How on earth can we talk about this in the field?
Like this, perhaps? And maybe we say, writing is just writing. But ten years ago? Five? Writing digitally was very different. Probably the label remains from a time when we (you, me, us) were trying to explain how technology was changing the way we wrote and interacted and read. Maybe it is no longer different. (Although, I don't think we are there yet)
Full disclosure: if it seems this question comes out of left field, my dissertation takes up ideas of literature as a power mechanism for the social elite, one mechanism that is challenged by cultures of the Web
Thanks. Interesting dissertation idea.
4TDW Conference
This post is dangerous.
I am here, in the margins of your writing, writing alongside with you. We are two. The digital aspect of our world allows you to write one day, send it into the world, and then I read it, and write with you another day. Is that one aspect of Digital Writing?
And the difference between reading with kids and studying literature.
You take a turn here, from Writing into Literature. I wonder how you perceive the bridge from one to the other. Is Digital Reading a thing?
What are the implications for English teachers of what Mr. TW, Mr SA, and Ms SE have said? Should they be thinking about “digital writing?”
Yes, but critically. Their arguments are valid and worth viewing and making sure we have some answers. I don't have all the answers. I keep exploring.
Is the only real “digital writing” writing in computer languages?
No, I don't think so. Do you suggest that writing code is the only form of pure digital writing?
“What is the desired outcome for ‘digital writing’ and how is it different from other, regular, writing?” she wanted to know. She couldn’t see a difference.
This is the kernal of the question. And we have asked it before. Can we just drop "digital" and call it "writing"? I prefer the term "composing" because it has larger arcs and possibilities.
Discussions of audience. “When teaching kids to write in school, who are you teaching them to write for?” she demanded.
She's a smart one. Critical question. How we write, and what we use to compose, depends on whom the audience is, and what the writer/composer is trying to convey.
In other words, written language is more and more only part of the communication scenario.
Hmm. But this seems to back the point of digital writing ... that writing is no longer just words on the page, but something much larger. Visuals and charts, yes, but also composing with video and with audio and with interactive elements.
He also believes it is much more important to discuss the issue of what he called “sociality,” that is, of managing one’s identities across the different spaces one inhabits on the web, and thus the varied purposes for which one writes.
This is different, though. Important, and worth noting, but not the same as thinking of how the use of digital platforms might alter the ways in which we write. What does it mean when we embed links to associative information? How does a video thread extend the written word? Does voice of the writer inserted right into a written text change the notion of how the reader's interaction with the piece? This is more with the inquiry of the question, in my opinion.
Is there a unified and cohesive set of characteristics that make digital writing identifiably distinct? Can it be defined in a way that works across multiple or varied contexts?
I bet some researcher has, in fact, done this. It might be along the lines of "Communication across digital mediums in which elements of writing and media (audio, video, etc) intersect with connectivity of content." - That sounds rather gibberish. Maybe he has a point.
And they thought “digital writing” was, basically, hogwash.
I love this sentence. It's good to hear from others and to dissect the terminology of the profession.
(4TDW)
Which makes it a perfect time to wonder, critique and question the whole notion ... (notice I am using the hashtag for Digital Writing Month .. ha!)
recognizing the importance of internationalism and acting upon it are very different things.
the shortcomings of an attempt at global learning
I guess I hope you all will come up with some practical solutions to this issue of Open Invitations and Cultural Acceptances and more. I mean that with my heart, and not with any sarcasm. Perhaps a set of "Remember This" for folks planning what they hope/intend to be a Global Experience. That would be an important artifact of these discussions. Thank you!
However, for most of us not in the US (or the UK), this vision has often signalled top-down, US-to-world, Anglo-oriented, decontextualized, culturally irrelevant, infrastructure-insensitive, and timezone-ignorant aspirations, even when the invitation for us to join in may be well-intentioned.
I need to bookmark this sentence and remember it anytime I am involved in some open learning system. Thank you for expressing this in strong terms.
critical
That word again ... I know Remi asked about it ... I wonder about it ...
We don’t use the same digital devices and this has had a surprising impact on how we each work when we’re away from our desks.
I'd be curious to know about these obstacles -- I know it is an ancillary discussion -- the technology -- but I find it intriguing how the technology is both the opportunity and the barrier.
THREE timezones
Time zones are their own challenges when it comes to collaboration
It requires a lot of patience and coordination -- which may be a stumbling block to being inclusive across world cultures -- someone(s) has to coordinate the time zone jumps (never mind the cultural elements)
Who should I talk to next?
Looks like it's been happening right here ...
Go look at it now!
You mean, literally, right?
