And now, three years later, the research is done, and I am very happy to report that I have successfully defended my PhD thesis. It was a fascinating journey. I learned a lot about writing in online environments, about student interactions online, and about fostering student engagement in online spaces. However, one of the most personally relevant findings of my research was the impact that it had on me – the teacher-researcher.

During my defense, I focused on all the key findings of my research, but paid particular attention to my conclusions on teacher professional development. My research taught me a lot about the role of the teacher in an online class community of writers. At my defense, I used this painting by Caravaggio, the Italian Baroque master, to elaborate on what my research findings suggest about teacher professional development:

Caravaggio, The Taking of Christ

Before I explain why I chose this painting, let me first elaborate on Caravaggio as he himself is an important figure to consider, an important role model for 21st century teachers. Caravaggio’s work was revolutionary. He was an innovator in his time who rejected established conventions. Instead of painting epic scenes with masses of people and religious symbolism (as was the established norm), he chose to focus on the personal struggles and experiences of his subjects. He chose to highlight the individual. The subjects he chose were mere mortals, representatives of the working class – the poor, humble, ordinary people of his time. The faith he depicted in his work was the faith of the simple, uneducated masses, not the faith of the grand Biblical narratives. Caravaggio focused on what he saw around him. His paintings feature wrinkled, aged faces, torn clothing, and unadorned, simple, often neglected interiors. Truth, in other words, truth as he saw it around him on a daily basis, was more important to him than conventions.

So, what does all of this have to do with teaching in the 21st century?

That painting by Caravaggio has became for me a metaphor that I like to use to explain the role of the teacher in a blogging community. Since I’m using it as a metaphor, I am interested only in its visual appeal – the placing of the subjects, the light that penetrates the scene, and the fact that the man carrying the lantern on the right side of the painting, the one who looks with interest over the heads of the two Roman soldiers, has been identified as Caravaggio’s self-portrait. (Caravaggio is well-known for inserting his self-portrait, inserting himself, so to speak, into his paintings.). I believe that, much like Caravaggio in this painting, a teacher in a blogging community should enter the context that gives rise to his or her work. Caravaggio portrays himself as one of the characters. He becomes implicated in his painting. He is both subject and artist … and that is why I think this painting is so relevant to my research and can help convey the redefined character of teacher presence in online communities. It makes visible some key implications of my study in the field of teacher professional development.

What this painting says to me is that we can gain a better understanding of our classrooms-as-communities if we immerse ourselves in them. In the manner of Caravaggio, teachers should weave their readerly, personal voices into the fabric of classrooms-as-communities. What my experiences illustrate, and what the painting metaphorically emphasizes, is that teacher professional development in the 21st century requires that we look closely at how to most effectively embed ourselves in our practice and in the experiences and interactions of our students. Professional development in the networked world requires that we look closely not only at what we do as educators but also at how we are embedded in educational contexts. Much like Caravaggio, we have to narrate ourselves into existence through participation in our classrooms in a way that is non-authoritarian, readerly, and conversational.

Much like Caravaggio in this painting, we need to be present in our classrooms as providers of light. Our guidance is needed and important. But, too often, our guidance becomes authoritarian and fails to take into account the voices of our students. We don’t often peer questioningly over the shoulders of our students. Instead, we impose the content and pre-define the learning trajectories for our students. Why don’t we take the time to just listen and observe once in a while? Those of us who give our students the freedom to define themselves through their work in classroom communities know how much we can learn by listening and observing. We should not be afraid to step down from behind the lectern and move to the edge of the community, where we can redefine our presence as that of a participant, as one of the voices, not as the voice that dominates, demands, and evaluates. What Caravaggio’s painting reminds me of is that I can be just as helpful as a facilitator if I engage from the sidelines and do not dominate the community as its focal point. Let student voices remain in the centre, let them be the focal point of the community where they interact, engage, and learn.

This reconfigured approach requires a difficult shift in our understanding of classroom practice. It requires that we accept a new dethroned position and become embedded practitioners – embedded in the classroom interactions as readers and participants, not evaluators and overseers.

That brings me to another important point: What’s Next?

My research has led me to some important and timely questions about teacher professional development – questions that I hope to be able to work on in the near future:

1. How do we prepare teachers to teach 21st century learners whose lives are based on rich interactions in multiple online environments?
2. How do we help new teachers move away from what Marshall McLuhan once called the “imposing of stencils” and adopt a practice of probing and exploration?
3. How do we help new teachers acquire the courage to transform their classrooms into communities of learners and transform themselves into participants who can embed themselves in those communities?

