a citizen who has not spent time in a graduate or doctoral program.

A perfect storm has erupted around the ways in which networked publics consume and critique information online.

emotional coddling

I encourage the academy, and all of those who advocate for its primacy, to consider the ways in which it has sheltered itself from the world, and to put on some boots, become deeply aggrieved, and be strong.

the Middlebury protest ended in violence muted its usefulness

students are finding themselves on the front lines

Is it any wonder these students didn’t want to sit down for a chat with a (at least theoretically) eugenics enthusiast?

if the level of rage and despair in student lives had been accurately assessed.

It’s been strange and alienating to experience the drama of the Middlebury protest from a distance.

“There are no devices allowed in this class.”

wanted there to be a continuum, a narrative,1:33that tracks the history of people1:37disseminating, collecting, sharing data.

ail system and the telegraph1:08and made Council Bluffs an enduring anchor1:13of the sharing of information.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfmdv68nOck

At $600/lb.

Black laboratory anyone?

BS detection and deep searching

Deadly rubber band weapons.

several students doing podcasts

Why can't we all just be convivial toward each other and the planet?

Terry Elliott

diversity of my web feeds

Yancey reminds us that the move toward new media in composition does not mean a move away from the written word. Digital and print overlap. They depend on each other and remediate each other.

Text may call to mind words only, but I am indicating the woven nature of this thing, distinct modes overlapping in a unique composition but also the various other texts (discursive and nondiscursive) to which this thing responds.

Neil Gaiman

To write comics is to write from the middle, between modes. To read comics is to enter between panels.

Best Practices in Digital Writing

Similarly, in Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st-Century Classroom (2009), Herrington, Hodgson, and Moran suggest that writing and assessment are changing as teachers “develop curricula that teach students to use new media to compose, [to] communicate with others for a range of purposes, and to understand and act in the world around them” (p. 14).

In other words, unless teachers provide proper scaffolding and support, inquiry-based instruction can quickly turn into mass chaos.

National Writing Project

go online

the MAPS heuristic for writing and thinking. Traditionally, this heuristic includes mode, audience, purpose, and situation. As you will see, we’ve added another essential M to this heuristic: media.

“Dream big, start small.”

The purpose of sharing these tools is not to define a single, preset suite of tools that students must go through in order to complete a research project.

We didn’t just integrate technology when it seemed convenient; instead, a variety of technologies were integral to the research process.

research paper

the increasingly myopic view of standards and assessments that dominate the current discourse about schools, as well as the changing nature of communication and commerce in our global world

connecting students with language and helping them interpret what they read, see, and hear, as well as the language they employ when sending their own ideas, questions, and reflections out to the world.

Anyone would think that they'd be pleased to see the back of me.

surveillance

I was in their shoes once.

I smile at 'em

I was just an ordinary woman

It was a long time coming, but one night my husband located me and called to me from orbit. My heart leaped in my chest to hear his beloved and nearly forgotten voice. “Time to come home,” he whispered in my mind as I held my palm chip over my fluttering heart. “Oh yes,” I said, “oh yes.”

first warrior who fell out of the sky

“I can do this, at least,” I thought, and in my own way fought like a warrior to save him.

I was still on Earth

It was just me

I wore a long green cape with stars printed on it.

it seemed for a moment like there were paths going off in every direction, as if I had a choice

It may have been pointing ironically out into the vast, sun-hammered alkali flats.

I tried to remember all of them

It was as if some force had picked up my world and shaken all the people out of it like the last of the peppercorns, leaving me alone in a world of salt and abandoned mercury mines.  

I hadn’t been able to save them

bots

Hypertext

Networking

transmedia storytelling

a fixed narrative playing out across multiple worlds

The ability to wander among the alternate worlds serves more as a framing device, a set of instructions on how to consider the film, than as a tool for exhaustive use.

