So this week I'm reading Black Stats: African Americans by the Numbers in the Twenty-First Century by Monique W. Morris, and clearly it's taken me more than a week to read. I could blame this on having to grade all of the things for the end of the semester, or on my three children's unwillingness to just leave mom alone to read, but it really has more to do with how hard it is to stay focused while reading line after line of statistics. Don't get me wrong, I think the layout of the book goes a long way towards overcoming the this problem through the page design, organization, and use of introductory prose in each chapter, but the sheer volume of information is overwhelming.

All together, though, that information paints a picture of unequal opportunity and consequences in this country, albeit with some strides in the right direction. None of what it presented was really new to me because of my previous reading and experience, but it is an excellent resource to have so many facts collected in one place for easy access.

What I found myself reflecting on in relation to my teaching as I read, however, was how these numbers don't actually tell the story that needs to be told. Just a few weeks ago, one of my composition students was presenting on his project looking at the quality of prison food in Ohio. His research hadn't been terribly in-depth, and my other students were content to leave the discussion at, "Man, that looks like the gross food they served us in high school!" but I wanted to push them a bit further. I was asking questions about the purpose of prison (punishment, rehabilitation, seclusion) and how their position on that purpose might change their thinking about what quality of food ought to be served. Then I asked them about the fact that people of color are disproportionately represented in the prison population for things like drug offenses despite the reported rate of drug abuse being roughly equal across all demographic groups.

The majority of the class erupted into comments about decriminalizing drugs, fighting racism, or at least improving the quality of the food, but one girl kept insisting, "Or maybe they could just not do drugs! If you don't break the law, nothing bad can happen to you!" She was clearly frustrated, turning red in her anger, and I could relate to her feelings. I remember taking such an adamant stance myself in my younger days.

Which brings me back to my issue with numbers. As I'm continually telling my students regarding quotations, these numbers can't speak for themselves. If left to ourselves, we will attach whatever narrative to them that suits our worldview, whether we take the blatantly racist view that more African Americans are incarcerated because they are more inclined to criminal behavior, or the more subtle position of my student that whatever discrimination might exist could be overcome by good behavior on the part of an individual. Both views miss the point, in my opinion, of all of the numbers working together, demonstrating that a lack of access to education, job opportunities, financial services, affordable housing, health care, and a safe environment stacks the deck against African Americans in this country, making that good behavior my student sees as natural incredibly difficult to achieve.

My job as a white educator is to make sure I'm telling the stories that flesh out what these numbers mean in the lives of actual people. For more help with that, I'm moving on to Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me for next week.

(Mis)Understanding Integration

As I mentioned in my last post, I've taken on the project of reading all of the books on Crystal Paul's "10 Books I Wish My White Teacher Had Read." For this week I read Dana Goldstein's The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession. 

I'm not trying to write a traditional book review here (though I would certainly recommend this book to anyone who would like a highly readable and fair-minded discussion of some of the major themes of education and education reform in the US over the past two hundred years), so I'm going to focus on what stood out to me the most in relation to Paul's article rather than the book as a whole.

I've spent the last few years studying the meeting minutes and other internal documents of the New York Women's Trade Union League from the first couple decades of the twentieth century. I was, therefore, very interested in Goldstein's discussion of the role of teacher's unions in the history of education in the US. As usual, I discovered that the answer was complicated. While I'm inclined to be fairly sympathetic to the need for collective bargaining and other protections for workers who are vulnerable due to their youth, gender, and social class, the ugly underbelly of racism and xenophobia so common in labor unions of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries is evident in Goldstein's history. This was disappointing for me to see, though not surprising.

What was surprising for me was discovering my own blindspot regarding the integration of schools following Brown v. Board of Education. Going into this book, my thoughts on the subject went something like this:
Segregation and discrimination were inherently bad, but one byproduct of the "separate but equal" system was that many of the most capable and brilliant minds in the African American community became teachers due to a lack of other opportunities. As a result, despite terrible facilities and a lack of supplies, African American children often received superior instruction. Through the Civil Rights Movement, however, opportunities opened for those teachers to choose other, more lucrative professions, leaving African American children with fewer stellar role models in the classroom.

In reading Goldstein's history, however, I realized that I only had part of that story right. Integration did lead to Black children losing wonderful teachers, but not because those teachers were off living the American dream. Far from it. When schools were combined, most of the African American teachers were fired and replaced by White teachers who were often less qualified. In addition, these White teachers brought with them into the classroom prejudices against Black children's abilities to learn and achieve at higher levels. These often became self-fulfilling prophecies as children saw that they were not valued or expected to succeed, and did not see anyone who looked like them modeling who they could become.

After reading this history, I find myself shaking my head and saying, "Of course. Of course they didn't want to integrate teachers fairly. People who would scream and curse at children for just wanting a decent education are not going to submit to a person of color having authority over their children. How could I have not considered this aspect before?!" The answer, of course, is privilege. I haven't had to wonder why there isn't anyone who looks like me at the front of my classroom because generally, my teachers did look just like me. I'm sitting here wracking my brain, trying to think if I ever had an African American teacher before I got to college, and I can't think of one. And even in college, the two professors who come to mind weren't African American but recent immigrants from Africa. But I didn't notice.

This is why Paul needs teachers like me to read these books. Because even when we mean well, we sometimes just don't notice what's going on around us.

Up next:

Reading the "10 Books I Wish My White Teacher Had Read"

The class that I began writing this blog for is now over, but I have enjoyed writing semi-informally about pedagogy and my classroom practice, so I thought I would keep it up for awhile, even though I will no longer have a captive audience.

Over the past few years, I've thought a lot about systemic racism and my role in dismantling it as a white, woman teacher. Two main messages have come to my attention in this process: first, it is essential to listen to and believe the experiences of people of color in order to understand what actually needs to change, but second, I need to do the heavy lifting of educating myself on what the current and historical situation is in this country rather than relying of people of color to spoon-feed that knowledge to me.