My study and experience provide some answers, some of which I addressed on this blog in the past, but they are just starting points that will need further attention and elaboration. I believe that this process begins with opening ourselves up to the language of possibility and recognizing teachers whose work in the classroom can help us redefine not only our own classroom presence but also our notions of professional development. We need what Paulo Freire calls “curiosity as endless questioning.” He describes it as

movement toward the revelation of something that is hidden, as a question verbalized or not, as search for clarity, as a moment of attention, suggestion, and vigilance … there could be no creativity without the curiosity that moves us and sets us patiently impatient before a world that we did not make, to add to it something of our own making (Freire, 1998, pp.37-38).

In other words,

[...] there is no such thing as teaching without research and research without teaching. One inhabits the body of the other. As I teach, I continue to search and re-search. I teach because I search, because I question, and because I submit myself to questioning. I research because I notice things, take cognizance of them. And in so doing, I intervene. And intervening, I educate and educate myself. I do research so as to know what I do not yet know and to communicate and proclaim what I discover (Freire, 1998, pp.35).

Coda

Recently, Al Upton, an award-winning teacher from Adelaide, Australia whose work I’ve admired for a very long time, was forced to close his classroom community that has proven over the years to be of immense benefit to his students. He was forced to disable the classroom community by the Department of Education and Children’s Services in South Australia despite the fact that he used it to teach his students about online safety and received parental permission to carry out his project. The Department of Education is worried that some material on his class blog may put the students at risk of being identified by outsiders.

Al and I never met and we never corresponded, but I’ve been following his work for years and have always found it innovative and inspiring. In my opinion, Al is an embedded practitioner, someone who listens, observes, and is constantly searching for and researching new ways to improve himself and bring greater educational value to his classroom practice. I hope that he will soon regain his freedom to bring the world into his classroom and the classroom out into the world.

Works Cited:

Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom. Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Rowman & Littlefield, New York.

But there is another group that also deserves to be recognized here – my students. Over the past three years, I have introduced three different grade eight classes to blogging. I cannot say that every single student enjoyed blogging, I cannot even say that every single one of them benefited from this innovative and unique approach. One thing, however, that I can state with certainty is that every single grade eight student who entered my classroom in the past three years has taught me one very important thing about both myself and teaching – the best teachers never stop learning.

This past year – the final year of my doctoral research – has been especially illuminating. It helped put into perspective some of the findings that I collected in the first year of my study. It was a time of reflection and a time of looking forward, a time when many of my initial observations in the grade eight blogosphere led to some important realizations, realizations that have completely transformed who I am as a teacher. Some of these moments of epiphany are documented here on this blog. This is one of them, and this one, which took months to develop and is especially valuable because it emerged from my own often uncertain practice, is nominated for the 2007 EduBlog Award in the Most Influential Post category. The fact that the ideas in this entry, although seemingly simple, took months to develop makes this nomination especially meaningful.

It is also a great honour to be in the same category with some of the entries that I have printed out after the first reading and gone back to on a number of occasions because they seemed to open yet another door, because they challenged and inspired me. These include:

Ben Wilkoff’s The Ripe Environment
Karl Fisch’s Is it Okay to be a Technologically Illiterate Teacher?
Kris Bradburn’s How to Prevent Another Leonardo DaVinci

I am also honoured to be in the company of the following inspiring educators:

Clay Burrell
Vicki Davis
Graham Wegner

who, along with me, have been nominated in the Best Teacher Blog category. Their work has often made me ask that crucial question: “And what am I doing that’s making a difference?” It’s important to have people like that in one’s RSS reader. Thank you for sharing your work!

As a relatively new resident of Second Life, I would also like to mention two people whose help and guidance have been invaluable in my journey as a Second Life resident, user, and researcher. Sean FitzGerald and Jo Kay have been nominated in the Best Educational Use of a Virtual World category. Jo’s Second Life island, jokaydia, has already been host to a number of meaningful educational events (and will also host the 2007 EduBlog Award Ceremony!). Jo and Sean’s Second Life in Education Wiki is a rich and indispensable resource for any educator interested in exploring Second Life. It is great to see that their work has been recognized.