B. Watterson via T.Elliott.
Start by admitting that it exists, then begin to develop simple, easy to use ways to tap into the flow or to use existing channels (social media, email, online communities) to do so. If we don’t, then we still have the status quo with its secret backchannels and old boy/old girl networks.
Acknowledgement, following by action.
Teachers ought to seek out ways to engage students by finding educative uses for both spaces, especially when those spaces can converge on a single project and then expand to share that experience with a broad audience. If we want authenticity from our students, we need to take authentic risks that allow student voices to prevail.
Watching and listening and reading gave me some insights into my students that I may have missed otherwise. The quieter students wrote more than I expected, and the students who seemed disinterested in class seemed to open up in this creative space. I didn’t have to tell any students to be respectful of ideas or their peers; students governed themselves in a surprisingly egalitarian way.
A second Google Doc contained the story as it emerged without commentary or multiple voices.
Concurrent docs? Hmmm.
paper storyboard
I love this storyboard! Funny, right? The paper planning process notes are something I want to dig into almost as much as the collaborative story itself ...
The comments section buzzed with ideas and then some brave souls started brainstorming on the document itself.
I am curious to know how many waited for the first words to appear before jumping in ....
I used the comments feature of Google Docs to ask questions.
This is where the margins are important -- sort of like here, I guess, we comment. Having two texts (and now three?) running concurrently is an intriguing thought, made more accessible with digital (but of course, you can do the sam with paper)
Many students today move fluidly between digital and physical spaces, but not all.
And, in fact, many students still need guidance on navigation of those spaces. They can find them ... but can they use them to the fullest limit? We still need teachers!
It began with a blank Google Doc.
As everything does ... the blank page ... the collaborative element is what changes this dynamic, though. We're, together, staring at the same blank document, and then ... words appear.
video
Rooster soundtrack ...
What’s in your right-click menu?
Mine is nearly empty. Interesting. I almost never venture into the land of the right click, but not sure why. I mostly use the tool bar of my browser. Right click land seems more efficient ...
If tech isn’t connected to life it is an inert idea
But it is up to us to make sure that doesn't happen ... developers often don't know the way something will be used (they have an idea ... often, it is wrong ...)
poem
Me, too
field walks
I am a huge fan of field walks -- or learning walks -- or whatever term we want to use, where we head out not in any one direction or with any specific intention ... merely to discover something you didn't know you might discover.
reader’s zoo
Note: This website is all about digital marketing, so it has a certain bias towards how to "sell" messages. Still, I think its analysis here is useful. - Kevin
The voter who wants information tailored for their personal political preferences need only click a couple of boxes on a list to ensure they get newsletters personalized in a way that direct mailers can only dream of.
This is also a strange privacy line, too, right? A candidate knows what you want because it is scouring your responses, and maybe extrapolating to Tweets and Likes and other social media posts. It is using algorithms to parse through your data (my data, our data) and then sending you what you want to see. This may just create another Echo Chamber in our lives.
Of course, the internet is not the first technology to play a game-changing role in political campaigns. The advent of the radio gave politicians a voice and the ability to broadcast in a way they had never had before. Television, too, presented candidates to the world a more than just a slogan or a speaker, but as a person, live and in living color (all, at least eventually in color).
Good to have some historical perspective. Each technology changes the way that a candidate potentially reaches voters. Those who don't adapt often don't survive for very long.
An event streamed via the internet is just as live as the radio or television broadcast that accompanies it, yet is also easily accessed immediately and in perpetuity following the event via any one of dozens of free video streaming services.
It is also more likely to be picked apart and remixed by the opponent. Veracity of content is part of the equation, too. With so many editing tools in our hands, can we even believe what we see with our own eyes to be true?
An individual can hear a comment, record it, upload it, and tweet it to thousands of people within seconds of it occurring.
This is part of the Revolution ... one person potentially (and that is a key word here) can shift a campaign. Potentially.
Today political campaigns are no longer about being able to shake every hand in the room but rather about reaching every single person who might wander into a polling place and mark a ballot.
This was always the case, I think. Politicians always wanted voters. The difference is that data analysis makes the courting of voters more focused.
I am deeply disturbed by dominant discourses in society that silence the voices of others, particularly women and ethnic minorities. I am frustrated by people who put others down, particularly online. And I am always surprised by teachers and academics who talk of empowering and encouraging their students while they constantly put others in academia down, by belittling their research, providing harsh and hurtful feedback, stifling dissent, and harming them in countless micro-aggressive ways.
Maha starts off from a strong position, noting the conundrum of the Digital Age, which both opens the doors to new and opposing views while also shutting down discussions and discourse with ease.