My first post-course series for this blog is an attempt to do both by listening to the suggestions of one person, Crystal Paul, for what 10 books she wished her white teachers had read to prepare them to meet the needs of students of color, and then to do the hard work of actually procuring, reading, and processing through the information in each of them. Paul's article appeared on Bustle just over a year ago, but the titles are no less relevant today and it's better to do the work late than never. Seriously, the fact that I have not yet read Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me feels like a mark on my character at this point and the sooner I can rectify this omission, the better.

I'm proceeding through the list in the order I am able to borrow the books from my local library rather than in the order she listed them, but my goal is to read one book each week and write at least one post reflecting on that week's book.

This week I'll be writing about the tenth book on Paul's list:

Summary of Learning

I embarked on this course with a little trepidation. It is my first education class on this campus (I took a qualitative research course in the Education Department at the Univ of TN, but it was much more about research methods than pedagogy) and it is focused on using technology, which I have improved in greatly over the last few years but still don't consider an area of strength for me. I have been pleasantly surprised, however.

For one, I've found that much of what we have discussed is immediately useful to me in my composition courses. I completely changed my major project for this semester in order to let my students play with some of the cool tools we reviewed, while enabling to think about who needs to know the information they discovered in their research and how they could most effectively present that information to their chosen audience. They (mostly) had fun while engaging in the higher order thinking I was hoping they would do.

In addition, it's been very eye-opening for me to see just how many really great resources are readily available online if I build up a personal learning network that will help direct me to them. Life as an adjunct professor can be a very isolating experience. I have a person assigned as my officemate whom I have never seen and am beginning to doubt exists. I was depressed all spring by the continued sight of several candy canes that the office staff had placed as gifts into all instructor mailboxes at the end of last semester that were never picked up by those who presumably never had time to come into the department. I work really hard to build relationships with my colleagues during my more extensive time on campus in my office doing conferences, on social media, and by participating in a faculty learning community this year. These efforts have led to sharing some good assignments and classroom management strategies, but those benefits pale in comparison to the volume of practical materials that I have come across this semester. I plan on using the NGLC composition course lessons to help me manage teaching five sections on two campuses in the Fall.

For some reason, I've had a very lone wolf, solitary genius mentality about my lesson plans, feeling like I had to invent everything anew for myself, but I've seen such high-quality lesson plans and resources through this class, and even in the structure of the class itself, that I feel empowered to treat teaching as a community affair that I don't have to manage alone.

At the same time, I have felt encouraged to embrace the sharing economy in education. I am undertaking the creation of some discussion guides, class activities, and assignment ideas built around satirical or entertaining videos that also aim to inform the public, such as Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, with my colleague across the hall from me. I have used John Oliver clips fairly extensively in my classes because he creates such beautiful yet entertaining arguments and have assigned a group project where students were to create their own mini-episode of Last Week Tonight. I've shared those lessons on a very small scale, but now I'm going to attempt to go big. Because if I don't have to plan every little detail of my class myself, I can afford to spend more time making the lessons I'm passionate about really great and worth sharing.

I didn't expect to learn so much about community in a class where I expected to (and to a certain extent did) feel like an outsider. But technology enables us to create community with those beyond our immediate physical access.

Bubbl artifact

I used Bubbl.us to create an artifact illustrating what I learned this semester. It's an intuitive and free application, two features I generally love.

How to How-to #7: What's Left to Learn?

When I started this project, I wanted to learn how to use my phone to film me braiding, how to use software on my phone and laptop to edit that film and add audio, and how to upload those videos to YouTube to share with others. My underlying goal was to then be able to turn around and share that technical knowledge with my students when I ask them to create videos in their multi-modal projects.

I believe I have made progress towards all of those goals, though I would still like to improve in all of them. For instance, while I managed to use a selfie stick to hold my phone with MacGyver-like improvisations, I am positive I could be finding better angles to film from and a more permanent system for holding my phone if I continue making these videos. Additionally, when it comes to software and apps, while I like using iMovie and Splice, they are both Apple products that not all of my students will be able to access. That means I need to learn the basics of some other programs if I'm going to be able to help everyone in my classes.

Just in general, I think continued practice will lead me to discover so much more that I don't even know that I don't know right now. The good news is, I've gotten over my initial fear of trying a new skill, and I now know that it's possible to figure it out. Plus, there are still so many hairstyles to demonstrate! I'm also very tempted to try some satire in the form of videos about everything that goes wrong or what it actually takes to train a child to sit still long enough to do a fancy braid.

How to How-to #6 - Zig-Zag Braid video!

The zig-zag braid is in many ways the braid that started it all, so it seems appropriate to finish with it. I had done fancy hairstyles in Ambriel's hair prior to it and posted pictures of them on Facebook, but it was the zig-zag braid that earned me the reputation of being a braiding expert. It's the one I do in the hair of other people's kids when they beg me to do their hair like my daughter's. I have more pictures of it than any other. The funny thing is, I started doing it because I found a single, straight-down-the-middle, French braid difficult to do and kind of ugly, but I didn't want to always have to do pig-tail French braids, so I tried this. If I had been better at regular French braids, I might never have branched out into more complex ones!

As for the video, I am generally very pleased with this one. I did try to have a "Please Subscribe!" slide at the end of it, but Splice insisted on putting their logo over top of it, and I didn't notice in time to correct it. I could probably have cut a little more just to keep the video shorter, too, but overall I like this one a lot.

Enjoy!

How to How-to #5 - The Cutting Edge

I mentioned in my last post that I was planning to edit my next two videos by cutting one and speeding up the other. I actually ended up doing both for both. I had a "Eureka!" moment when I figured out that it was much easier to split my video on either side of the part I wanted to cut on iMovie and then delete the entire clip in the middle that doing so created than it was to try to use the sliding controls on Splice to select the entire piece I wanted to delete. Suddenly, I was the master of my destiny, slicing and dicing my film to eliminate all of the little infelicities of me struggling to get a piece smooth or stopping to use a brush mid-braid. 