This year’s EduBlog awards have also made me aware of new voices from many different categories whose work has already been added to my RSS reader.

It’s an honour to be in the company of educators who continue to reflect and grow. Let’s keep in mind, however, that the nominees in this year’s EduBlog Awards are just a small sampling of all the valuable blogs, wikis, and other resources that we continue to both produce and rely on as educators trying to make meaning of learning in the 21st century.

The title of my presentation comes from a concept devised by an American urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg. My research on his work led me to an organization called Project for Public Spaces, a non-profit organization dedicated to creating public spaces and communities. Their diagram of the key attributes of great public spaces inspired me to try to relate their work to my experiences online.

Over the years, I have noticed that the online community that I build with my grade eight students every year often resembles a third place. I decided to investigate what contributes to this recurring development. I discovered that starting with the right foundations, ensuring that certain features and freedoms are in place before learning begins, can have a strong impact on the development of a classroom community and its potential movement away from what Oldenburg calls “second place” (a place of work) and towards a third place – an informal meeting place that can facilitate and support creative interaction.

This presentation is my attempt to explain how the right foundations can contribute to the emergence of a community that displays at least some characteristics of a third place.

(If you’re interested in the concept of third places, I highly recommend Teemu Arina’s presentation, Serendipity 2.0: Missing Third Places of Learning.)

Before the end of the year and the madness that comes with the final exams, in an effort to counteract this focus on grades, I encouraged my students to reflect on their independent research projects that they have been documenting on their blogs. Many of them took up the challenge and gave me an interesting glimpse into their learning.

Sooooooooooooooooo What?

This is unfortunately my final and last post. This is my so what. From my research, I have learned many things. First of all I have learned that children all around are suffering constantly and Canada is not involved in the coalition to prevent child soldiers. I have learned that the training is cruel and intolerable, an experience no child should go through. They are punished for expressing any fear or sincerity, tear shed will only cause blood shed. Overall I would like to continue researching this topic but due to the lack of time I cannot. I hoped I achieved my goal which was to raise awareness about this topic among my classmates. Hope you enjoyed following my topic. (Italics mine)

This is what happens when we compartmentalize learning into neat chunks. There’s nothing that’s stopping Chloe from continuing her research. I can make sure that she has access to her blog for as long as she needs to. She can also transfer her entries to a Blogger blog, for example, and continue her efforts there. Unfortunately, the one thing that school taught her very well is that learning ends in June, that it is organized into neat units, and that weeks and months of learning can be reduced to a single test or exam.

On Sunday, June 3, 2007, Michael wrote a reflection on his research on genocide and, specifically, the situation in Darfur.

When will we ever learn?

What have we learned now about genocide now? After all the things that have happened with genocide to people over the years all the death, people always forget the results of genocide. We have learned nothing. If we had this would not have happened in Darfur. This genocide has been started by: president Bashir, vice-president Taha, and security chief Gosh. These men are from the Sudanese government. They are supporting the janjaweed militia while lying about doing so. It is a massacre/genocide on all of the non-Baggra population. The Sudanese government is making sure no one finds out anymore and is trying to kill all witnesses of these things. Now this is agreed upon by everyone that this is a genocide. When the United Nations try to help the Sudanese government attacks them. What has begun at just Darfur is now beginning to spread all the way to Chad and Central Africa. This is a current situation that has already had a major effect on people in that area, already 450 000 are dead from violence and disease. This genocide is currently not very big and has not killed huge amount of people yet, but it is growing. Soon it will grow larger if it is not stopped soon. We must stand up and stop the wrongs happening in Sudan.

Both of the above entries show, in my opinion, that these two students engaged as learners. They researched topics that they were passionate about and they have both become experts. They certainly know more about their respective topics than I do. They have created on their blogs a cognitive trail of their efforts. They have created learning objects that I, their teacher, can now learn from and perhaps even use next year when discussing these topics in my class with another group of students.

Of course, I knew about child soldiers and the situation in Darfur – not to mention some of the other topics that my children explored this past year – before the research projects started. But through these blogs, through their research, I have learned more. I have also become engaged not as a teacher who needs to know what the students are doing in order to assess and evaluate, but as a human being whose thirst for knowledge was satiated by a group of fourteen-year-olds who set a goal for themselves – a goal of exploring issues they found relevant and interesting.

The fact that their goals were their own made a big difference.

