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20100520-GRSMantras-Jfrink

Blogging Skills

	Blogroll Description: A Blogroll allows you to display links to other blogs that you read or that you see connection with. This is not only a helpful aspect for readers of your blog to find other resources but also shows where you see yourself in the educational blog world (edublogosphere). Activity: In the blogging system we use (WordPress) the blogroll is now called Links Manager. Set up a blogroll on your blog site. Select blogs that make sense to you or that you read frequently.
	Searching Blogs Description: Although following a specific blog or set of blogs is helpful, it is also important to follow topics across blogs. Using specific search tools designed to look at blogs are good. The key with these is that you can actually follow a specific tag (think keyword) or subscribe to a specific search. This means that once you have found a good search phrase, you can see regularly what is posted that follows that topic. Activity: Select a topic that you want to follow across the blogoshpere. Use a blog specific search engine to search for that topic. Tweak your search until it is finding what you want. Save that specific search for later use.
	Google Reader Description: The real power of blogging technology involves three little letters- RSS. Basically, this allows you to subscribe to the blogs and have the posts come to you. Activity: Set-up A Google Reader account and subscribe to some favorite blogs (don't forget the GRS cohort). If you already have an account, there is an AMAZING amount of additional options in Google Reader. Look at the advanced tutorials for these.
	Embedding links Description: A powerful aspect of blogging is the ability to interconnect to various blogs. You will need to be able to embed links in both your posts, but also (if the blog allows it) in your comments. This creates a hyperlink over to another webpage, blogpost or comment. Activity: Create a post that links to another blog entry. Then on the other blog site, comment with your thoughts and a link back to your post on the subject.
	Adding Media Description: The 'next level' of making interesting blog posts is the ability to embed media into those posts. This takes the video, photos, etc and places them right in the text of your blog rather than just having a link. Activity: Create a post and add media to it. Note that both the type of blog you use (wordpress) and the type of media you are trying to embed both effect if you can do it and how to do it. Once you have succeeded at placing photos or video, you may want to get more creative and see what else you can embed. Many Web 2.0 tools allow you to embed the work you do on one site into your blog.

Blogging Practices

	Community Building Description: Blogging allows you to connect with and build your own personal learning community and also enhance the personal learning networks of others. You become part of the larger community of edubloggers or Science bloggers or research bloggers or teacher bloggers or .... whatever community you choose to join. These communities are not a set thing however. YOU help create them by being one more part of one. Activity: Begin to build the community by: Commentting on one person's blog and reference another person's blog Adding a blog to your blogroll and introducing yourself through email to that blogger Another idea?? Go ahead and do it and then share what your idea was
	Advocating Description: It is important to advocate for the beliefs and goals that align with those important to reform-minded teaching including social justice. This can be done through creating and linking to a blog post that clearly communicate how you think things should be. Many teacher bloggers also use this to advocate for the role of students as both students and as people. Activity: Create a blog post or comment that advocates for something you believe in or feel needs to be recognized in the broader community.
	Resource Sharing Description: A powerful teacher practice is to share resources. This more open approach to professional practice can be facilitated on your blog. Some teachers actually have weekly posts with a few resources they have found that they know others would find helpful. These resources can be websites, tools, documents you have created, etc. Activity: Use your blog to share a resource. Be sure to clearly outline the benefit of these resources to others.
	Conversing Description: Blogs allow you to hold a conversation within one blog or across multiple blogs. You can do this through the comments and links that you leave. Good bloggers utilize their posts to both start and reference conversations already happening on their blog or others. This encourages ongoing discussions. Activity: Start or enter into a conversation. (remember to return to it later so you are truly part of an ongoing conversation)
	Making a statement Description: Blogs allow you to make a statement and be creative in doing it. Many teachers show that learning is more than just a school activity by making statements about the broader world. This is often the case when wanting to help the broader world understand issues like going green or the importance of life. These are often much more powerful by using media to make your statement. Activity: Make a statement on your blog. Remember to be professional still. If you can be creative and maybe even include media.