“Possibilia” is a term of art in metaphysic

Ben-Shaul feared that, as technology dissolved the boundaries of conventional narrative, it could also interfere with essential elements of good storytelling. What was suspense, for example, if not a deliberate attempt to withhold agency from audience members—people at the edge of their seats, screaming, “Don’t go in there!,” enjoying their role as helpless observers? At the same time, why did the mechanisms of filmmaking have to remain static? Cautiously, he embraced the idea that interactivity could enable a newly pliant idea of cinematic narrative

the book, he discovered, sought to explore every possible decision that its characters could make, every narrative bifurcation, every parallel time line. By chronicling all possible worlds, the author was striving to create a complete model of the universe as he understood it.

“We have to break out of the gimmicky use of interactivity, and make sure it is used to enhance a story.

story

the shattered moment

An animated gif is not a story.

At the heart of anything called a story is a shattered world.

When the centeropened, it was used first by African Americanyouth. Center staff found that young peopleparticularly those new to this countrywere notwilling to cross cultural boundaries until they haddeveloped some security in their own culturalgroup. Ultimately, the Trust, the ethnicassociations, and the Y acknowledged the needto strengthen the programming of the individualethnic associations while working to bring theiryouth together through the teen center'sprograms.

Scarce resources have caused intense com-petition between social service agencies vying forthe same dollars. Organizations work hard todistinguish themselves from one another, carveout their "turf," and convince funders (as well asthemselves) that the services they provide areunique and better than those provided by others.

Many were surprised when alongstanding member of the community councilasked those present if they had "any problemwith 'us' being at the table." By "us" he meantgangs, and thereby revealed for the first timethat he was not only a member but a key officerin a gang. All present were asked their reactionto having gang members at the table. and mostindicated that it was not a problem.

a collaboration withlocal professional perform-ing arts and visual artsstudios to involve 400youth in a wide variety ofopportunities for artisticexpression

Mostfamilies turn first to their communities for sourcesof enrichment, support, and problem solving.Connections among providers and the people theyserve can be created and sustained most easily atthe community level.

The proposed shift is from anexclusive focus on curing or preventing problemsfor some children and families to one that is alsoconcerned with promoting the development of allchildren and the functioning of families.

The goal-- improving the lives ofchildren, families, and communities-- is important,and the resources being invested, both humanand financial, are substantial

guerillaconnectors

VCfeelslikeanexclusiveclub

inancial,logistical,socialorhealthreasons

VCthereforeallowsvirtualconference participants tomeetandtalkwithconferencepresentersandattendeesinwhatoftenfeelslike spontaneous hallway conversations. Thereis room fortenconnecteddevicesineachvirtual conversation - thelimitation of Google hangouts on air.

Informal conversations thatoccur outside of the scheduled organized sessionsareanessentialyet overlooked knowledge-sharingaspect of conferences.

We can change the world for the better.

channels

combinatorial

But we rarely recognize how wonderful it is that a person can traverse an entire lifetime without making a single really serious mistake — like putting a fork in one’s eye or using a window instead of a door.

Schools do not have feedback loops even though they exist within larger feedback loops.

If it leaves a digital trail, if it is owned by someone else

post-school view of learning

mirror

civic imagination

Suffice to say that when we help students into those unregulated spaces where their learning is unfettered by institutional management systems, assessment deadlines and fair use rules, we are not sending them into the country of the free. We are sending them to the data warehouses of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Weiner. We’re sending them into a world of increasingly de-regulated private learning, where the sales team at Trump University can promise you the educational sky if you are only willing to max out on your credit card. Let’s be very careful what disruptions and transformations we wish on them.

Thank you for reading.

In digital space we are constantly choosing. Click and sign. Send a message. Vote x out of the tent/chair/jungle. We have the illusion of elective power but none of the responsibilities of citizenship.

resilience

Let’s remember that was the promise. Not the freedom to order white goods in the small hours, or to spit bile below the line when any liberal (especially non-white, especially female) person feels empowered to speak.

in a culture where everyone has access to values-based conversations, people above and below the median level of formal education are joining different conversations.

The ironies abound

he uses the computer as a key actor in the text, but it is all controlled by him.

"Teach the writer, then the writing, then the technology."

Troy Hicks frequently uses the words "intentional" and "deliberate" to highlight the need for writers to conscientiously think through composing digital texts.

Troy Hicks

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it's nothing but wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference.

They would like us to believe that they can distinguish between the public good and the private or corporate gain.