Collaborative writing, in general, is an activity that builds on our inner voice while opening us up to alternative voices.
And this is why I write online, and join in discussions. It's an exploration.
collaborative autoethnography, a participatory approach to researching lived experience from participants’ perspectives, done collectively. This kind of research privileges the voices of the participants and empowers them to research themselves rather than have others research and write about them. It also has the collaborative element which provides a supportive way of incorporating the worldviews of others to help us understand our own selves more critically, and perceive our experiences in the light of how others see theirs. It supports inner voice by challenging it, and in doing so, I believe, such an exercise has potential to raise critical consciousness.
I know Maha and others (including myself) have tinkered with this and reveled in the messy nature of collaboration, searching for voices and themes and links between experiences.
how do I maintain my own self-esteem (which is admittedly quite difficult to shake, but still shakeable by micro-aggressions) while trying to listen constructively to the perspectives of others.
This is what faces us all, if we allow for the introspective/reflective voice to take hold.
especially the marginalia
And it would be an interesting endeavor just to read the margins and not the text. It's multiple storylines emerging from the book itself. I remember taking great interest in the margins of this text, where I felt a bit more free to explore.
We had no definitive answers. We became distracted.
Or more like, we needed time to think, to let the experience simmer for a stretch. Reflection points give us another view of the experience itself.
a number of questions
In some ways, these questions are the inquiry itself, almost more than the writing we did as a swarm. I appreciate that others took the time to formulate questions. I dove in and wrote. Others framed the experience.
do you also sense the energy and engagement and collegiality and even fun underneath it all? We hope you can, because that is what keeps us going.
So true, and it was this spirit of the digital page that made this kind of writing experiment not only interesting, but also engaging. We did not know how it would turn out. I, for one, did not ever think it would ever become an article for HyPed, or the basis for a presentation, or anything more than thoughts streaming along the page (and the margins of the page)
First, most MOOC research has not brought the connectivist experience to life for readers who have not experienced the rhizomatic swarm of open, online, connected learning.
Here lies the difficulty of explaining the potential of open learning spaces, and why canned MOOCs at the University level exist. Getting people to wrap their heads around the experience is critical. I'm not sure the Untext did that, though, and wonder if it has made it all the more imposing. Not to take away from the writing and the experience of it. It is valuable. But will its chaotic nature be a closed door instead of an open invitation?
We believe that The Untext is an accurate expression of rhizomatic learning as we experienced it in #rhizo14, and we invite readers to look through it, in all its chaotic messiness, multimedia-ness, and important marginalia.
We do, even if some of us still question the whole rhizomatic metaphor for learning. Learning can be messy at times. Collaboration is a tricky balance. Writing in and around and among spaces are their own difficulty.
It was the process of coming together to think and work and make beauty and chaos. It is our way of engaging in exhilarating learning and research. For us, this is scholarship.
or at least, a way to remain "in the moment" even after the moment -- that arbitrary element of "six week course" -- has ended. The Untext was a desire, for me, to keep moving forward, to remain entangled in the writing of others.
you can put the handprints of 30 children in your pocket and you can read The Untext at one sitting without having to spend six weeks in the MOOC.
Nice visual. I wanna dip my palm in paint and press it up against the page.
The Untext demonstrates that writing is a function of complex, multiscale networking as words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, marginalia, links, and images flow through and around one another to create new ideas. This has always been so, but precious, static print concealed this dynamic flow of ideas. Modern technology has made this flow of desire more apparent.
This is my favorite passage in this article so far. It covers a lot of ground and a lot of thinking that is aligned to my own about learning and writing and connecting. That dynamic flow of ideas is what keeps me engaged as a writer/learner, and helps me think of my role as a teacher, too.
About the Authors
Thanks to all of you for trying to make sense for the rest of us. I'm tempted to think: Oh, so this is what we were doing?
We suspect that this kind of writing has always been possible, but modern technology makes it likely and so easy.
Yes. True. Another hint of how digital is changing/altering/shaping literacies -- in how we write and how we read and how we interact with texts and each other.
There is no authority and no position in a swarm, at least no position with political, rhetorical, and power implications.
and thus, no distinguishing anchor. In fact, this article about the writing of the Untext is prob now the anchor, and I wonder if there is tension in that fact -- that by writing and explaining about the Untext, we have lessened its power as a rhizomatic document?
Next time, Hybrid Pedagogy or some other radical, digital journal will perhaps be able to accept The Untext as it emerged without this bridge, this frame of an article that leaves too much out. Soon.
maybe ...
Well, we believe we should lift each other up, not tear each other down.
Keep this message ...
let’s remember all that unites us.