Their work also made me realize that I can measure their success not only by how much they have learned individually but also by how much they have learned from each other and by how much they have taught me.

Here are some topics that they explored on their blogs:

Child soldiers

Darfur

Genocide

Children’s Rights

Current Human Rights Abuses

Nazi Human Experimentation

Anne Frank

War Diaries as a Literary Genre

Street Children Around the World

Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide

Domestic Abuse

Women and Children in the Holocaust

Fascism in Italy

The Warsaw Uprising

The Internment of the Japanese Canadians and Americans

Freedom of Expression Violations

Nazi Propaganda

This past year, through the research that they have been documenting on their blogs, my students expanded my understanding of all of the above issues. They have found many links that I eagerly added to my delicious account. They have expressed views that I had not come across before. They started multiple conversations and expressed themselves in what Darren Kuropatwa calls “galleries of thought.” They engaged as researchers interested in expanding their knowledge.

Too bad June had to put an end to that.

I want my students to realize that learning is not about making your work conform to some standard imposed by the teacher. Learning is about creating your own standards and adjusting them based on your goals. Learning is about setting your own goals and monitoring your own progress. It is about having conversations with yourself and others.

My students have been very productive in the last couple of weeks and many of them seemed to have grasped the fact that learning is about conversations. Their Personal Progress Reports indicate that they have been reading other blogs and engaging in research that is personally relevant. Their words suggest that they have found topics that they are truly interested in exploring. They are developing their ideas and plans for further research.

My biggest challenge at this point is evaluation. Clay Burrell is right when he suggests in his comment that blogging and grading don’t mix well. I agree. Nevertheless, as Clay observes, the students are “as addicted to being traditional students as we are to being traditional teachers.” They are waiting for grades. They want to know what their work is worth. They have been trained, unfortunately, to equate learning with a letter or a percentage. It’s not learning, in their view, it’s not school, unless there’s a grade attached.

So, how do I make them see that their ability to direct their own learning and engage in conversations with their peers is much more important than a formal grade?

Before I proceed, I should explain that my grade eight students are currently engaged in personal research projects on human rights and social justice. This project emerged from our literature units: we’ve read Animal Farm, and The Diary of a Young Girl. These two texts and their historical background helped us define a context within which the students are now operating as independent researchers. In other words, I gave them complete freedom to research any topic that fits into the context defined for us by the two texts and their inherent themes. The students are researching concentration camps, the Holocaust, child soldiers, euthanasia, current human rights abuses, the Rwandan genocide, the current situation in the Darfur region, children’s rights, human trafficking, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Nazi propaganda posters and films, Fascism in Italy, war literature, Holocaust poetry, and many other topics.

Their first step involved locating appropriate resources and collecting information. After a while, the students’ personal voices began to emerge and their personalities and individual interests began to dictate the direction of their research. I did not want to disrupt the process by marking their first entries and giving them a rubric with a grade on it. I believe that the act of assigning a grade is a very conclusive and definitive one. It means that whatever has been accomplished has been deemed to have certain value and that it is time to move on. I did not want my students to see their research as fragmented into a number of separate entries, punctuated by my rubrics and marks. I want them to see their work as one continuous flow, not a series of entries. So, I have refrained from assigning grades. Instead, I used class time to talk to them individually about their work and their ideas. I also commented on their work online. I shared resources, pointed out similarities between seemingly different projects, and did my best to encourage cognitive engagement.

Then, I decided to use Individual Progress Reports to help them keep track of their projects, reflect on the work already completed, and plan future direction of their research. As the progress reports of Alice, Gregory, and Amy clearly show, the Individual Progress Reports worked well. They gave my students an opportunity to think critically about their work. It also gave me an opportunity to have yet another conversation about their work, this time centered around a tangible artifact – their very own progress report.

Then, I realized that the students would also benefit from assigning value to their own work. Of course, the challenge with student self-evaluation is that many, when given an opportunity to give themselves a grade, are often too harsh on themselves. Others, on the other hand, sometimes choose not to take the task seriously and give themselves an A+. I realized that I needed to help them visualize their progress, their level of engagement, and their sense of ownership and not simply ask them to rate their own work using the traditional percentage or letter scale. Most importantly, I wanted them to see that an entry that contains lots of facts and links to many valuable resources is not necessarily as valuable as one that shows personal engagement with ideas, one where the readers can hear a unique, personal voice.