I do not advocate that we turn television into a 27-inch wailing wall, where longhairs constantly moan about the state of our culture and our defense.

But this nation is now in competition with malignant forces of evil who are using every instrument at their command to empty the minds of their subjects and fill those minds with slogans, determination and faith in the future.

One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and, at times, demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles.

it remains a fact that the newspapers and magazines are the only instruments of mass communication which remain free from sustained and regular critical comment.

For surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities which must indeed be faced if we are to survive.

do-it-yourself

This just might do nobody any good.

We still believe in make believe.

black wind blowing

Listen to Coltrane fuse experimental jazz

Like "rhetoric," "imitation" sounds pejorative today: a fake, a knockoff, a mere copy.

Because thinking and speaking well form the basis of existence in a community, rhetoric prepares you for every occasion that requires words.

critical thinking; clear communication; collaboration; and creativity. (To these "4Cs," I would add "curiosity.")

this unrelenting assessment has stunted your imaginations.

your course offerings in art, drama, music, history, world languages, and the sciences were all too often set aside "to create more time for reading and math instruction."

Your generation is the first to have gone through primary and secondary school knowing no alternative to a national regimen of assessment.

How is technology changing our memories?

Are we more connected or more lonely?

I want students to embrace technology and to love it, but also to think about the nature of technology. I want them to think beyond simply “how does this work?” and into the deeper questions about how technology is shaping our connected world.

Who owns your data?

Sure enough, they are selling a book

NPR story

I noticed people sharing a few random articles from Atlas Obscura

What is the relationship between virtual learning spaces and the pedagogies being enacted? And what are students actually doing while they are learning anywhere, anytime?

Incorporating all of these modes and hybrids are Collectives where the crowd acts as a single user. In this circumstance, collectives organise learning through the use of algorithms, allowing the user some amount of control and autonomy.

Communities of Interest:

Communities of Practice

Groups are social forms where individuals deliberately join others with shared goals and identify with group norms and behaviours. Nets are social forms where the connections between individuals and sometimes clusters of individuals are what bind them together. Sets are social forms where people may have no knowledge of others in the set but are clustered by commonalities between them. This may lead to strong identification and trust in some cases, but not typically.

However, I wonder if the focus on anywhere, anytime overlooks the complexities of the pedagogies and practices in these spaces? The question that seems to get overlooked is what do the complexities within these spaces look like, how do the different roles and relationships change and what are influences and expectations on pedagogy and practice?

Katie

We ask our teachers to innovate, differentiate, and create awesome learning experiences for our students. But do we provide our teachers with awesome learning experiences? Can they take risks? Exercise curiosity? For a lot of teachers, they can’t.

efore I knew it, my students were teaching other teachers on campus how to get their students collaborating using GAFE!…Embracing change can lead to innovative experiences for our students!  

A real teacher is constantly changing, giving up, and adding in. Not for the sake of change, mind you, but for the betterment of learning.

10 years

The learning environment can be an innovation in itself.

I too, have often associated innovation and innovators with amazing new technology, systems, designs and ideas created by brilliant minds.  

What is the purpose of education? Is innovation necessary in education?   How are you embracing change to spur  innovation in your own context?

More discussion here using Hypothes.is (digital annotation right here)

These shifts are accelerated by access to technology that has transformed how we learn. However, making these shifts equitable across countless classrooms is more than purchasing technology or creating creative learning spaces. In order to reimagine classrooms and to leverage technology, educators need opportunities to develop new skills, knowledge, and dispositions to create opportunities for deeper learning that align with the world we live in.

There is wide agreement that we need to rethink the outdated factory model of education to meet the needs of all learners in our schools.

We cannot prepare students for these careers that don’t yet exist, we must equip them to be able to adapt and work in a world that is complex and dynamic.

Educators need to better understand and attend to the misalignment in the workforce job skills and our educational system that leave over half of college graduates to be under-employed  or under-qualified for their jobs.

According to the report, the skills that will be in high demand by 2020 are: Complex Problem Solving Critical Thinking Creativity People management Coordinating with Others Emotional Intelligence Judgement and Decision Making Service Orientation Negotiation Cognitive Flexibility