As a country, not just as a political party ...
So many of you feel like you are out there on your own, that no one has your back. Well, I do. I hear you, I see you.
A little Wiz Khalifa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgKAFK5djSk
we are all standing under a glass ceiling right now. But don’t worry, we’re not smashing this one.
We can create moments of wonder by allowing for meaningful confusion in science classrooms.
Although students should pursue their own areas of passion and purpose, sometimes they need to be noticed in order to take that first big step toward original work.
I don't do enough of this ... I know that and keep making progress and then the year ends (like now) and I think, I could have done more of that. Dang it.
they follow the rules in order to get the grade and move on
He asks too many questions. He daydreams. He makes things. But the truth is, my son isn’t unusual. He isn’t an outlier. See, every kid is weird. Every child starts out as an original thinker, but somehow along the way, so many of them learn to be compliant. They stop making. They stop dreaming. They stop asking hard questions.
This seems to happen, in my experience, around fourth grade, for whatever reason. I get them in sixth grade and we spend the year trying to show them how to be creative again.
He sees the world differently.
That's worth celebrating in our corners of the world ... but I know that's not always true in all corners of the world.
If you want a revolution, you have to vote for it.
Young people just don’t vote.
Maybe this will be the year of the shift ...
“Disenchantment with Obama was a driver of the Occupy movement for many of the young people who participated,” they wrote.
Which explains the energy behind the Sanders' Movement ...
At a time when the federal government is dragging its feet on every issue, the most significant policy decisions often come at the local and state level.
This is a critical point ... change happens more on the local level but ... but ... the Supreme Court .. that is the key to so much in terms of fundamental change in the country ... now and into the future ...
It will be the first presidential election in which Generation Y—a.k.a.: Millennials—makes up the same proportion of the U.S. voting-age population as the Baby Boomers.
Let's hope they become informed voters, too
the rising cost of school has combined with a chilly labor market to create a perfect storm:
Although several polls find that young people are less likely to identify as Democrats, that has much more to do with an aversion to establishments and labels.
I wonder if this is always true, or just this generation ...
“Student debt will be a central issue in the 2016 elections, both at the presidential election and the congressional level,”
Let's hope so but somehow, I doubt it. Maybe the continued emergence of Sanders on the Left will force the issue.
The issue weighs heaviest on the minds of millennials, who have endured soaring college costs that forced many to take on tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
$1.3 trillion burden of student debt
My gosh ... just seeing a number like that makes me choke ...
Venn
What if we took this Venn and turned it again, and where the line meets the circle meets the line, we drew ourselves dancing? - See more at: http://impedagogy.com/wp/blog/2016/05/22/the-wolf-in-the-fold/#comment-12397
mystery
Surely, it is, and it is in the mystery that we engage in it.
existing to herd
OMG .. love this wordplay ...
making learning legible
Yes, if only ... or maybe no, if only not ....
We don’t yet understand how to model a complex conversation in the web’s two-dimensional environment and we’re hoping this experiment will help us learn some of what we need to do to make this sort of collaboration as successful as possible.
I wonder how far we have come since 2008 ... have we learned enough to really understand the possibilities of the Web as a mode of reading? How it differs from traditional paper reading? Eight years later, and we're sort of still working on the ideas.
It’s an experiment in close-reading in which seven women are reading the book and conducting a conversation in the margins.
So, I wonder what would have happened if a man or men were also involved. I get why this was not the case, but the gender influences the comments. Maybe? It's interesting that while this is an open reading space, it is also a closed reading space. But tools like Hypothesis allow me to add my own thoughts to the margins beyond the margins.
People could make of it what they wanted and they could look at it as a future way to share. Let us not make a big deal about learning. Let’s not make it so ponderous and heavy. It needs to be lightweight, flexible, and nimble.
There's a lot here, in this sentence that I like.
sandbox
I wonder how this step -- Hackpad -- went.
marginalia
like me, right now. There is something powerful about notes off in the margins, and the processing power of our brain to make those notes and read those notes ... and share those notes? Collective? Individual?
my main purpose here is to model the work of close reading to my students and to show how you must pay homage to the reading in order to do justice to the writing.
This is a key component, right? Showing how one goes forth, but leaving enough space for students to do it their own way, too. Yeah. That's always the tricky balance or we risk automatons.
out of last week’s work with memes/gifs and political candidates arose classroom work with… annotation and memes and gifs.
This is what we want to have happening ... moving from discussion and sharing with teachers to the classroom stage.
It seems to me that by its very nature annotation would have to be lightweight.
