Blog Juice for Educational Technology

Writely is a free online service that bills itself as a “web word processor” with “Simple & SECURE web
document sharing.” Once a user has registered for an account, she can create word processing documents using the online WYSIWYG interface. Those documents can be published to a blog via the blog API. The system tracks revisions, and documents can be shared with selected collaborators.

NCETC with Governor Angus King
9:15 AM
I sitting in the keynote address, being delivered momentarily by Governor Angus King, the former governor of Maine, and chief evangelist if not architect of that states 1:1 initiative.
Right now, Gwen Varsamis, the director of the conference is making introductions. I’ll be posting updates to this entry as I […]

A communications expert plugs the Web mammoth’s Library Project into his search algorithm, and fear and doubt are his top two results. By Siva Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University. (The Chronicle, subscription required)…

ST. HELENS, Oregon As a first-year teacher assigned to teach writing to seventh-graders in this small working-class community, Danielle Speiser faces a long list of daily challenges.

Yesterday was a very good day. I taught An Educator’s Guide to Blogging and An Educator’s Guide to Podcasting. The podcasting session was a little tough because OurMedia seemed to be experiencing some load problems. I suspect that I’m going to, at some point spring for a commercial host for my podcasts, […]

Macs and the iLife suite are inspiring children across the UK, particularly at Mill Hill comprehensive in Derbyshire. The school is one of the largest dedicated Apple-using schools in the UK, according to The Guardian. It’s a media college which focuses

Far into the future, students will simply beam their projects through infrared rays to classmates and teachers. Using wireless, palm-sized computers, they’ll edit each others’ work as they write it, conduct experiments and simultaneously explore the Inter

The question on the big white screen is a controversial one: Should a physician who assists a patient in suicide be convicted of murder? Everyone in this freshman seminar class at the University of Missouri-Kansas City is expected to respond to the questi

I opened my inbox this morning to discover an e-mail from AOL saying that my mail was undeliverable. While I don’t use AOL as my e-mail provider, there are a few AOL users that have subscribed to the site. I thought at first that perhaps their mailboxes were full, or some server issues had arisen. […]

What will the student computing environment be like a few years hence? That is the subject of this post.
Let me begin with the following. My campus currently does not have a computer ownership requirement. There are a couple of professional programs, …

A typical night at the Richardson house is now punctuated by a conversation that goes something like this:

Tucker: (Screaming) Hey, DAAAAAAD!
Me: (Running in from the other end of the house thinking something is broken) “What????”
Tucker: “Can I blog?”
Me: (Trying to go from fright to calm and supportive) “Um, sure.” (Deep breath.) “That’s fine.”
Tucker: “Can you help me?”
Me: “C’mon Tuck, you know how to do it by now. You’ve got like 200 posts on your blog.”
Tucker: (Wide-eyed) “REALLY?!?”
Me: “Well, um, no. Not really. But at least 12.”
Tucker: “Coooool!” (Does awkward break dance thing he learned at break dance class last week.) “Can you at least help me login?”
Me: “Sure. Go to Blogger.com.”
Tucker: “Oh yeah, right.” (Short pause.) “How do you spell ‘Blogger’?”
Me: “Sound it out. You can do it.” (Add supportive facial expressions) “Bl…Bl…”
Tucker: “B?” (I nod.) “B…Bl…L?” (I nod again.) “Bl…Bl…Blo… W?”
Me: “What?!? W?”
Tucker: (Eyes wide) “A?”
Me: “You’re guessing. Sound it out.”
Tucker: Bl…Blah… O?”
Me: “Yep.” (Five minutes of this ensues)
Tucker: “Ok. What do I write about?”
Me: What do you want to write about?”
Tucker: “Aliens!”
Me: “Great. Write about aliens!”
Tucker: “How do you spell it?”
Me: (Trying not to frown.) “Tuck…you can do this. Sound it out.”
Tucker: “A?” (I nod) “A…Al… L?” (I smile.) “Al… E?” (Oy)

Get the idea? Thirty words in 45 minutes. But he’s blogging, by golly.

Teaching 1.0–information retrieval
Teaching 2.0–information creation

Hmmm…

So with some pointers from Barbara Ganley, I’ve been doing some reading on hypertext theory and over the past couple of days have immersed myself in Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print. The second edition came out in 2001, just before the blog explosion, but the table is clearly set by what he’s writing. This is probably the first of a couple “capture the main ideas” type posts about the reading.

We’re in “the late age of print” which captures the feeling I have about paper texts so well. Bolter says that the possibilities for print have pretty much been played out (2) and that “Digital media are refashioning the printed book” (3). Inherent in this discussion is the idea, I think, that hypertext is forcing us to shift our thinking as to the value of print.

In the late age of print, however, we seem more impressed by the impermanence and changeability of text, and digital technology seems to reduce the distance between author and reader by turning the reader into an author herself. Such tensions between monumentality and changeability and between the tendency to magnify the author and to empower the reader have already become a part of our current economy of writing (4). [Emphasis mine.]

Echoes of Jay Rosen, no doubt. And echoes of the connective reading that we must do when we are “empowered” by the ability to enter space with the author. As we read, we connect to ideas and personal knowledge with the intent to respond, not simply to passively, internally grapple with the meaning. Bolton connects this to Plato’s Dialogues which “invite the reader to participate in a conversation and then denies him or her full participation” (104). Not so any more.

What I’ve found especially interesting is how he discusses the network necessary for electronic writing.

If linear and hierarchical structures dominate current writing, our cultural construction of electronic writing is now adding a third: the network as a visible and operative structure. The network as an organizing principle has been present in many forms of writing; indeed Homeric oral poetry shows that the network is older than writing itself…After the invention of writing in the ancient world, it became the writer’s task to establish his own network comprised of references and allusions within the text and connected to the larger network formed by other texts in the culture. From that time until the advent of electronic writing, the referential network has often existed “between the lines” of text—that is, in the minds of readers and writers. Now, however, the network can rise to the surface of the text (106).

Digital technologies call into question the traditional treatise in which the writer assumes control over the argument. And this is the way we teach exposition today, without ever thinking that what is written may be connected to other ideas or interpretations.

Why should a writer be forced to produce a single, linear argument or an exclusive analysis of cause and effect when the writing space allows a writer to entertain and present several lines of thought at once? (107)

What a concept. This idea that a text speaks with a singular voice does not as easily stand in these new writing environments:

Publishing is fundamentally serious and permanent; a scholar or scientist cannot even retract his own previously published argument without embarrassment. A dialogue, on the other hand, speaks with more than one voice and therefore shares or postpones responsibility. A hypertextual essay in the computer could in fact be fashioned as a dialogue between the writer and her readers, and the reader could be asked to share the responsibility for the outcome. [Emphasis mine.]

Really good stuff, much of which seems to validate the shift in thinking that we’re going to have to complete in order to fully prepare our kids for what’s out there. That’s not to say that we don’t continue to teach linear forms of writing as well. But we have to begin introducing the idea of transactional writing, of writing in and for networked audiences that are invited into the conversation. The more they understand that writing is a part of a process of learning and not just a product of it, the better off they will be.