So, I created this Self-Evaluation Sheet to help my students plot their own progress:

So far, this handout has been a valuable tool. It gives my students an opportunity to look at their own work from the point of view of four distinct categories (there are, of course, echoes of Bloom here as well as Anderson and Krathwohl):

The first category, that of Data Gathering, asks them to check whether the key facts and issues pertaining to their independent research projects have been identified and posted: “Have I gathered enough information? Have I stated the facts at the core of my research project?”

Next, they have to ask themselves if their entries show that they have grasped the concepts they’re researching. I refer to this stage as Evidence of Understanding. Have they used their own words to restate or paraphrase the material? Can they explain the key issues in their own words?

The third category pertains to analysis and reflection. In other words, I want the students to ask “So what?” What is the point of all this? What have I learned? What do I think about all the information that I’ve been reading and writing about?

The final category asks the students to think about Evidence of Creativity. I want them to ask themselves, “Have I made a personal and unique contribution as a researcher to the field that I’m exploring?”

Once we discussed the four categories, I asked them to draw a horizontal line inside each vertical arrow to represent their progress within each category: “You can place the line close to “No” if, in your opinion, you still have a lot of work to do in this category. You can draw the line somewhere around or even above “Yes” if you believe that your work already exhibits the attributes of this category. Be sure to place the line where it most accurately describes your progress.”

Once the students started plotting their efforts, many realized that their work has been following a flat line, or even falling:

In some cases, the Self-Evaluation Sheet helped the students realize that they have not posted too many entries that indicated reflection or personal engagement and creativity:

After a number of discussions about this chart, I was delighted to hear some students mention that without high achievement in the first three categories, it would be impossible to reach the top half of the arrow in the final category:

“You really can’t do anything meaningful, like write a really good poem about your topic or do some multimedia stuff unless you’ve done all three first and really well, too.”

“I think I need to go back and reflect on some of my entries. I have too many with just plain facts.”

In other words, they seem to understand the relationship between all three categories and why each successive arrow is taller than the previous one. They understand that collecting information and putting it on their blog is not a challenging task. They understand that an entry that paraphrases information found online is not as interesting and valuable as one that shows the author in the process of analyzing and reflecting on his or her research. Finally, they can see and understand how much effort is needed to produce an entry that makes a personal statement, that constitutes a valuable and unique contribution to the studied field. In other words, they now understand that in order to produce something uniquely their own, they first need to have a solid grasp of all the facts and spend some time reflecting on them and their own thoughts about their research.

The most rewarding part of this experiment was when many students realized that some of their most often read (and commented upon) entries contain all of the first three categories: they contain facts, they paraphrase the information that the students have located, and they also contain a critical analysis and/or a reflection.

Needless to say, this experiment with student self-assessment and personal progress charts is a work in progress. I’m not sure if I’m going in the right direction. I’m not sure if refraining from formal evaluation until the very end of the project and until after the students have had a chance to critically assess and evaluate their own work is the right thing to do. However, so far the response from my students has been encouraging and I can see that the opportunity to plot and assess their progress has been much more valuable to them than a formal grade. If blogging at its best is really a conversation then we as educators are responsible for ensuring that these conversations are not defined by our rubrics but are guided instead by meaningful reflection.

So, while I do post comments, I want them to show that I see the students as independent researchers, as individuals who need to know that their work has value not because it will generate a grade but because it keeps me glued to my laptop screen at 10:30pm on a Tuesday night. I read because I’m learning, not because I have a gradebook to fill.

Needless to say, in order to have these conversations, I needed to abandon my teacherly voice in favour of a more conversational, expressive, and readerly voice of a participant. I think I succeed most of the time but I’m still at a point where I have to carefully analyze my responses to student work before I press that “post comment” button. They still tend to be evaluative, of the “teacher knows best” variety. They still tend to end student engagement. “This deserves a B+,” they seem to say, “now let’s move on to another assignment.”

Recently, I’ve been commenting on the work that my students are doing on human rights. I gave them the freedom to pick any topic within this context and encouraged to find some aspect of it that they want to engage with as researchers. Some are still looking for that perfect fit, but some have already posted a number of entries. I’ve been trying to nurture the voices that I see around me in the class blogosphere by starting and maintaining conversations about student research. Here are some of my attempts:

Dawn,
I am really looking forward to learning more about child soldiers from your research. I’ve always been interested in this topic but never really had the time or the opportunity to do serious research.

