I gave a presentation to a class on Wednesday. The class focuses on using electronic texts in First Year Composition. I took the course last spring and it opened my eyes to the things that I could do in my own classes. This was the class that set me on my path to a potential dissertation topic. So, when the current professor of the course asked me to present on blogs in the classroom, I jumped on the chance. Honestly, I did this for three reasons. It gave me a chance to further show off my research to a professor who I want to be on my dissertation committee (she now is). It also gave me the chance to try out some new things in presentations; I got to use a YouTube video in my presentation for the first time. But most importantly, it gave me a chance to present a good idea to a group of new teachers. This last one was the most important.

I spend a lot of time in the office working with our first year teachers and helping them along as a mentor would. I never would have thought of this role developing into anything else when I took on my first mentoring role. But now, I have three teachers who come to me for guidance when they need it (and two more who call from out of state on occasion).

Yesterday, I sat down and had a conversation with these first year teachers. They were all saying the same thing–they loved the presentation, but they still weren’t comfortable using blogs in their classroom. Now, keep in mind that these are the same people who are the core of the technology workshops that I am starting in the office. I reminded them that once we cover blogs, they’ll begin to see how they can use them in their classes. But then I began to listen–really listen–to what they had to say and think about this from a broader perspective.

I know that what I am trying to do with the technology workshops will help the teachers that I work with. I also know that a good number of people are doing the same thing in their own schools and districts. But deep down, my plans for a dissertation have been bothering me over the last few days. I can’t seem to justify to myself what good it will do to write 200 pages on how effective social medias can be when used in the classroom when at least half of my general audience may not know how to use these mediums when they’re through reading the book. If I really want to make a difference in the way that teachers engage their students, I need to make them tech-literate on their own. I cannot expect them to read my work and say “oh, Diigo. I’ll just go sign up and figure it out.” Not all teachers are prepared to just get an account and figure these things out on their own. This is already a question that I can see having to defend in my prospectus defense. Which brings me to my first “dissertation coffee break” as I shall call it.

I want to use these random thoughts to converse with my readers and get feedback on some ideas I’m having for coming up with the ideas that will drive my thinking to a fuller idea for a dissertation. I want to consider not only the use of Web 2.0 and social media in the classroom, but I want to expand that to look at how teachers can be taught to (a) learn to use 2.0 (specifically social medias) in their personal lives (b) use current 2.0 tools in their classroom (c) assess and learn new tools as they become available.

Now, I have a background in literature which I have realized is not as conducive to working with educators as, say a degree in education or curriculum could be. However, I’m relatively good at learning as I go. But I could use some feedback. Since many of you are teachers or work with teachers on a regular basis, take a minute and comment to this post to let me know what the one thing you think a curriculum for teachers should include to help teachers accomplish these goals. What is the one thing you wish somebody had taught you about using these tools.

The good news is, my prospectus is over a year away (I still have coursework to finish and comps to take). So, you have plenty of time to think this through and let me know of good leads that you have along the way. I’m looking for links to sites that help, stories, ideas–anything you’re willing to provide. Also, I’m starting the technology workshops in mid-April, so you’ll be seeing more in-depth ideas on this same topic as we undertake these.

It’s true confession time. I learned about face-book from a soccer player. He couldn’t get off the site long enough to participate in class. MySpace was the same; one of my sorority girls updated her page each day before class. YouTube I attribute to one of my students showing me my first YouTube video after class one day. This is just a sample of the technologies that I’ve used and the students who have introduced me to them. So how can I turn all of these introductions into familiar technologies? Simple. I start with just a couple of steps that are easy to use in any classroom.

Listen

Just a few weeks ago, I was talking to a student about an article I had read. When I remarked that I should have bookmarked it, she replied “Did you tweet it?” My first response was “No.” (I make it a policy not to directly ask my students for these terms because if they ask me to define a term, I tell them to look it up. For me not to do the same is a bit hypocritical.)

Google It

Back in my office a few hours later, I sat down at Google and typed in the question still on my mind. “What is a tweet?” After skimming over a few suggestions, I elected to check Wikipedia. I knew from the sentence that what I was looking for was a verb. So, as I skimmed the explanations on Wikipedia, I found only one verb:

To send a message via Twitter.

I followed the link, skimmed the Twitter information on Wikipedia, and then I did the unthinkable. I signed up.

Use It

Now, it’s easy to find out what your students are talking about with these technologies, but the first step to learning the technologies is to experiment.