What I found, however, was that the clip was still way too long after I had eliminated those moments, so I went ahead and speeded up the film. My goal was to learn how to help students cut their videos, and I feel confident doing that now, so I might as well have the look I want. 

You'll notice that I also added more still photos and a bit of text in this video. Sadly, it wasn't until just after I uploaded this one that I noticed that the orientation of this video is portrait. I fixed it in the next one so that the picture is bigger and there isn't a frame around it. 

It's a little crazy to me how much I feel like I am improving with each video. When my little neighbor was acting as film crew, she asked if she could see the videos I had already made. I was somewhat embarrassed to show her the first one because I would do it so differently now (though she was still impressed just to know I made something that anyone could see online). I'll talk more in my next post about what I still need to learn, but for now I just wanted to say it's nice to feel like I am getting the hang of this.

Forgive us our procrastination...

I like to joke with my students that I am just like Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way, but I think we all know better. My biggest struggle/character flaw/lovable imperfection as a student, instructor, and scholar is a tendency to procrastinate. It's often productive procrastination (my house gets so clean when I'm avoiding a looming deadline!), and I know how to manage it much better now than I did as an undergraduate, but it still trips me up sometimes.

I know some people thrive on to-do lists, of varying levels of tech-enhancement, getting great pleasure out of checking items off the list, but I tend to feel overwhelmed by them and shut down. My motto is "one flaming hoop at a time!" I don't look 15 steps ahead of where I am but instead stay focused on the task at hand, maybe the one immediately following. It's how I've survived two rounds of grad school while remaining the most well-adjusted, least-medicated grad student I know, but it has its drawbacks (Not having any publications when I graduated is one of the most impactful results of my focus. Still, sanity is so nice!).

I loved the above comic so much I started making
a cross-stitch sampler of it to hang in my office.
Naturally, it's not finished yet. I keep needing to do
other things first...

I tell you all of this to say that what I'm looking for in the way of productivity tools for teaching are those that will help me do things quickly (in case I've waited until the last minute), will keep me on task when I'm rushing to get things done (see last parenthesis), and will help me to get a whole lot of planning and prep done all at once during my highly motivated, peak activity periods (like the two weeks before a semester begins and the first few weeks of the semester before my students turn in their first major assignment, when grading takes over my life).

So far, what I have implemented along those lines are the use of doodle to schedule grade conferences (I can easily update my schedule, students can check when they are supposed to meet me without needing to ask me, and I can't procrastinate grading when I have an appointment to sit and do it with the student present), the use of LMS to plan out due dates and share assignments, and the use of Google docs and forms for some work with students. After learning about so many other tools this semester, however, I think I will endeavor to expand my use of my current favorites and try to add some new ones.

I wish that I had access to Google Classroom, as it seems like the perfect one stop shop for everything I want, but I will make due with a combination of Google Drive and whatever LMS I do have access to next semester. And as I said in my last blog post, I'm going to try to pace myself, only adding a couple of new elements each semester rather than trying for a total hostile takeover.

I'm not yet ready to try one of the apps like Rescue Time, suggested by Mary Ellen Ellis, however, to limit my access to websites like Facebook while I am working. There have to be some rewards to maintain sanity! But I did delete Candy Crush and AlphaBetty off of my phone over a year ago and have felt so much more productive ever since.

I'd also like to try Screenr and Fotobabble, as mentioned by Sandra Miller, to create how-tos or answers to FAQs for my students to post on LMS (then I'll need a t-shirt that says "It's on Springboard!" as well as one that says "It's on the Syllabus!"). It's just exciting to know that there are so many tools out there and that they are becoming more user friendly all the time. It's going to be fun trying new things on my little guinea pigs!

Photo by Dakiny

How to How-to #4: A film crew at last!

As the end of the semester barrels down on us, I realized I better hurry up and film some more braids so I can work on editing them. Semi-conveniently, my kids are on spring break this week, which means I had access to my daughter's hair in the middle of the day and also had her friend available to act as my film crew. It also meant that my husband had the day off from substitute teaching and that my preschooler was home. You win some, you lose some.

I paid her in apple pie. That's legit, right?

You see, when I was at my mom's house filming, she actively tried to keep things quiet and offer whatever assistance she could. My husband, bless his heart, kept walking back and forth in my light, singing, and asking me questions while I was trying to concentrate/braid and hold a comb in my mouth (I forgot to have a safe place to put it off camera).

The good news is, I did manage to film two braids without my phone giving up because it can't even with all the memory used. Now I know just how many things I need to delete first and I know how to quickly upload a video to my computer, delete it from my phone, and move on to the next project.

I haven't had a chance to edit either video yet, but I will. I'm going to edit one by cutting and the other by speeding it up. I prefer watching the speeded-up versions, but I know the cutting skills would be handy for more filming situations. Therefore I must master them.

I also spent some time this week watching other people's YouTube hair tutorials, and I was reassured to see that some seriously viral videos had no better filming/lighting than mine. Like this one, for instance.

What they do have is additional still photos and text at the beginning and end of their videos (as well as a drive to promote their channel and websites - not sure I possess that), so I'm going to work on incorporating some of that into my next two videos.

Here are some sneak-peeks of the braids I filmed: an Elsa-inspired one and a zig-zag.

Blended, Not Stirred: Transforming Instruction with Technology

What struck me the most in Stacy Hawthorne's presentation, and the iNACOL Blended Learning Teacher Competency Framework that she references, is the idea that blended learning isn't just "old teaching practices" + technology. Truly blended learning requires a transformation of how and why we do what we do in the classroom.