Lightweight is its own weighted phrase. It seems to suggest that nothing of meaning or value, beyond something skirting the surface, would be worth writing or reading. But I think it all depends on how one uses the margins of a text. If someone writes a racist post, I can't take it down, necessarily, but I can target the writer and the words with annotations, making my views known and inviting others to do the same. Perhaps then, the weight of the annotation protest might have some value. With annotation, we can target specific words and phrases and sentences, as opposed to comments, where observations are more general in nature. Maybe it is the comment bin that is lightweight.
He said the state is already implementing some of its recommendations
"I want to solve the problem in Flint. So that's my focal point," Gov. Snyder said.
The fear now is that the avalanche of digital information might push things the other way.
And that once again, those with power and money will give the rest of us a little gift ...
Governments that were digitally blind when the internet first took off in the mid-1990s now have both a telescope and a microscope.
Yikes
Ever more data and better algorithms, they fret, could lead politicians to ignore those unlikely to vote for them.
This is the crux of it all -- who has access and who does not have access means who has a voice and who does not have a voice. Who gets ignored?
But it is beginning to spill out from the ivory towers, and is gradually spreading to other countries.
The internet and the availability of huge piles of data on everyone and everything are transforming the democratic process, just as they are upending many industries.
And this is a good thing, right? Unless of course, the "crowd" has views opposite your own, and then it is a bad thing. I like the focus here of localizing the impact of the flattening, improving lives in our cities and towns.
“I will be using Facebook & Twitter. Watch!”
"Where I won't have to say anything of real substance because it's only status updates anyway"
I suspect a lot of Americans have had enough of 25 years of Clintonocracy, but who knows
Not me, though. I am still one of the fans of the centrist theme and message of the Bill Clinton years but I often feel very lonely in that zone. I'm not saying Hillary does it for me, either. But Bernie is too far left for my taste.
Ignore us at your peril.
And there have never been as many Independents as there are right now.
So, there is a possibility of some sanity ... unless of course, it is the nutjobs who have also opted out of the political parties and will make an even stronger lurch to the right or left than the primaries are showing right now.
DINO
independent voters
This may be the key to the unknown element of the election -- while the primaries tell one story, the general election may unfold another - driven by those of us not affiliated with either party. Whose message will reach those people?
along with an incident in which a member of the crowd punched and kicked a protester and another that involved Mr. Trump’s campaign manager.
politics news updates
Mr. Trump’s rallies have been anything but usual
the protester was part of a group behind Mr. Trump that had been jeering him as he spoke.
The cameras showed the crowd member being quickly led out by police officers
rally
At that point, “we just went crazy,” said Green.
whose revolutionary streak has excited radicals of all colors
Protesters interrupt virtually every Trump speech.
We’re all going in!!!! #SHUTITDOWN
Leveraging is an appropriation, and at times, repurposing of structures, tools, concepts, etc. in service of individual and shared interests.
I like the concept of a "repurpose" beyond the original intent of the tool or tech or whatever. That's where the agency of the user has roots.
By focusing on the remix moments that rupture existing power structures and impede the neoliberal flows toward efficiency, effectiveness, and individual competition, we can begin to understand how remix functions as an inflection point for developing individual and shared agency among MOOC participants, working together to coproduce knowledge and minimize hierarchies in this community of practice.
What this report does that we in CLMOOC did not always do is to circle back around. I am not sure what "neoliberal flows" are but the inflection points of remix moments -- where the idea took root and then expanded -- is a fascinating topic to examine.
remix as a kind of cultural glue
Cultural glue is an interesting phrase ...
authors
Mia, too?
Stephanie West-Puckett
Anna Smith
Christina Cantrill
We can imagine how professional learning communities might embrace or even cultivate historical rupture to open moments of possibility for professional learning by leveraging active, collaborative, multimodal knowledge remixing as a pathway for co-creating critical approaches to technologies and new literacies.
Hopefully, more than imagine it. Let's keep pushing to make it happen.
n CLMOOC, the teacher is first and foremost a creator
Yes
Thus, it was not Vera’s remix move alone that created new learning opportunities for participants; rather, the turning happened as a relational function of artifact sharing and dialogic exchange, exchange that included both novice and experienced participants, each imbued with different kinds of power, that allowed a more critical learning pathway to emerge and subtly refigure the operational logics of the space.
So, the larger question in mooc design is this: can such turns happen without a facilitator stepping in? How do online spaces and events ... just happen ... or can they? If we diminish the role of facilitator, and flatten the expertise, does activity and "turn"ing still happen?
the CLMOOC professional development experience was marked by bursts of collective creativity.