The video is excellent – I’m glad that we got YouTube unblocked and that it is possible to post videos on this blog.

What a great way to start your project – with a poem! I think the repetition of this line – “Lies and hatred obscure all truth” – is very effective. This is what the whole problem of child soldiers really boils down to – brainwashing. I’ll be visiting your blog regularly – inspiring stuff!

Then, in response to Dawn’s subsequent entry:

In my comment to your previous entry, I wrote that I was really looking forward to learning more about child soldiers from your research. I feel that I am learning. You are very good at combining facts and statistics with your own personal thoughts. Your writing is personal and informative, thoughtful and engaging.

I find this topic very sad but I am glad that you chose to research this issue. Forcing children to fight in a war and to kill is a reprehensible act. It is wrong on so many levels. Is anything being done to stop it? Have there been any attempts, either in Sierra Leone or other African countries and Western nations, to introduce laws to protect children and punish those who recruit and use them as soldiers? Perhaps the region where this is happening is too unstable to do anything about it. Are any other countries doing anything to stop this?

Also, you should probably take a look at this: Declaration of the Rights of the Child It might be helpful to you in your research.

This probably does not read like anything out of the ordinary but, to me, it represents a long period of learning to engage with students as a learner and a participant and not a teacher who has read it all and knows everything the students can possibly come up with. I’ve had to learn this and it is still a challenge.

It’s a challenge because becoming a participant and divesting myself of that teacherly voice means that I need to gradually move away from formal evaluation. I want to. I am interested in reading my students’ work, sitting down with them individually and talking about their progress. I don’t want to be the only arbiter of their progress. They need to be part of the process too. In fact, since it is their work, they should be given a chance to talk about it, not as an artifact to be evaluated but as evidence of engagement. I want them to ask themselves the following questions:

• What is my goal?
• What have I learned?
• Where do I want to go next?
• Are there any gaps in my knowledge?

Assigning a grade is not going to help them in this process, primarily because grades are final and tend to stop progress. Once we attach them to student work, they indicate what has been accomplished, not what can still be done. They do not measure potential.

So, instead of assigning grades, even progress grades, I want to experiment with my own take on instructional conversations (and here). I’ve devised a Personal Progress Chart (work in progress) that I’ll be testing over the next few weeks.

I want my students to realize that learning is not about making your work conform to some standard imposed by the teacher. Learning is about creating your own standards and adjusting them based on your goals. Learning is about setting your own goals and monitoring your own progress. It is about having conversations with yourself and others. So, instead of imposing, I want to ask: What do you want to accomplish? What do you think is good? What would make you feel proud? I want to promote a process of questioning and I want to do it through dialogue.

If I give my students a list of my own criteria or a rubric then I’m essentially asking them to listen and conform. They may have the freedom to do their own research but if all their work is expected to conform to a rubric imposed by the teacher then they are still just trying to reach some goal that may have very little to do with who they are and what they’re interested in. So, instead of giving my students a list of criteria, I want to talk with them individually and get them to develop their own. I want them to use the progress chart to think about where they are, where they see themselves going, and how they think they can get there. I want them to use this chart to ask themselves questions about their own work and their own work habits. I want to use the chart as an opportunity to talk about their work, one-on-one. I’m tired of having conversations about grades. I want to start talking about ideas that they care about. I’m hoping that this guide will help.

This is, of course, work in progress. Any thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I also had an opportunity to talk to some passionate Ontario edubloggers (thanks, Quentin, for organizing the meeting) and it was collectively decided that we should all have an online presence as Ontario educators interested in researching blogs, wikis, and podcasts in education. Quentin created a community on ELGG and I hope that the community will continue grow. Here’s the link. There’s nothing there yet – we’ re just starting.

Click here to see a photo of our meetup.

I know that blogging will continue to form a significant part of the course. I will incorporate blogs “as key, task driven, elements” of my curriculum. I will once again use blogs to create a community of writers. This year, however, I want my students to engage in more research. This has led to some thoughts about the tools they can use to make their work sharable, visible, and interactive.

First of all, I would like to get students to use TagCloud to create a visual representation of student work (from both individual blogs and as a community). This would be a great introduction to tags and also a wonderful way to show students that writing can be “visible” in a fun, interactive way. I also want my class to use this application to see patterns and trends in their own writing (individual tagclouds) and in collective work produced by all of its members (community tagcloud). I’m hoping that this tool will emphasize the interconnectedness of their work and make it really “visible” to them. (Amazing things happened last year when we looked at some visualizations of writing: here and here).