I'm reflecting on my own adoption of technology at the front of my classroom and wondering how well I've used it to transform what I do rather than just replace a former technology. For the first few years that I taught, I didn't even own a laptop, so I relied on the chalkboard/whiteboard and paper handouts for visual information. Now I hook my MacBook up to the overhead projector just about every class, sometimes to show a Keynote presentation, sometimes to show an online resource, and sometimes to type into a blank document instead of writing on the board.

Public domain pic! Gotta love searching on Creative Commons ;-) 

On the one hand, this use of my laptop has drastically changed the experience in my classroom because I post all presentations, links to online resources, and in-class-created-documents to our LMS, thus giving students far more access to class materials on their own time and pace. My goal hasn't been to create content that could replace being in class in person, however. One of my fears is that putting everything I do in class online, say in the form of recorded lectures and/or discussions, would lead to students missing more classes because they figure they can just watch the video later. This fear assumes that being in the classroom with me at the appointed time is the best possible way for students to learn, though, and blended learning asks me to consider carefully whether that is always the case or if some lessons might be taught just as well, if not better, through a carefully constructed, well-thought-out online module.

Which brings us to my second major fear: that the prep and planning for a truly blended classroom would lead to me either failing utterly to maintain any semblance of work/life balance (cue the "Cat's in the Cradle" music) or to me sticking with a course plan that isn't working the way I wanted it to just because I don't want to scrap all of the time and effort I put into creating it. One thing I've discovered in this course, however, is that there are so many great lesson plans, activities, videos, assignments, etc. available for free online if I maintain the right kind of Personal Learning Network that I really don't need to reinvent the wheel to fill my course with quality materials.

Anyone else remember doing cat's cradle? photo by stevendepolo

So as I look to preparing for the fall semester, I very much want to create a blended classroom. I want to let go of my insistence on attendance in favor of accommodating my students' circumstances and competing responsibilities so that they can learn the material even when they aren't physically present. I want to embrace the grit and adaptability required to create, curate, and implement new instructional materials with open hands that can release them and find a new path in response to my students' needs. I want to become as tech savvy as I can so that I can model the technologies my students will need to master. And I want to avoid adding apps and gizmos to the syllabus just to say I'm using technology. Going back to the idea of TPACK that we discussed earlier in the semester, I want to be sure that my content and pedagogical knowledge is informing my decision to include a particular form of technology in my lesson plans and assignments.

And having set myself such lofty goals, I'll just go back to this blog post about why blending learning fails and remember that I shouldn't try to go too fast. I should make the changes I can make and move towards a more blended learning environment over time.

Assessing Assessment

This week's topic of formative versus summative assessment has me thinking once again how great it is to talk with people in other disciplines across the university. In my own field of composition, assessment is a topic near and dear to our hearts. Traditionally, we've tended to accept the essay as the form of our assessments (though that is changing as we move towards more multi-modal projects that still demonstrate the critical thinking and rhetorical decision making that we are looking for in terms of learning outcomes beyond correct grammar and thesis statements). There has been a great deal of discussion about how we should respond to those essays, however, and much of it is relevant to the discussion of formative and summative assessment.

Should we mark grammar mistakes and make comments in the margins or should we provide a paragraph of commentary at the end of an otherwise unmarked essay?

Should we put a grade on rough drafts or only suggestions for improvement?

Should we comment on everything that needs work or focus on three items at a time?

Do our comments on one essay lead to improvements on the next assignment or are they only effective towards a revision of the same essay?

As I mentioned in a previous post, my answer to these questions has been that spending 20-30 minutes talking face-to-face with students about their work is far more effective than any written feed-back that I can give. I do give letter grades on their essays in these conferences, but I always describe them as a jumping off point. (Alfie Kohn's work on the topic of eliminating grades is certainly relevant to this discussion. I wait to give a letter until the very end of a conference and have often been disappointed by the way students' excitement about how to improve their project turns to relief that they don't have to do any of that work when they realize they already have the letter they were hoping for.)

Another cross-over concept for me is the idea of recursiveness. As Rick Wormeli notes, the line between formative and summative assessment can be fluid as teachers use assessment to determine what students have mastered and what they still need to work on. What was intended as summative may become formative if half the students don't pass or all struggle with the same area, indicating that more learning events need to occur. In writing, the assumption is that a once and done approach will not produce good results. Grown-up writers go through a process of prewriting, writing, and revision that frequently circles back on itself until the desired result is achieved (or the latest deadline hits).  I want my students to learn this process approach, so I use formative assessments along the way to force them into it. I link attendance/participation points to bringing drafts, outlines, research, annotations, etc. to class before a project is due and we look at them together in small group and whole class workshops. I make them turn projects in in stages so that they get feedback along the way, guiding them toward a more successful end product. And once they have turned in a draft, I allow students to keep revising (so long as they turn in a revision within two weeks of meeting with me) until they are happy with their grade or the semester ends.

In this case, the essays are formative as long as students keep revising them but become summative as soon as they lose ambition or decide that the grade they have is good enough. On the one hand, this is a very student-centered approach to assessment. If they are willing and able to put in the time and effort, there is no reason why they cannot improve their writing and their grade. But there are those who are so conditioned by the grading system that they will not do a revision unless it is "required" and won't do a bit of work beyond what it takes for them to get the letter they have decided is right for them.

One method I attempted to get around this difficulty was grade contracts. Students helped to negotiate what one would have to do to earn an A, B, or C in the class, signed a contract for one of the three, and then in grade conferences we would talk about revision plans and whether or not the assignment met the terms of their contract without assigning any letters to them. I eventually gave it up, however, because it was a lot of extra work for essentially the same outcome.

Until Kohn's no-grade revolution takes off, however, I will just continue trying to make assessment in my classes about learning where my students are, figuring out how to get them where they need to be, and learning how I can change/improve my instruction to make their path there as smooth and direct as possible. I don't see much need for the use of instant quiz technology in my classroom right now since my classes are small and discussion-based (though it might be nice for keeping students engaged on the few days a semester when I have to lecture in order to introduce essential vocabulary or the details of major projects), but I do appreciate the commitment to being aware of student progress long before the mid-term or end-of-semester assessments hit that the use of such technology encourages. At the end of the day, after all, formative assessments are going to enable us to be much better facilitators of our students' learning, and that should be our goal as educators, regardless of our discipline.

