One of the ways I hope to see the ubernetwork that is the internet evolve is for its depth to begin to catch up with its breadth. With the viral spread of online networks, we must take care not to dilute them so much (by rapidly migrating to new ones) that they lose their power, which derives from the quantity and quality of their membership. With the proliferation of blogs, we must take care not to get lost in a plethora of solipsistic silos, speaking without listening, reinventing rather than building upon each other’s ideas and deepening the collective dialogue.

Whether these tendencies are an indicator of the novelty of the Web 2.0 phenomenon, an extension of dominant American cultural values emphasizing independence and entrepreneurship, or the result of some other socio-cosmic force, I do not consider them to be an inevitable end. I believe that if we choose to be reflective about the ways in which we interact online, we can optimize the enormous learning possibilities that such connected authorship affords. We can become even smarter and more knowledgeable than we are, both individually and collectively.

In particular, I find myself wishing for more reciprocal dialogue. For example, I was pleased to receive a number of quick, thoughtful responses to my initial post in a discussion forum I initiated about Teaching Writing with Web 2.0 within Classroom 2.0, an online network for educators interested in Web 2.0 created using the Ning platform. However, conversation seems to have withered with my responses to those responses, full of open questions posed in an effort to probe deeper into the topics at hand, make additional connections, and learn more by thinking together with my cyber-colleagues. Similarly, most of the comments I have made on other people’s blogs or posts I have made to other discussion forums remain unanswered, despite my efforts to engage others in dialogue.

One can only speculate about the reasons for this…people are busy and easily distracted or overwhelmed…the design of popular tools does not inherently foster two-way communication…social norms and time constraints favor more cursory discourse. And yet, it is my hope that once they are experienced more broadly, the benefits of such interactive communication will ultimately prove strong enough for cyberculture to break through those barriers and realize its potential to promote sustained, enduring, thought-provoking conversation as well as individually authored, interconnected literary nodes.

Just as we are innately driven toward both adventure and safety, people are driven both to speak and to listen. Real dialogue involves multiple cycles of speaking and listening in the spirit of inquiry. Such dialogue, in the tradition of Socrates, Plato, and their cohorts, is preciously uncommon in contemporary society. It is my hope that just as we have seen authorship and publication rise to new levels with Web 2.0, so shall we see true dialogue also rise.

Naturally, I would welcome any dialogue on the subject!

Though the central topics of her address are not unprecedented in this genre, their meaning both extends and is enriched by knowledge of Rowling’s beloved Harry Potter tales. In particular, she reflects on one of the underlying themes of her celebrated opus, explaining that “Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”

One of the qualities that makes Rowling’s books so transcendent is that they are simultaneously fun and wise, artfully mixing adventure and parable in ways that define the sort of literature that leaves a permanent mark on society. They are at once entertaining and thought-provoking, engaging and instructive, amusing and unsettling, enjoyable and cathartic. Rowling’s unabashed moral and political stance is evident in the novels (which is likely why they are more than occasionally banned), but it is a rare treat to learn about some of the experiences that have informed the author’s passionate positions. Though I consider being a children’s author one of the most exalted vocations in its own right, I especially admire Rowling for doing such an exceptional job using her authorship for the common good. Hers is a shining example of writing that transcends genres that tend to be artificially separated in the standard curriculum; she demonstrates that creative writing and persuasive writing are not mutually exclusive. The best fiction is full of truths, and there are more ways to explain a perspective or convince an audience than the five-paragraph essay.

Fortunately, children are smart enough not to limit their education to school. Henry Jenkins of MIT’s New Media Literacies Project speaks to this phenomenon in his article Why Heather Can Write, which characterizes how Web 2.0 media can support young authors in ways that schools often do not. He describes the Harry Potter fan fiction community, also featured in a new film called We Are Wizards. These irrepressible writers take inspiration from J.K. Rowling’s brilliant stories, which serve as templates rich with multifaceted characters and complex plots that engage readers’ imaginations and invite them to try their hand at authorship, guided by a helpful framework and a supportive community. Naturally, such “affinity spaces” are self-selecting, but teachers who employ such media and encourage such “participatory culture” in the classroom could distribute their benefits much more broadly. Sites such as Fiction Alley and The Daily Prophet provide infrastructure for paying tribute to Rowling’s literary genius and mobilizing new authorship in ways that were not possible before Web 2.0.

Ironically, Rowling’s commencement message seems to have evaded the very segment of the audience for which it was most directly intended. An NPR story about the event indicates that some graduates found her unworthy of the honor of speaking to them on the auspicious occasion of their transition to adult life. All the more reason, I suppose, that the rest of us should heed her sage advice.