Beyond the Research

My department here at Warner, focuses on some larger issues: one that is cited alot is that of social justice. I have found that although this is central to my own thinking it has tended to be a given, almost a backdrop to what I wanted to look at. Recently, as I have struggled to really understand what my central question for my study was, I began to look to larger and larger issues. It was less about the process, setting or activities I was studying. What was at the core of my research?
As I thought of myself as a researcher (yes, code this for identity), I began to ask: What do I research? If it is just about the stuff of the research project, than I maybe am wasting my time.
I don't research K-12 students and teachers in online spaces. That might be the current focus, but I think what I really care about is much larger. How do we move beyond the current constraints of school to truly provide an environment that encourages student-exploratory learning? How do we free and at the same time support students to learn? This becomes more than research...it becomes a pursuit...a mission? Some might suggest that this would then 'taint the research.' If I have a purpose than I will make the research fit my purpose. Well, that is where ethics and design come into play. If I am ethical and design my research in such a way that I am truly looking for uncovering and understanding, than this is not an issue. AND if I am up front with my stances, this provides others with an understanding of where I am coming from. I don't see that this taints the research at all, but rather focuses it.
So I guess that in my design I need to understand not just the 'so what' of my research, but also what I am looking to say and do with it?
J:)

Moving beyond literacy

So I am finding that there are really three strands that are coming into play for what I am looking at regarding emerging technology in education. There is the one that is more of an ICT (think geek) approach that is looking at this as a technology approach which examines the networking, the computers as tools to communicate, etc. There is a second that looks at this phenomena from a use in education approach...that is from a how do I apply this technology in my teaching and how does that impact the teaching. The third is more where I situate myself which is the idea of new literacies which has been used by many, including my favorites of Lankshear and Knobel, to discuss emerging technologies and the impact of the meaning-making associated with and a part of the
everyday and classroom practices in the use of these technologies.
I see that this is incredibly useful starting point, but I also have this feeling that it is slightly off-center from my own focus (or better to say that I am off-centered from this focus). That is, there is a great amount of work looking at this from a literacy view. This is not bad, I just seem to feel that there is other views, that I am in some ways constrained by forcing this through the literacy lens. I resonate more with the practices and spatial approach. Yet, this area is less defined and is so often tied into this idea of literacies. I know that part of this is that the way that we do interact are through artifacts of communication. This approach seems to come from those like Heath and Street who discuss literacy events and practices. They have defined these so broadly that we can really look at anything we do as part of that event/practice.
Yet, I do see that we are missing something. So what is this something? Or is it something, or rather, as I said earlier, that I am coming from a different viewpoint. Thus, I am not viewing this through the lens of literacy and see that there may be value in viewing these activities through different lenses. Other lenses that have been used: identity, spatial, participation, activity, etc.
Although all of these are part of what I am seeing as a part of this, I do not see one as resonating with me as MY lens.
So this is more a post of questions than a post of in depth theorizing.

Exploring everyday life and social space literature in four articles

Here are my reviews of 4 articles and the themes that play across them.

Lankshear- The Challenge of Digital Epistemologies

Starting from the idea that the everyday life is more and more digitized, Lankshear looks at the way that the change from 'atoms to bits' in everyday practices cause specific changes to knowledge, knowledge processes. Specifically he says that "these are ‘changes in the world to be known’, ‘changes in conceptions of knowledge and processes of coming to know things’, ‘changes in the nature of knowers,’ and ‘changes in the relative significance of different modes of knowing.'"

First, the knowledge changes in value from that of a valuable resource to that of a commodity to be used. Secondly, knowledge becomes externalized, so it is not a property of the individual but rather a shared resource existing between people. This also impacts the essential knowledge for a task. Internalized knowledge was needed in the past to complete a task, that is the one performing the task needed to know the information, now one must know how to access and operate the technology to bring up the information to be used in the task. Lankshear discusses that this shift is really that of shifting from propositional knowledge, or knowing what, to procedural knowledge, or knowing how. Even so, "the abstraction and decontextualization of classrooms from mature forms of authentic non-scholastic social practices has seriously limited the range of possibilities until recently" (p. 177).