How to How-to #3 - Hallelujah, another video!

My goal this week(ish) was to learn how to cut a video in multiple places to shrink it to my desired length. Alas, I did not quite manage that. What I did learn was that speeding a video up to 4x normal speed turns it into a manageable size without deleting everything off of my phone. (It also makes the original soundtrack sound like angry mice, which is a nice element of levity in an otherwise stressful process.) I changed the speed using iMovie on my laptop and then emailed the shortened video to myself, saved it on my phone, and made audio revisions on Splice before uploading it to YouTube. 

I actually think I understand the theory behind making multiple cuts now, but implementing that theory is a more laborious process than I had time for before I had to pick up my children. I'm curious what you all think about the trade offs between a cut versus a speeded up video. I think both could potentially undermine the ability of the video to actually demonstrate the details of what to do, but I also realize that what I'm demonstrating isn't exactly Braiding 101. The viewer would already need to have mastered some basic skills before attempting this and might, therefore, not need as detailed of instruction.

Also, I think the speeded-up version is kinda mesmerizing to watch.

I think I will attempt a cut video of a zig-zag braid for my next stage, and then I can compare the two styles and decide which I like better.

Zig-Zag Braid

Space to Learn

It is always an adventure finding out just how well (or not) my classrooms each semester will physically meet the needs of my course. In my ten years of teaching composition on two different campuses, I don't believe I've ever taught in the same classroom for more than one semester. Flexibility, therefore, is something I've had to get pretty good at. I could spend my time reminiscing about that one semester at the University of Tennessee Knoxville when I got to teach in the magical (except for the weird shades of orange and green - seriously, who passed off on the "science" of those being colors that are conducive for learning) revamped classroom in HSS that looked rather like this, but that doesn't help me to meet the needs of my students now in the classroom I have access to.

If I'm lucky, I'm in a classroom big enough to accommodate everyone with enough desks/tables/chairs to keep the beginning of class from feeling like a game of musical chairs. If I'm really lucky, the furniture is also not bolted to the floor or so heavy that moving it is out of the question. I don't surrender and just start lecturing for 50 minutes straight during those semesters when I am proven unlucky, but making group work and eye contact happen takes up way more of my energy and creativity than I would like in those classrooms.

The bigger struggle I am finding in terms of learning space right now, however, has to do with my practice of grade conferencing. Basically, I don't take stacks of student essays home with me to ignore for several weeks before grading late at night in a self-loathing induced panic. I schedule 15-25 twenty-minute-long conferences each week of the semester after my students turn in their first major assignment and I grade their work with them sitting in my office next to me, listening to me read it aloud. In general, both my students and I love this. I can't procrastinate or have my weekend ruined, and they get to ask questions, explain what they were trying to accomplish, and help to create a plan for revision that they are actually on board with. The problem is that not all students find it easy to physically make it to my office for these meetings because of scheduling conflicts, transportation difficulties, or other responsibilities.

I've been trying to figure out a way to give the same quality of assessment interaction through technology so that our physical space wouldn't be so limiting. I think using Google Docs could be an important part of the solution because if we were both in the document at the same time, the student would be able to see where I was in the document when I ask a particular question. I still want the freedom of being able to talk, though, so it might be Google Docs plus a cell phone for the most basic  conference. Of course, Skype offers screen sharing options that could allow for talk, video, and the ability to point to specific places in the text, but students may not be as comfortable with it (especially with video - who wants their professor to see their dorm room?!).

One of my biggest limitations is that I'm committed to avoiding asynchronous formats (meaning we're not both present at the same time) because no matter how many bells and whistles the technology I use for that might have (say doing a screencast of myself reading the essay and making comments that are linked to the text), it still prevents the student and I from having a dialogue, a dynamic interaction, regarding their thinking and writing and the work they can do to improve both. I might as well just pull out a red pen and scribble indecipherable comments on their paper essay that won't get revised if I'm not going to give them a voice in the process.

So yeah, I'm open to suggestions for finding a new and better digital space for meaningful interactions with students who may have limited access to quality technology off campus. No pressure.

Cool Tools Review #5 - Loupe Collage

I have to admit, I had a lot of fun with this tool. Loupe Collage is a super user friendly photo collage website that allows users to upload pics from their device, social media accounts, or the web to then format into cool shapes. Users can choose from a fairly large number of preprogramed shapes, including many animal, holiday, and special event-themed ones, or they can draw their own shape. Additionally, they can do as I did and choose the text option, which will place their pics into the shape of whatever letters they type in the available box.

I typed HAIR and used all pics of hairstyles I've done on my daughter. If you hover over the images, you can see larger versions of them.

The site is free to use and easy to sign into using Google or Facebook (or a couple of other options). It's possible to create something without signing in, but I had to sign in if I wanted to use more than 25 images, and I did. There is also an option for creating cards and a game called Waldo where users have to click on one particular image within a collage within a certain amount of time before moving on.

I could see this being a useful tool for a project where students are asked to document their progress  with images or where they would like to add a fun element to a presentation. I was able to pick it up almost immediately without even using the tutorials because it was so intuitive, and I would imagine most older students would be able to do the same. It could be tricky to use in class for several reasons, however. First, it doesn't offer a range of stock or creative commons images that students can choose from, so they will have to be cautious about using copyrighted material unlawfully. Second, all collages are public, so if students use their own images to avoid copyright infringement, they still need to be good digital citizens when they decide what is safe to include. And third, the game is silly but addictive, so students could be easily sidetracked by it. I don't think any of those reasons are deal breakers, of course, but it is best to know what one is likely to be up against in order to be prepared.

