Take a look at the following article:

http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/Americas/2009/June/The-Internet–A-Boon-to-Writing–or-the-Beginning-of-the-End.html

Even with the growing pains associated with such a change to the program, it’s been exciting, and I plan to continue next school year. I strongly believe that students first and foremost dictate the curriculum, and I feel I’d be doing a disservice to my students if I didn’t introduce these technologies into the classroom. We still do traditional in class critiques, but by using Flickr and blogging, I can tackle literacy from another angle while also differentiating instruction at the same time.

To make a long story short, I wanted to start by measuring three very easily obtained quantitative variables. I looked for differences in word count, readability, and performance on a subsequent objective exam. Half of the students wrote a traditional unit summary prior to the exam and turned the attached MS Word document directly to me only via email (largely analogous to printing and putting on the teacher’s desk.”)

The other half of the students wrote their summary to be uploaded to a class blog on the Ning platform and were allowed to use any of the features accessible by this method.

In short? => student scores on the exam were statistically the same across the board. At first, this wasn’t a big thrill to me, but when I then realized that the students writing in online spaces wrote far fewer words, I was intrigued. We’re talking an average of 1/3 fewer words. It seemed that we showed a quick glimpse of one of the features of online writing… students tend to be more efficient summarizers given the connective nature of this writing.

Less volume… same scores (a terrible measure of writing in my opinion, but what makes so many folks pay attention). To me it looks like writing in online venues to a wider audience might tend to lean students toward solid summary and succinct communication. I plan to do much more work next year along these lines. What do you see in this data?

Sean

It’s tough to get past scripted curricula, and yes, even Writer’s Workshop. It’s so 20th century There are not many voices willing to question these standard approaches – so I really appreciated your post.

I’ve presented with the amazing Don Leu, and I’m puzzled that his voice and his ideas are not more widely heard.

And thanks for the Yancey essay – it is very much where I’m looking right now.

The reason I decided to comment was because I just read the latest from danah boyd, who writes about retweeting – front and center now because of the unrest in Iran. The draft paper is fascinating, looking at writing as conversation, studying the syntax of that conversation, examining the social implications, looking at authorship and attribution issues… so many things we should be helping our kids with….

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/06/18/understanding_r.html

“I have had to research other people before. It has always felt like “flat, factual” research. In this case, I feel like I have met a new person.”

That is powerful.

@Will I too love that quotation from Leu. Our students want to PARTICIPATE. And the reading to write and writing to read cycle shows active engagement. I’ve been working with 20 summer school students for just two days…and I am realizing more and more that they’ve been put to sleep for years in school. Your comment “we can no longer look at publishing as the final step in the process but see it instead as somewhere in the middle” is spot-on. Why does everything have to be a final product–mediocre at best?

I have more questions than answers, and plenty of pilots. The questions revolve around: What is the role of the individual research paper? How can we lever that up to a collaborative, connective reading/writing experience? How do we balance the writing prep for college (argh) with the prep for for how we live? (All factors when you work for a college prep indep school.And hated to hear that my alma mater really hasn’t shifted….)

Thanks for continuing to push us to think about writing and reading…and I am kinda yearning for my own classroom too.

Imagine that the teacher had asked a student to research an “important person” and they were to use new social tools, not just Google!

That is what I did for Lisa H, a graduate student in one of my classes. In this case the “important person” was and is an active participant in educational discussions- Dean Shareski. I loved her response in a blog ABOUT the assignment. Here it is:
======================
Monday, April 27, 2009
For the past week now I have been actively researching Dean Shareski. My research has taken a very different path than any other research I have ever done before. I decided to use social networking tools to help me find out about Dean. Using Twitter I began to follow Dean’s tweets. My friends don’t think much of Twitter calling it silly and stupid, “Who cares about what someone is doing every moment of the day they ask.” Actually, my friends don’t realize what a great tool Twitter can be for researching.

I read Dean’s tweets often finding links to his blog, the blog entry of someone who had a post about a topic Dean found interesting, and URL’s that sent me to look at websites about his work or others’ work related to his work.

After a few days of reading Dean’s tweets, I began following a few people who follow Dean. Things got pretty interesting because the thoughts and ideas in their tweets sent me off again to places like UStream or Slideshare where ideas Dean wrote about in his blog post or in his tweet were once again illuminated.
Just for the heck of it I searched for Dean Shireski on Tweet Deck. I was not disappointed when up popped tweets written by a wide range of people from around the world, who read his blog, have seen him present, or have downloaded his slideshare presentations. Many of these people have posted new URL’s to other work connected in some way to Dean’s work.

Where has this gotten my research? I have had to research other people before. It has always felt like “flat, factual” research. In this case, I feel like I have met a new person. I have a sense of Dean’s sense of humor, his passion for the use of technology FOR learning, his commitment to have authentic work and assessment, and his desire to communicate and share his knowledge and skills with other educators. I have learned he and I share many of the same frustrations about things like digital citizenship or grading.

I wonder how different research would feel to students if they were using blogs, Flickr, Twitter, UStream, Slideshare, and YouTube videos produced by their subject of research to gather information. I wonder if the plagiarism issue teachers sometimes encounter when students are asked to research a person would diminish leading students to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate as they used these tools for research.

This assignment has made me think as much about changing the way I have students conduct research as about Dean Shareski. I am happy about this.”