True, and then we often wondered: how to sustain the burst? But maybe I see now that such thinking might be counter-active to the burst itself. Maybe the question is: what resonance happens after the burst itself and what are the echoes from the original?
bursting or a “burst effect”
Screenshot of a portion
Wish resolution was better, although the squiggly lines are interesting in terms of connections and iterations
The pursuit of possibility is, perhaps, the key component in CLMOOC’s orientation toward professional development designed for potential rather than outcomes.
Love this phrasing: "The pursuit of possibility" because it captures the essence of exploration and play, and maybe arriving at a destination that you didn't even know existed, but had faith that your journey will lead you somewhere.
Joe
bursting
Interesting term to use ...
openly networked, production-centered, participatory learning collaboration for educators
As we continue to play, and as we continue to playfully approach our annotation in the open, I am eager to name the many ways in which learners creatively engage amongst text, context, and (con)text.
Keep moving forward, reflecting as we go ... and learning the barriers and the open space, and finding the way between them.
sarcasm
Interesting ... and so cultural, too. We bring our language bias when we use sarcasm.
a playful attitude – and whether expressed individually or shared socially – can appropriate a street, the city plaza, a building facade or foyer, a store, or an office as a playground.
Unless you are the cops ... then "playful" skirts into "unlawful." Maybe. Continuing this line of thought is one that Terry brought up in some earlier annotation at some other post -- we have no control over who annotates our post with Hypothesis, right? Anyone could come here and add racist, derogatory media and comments in the margins -- maybe even under the banner of "play" -- and the post's owner has no recourse? Just wondering and pushing thinking about annotation etiquette in the realm of play and appropriation ... hmmm ..
Inside, the margins are littered with notes.
The margins are littered with notes: Scrawled love poems; Anguished understandings; Scribbled doodles of stick figures, dancing; A recipe for a dinner date; Lost phone numbers of dead telephone lines. The text dances at the margins, as if the book were a stage and the words, the music but not the show, and you and I, we pull up our chairs, watching in silence for the performance someone's pen wrote out, long ago, some other room, and we applaud.
Think about that, a student speaks up to represent her class.
The Open Stuff that I am interested in, is not just that anyone can walk through the door, as there are often ONLY IFs. They can walk through the door ONLY IF they create an account and login. They can walk through the door ONLY IF they are in certain parts of the world (geographic limits on media). Openness is not just a door.
This is a crucial paragraph in this post ... many of us assume openness as a possibility for everyone but the world is complicated for many, and the "if" question -- and how to change the nature of the world to lower barriers -- is as crucial as designing something that has the possibilities of open.
you do not always know who is there with what class, or on their own.
I rarely even think about that idea of a "class of students is here" -- I just figure, this is my space and I am doing what I am doing, and enjoying what you re doing and so ... away we go ...
inner cynic
Frustrating
Did you write notes on a sticky note and stick them to your screen?
Participants were encouraged to start wherever they wished, to make multiple connections between each other and with a diversity of participant generated and shared resources, to create their own personal learning maps and content, to engage in multiple different modes of activity, in multiple spaces, and to manage their own learning. A culture of play and fun emerged; many artefacts incorporating poetry, music, personal writings, photography, and art works were produced. A-signifying rupture and lines of flight, if not lines of fantasy, and nomadic behaviours were in evidence.>
-- http://ajet.org.au/index.php/AJET/article/view/2486/1342
This is the heart of it for me: the playful exploration with no set boundaries
This graphic is helpful since I continue to be unable to completely grasp the D/G concepts on my own in regards to how I participated in the Rhizo events.
here we go
Here we are ...
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the more I write about annotation in the open, the more meaningfully I connect with other higher education practitioners who share similar interests.
The fact that you are so open about your teaching and the learning going on in your classroom is evidence of how this kind of open annotation is really just a thread in the ways of approaching learning. The annotations themselves are just one piece of the larger quilt, and you are inviting us into the making of that quilt.
I jumped at the opportunity to share and deepen a conversation that is increasingly defining my own teaching
Here is a great example of Connected Learning -- Connected Sharing.
free range annotation
Good band name ....
Playful Annotation
interesting that we can annotate the annotations ... can we use that meta-idea to surface thinking?
playful adventures
Was this egg hunt unassigned? (please say 'yes') and if so, whoohoo. And did folks play? (please say 'yes')
Like the Konami Code in a game, bjauw’s annotation is intentional, context-sensitive, and subversive; it is literally and conceptually playful.
This does bring up so many interesting questions.
Did they know you would "get" the code? (speaking to our audience?)
Was the code another code for the annotation activity? (It would be cool if they layered in another Easter Egg into the annotation)
What was reaction of other students?