Now go make something cool!

How to how-to #2

I had hoped to have another video up and running by now, but filming and editing a spiral braid how-to has proven more challenging than I expected.

At first, things seemed promising. I decided to film at my parents' house so that I would have my mom to help/run interference with my younger kiddos.

This is what she resorted to in order to keep them out of my shot.

I used one of her stools with an incredibly high-tech bonding method for my selfie stick to get a higher vantage point for this braid, which seemed like a good idea at the time.

I think the bow was a nice touch.

The problem with such a high camera, however, was that I couldn't actually see the screen while I was braiding. Initially, I was just concerned that I might not be keeping her centered in the frame, but when I finished the first spiral braid, I realized the bigger issue was that I didn't notice when my phone ran out of storage space after seven minutes and stopped recording, mid-braid. *head desk*

So. I deleted all the things from my phone that I could, pulled out the braid, started from the hair already parted, and tried again. I asked my mom to stand where she could see the phone to make sure it didn't stop recording, and I braided like the wind!

The finished product!

I ended up with a ten minute video and knew I would need to edit it down. A few days later, I started trying to do so in Splice. Unfortunately, I think ten minutes is beyond the scope of what Splice can do with the memory that I have on my phone. As I was starting to get the hang of how to trim and cut my video with its controls, it suddenly froze and gave up on me. *head desk*

My plan at this point is to upload the video onto my laptop, edit it using iMovie, then transfer the shorter video back to my phone to use the audio features of Splice, which I really like. Since I won't get to do that for another day at least, though, I wanted to give an update on where things are right now.

Cool Tool Review #4 - Mind42

My favorite thing about Mind42 as a tool is that it doesn't require Adobe Flash Player, which I'm pretty sure we can all agree is delivered via a direct portal from either Hades or the fires of Mount Doom. Mind42 is a handy, free, easy to use, online mind-mapping tool. It is limited in a number of ways (it formats nodes automatically meaning the user can't move them around, images can only be added via url, there are only three sizes of text and no alternate fonts, etc.), but its simplicity makes it really easy to pick up.

Additionally, it has collaboration capabilities and to-do functions that would make it handy for managing large and/or group projects with students. Teachers could use nodes to break down an assignment into incremental steps, each with its own "to-do" for students to mark off as they complete each task. I could see that being useful both for helping students understand all that they need to do (and in what order) as well as for holding students (somewhat) accountable for what they are doing. Similarly, students working in a group could apportion tasks and keep tabs on one another with the nodes.

In a more student-driven, it could also be used as a visual for students to create a research plan that the teacher could then view and make suggestions on.

I just recapped my Spring Break to-do list. You know, a to-done list.

Basically, if I were into mind-mapping rather than free-writing and listing activities, I could dig this, but I might not use it in my composition classes because I have precious little time for teaching any software, and most of that time is devoted to showing students how to insert page numbers and page breaks into their word-processing software of choice.

Of Audiences and Ebooks

As a writing instructor and a rhetoric scholar, audience is something I think about on a regular basis. When I talk about the rhetorical triangle with my students, I try to convince them that to be persuasive, they need to think deeply about their audience -- their values, communities, knowledge, emotions, etc. And they need to let what they know about their audience shape what and how they write. I ask them to imagine an audience who needs to hear what they have to say and write to them.

This is the Rhetorical Triangle if you don't remember it from your first year composition course.

The trouble with this approach, however, is that I know and my students know that I am the actual audience for most of what they write. It's not a terribly far logical leap to go from "Write to your audience" to "Write what your teacher wants to hear," even though that is the last thing I want my students to learn.

Some teachers try to overcome this obstacle by asking students to write letters to some authority figure about a problem the class has researched, but few such letter-writing campaigns have resulted in policy changes (I don't know of any, personally), which means that students still tend to view this as a school genre with no significant audience. Others try to at least have students publish their work to a blog or YouTube so that they have an authentic audience, though I fear that too often teachers are just asking students to complete the same old school genres (essay, report, argument, etc.), just posted online.

I like Jon Smith's approach to this problem using ebooks. He describes how his fifth grade Special Education students hated writing for just him, their teacher, and especially hated all of the prompts for writing that he provided. When he gave them an actual audience in the form of an ebook available on iTunes, however, they came up with their own prompt, their own motivation for writing. As other teachers in his school district adopted his approach, I noticed a common theme among what students produced: they created books that would teach others what they were currently learning. Now on the one hand, these books still represent a school genre in the form of a textbook, but rather than being what students passively consume, it is something they actively create.

Does this mean that my first year college writing students will be producing ebooks from now on? I don't know. But my 11-year-old daughter has been enthusiastically writing a book for the past week, and I love the idea of her using this software for school purposes as well. Creating an ebook to demonstrate what she has learned at the end of a unit rather than taking a test sounds particularly appealing to me. I'm not convinced that what she produces will necessarily be worthy of the 24,000+ readers that Smith's students have gained, but I am sure that her belief that she could have such an audience will motivate her to create better work than she would otherwise have made. 

Copyright or Copywrong?

As an English Composition instructor, I'm usually way more concerned with plagiarism than I am with copyright infringement. In the past, I have typically asked my students to create documents or presentations that only I or their classmates would see, so even if they used images or music that was not their own, I assumed it was okay because it was for noncommercial, nonpublic, educational purposes. I would like to have my students share their work in more public venues to possibly address some of the problems they write about and try to solve, but doing so creates a new problem in that it means I have to teach them how to avoid breaking copyright laws.

I have every intention of using the creative commons curriculum for teaching copyright that is offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as I start to navigate this new area of teaching, but I am a little concerned about teaching something that I still find so bewildering myself. On the one hand, I could just require my students to only use images and music that they find on the Creative Commons website for my assignments, but doing so dodges my responsibility for teaching them how to engage ethically with other people's work as a digital citizen.