I’m also thinking of using Furl or another social bookmarking application. What I like about Furl is that it would allow me to comment on individual bookmarks saved by my students and, of course, allow them to construct repositories of materials to be used in projects or their blogs. One of the strengths of this application (and social bookmarking in general) is that the collected information can be easily shared with one’s peers. I want my students to use this tool to not just collect valuable resources but also categorize them and annotate them (using the comments field) before adding to the database. I want them to read/skim the electronic resources they find and then categorize and annotate them based on that first reading of the text. What I am hoping to see is Furl collections driven by genuine interest in a given topic and sharing of resources among students researching similar topics. (Shadows, which I discovered this morning, could also be interesting in getting students to write and exchange comments about online resources).

In short, I am interested in exploring students’ TagClouds, Shadow Pages, or Furl databases as evidence of learning. They can all demonstrate individual engagement with the studied material while being firmly entrenched in and continuously expanded upon by a community of learners.

I still need to think long and hard about the place that these tools will occupy in my classroom. I know that they will have to be, much like blogging itself, driven by student interest. I don’t think I am going to force my students to use these tools. When tools of this sort are embedded well pedagogically into the curriculum, students use them because using them seems natural.

Do not use blogs to replace writing or reader-response journals. If the only goal is to get students to write online what they would otherwise put in their notebooks, it’s probably not worth the hassle. Blogs can do much, much more. Use blogs to enhance personal journals. Take advantage of the community-building potential. Let students work as a group of individual writers.

Do not mark individual entries. Develop a more holistic way of looking at student work.

… and one more thing that (I found) can have a very positive impact:

Use your own blog to comment on what the students are doing. Abstain from evaluative comments. Situate yourself as a participant, a reader – not a teacher – and the class bloggers will flourish.

Why? Well, out of hundreds of texts that we read and analyzed, only one (the novel itself) was brought into the discussion by me. Everything else was contributed by my students. In fact, they have spent so much time researching social justice and human rights and commenting on their research that many of them ended up teaching me. I don’t just mean that some found articles or resources that I have never read or seen. What made a really strong impression on me was how they engaged with what they found and how they used these texts to further their own knowledge. My students found, wrote about, and discussed much more than I could have possibly given them as a teacher – not because I wouldn’t be able to locate these resources myself but simply because coming from the teacher these texts would have been considered “work.” In fact, if I attempted to bring around one hundred texts into the curriculum in addition to the novel study unit, my students would have revolted and I would probably also hear from their parents.

Instead, having a blogging community allowed my students to create a repository of texts and ideas, all centred around the same general topic. No one seemed overwhelmed. No one complained. Students felt compelled to research and write about issues related to the novel that I have chosen for the last term of the year. So, content generation began with me but my contribution of one text blossomed into a community of inquirers and a community of content generating teenagers who did not seem to mind the sheer number of resources they were learning about. What’s more, they kept contributing to this number by creating their own texts, texts that were generated throught their interaction with other texts. Every entry and every comment became a new text. Every entry was a text generated by a learner in the process of enaging with knowledge or with a response of another learner. Soon, their blogs were filled with entries written not only in response to articles they found but also in response to entries written by their peers. I started seeing conversations.

What did I do? I kept reading. When the time finally came to write the final exam, I couldn’t reduce it to a number of inane questions about the novel. Even open-ended questions felt somehow inappropriate. Focusing merely on the novel or even the texts they have found as part of their research would have invalidated their work as a community of bloggers. It would have invalidated their own texts, generated in the process of engaging with ideas, generated through debate. So, I finally decided to ask them what they have learned, not from the novel, not from scholarly publications or newspaper articles but from each other.

Their responses were fascinating. Most made it very clear that what made a big difference was being part of a community. They mentioned names of their classmates and the content they found on their blogs. They talked about ideas that emerged, not ones that have always been there – in an article or a book. In short, their exam was based on content that they themselves have generated. I read every one of their exams completely fascinated and totally engaged. For the first time in years, I sat down to mark their exams not knowing what to expect. When I was done, it was clear that the knowledge they shared on their exam would stay with them, that it was a reflection of individual drives and interests.