The Fall 2011 Digital Is Resource Retreat

                                                   References

Fraiberg, Steven. “Composition 2.0: Toward a Multilingual and Multimodal
     Framework.” College Composition and Communication. The National
     Council of Teachers of English 62:1 (September 2010): 100-126. Print

Digital Is Improv?

“Point to something and say what it’s not.”  When Lacy said this to start our Digital Is planning meeting, I laughed a little bit.  What did she say?  It would be a difficult task, but I’d give it a shot.  “Large green chandelier,” I said while pointing at the red velvet curtains.  “Those are markers” (It really was my laptop).  Then I stopped.  I found myself staring at the two-toned blue walls of our hangout spot, pointing at it, unable to name the object.

It’s a blue wall.  It is not anything but a blue wall.  It was strange to point to something and describe what it was not, and we all had difficulty trying.  But that was the point: “to make the familiar strange,” as Lil later said.

This improv activity is indicative of our work with Digital Is.  Our site’s mission is to understand/deconstruct/critically investigate our personal histories and interactions with technology and literacies.  We want to bring together our personal experiences and make connections with others based on these experiences.  We also want to question—we always question.  This is a good thing.

After this activity jump-started our thinking, we began thinking about the different events along our literacy journeys.  Specifically, we created timelines of our experiences with digital literacies in our daybooks, taking note of the years and events we felt were significant.  Lacy asked us to transfer these events to sticky notes, and together we created a group timeline of significant events.  Technologies such as the Atari game system, instant messaging, our first cell phones, etc. all made the list.  “Oh yeah, I remember that…” accompanied by a smile or a laugh was a common response for many of these examples.

Our timeline of sticky notes covered our table; there were so many, in fact, that the amount of yellow sticky notes over the table formed a U-shape rather than a straight line.  As we read each sticky note in chronological order, we began to deconstruct why these events were significant to us, making connections to each other’s experiences.  We then challenged these events by asking ourselves what dominant narratives were present or affected these experiences.  Capitalism, competition, authority—these were just some of the ideas that came out of that discussion.  Next month, we will meet again for a writing retreat in which we will delve deeper into these topics and discussions.  If our retreat is anything like our planning meeting (and I know it will be), it’s going to be awesome!

Revisioned Student Blogging

students sharing blog drafts in thier writing group

When I was first presented with the idea of using blogs in the classroom, it was suggested that they be used as a way for students to respond to a question or text and the ideas of others. I set up a classroom blog, had my students use it as a space to respond to a story we read, and quickly decided that I wasn’t impressed.  Physical class discussions elicited greater depth and participation, and besides, online venues such as threaded discussion forums, chat, and microblogging were better digital options for students to interact and share.

Recently, however, something happened that has caused me to rethink the blog and its potential in my classroom.  I started blogging for myself.

I created my own blog where I write about what matters to me, and enter into a conversation with others of the same interest.  I learn from these other bloggers and integrate their ideas into my own, composing my new knowledge in a digital space where writing is no longer constrained to a pencil and daybook, where the world is my audience.  Blogging has taken me to a new level as a writer.

How I have come to know blogging hardly resembles my initial conception of it, as a teacher-centered space for student response.  Real bloggers are engaged writers because they write about what is important to them, and while in retrospect it may be painfully obvious, this realization helped me understand that any successful experience with student blogging must characterized by student ownership and the opportunity to create meaningful writing.

Empowered by a new-found awareness and identity as a blogger, I decided this year that I would make a second attempt at using blogs in my classroom.   Fortunately, I knew just the place to start.  This year, like in years past, my students were writing in the context of our writing workshop, where they created, developed, and shared writing pieces of their choice.  After a couple months, our workshop seemed like it was off to a pretty good start, and not wanting our venture into blogging to distract students from our still fragile writing-focused environment, I kept the first steps of our journey simple.  We would use blogs simply as spaces to publish the writing composed in writing workshop.

During class time that we devoted to writing workshop, I made sure to have computers on hand so that students could write their final drafts to their blog when they were ready.  Every two or three weeks students would publish a new piece to their blogs and also take time in class to read and post comments on the published posts of their classmates.  The process was fairly simple and on the surface wasn’t much different than how we did things before blogs.  What happened after we began these digital sharing sessions, though, was pretty exciting.

I noticed it on our first commenting day when a student turned around and told her friend about a post she read that was really good.  After she made this comment, I noticed that every student within earshot was reading the piece the student mentioned.  By the time I got to my computer and read it, seven students had posted comments.  By the time the author arrived to my class (the last of the day), 25 comments had been posted on it.  She came in the next day with the sequel to that post in hand, and her enthusiasm for writing has only grown since.  And she was just the first.

As we continued to blog, so did this trend of students talking during class and in the hall about student writing.  Students gained reputations for their writing and began to identify themselves as writers.  They stated thinking like writers, too, borrowing ideas from the posts of others and viewing the events that unfolded in their lives and in the world as new topics to write about.  They jotted down notes in their daybooks and freewrote with purpose. Revision was taken seriously, and proofreading gained a new significance.

In years past, I’ve observed my students growing in such ways as writers over the course of the year through writer’s workshop,  but the scale at which this growth took place this year was unlike anything I had seen before, and I’m confident that blogging had a lot to do with it.  Sure, I am a better teacher of writing this year thanks to participating in SI last summer (shout out UNCC Writing Project!), and without question my students’ experience would not have been near as powerful it were not for my improved practice.   That being said, writing as bloggers afforded my students opportunities not available to writers in physical spaces alone.

Blogging gave students a chance to do more than tack their final drafts to the classroom wall.  It broke down these walls, and entered students into a new type of writing community, one where their words could be read by anyone at any time, where their ideas were widely received and could be disseminated instantly, and most importantly, one where they were able to feel that writing about what mattered, mattered.

*Want to know more about our blogging journey,  including how it was organized, how it evolved, how it incorporated digital storytelling, as well as links to student posts and digital resources? Check out the extended version of this piece that I posted on my blog on my here.  You may also be interested in my post, Writing into the Student Blogging Challenge, which explains how we approached connecting with student bloggers around the world through a global blogging event.

UNCC WP Blogging Out

As I have been thinking about how blogging is becoming part of the culture of this year’s Summer Institute, it occurred to me that this could really permeate our Writing Project site more fully, too.   I have been fiddling, sort of unhappily, with our current UNCC WP newsletter in Word for a couple of weeks.  I keep trying new templates, searching the web for a better pdf viewer, and changing fonts.  The content writers and their pieces are so interesting that the flat newsletter page just hasn’t felt like the right mode for delivering these stories to readers.

It hit me on the head like a pound of unread drafts that our webspace has a blog feature!  All this great content can go out to people in the way that folks are actually getting their information now: over Twitter, Facebook and maybe an RSS feed or two.  This is the medium that our TCs’ stories need to find readership! Blog world, here comes the UNCC WP!!