It's just a sticky situation, though. I'm not much for downloading or remixing music, so the intricacies of that are a little lost on me, but when I think about patterns for crafts like knitting and crocheting, all of the potential problems become clear. On the one hand, ideas and processes aren't supposed to be protected by copyright, and what are patterns if not processes for achieving a particular idea? The actual photographs and written instructions seem like they would be protected, so that if I printed off copies of a pattern I found online and started selling them as if they were my own, that would be copyright infringement. But following the instructions to create something and then selling that product is less clear. (See this blog post for a more in-depth discussion of this issue). Then again, if I use sheet music written and copyrighted by someone else to play a song on my French Horn (and let's be honest, it's been so long since I played it that it likely won't sound exactly as intended), and I record that song without permission and share it widely, possibly for profit, I would be violating copyright, wouldn't I? Because that is also a procedure for creating art, but a procedure that requires an awful lot of knowledge, talent, and creativity to come up with. See, I'm even more confused as I continue to write.

I feel like the only safe bet is to just create all of my own content. Except then I have to worry about other people stealing my stuff without permission. Even if I do a Creative Commons license for my things, there's still a good chance that people will, knowingly or otherwise, use my creations in ways I did not intend. Suddenly I hear a member of a royal family singing something about not holding onto things (wink, wink). In other words, the ideal sharing environment would come with a lot of letting go: of expectations for financial gain, of control over what we are willing to share, but also of greed to profit off of what others have made. 

See. Still complicated.

How to How-to: My Journey to Internet Fame #1

I mentioned in a previous post that people have repeatedly asked me to start a YouTube channel devoted to the fancy braids I do in my daughter's hair, but that I always resist because I don't know how and feel like it would take too much time and effort to figure it out. Given our option in this instructional technology course to document learning something new as our major assignment, however, I've decided to go ahead and attempt to figure it out.

In that spirit, I went out last week and purchased my first selfie stick, rearranged the furniture in my dining room to create a semi-well-lit "studio," and rigged up that selfie stick to film my first braid.

If you're wondering, yes, that is my son's highchair standing in as camera crew. I expected filming to be challenging, and it definitely lived up to that expectation. In fact, I was originally planning to record a more complicated braid, but ended up settling for a headband braid for the sake of the continued sanity of all parties involved.

See how pretty! I was going to recreate this one, but then the forces of the universe conspired against me...

So what made it challenging?
1. The presence of my other two children, particularly the 10-month-old. One of the important features I worked with in Splice was how to mute the original video so no one could hear her alternating between singing and crying in the background. Where she was confined to her highchair after crawling in and out of the shot repeatedly in the first take.
2. Trying to get the selfie stick rigged up at the correct angle to capture what I was doing without resorting to duct tape or dark magic.
3. Realizing just before finishing the first take that I didn't have enough storage on my phone to finish filming, so I had to stop, delete 350 photos, take out the braid, and start all over again.

Despite my frustration, however, I'm pretty pleased with my first ever how-to video, and I'm looking forward to seeing how much better my videos will get over the next few weeks.

Cool Tools Review #3 - Splice is Nice!

This week I reviewed Splice, which is a video editing app for iPhone and iPad made by GoPro. Finally, I managed to choose a truly free app, and it's frankly pretty sweet. I used it on my phone and was able to add both music and voiceovers to a video of me braiding my daughter's hair. It was relatively easy to pick up and has some handy features, like a library of songs that are free to use or the ability to pull music from an iTunes library (assuming that one obeys the dictates of copyright and fair use). I found the Help section of the app particularly detailed and, well, helpful.

I could see this being a really useful tool in the classroom for assignments when I want my students to produce a video essay. Without any special equipment beyond an iPhone, students would be able to do some pretty sophisticated editing. I focused just on the audio tools this week because my video wasn't terribly long and I prefer to tackle just one flaming hoop (aka new skill) at a time, but the app also has tools for cutting, cropping, filtering, etc. that would allow for cooler, more streamlined videos as well.

The only downsides I can see are that there doesn't appear to be an Android or Windows version of the app (which means not all students can use the same tool) and that the app requires A LOT of storage space to function well. If students are working in groups, however, it probably wouldn't be too difficult to ensure that there is at least one iPhone user per group. The storage issue isn't a deal breaker either, if students are willing to use an app like Google Photos to store their pics and videos off of their devices.

Overall, I was very pleased with this app and plan on continuing to use it for my braiding tutorial project. I give it two very enthusiastic thumbs up!

Leaving a Legacy as a Digital Citizen

Prior to this week's readings, I hadn't thought much about digital citizenship, as such. I thought about being smart about what I shared online and how I set my privacy settings, about treating people online with the same respect I would show them in person, but I had never attached a specific name to it. I really appreciated Garth Holman's framing of the topic as leaving an online legacy rather than focusing so much on the Internet as a dangerous place. Of course, there are predators and frauds out there who would love to take advantage of the unsuspecting web surfer, but they tend to target those who engage in activities that wouldn't fall under the definition of a legacy, so teaching students to construct a positive digital footprint is likely to also protect them, without drawing on the vivid picture of Internet Bogeymen to scare them straight.

See what happens when you talk to someone you don't know online!

My own negative experiences online have been fairly mild. The worst instance was when someone I would have preferred to shut out of my personal business created a MySpace account posing as someone I trusted so that I would accept the friend request and she would be able to see what I was posting on my account. I don't know if she expected to find me saying terrible things about her online, which I guess would have made her feel better about things she had done to me, but she was certainly disappointed if she did. I'm not one to call names in private, let alone in the forever world of the inter webs, regardless of what my privacy settings might be. The result was that the situation de-escalated. I quickly realized what was going on and quietly unfriended her, with basically no damage done. My commitment to keeping drama offline meant that even when someone tried to attack me, she had no ammunition. Basically, I was building a legacy, and it turns out legacies are pretty safe.