My approach to this issue is to try to break free of either/or thinking about whether Web 2.0 is good or bad for society and/or education and focus on context of use and conditions of value. Such an ecological approach considers how the affordances of a particular medium might help people achieve specific purposes or address particular pedagogical goals under certain circumstances, while also considering its limitations. For example, if people understand how to conduct an efficient web search and evaluate the reliability of sources, then the benefits of having access to the thoughts, ideas, and creative achievements of millions of newly self-published authors may outweigh the challenges of sifting through them to find the worthiest ones. And the potential benefits of being able to interact so easily with people and their ideas without restrictions on time or distance are enormous.

The social web can offer a great deal of value as a learning environment, under the right conditions. Web 2.0 media such as blogs, wikis, and threaded discussions can help developing writers build a sense of audience and purpose as they interact in writing with others around their ideas. In the context of effective instruction, this sort of authentic written communication can potentially help students learn how to write better than typical classroom composition activities in which the sole purpose of writing is to prove competence to a teacher. However, Web 2.0 media do not inherently provide instruction; in order to achieve such results, teachers need to guide students toward learning the rhetoric and applying the conventions of academic discourse, with clear expectations and reliable accountability mechanisms. They also need to provide writing tasks and prompts that engage students in genuine authorship involving critical and creative thinking about substantive issues, works of literature or art, or other meaningful content that has relevance to students and to society at large. Discussing the value of Web 2.0 for authors as well as audiences, considering both challenges and opportunities, essentially reframes the debate about Keen’s polemical argument. Rather than listing “why we like (or do not like) the social web,” it might be even more compelling to explain “when we like the social web and why.”

I believe that authorship is an important vehicle for learning. Teachers often ask students to write, but such activities do not always engage students in true authorship.

This concept map that I authored with MindMeister elaborates on what I mean…
[Mind map is interactive...Click and drag to center map and mouse over gray dots for additional notes.]

Most teens felt that they could benefit from improved instruction in writing. When teens were asked about their suggestions for improvement, researchers discovered that, “Overall, 82% of teens feel that additional in-class writing time would improve their writing abilities and 78% feel the same way about their teachers using computer-based writing tools.”

Focus group teens offered this helpful advice to educators:
“…they are motivated to write when they can select topics that are relevant to their lives and interests, and report greater enjoyment of school writing when they have the opportunity to write creatively. Having teachers or other adults who challenge them, present them with interesting curricula and give them detailed feedback also serves as a motivator for teens. Teens also report writing for an audience motivates them to write and write well.”

Asking students to share their views about their own learning can be so illuminating. Students, in their infinite wisdom, have identified what makes Web 2.0 communication media so powerful: they genuinely put the act of communication back into writing. They offer a platform for students to use writing to develop their ideas and communicate those ideas to real audiences with real purpose. Isn’t that what we’re trying to prepare them to do? If we want students to learn to communicate in writing, then we should give them opportunities to do so authentically in the course of instruction.

Artificial writing exercises that ask students to tell teachers and test-makers what they already know, or prove command of rhetoric divorced of meaningful substance, do not qualify as authentic communication. Students are eager to use blogs, wikis, and threaded discussions for academic writing because they offer opportunities to interact in writing with other people around ideas. As teachers, we must find ways to engage students in writing about things that matter to them and to society and facilitate the sorts of interactions that help them sharpen the expression of their thoughts. And we are fortunate to now have such helpful tools available to help us meet those goals.

In my experience, most children in the primary grades are encouraged to view themselves as authors and artists, but by the later grades, kids typically have internalized a belief that imagination and authorship are the province of only a “creative” few. This phenomenon has been exacerbated by the recent obsession with high-stakes standardized tests, which now drive so much of what happens in classrooms on a day-to-day basis. Such tests go far beyond merely measuring what students know to very narrowly defining what is considered worth knowing.

In her book, “The Having of Wonderful Ideas” and Other Essays on Teaching and Learning, Eleanor Duckworth argues that “Standardized tests can never, even at their best, tell us anything other than whether a given fact, notion, or ability is already within a child’s repertoire. As a result, teachers are encouraged to go for right answers, as soon and as often as possible, and whatever happens along the way is treated as incidental.” When the culture of schooling is overwhelmingly focused on demonstrating what one already knows rather than exploring what one doesn’t, children repeatedly receive the message that knowing is more important than learning. And, as Duckworth points out, “The virtues involved in not knowing are the ones that really count in the long run. What you do about what you don’t know is, in the final analysis, what determines what you will ultimately know.” This is not to say that knowledge is unimportant, but rather that banking inert knowledge should not take priority over building active knowledge; knowledge should be something we expect students to use and expand, not just to have.