All of this questions the current way knowledge is looked at and understood and suggests the need to develop an understanding of knowledge in the digital age. There are references to the ways in which schooling is impacted by this such as recognizing the change to shared knowledge work in the wider, online world does not truly change the individualistic approach in schools. "Ultimately, schools too operate on this assumption at the level of their ‘deep structure.’ For all of the group work and collaborative activity that has entered classrooms in recent times, knowledge is seen in the final analysis as a private possession, and is examined and accredited accordingly" (p. 176).

Leander- Tracing of everday sitings of adolescents online

Leander and McKim discuss the need to "understand online literacies as social practice" p. 211. As such they problematize the dichotomy of offline/online practices which is often addressed in the literature regarding online practices. They suggest that this is primarily an aspect of moving from analysis of one type of place, that is a static conception of space to a different understanding of social space, that is a relational notion of space. They provide examples from the research that make the case that offline and online are not separate but are rather interconnected and interwoven.

They suggest that there needs to develop new methodologies which could be grouped under the context of connective ethnography. This is the ethnographic study of relational interactions through multiple contexts and not tied to a specific physical space, but rather defining space as "performance of place" which is done through boundary creation. These boundaries are continually defined by practices which have embedded meaning within that space.

In my own critique, it is here that I would want to further explore this idea of space and place. If the performance of place does involve that definition of boundaries, yet there is a desire to define place by the relational aspect, then it is difficult to see how we would in reality develop that context of study. The continual enactment of the place would mean that the space that is being study would be a shifting and changing entity and perhaps lose clarity for the study in this shifting. I believe that this is not an issue which is irresolvable, but rather needs to be further refined and discussed.

Leander- You won't be needing your laptop

In this discussion of a study done at a private school, Leander examines the ways in which traditional definitions of literacy and instructional practices intersected with the "open" framework provided by every student having a laptop connected to the internet. The implications from his study is that the provision of access to the technology is not enough to change the practices in school around teaching and learning with these technologies. Leander does not address this issue from an organizational culture or even the momentum of 'habitus' in recreating itself. However, he discusses the technologies which are used to "spatio-temporally produce and organize schooling as a particular kind of activity" (p. 27). The observed practices of ths use of the laptops, for the most part, were for common practices that were just the transfer from print interactions, such as taking notes and the processes surrounding handing out and submitting homework. Yet, even in these traditional practices, the use of the laptops did provide opportunity for changes to these practices.

Leander also highlighted tensions between competing concepts of identity (strong wired women versus vulnerable frightened girls), information (unlimited, open digital library versus questionable and unreliable online postings), and classroom interaction (ongoing, shared discussion versus scattered, disruptive and unobserved side chatter). Most helpful is Leander's chart depicting the space-time productions seen in school and that in the online.

Although Leander's shift to the idea of space-time is very helpful in approaching the issue of the use of online practices in the school setting, he is recreating the very binary that, in other works, he problematizes of in-school/out of school. I do not see that this is a contradiction, but merely the tension in discussing how we can address this complex interaction. Leander does reference Soja's work on spatiality which recognizes the complexity of space-time by understanding it as trialectically created, with the trialect being comprised of social, historical and spatial aspects. This is an area that could use further exploration. How do these three intersect? What can actually be seen as the social, historical and spatial aspects? and How do these interact to produce social space?

Leander - Writing traveler's tales on the new literacyscapes

Starting with an example of chalk writings on city walls explaining how to access wireless internet, Leander highlights four ways that this act provides entry into understanding online literacyscapes: 1) the writing is about the digital world but not in it, 2) explicitly shows the 'working of social-spatial boundaries' 3) a practice of identification and 4) uneven distribution of identity and knowledge related to online work. Pulling from both spatial theory (primarily Soja, 1989 and Lefebvre, 1991) and narrative discourse analysis (Holloway & Valentine, 2001) Leander suggests that the research needs to move beyond looking at the artifacts created by youth in online spaces and begin to understand the process or 'travels' through this cyberspace as an important aspect of study. He specifically discusses the need to recognize the crossing of practices without limiting to the in school literacy practices or out of school online activities only.