So, what happens if you get to the site and you still can’t figure out what’s the attraction to the site. What if you can’t figure out how to navigate the site itself? Then, you have to do take the difficult step.

Talk to Your Students

Remember, students know things that we don’t. They have their finger on the pulse of Web 2.0. If we’re learning about the existence of the technologies from students then they are obviously using these technologies? Why not give the students the chance to teach us something?

So why am I advocating eavesdropping on students to find out about technologies? It’s simple. As teacher’s we’re automatically slightly out of the loop with Web 2.0. We come home at night and we do “adult” things (cooking, grading papers, reading books). But most of our students get online after dinner and homework. Why? To tinker with their social networks and their web pages. Just as we were the pioneers of the Internet, our students are the pioneers on the Internet. If we cannot admit that our students know something that we don’t, what kind of teachers are we?

I remember being in high school and teaching my English teacher how to do something to her VCR. It was a very satisfying moment for me; I taught the teacher something. But even more gratifying was when she came back to the school the following week and thanked me. I had taught her how to do it right. The best teachers I had growing up were those who allowed there to be a give and take between their knowledge and that of their students. The worst teachers? Those who assumed they knew it all. To truly become the technology savvy teachers that we wish to become, we have to talk to our students. We have to learn what is important to them outside of the classroom. Then, we have to figure out which of the technologies they are using can be incorporated into the classroom. Not all of the technologies they play with are appropriate in the classroom. But if we don’t use the ones that are appropriate, then we lose a chance to engage students. It only takes one technology to engage one at-risk student and change their mind about staying in school.

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This article is also featured on TheApple; join the conversation in TheApple’s article discussion

In “Does Sense of Community Matter?” the authors explore the idea that a sense of community in online education classes is essential to the improvement of student participation and learning. Looking specifically at an online MBA program from a Midwestern University in which 28 faculty members and 20 students within the program were individually interviewed to determine how various teaching pedagogies and community building activities were carried out by faculty and received by students. The authors determined that though a sense of community created a stronger sense of learning among the students, a sense of community is not requisite to the students’ belief that they learn in the online environment. Xiaojing, Magjuka, Bonk and Lee address this study to active distance education faculty in order to aid in their comprehension of the necessity of community construction in their online classes. The purpose of the article is to present the fact that while communities may make students feel more comfortable with the online learning environment, they are not essential to furthering the education of students enrolled in a distance learning course.

“New Research Literacies for Contemporary Research into Literacy and New Media?” raises several questions important both to Nixon and the researchers looking into the literacies that surround various medias new to exploration. Nixon argues that with the controversy surrounding the term “literacy” and the use of new medias to gain literacy,scholars must not forfeit the traditional, socially respected literacies, but use these literacies as a basis for beginning research into new medias. Arguing that new medias are as important as the old medias of literacy learning, Nixon demonstrates the need for researchers to begin with the standards of old literacy learning and to build upon these methods by setting standards for their research that can transcend the new medias, thus aiding in these standards becoming more socially acceptable. Nixon’s article, with its detailed scholarship review, is aimed at new researchers in the literacy field who must begin their research by comprehending the research of the old literacies before beginning work in the new medias with haphazardly created standards. Her purpose in this article is two-fold; she strives to prepare researchers for the obstacles apparent in new media literacy while also providing valuable information about old literacies to aid in the new researcher’s developing a stronger ethos.

In “Measuring the Acquisition of Media-Literacy Skills” (2003), Hobbs and Frost explore the acquisition of media-literacy skills in a yearlong high school English course and demonstrate how this class improved the literacy of the students. Examining one specific media enhanced English course, Hobbs and Frost look at media-literacy acquisition in the areas of message analysis and purpose combined with reading and writing skills to determine the success of students from various social classes working in the same classroom. Hobbs and Frost present this information to teachers of all grades and disciplines as information presented by research professors distanced from the study in order to show an unbiased evaluation of media usage in the classroom. Hobbs and Frost’s article encourages readers to incorporate media material into their classrooms to aid students in meeting academic goals.

Hobbs and Frost demonstrate an effective study in their work. As distanced observers from the students participating in the study, they allow the reader to put more merit to their study. Overall, the study is effective and supports the argument that media literacies should be used more in the classroom However, this article does not aid in my research for the specific reason that I am not focusing on the classroom itself, but on media acquisition outside of the classroom. Since the methodology of the study involves using live participants, which is not a portion of my research, the article is not useful to my study.