(no answers needed here ... just thoughts off my mind)
the course is designed so that student learning occurs across networked and open settings and practices;
I love this concept of stretching the experience across platforms, Remi, and I will be doing my own grad course in summer that seeks to incorporate some of those same ideals. So, I might come back knocking for advice ...
playful annotation in the open
Thanks for sharing this post, Remi. I do wonder though ... we keep making notes in our blog post comment bins, saying: Check the Annotation in the Margins. How open is a system that would require you to tell someone to look for what you wrote? Does this impact the accessibility/open factor at all, do you think? Just thinking out loud here and looking around a bit ...
map
By the map, this map is a doozy to refold.
As all maps are .. once unfolded, they take on a story of their own ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYLPe9WLqe0
noting waystations and places where tickets get punched.
I love the byways of discussing a course like this and wonder what the students thought of this. Terry is bringing the spirit of inquiry and adventure into the learning ... wondering whether some are doubtful about this approach (ie, Tell me what to Learn and I will show you what I Know ....)
accept ourselves
I'm forever lost
in myself,
wandering this terrain
with such little preparation
that disaster seems imminent
every step of the way,
and the one sole thing that guides me
is the map of her voice
and the hope of the world
and the sense that just on the other side
of this landscape,
the world is always on the mend.
She said nothing
She said something
when she said nothing
but all I heard was empty thoughts
rattling about inside my head
because as she was saying something
I was thinking on anything other than
what she was saying
participatory culture
Hmmm (again) Is it participatory "culture" on display here or is it co-opting the idea of Participatory Culture for financial gains? This is an idea explored in other ways in the book that we have been slow-reading, right? This is a twist -- using the elements (remix for opposing point of view) for advertising gain (show me the money)
The two ads
This is a brilliant idea to read the ads. I saw the second one the other day during football and thought of the first one, and remember thinking: Hmmm. Then I forgot it. Hmmm
Despite all the talk about “leveling the playing field” and disrupting old, powerful institutions, the Web replicates many pre-existing inequalities; it exacerbates others; it creates new ones. I think we have to work much harder to make the Web live up to the rhetoric of freedom and equality. That’s a political effort, not simply a technological one.
Great point and important one, too, as we acknowledge the path is not all rosy and flowing optimism .... we still got work to do ...
But the readable, writable, programmable Web is an important development in education technology. Perhaps one of the most important. As such, we can’t just let that go. We can’t just surrender the Web to the technology industry, just as we shouldn't surrender ed-tech to programmed instruction.
In a nutshell ... how the forces of change are lining up ... who paves the way forward? the kids or the companies? (The kids, damn it!)
Designing the machine. Designing the material.
no student in sight?
But my experience with the correspondence course did help me understand, I think for the first time in my life as a student I think, how our models and our theories and our practices in education shape and are shaped by the technologies we use.
You see this weave through all of her writing (and others, too, including ours) ... where is the agency for the student? In the technology? The device? Or in the discovery? The inquiry? Or it it in the teacher? The lesson plans?
“Wait, what are we doing? Why?”
The most essential questions we can ask ourselves: Why are we doing this?
useful bridge
The more authoritative a classroom structure becomes, the less students feel that their own voice and their own choices matter, the less free they are to pursue their own passions and interests, and the less likely the curriculum is to reflect the realities of their lives beyond the schoolroom.
This was the anchor of my audio letter to Mimi Dear Mimi
New media technology has the possibility to reproduce many of the traditional assumptions of learning: disembodied, behaviorist, and sequestered. Examples include drill-and-practice software and more efficient testing regimes.
It sure does ... and we see it all the time. Pushing back on this seems like a Life Mission. Doing it with others who have similar ideas of immersive learning (like all of you) makes it seem like a movement as opposed to an isolated experience (we draw energy from each other to keep on keepin' on)
signal
Thanks, you guys, for marking up the margins of the page.
crowds
Dang right. Sometimes, it gets crowded, but it is always interesting ...
Wrestle With
the teacher’s role here is as co-learner in the reading process, observing and coaching student thinking on the side.
This is crucial ... and Terry is talking right now about videocasting annotation activity to show the work you are doing (but we do lose real authenticity? Are we annotation for the camera?)
teachers can monitor student work like a portfolio
Intrigued by how this would work ... the management of it ...
archival news reports
Hamlet
Ask students to fact-check a claim made in an article.
I love this idea ... particularly in this political season ... prove something right/prove something wrong ...