We as educators must not acquiesce to the pressures bearing down upon us, as strong as they may be, to act against the best interests of our students. The stakes are too high – far higher than those imposed by any test. We must push back and reclaim the culture of education, and renew our commitment to cultivating creativity in students of all ages in all disciplines. The good news is that many kids are exercising their creativity all over cyberspace…outside of school. Imagine what they could do with our guidance and support…

Forums are online discussions organized topically and chronologically. Whether public or private, forums are open to a number of participants who need not be online simultaneously to participate, as contributions can be posted asynchronously. Threaded discussions maintain the coherence of a given conversational thread, with a hierarchical format that tracks each chain of responses and how they are linked to each other.

Chats are real-time (synchronous) conversations online via text involving two or more people, often at a distance. Chatting (or instant messaging) often involves informal rhetoric, shorthand conventions, and emoticons to convey tone. As with any digital text, chats can be saved and transfered to other media.

A blog is a public online journal managed by a primary author who posts entries that appear chronologically. Blog posts are in digital hypermedia format, which means they can include text, images, links, video, audio, or animation. Readers can comment on blog posts, and bloggers can link to each other’s blogs and to other web sites.

A wiki is a web site that is open to many contributors who share authorship. Pages can be created, edited, organized, and discussed by different authors, and all changes are tracked. Authoring permissions are managed by wiki owners and may include a range of levels.

A podcast is a digital media broadcast via the internet, in either audio or video format, often through syndication feeds, for playback on a portable media player or personal computer. Podcasts allow radio shows, television segments, or homemade productions to be distributed widely for anywhere, anytime listening and/or viewing.

Digital multimedia productions take many different forms and can be distributed through many channels. For example, a slide show with text, images, and animation can be saved as a movie. Videos can be taken with a regular digital camera, imported into editing software to create movies, and then uploaded to a blog, an online social network, or any other web site.  Any digital media can be combined with any other digital media, and authors can share their digital creations with the world via the internet.

Every day makes new resources available to authors of all ages and experience levels, helping them engage in meaningful expression and interaction and make their voices heard all over the world. Though we have barely begun to explore the implications of the Web 2.0 revolution for authorship, I believe that these developments have a great deal to offer teaching and learning. That is the subject of this blog.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

We Are the Web

Everyone is creating and sharing digital compositions from anywhere at any time, using constantly evolving tools and rules, because we are inherently driven toward the edge of possibility.

Who – Everyone
Today’s authors comprise a worldwide peer-to-peer network of everyday people, free of editorial gatekeepers and restrictive production and publication technologies.

What – Creating and sharing digital compositions
Today’s authors can create dynamic, interactive, multimedia compositions to express anything on their minds to any audience. Digital compositions are dynamic because they can easily be modified in either form or content by author and/or audience. Interactive digital compositions allow audiences to direct their own experience and/or contribute to the composition in some way. Multimedia digital compositions can include any combination of text, images, audio, video, or animations. In fact, the new “text” is the multimedia text.

Where – Anywhere
Through ubiquitous computers and Internet, anyone can create and publish digital compositions from almost anywhere on the planet, and those compositions can be instantaneously accessed from almost anywhere on the planet, even if author and audience are miles apart. The only tools needed are a personal computer with an Internet connection.

When – Anytime
People can create, communicate, publish, and update digital compositions whenever they want. Unlike print publishing, digital publishing allows an author to make changes on a continuous basis. Web-based documents remain under the author’s control, yet audiences always have access to the most recent version of a digital composition.

Why - Because we are inherently driven toward the edge of possibility
People are innately intelligent, social, expressive beings. They are fundamentally predisposed to think, interact, create, and communicate through any means possible. Those means are now in constant flux, converging, diverging, and otherwise evolving, as authors and audiences alike better understand their affordances. The medium and the message are interacting like never before, both shaping and being shaped by each other. Categories are growing harder to define, and lines that were once clear are getting blurrier all the time. Such changes are a natural outcome of the human condition.

How – With constantly evolving tools and rules
Most anyone now has practical, affordable access to flexible, easy-to-use power tools for thinking and communicating (e.g., e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, wikis, online discussion forums, chat rooms, social networking sites, shared virtual environments) that capitalize upon the convergence of digital media. Each new communication tool engenders its own rhetoric, and society is constantly developing new discourses, social norms, and participation structures for digital interactions.

How might these changes impact teaching and learning?