In “Online Literacies and Learning,” Robin Goodfellow argues that online environments provide immense ways of improving the social literacies of todays students and examines a manner of research which explores the variation in relationships between teacher and student both online and face to face. Using the three dimensional theory of Lankshear,Snyder and Green Goodfellow examines the potential of this method of social learning research in relation to potential pedagogy and uses this method to examines two situations where social learning has been practiced. Goodfellow demonstrates the advantages of social learning as it relates to her fellow teachers and puts forth methods of research that benefit this audience in comprehending the benefits of social learning. Goodfellow’s purpose in writing this article is to motivate peers to begin exploring social learning online and to incorporate the usage of this medium of education into their pedagogy.

Goodfellow’s study exemplifies the benefits of social learning in a strictly academic setting, and much of what she examines in her article pertains to non-academic settings as well. Her examination of the three dimensional study and links to other methodologies aids the researcher in understanding how these methods may be combined and used to examine any social network regardless of its discipline. For the work I am doing with wedding planning message boards, the theories that Goodfellow examines can easily be seen as a base method for engaging in research in this area.

In “Threaded Discussion on the Internet and in the Classroom, Erik Simpson explores the reason behind a lack of student participation in threaded discussions required for their classes. Simpson posits that the reason for this student apathy emerges from the structure required within class message boards that force students to focus on a specific topic for only a specific amount of time. In the article, written by a college English instructor for other English instructors, Simpson attempts to explain the phenomenon of minimal participation and provide a means of improving this participation. To aid teachers in creating more active discussion threads, Simpson demonstrates that allowing students more flexibility in their posting by mimicking the open forum of online discussions provides better responses.

Though Simpson’s article is intriguing and posits an important point in the development of classroom skills, this study does not correlate to my research in any fashion. Working with message boards is a similar concept to what he discusses in the article, but these boards are not terminal, so the work in Simpson’s article does not advance my scholarship.

After reading your paper I’ve decided to make more use of blogs in my face to face advanced writing class in the fall. One problem with such set-ups, though, is that the class contributions and documents are all public. How do you contend with that?

Now, I wasn’t just gloating over the fact that I’ve influenced a professor (and me, a lowly PhD student). I was also gloating over the fact that I had an answer and had already been contemplating addressing this issue in a paper/presentation that I want to get a jump start on. Damn, I’m good! Look for more on this current question as time progresses.

When Jerome Mc Gann wrote that scholars no longer need to be limited to using “books to study books” he was already ahead of his time. As scholars, we now have access to materials that could often only be obtained in the past with a lengthy sabbatical, passport, and our life savings. Okay, so that is the worst case scenario, but the best case would have been a sympathetic librarian in charge of interlibrary loan. Today, we can access a majority of the material we need for research online: many books have been created in e-text format, journal articles can be accessed through online archives, and many other resources are available through similar resources. In addition, scholars now have the ability to publish their own webpages allowing scholars more resources for finding exactly what we need. No longer do we need to rely soley on a musty, moth-eaten copy of a book that may or may not be found in its place in the library stacks. We’ve come a long way, baby!

But I don’t think we’ve come to the end of the road. With the more recent emergence of wikis and collaborative websites, I think we will be able to see more of a dialogue between scholars than we have in the past. This will ultimately lead to more timely dialogues; no longer will we need to wait months (or years) for a scholar’s rebuttal to an article to appear, we’ll be able to access it as soon as it’s available. When we want to examine draft changes within a text, we’ll be able to access various versions of the text through PDF or GIF files from our desktop. While this feature is already available for authors of incredible notoriety who lived centuries ago, we’ll be able to see more current authors. For example, if a student was working on a paper based on J.K. Rowling’s novels, there would be more of a chance that Rowling had made these changes available online.

Another advantage we have that continues to grow is the ability to contact the author via email. In the past, this has been an availability since the beginning of email. However, authors are becoming more receptive to speaking via email with an individual working with their text. (I support this fact with the recent comments made on my student blogs by the author of one of the articles they are currently blogging on.) Now, authors have the ability to Google themselves, see what is being written on their work and reply as they see fit. This has the potential to lead to diret dialogue between author and scholar, between writer and student.

For teachers, this ability to present such broad means of readily available research to students provides us with a chance to expand their horizons while also teaching them about the importance of judging what they read or hear so that it meets or exceeds their own standards. In addition, as teachers, we can require more sophisticated research and refuse to accept the highly popular “they didn’t have a book on that in the library.” At the same time, if we are receptive to the “tools” of our students’ world, we will be able to enhance the tools of our own scholarship.