Post questions
like this?
audio recordings on 12 months of reading
Is this for him? Or for the world? You wonder about intention with annotation, and the value of it. Sometimes, I notice annotations get lost in the mix, and I wonder the real value of doing this: is it for me, to better understand? Or to gather with you, to share understanding? Both?
variety of tools
I like Hypothesis and the others here, but none feel like a natural fit for me in terms of conversation. I like this threaded element, but it still feels as if some of the bars for entry and participation leaves some folks out (unintentionally). I think we are making strides, though.
close reading 2.0
Catch-phrase of the Common Core era ... but probably a selling point for many teachers to consider digital annotation ....
maps
I love the annotation of maps, and the various tools that bring life to mapping ideas ... including the multimedia aspects of annotation .... showing us dark corners of the map and forgotten corners of the world ...
graffiti
I wonder how many people see graffiti as social annotations.
it can be a technique to slow readers down, deepen their engagement and aid in comprehension and analysis
This is so important, as a rationale for teachers to consider online annotation ...
yellow Post-its
I like sticky notes. So do my kids. But I know they fall off ...
“Digital natives, digital immigrants,” how do I loathe ye?
One challenge to this existing narrative is the emerging image of the geek or creative-class parent who is gaming with their kids, is tech-savvy, and provides a meaningful mentorship that values an empowered identity in relation to new media. This alternative orientation is defining a new digital learning elite characterized by particular kinds of social and cultural capital.
If we are going to make meaningful interventions here, we have to go well beyond the myth of the digital native, which tends to flatten diversity and mask inequality. We need to engage more closely with the very different ways that young people encounter new media in the contexts of lives that are defined around different kinds of expectations and norms, different resources and constraints, from those encountered by youth raised under more privileged circumstances.
We’ve seen a fragmentation of tools being used
Like us ... here ... trying to participate in a conversation with the book and authors when hurdles are there: lack of tools to make it fully participatory, no feedback from the authors themselves, etc. We cobble together our experiences, and probably leave a lot of people outside the door (inadvertently)
Teenagers need opportunities to learn how to interact in a healthy way in public and with strangers. They need to learn to take measured risks and face the consequences of their decisions.
I wonder if school environments are the place for this or not? Of course, as a teacher, I say, yes. But the reality is that school-based learning are not always authentic places for young people to explore, make mistakes, do inappropriate things (and learn from them) and more. It reminds me of my eternal questions about my video game design unit: have I sucked the fun out of video games by making it a learning experience?
For some adults, the phrase “digital immigrant” functions as a kind of learned helplessness: “I shouldn’t be expected to learn how to use this new technology because I wasn’t born in the right generation.”
I see this with teaching colleagues at times ... less so now than just a few years ago ... so, progress ...
They use song lyrics, pronouns, and in-jokes to have conversations that can technically be accessed but whose meaning is rendered invisible.
I find this fascinating and remember her exploration of this in her book ... the invisible culture right in front of us ...
When surveyed, youth consistently report that bullying happens more frequently at school, with greater intensity, and with more social and emotional costs. Parents, on the other hand, focus on the digital realm.
This is another key insight -- where do things happen as opposed to where we (adults) think it happens, and maybe it is a control issue, too.
Through social media, people have the ability to see – and interact with – people who are radically different than them. This means that youth can be exposed to new ideas and new people, not just in the abstract but through direct interaction.
One of the best things (potential exposure to new ideas outside your small geographic sphere), and one of the very things that makes so many parents nervous.
Today’s social and mobile media are part of this longer trajectory of media and technology, giving young people tools to access and participate in adult worlds and having adult-like autonomy and privacy.
Interesting, though, how when adults went to MySpace, the kids all left. As adults staked out Facebook, the kids began leaving. What's next? Will adults start using Snapchat now?
it’s important to shine a light on how adults often unreasonably curtail young people’s freedom and voice.
Guilty, I suspect, even without always realizing it ...
Technology was a way to gain unprecedented kinds of access to adult worlds and power.
Still the case? I wonder ...
Whether comic books were morally corruptive or video games made kids violent mattered less than the ability to drive fear through the heart of parents by suggesting that any new media would ruin their children.
Yeah to comic books for disrupting the world!
By positioning youth as “other,” adults fail to recognize or appreciate the ways in which youth use technology to connect with others, learn, and participate in public life.
I think this is a pivotal idea here ... this division of youth from adults, and casting them as some strange animal that uses technology in ways unimaginable ... as if it was learned through osmosis.
Our team has also found important gaps in access and participation, but the differences are quite nuanced and aren’t about a straightforward “digital divide.”
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Is there no comment opportunity on this blog? Am I missing it?
I feel like in different ways, we have each taken on the challenge of adding some texture to blanket proclamations about “kids these days.”
I appreciate adding texture and nuance to these conversations, and know I need to do a better job avoiding generalizations.