Leander provides a brief critique of the use of activity theory to analyze the shifting interactions of literacy across various literacyscapes; offline, online, home, school, out of school, etc. He suggests that this theory has potential as a lens, but is limiting in that it is so often tied to the concept of communities of practice which suggest a history of practices that are passed through an apprenticeship model. This reduces the explanatory power of such a lens when applied to rapidly changing forms of interaction which are developed and redeveloped through use with others who are also new to them. However, he does end with the suggestion that this lens is a useful one to examine and perhaps modify to help understand "how new literacies are learned and culture is being transformed' (p. 396).

Themes playing across these articles

First, it should be recognized that these articles were selected specifically since they addressed the ideas and themes seen in Leander's Connective Ethnographies chapter in the Handbook on New Literacies Research. Thus, the themes were in some ways already known going into these articles. However, there were in deed specific themes seen:

· The focus on the everyday practices shifts our analysis from that of recreating the online/offline binary to understanding how the new literacies practices shape and change the way that people interact and construct identity, space and knowledge. In this way the new literacies need to be seen as always emerging and changing, but that they are not new as in novel. The very everydayness of their use suggests a broader impact and transformation of practice and interaction.

· There is a shift to understanding space and literacy as relational. The social interactional aspect of activity and the connectedness of these interactions changes the primary assumptions about space and literacy as bounded and defined by one location or type of interaction. This understanding brings into play the historical trajectories of interaction as impacted by the current technologies for relating.

· Finally, all of these articles highlighted the conflicts and tensions that exist within systems and organizations which were designed and developed out of traditional literacy practices and yet now are beginning to try and utilize new literacies practices. These articles suggest that there needs to be an actual shift in mindset or change in foundational epistemologies for the new literacy practices to be put into place and also to be effectively researched and understood.

The Everyday of NML

In reading again today I found Leander (2003)* discussing everyday literacies. This resonates well with what I am looking at in regards to the concept that students are not completely different in school from out of school. Nor do they do identity work in isolation, as Wortham shows. Rather the development of literacies, practices and identities are across various spaces and settings in our lives. The use of the internet and the practices, meaning-making spans the spaces. By understanding new media literacies as everyday practices which cross spaces, it problematizes the binary often set between in and out of school practices. It situates the interactions in the broader social context of what is happening in the internet, which is a part of the broader society. The recognition that students bring more to school than just what school gives them (and more than school often values), can be seen in the ideas of Moll who discuss funds of knowledge. This movement to seeing the student participant as part of the larger social interaction of society rather than merely an actor in the school setting in isolation gives power to the need to look at the ways that students interact out of school (others are doing that) and inside school as part of that broader context (few are doing this). I see that the latter is my focus. What are the students doing inside the school setting, but at the same time enacting identities and practices to create social spaces which are part of trajectories which have school as a part of them. This view does not examine the students trajectory as that of a kindergartener (or preschooler) to that of a graduate (or non-graduate). Rather, this view sees the student as having a life trajectory that intersects with school and school practices, but does not limit the resources for action, participation, identity work and interaction to those which have been supposedly provided by school or assessed by school. It is for this reason, that I do not wish to focus on 'academic achievement' as the means of seeing what the impact of technology is on the students. This concept is problematic, not only in the problem of academic achievement but also in that of examining the impact of the technology. Again, the focus on everyday practices allows us to understand the technology, not as a tool put rather examining the social ecosystem for which the technology provides a vital part which changes the way the whole system is enacted and identities which in that are produced..not just a single impact. The embeddedness of the practices in everyday helps us to see that it is the practices which continually create, recreate the large system of interactions. Thus, to examine the 'impact of the technology' is to assume a static system on which it is impacting. This does not recognize the constant enactment of the ecosystem which is continually emerging.
This embededness of the everyday allows us then to return to a situatedness of the practices and interactions in both the local setting as well as the larger global setting through the internet and societal context (Gidden; Gergen).
*Reading Research Quarterly 38 no3, p. 392-7