MySpace. Remember when that was a thing?

What I like best about this approach is that it seems like it could work even with students at the height of their invincibility complexes, by which I mean, it's easy for any of us, but especially young students, to think that Internet dangers will never happen to me. Other people might get cat-fished, but not me; someone else might get a virus from illegally downloading music, but not me; that person's ex shared intimate photos after they broke up, but my significant other would never do that to me. If fear of getting caught/hurt is what we're trying to use to motivate student behavior, then we need them to believe that getting caught/hurt is something that could realistically happen to them, but human nature says they probably won't. Legacy, on the other hand, just requires us to get students to buy in to the notion that they can have an actual impact on the world through their online presence and should therefore curate an overall positive image. That's still not an easy task, but if we craft assignments that focus on solving real world problems and share what we find in public spaces, we just might get the kind of feedback Holman describes, with famous people commenting on student videos, for instance, showing them in a positive way that the world is, in fact, watching. And student egos may prove easier to fan than their fears.

What could possibly go wrong?

When our focus is completely on protect, protect, protect, by limiting student access to the Internet or leaving technology out of our teaching equation entirely, then we are failing to model for our students how they ought to behave online. This "positive is better than negative" approach holds true in parenting, as well: I get much better responses from my children when I tell or show them what I want them to do, rather than just giving them a long list of what not to do. Legacy is about showing students what they can do, and do really well, online, which makes so much more sense to me and seems so much easier to introduce to younger kids than outlining all of the specific, often awkward-to -discuss dangers of an online environment.

Turns out if you use Creative Commons to search for "Chester the Molester," all you get is a picture of beloved comedian, Jim Gaffigan, so here's a stand-in for awkwardness.

I tested it out with my composition classes this week since we were discussing social media's impact on culture anyway, and my students seemed taken with the idea, either latching onto the term as describing what they are trying to do online, or nodding and commenting that they really ought to start doing that before they find themselves on the job market (Although some were still committed to stirring up drama online because, and I quote, "I just love gossip!" I guess we can't save them all.). At any rate, legacy is a tool I will definitely employ again in the future, so thank you Garth Holman! (I really wanted to link to his video, but Flash Player is being uncooperative so here's a link to his blog instead!)

Cool Tools Review #2 - Slatebox

For week two of my Cool Tools Reviews I looked at Slatebox.com, which is an infographic/mind mapping tool. For the second week in a row I've stumbled onto one that comes with a cost, but it is not as prohibitive as last weeks. Slatebox is free for an individual and $8/month for a classroom with up to 30 students, and the free account allows slates to be easily shared across multiple platforms. I could see this tool as being useful for presenting complex ideas or for getting students involved in mapping out ideas in a more entertaining way than just creating an outline or writing on a whiteboard.
It was easy to use, requiring perhaps five minutes of effort after the tutorial to feel pretty confident in how to do the basic functions. This ease of use would certainly improve the chances of students being able to pick it up and use it successfully in a single class period. The downside to its simplicity is that it is somewhat limited in what I could actually do with it. I kept wanting it to be Prezi, but it wasn't. This isn't necessarily a shortcoming, just something to consider before committing to a paid subscription.

This is more or less an outline of Digital Citizenship's "Nine Elements"

As you can see (I hope) in the image of the slate I created, this tool has bright colors and access to many publicly available images that can make creating an infographic fun as well as easy. And it was useful to me in visualizing the material in one of the articles I read for class this week that I felt was particularly important and I wanted to retain. I would probably only spend the money on this, however, if I was planning on having students map most of their reading assignments or do them as pre-writing activities before turning in essays. Given the current structure of my composition classes, I don't think it would be worth it for my purposes.

TPaCK, Venn Diagrams for the Win

By the time we finished watching the "TPACK in 2 Minutes" video in class last week, I understood the argument that, as educators, we need to bring our knowledge of content, pedagogy, and technology to bear on every lesson if we want to fully engage our students and give them the best opportunity to learn. It's a simple concept, but it's not so simple to implement.



The trickiest circle of the Venn diagram to work with is the one dealing with technology. At this stage in the game, I know what I want my students to learn in my classroom (writing as a process, critical thinking, arguing toward common ground rather than "winning," etc.), and I know how I want them to get there (pre-write/write/rewrite, follow the money, listen deeply to the other side, etc.), but I'm not sure I always know the best technologies to use to help them get there.

My temptation is to use technologies I am comfortable with. Pen and paper, word-processing software, Springboard, library databases, doodle for scheduling, Google Drive for group work, email, texting, PowerPoint, screen casting, YouTube: these are my go-to tools and they can accomplish quite a bit. But, when I want to do multi-modal projects, I'm less comfortable with video-editing software; when I want students to conduct primary research, I have to pray that Survey Monkey or Google Forms will cooperate during my demonstration; and when I want to conduct grade conferences remotely, I have to overcome my discomfort with video conferencing.

The reason I tend toward the comfortable is that I know I have to be able to model the technology for my students if I want them to use it successfully and trust that I know what I'm doing. Even with word-processing software, which seems like it would be a cinch for digital natives, I always spend time going over it with students ("Do you know how to add page numbers or page breaks? No? Well let me introduce you to your new friend, Insert menu.") I walk students step-by-step through turning in items on Springboard and have them turn in a low-stakes assignment with it first, but I still always get a few frantic emails just after the drop box closes for their first major assignment from students who couldn't quite get the software to work for them. I talk about key words, and expanding and limiting searches in databases, because most of my students have never considered doing anything beyond typing a question into Google, maybe Google Scholar.

The take-away for me, then, with the idea of TPaCK, is a reminder that technology in the classroom always needs to be introduced in a thoughtful and thorough manner, seriously considering the theory that supports its use and clearly modeling and providing the opportunity for students to use the technology successfully. We need to avoid becoming stagnant in our use of particular tools, but we shouldn't just introduce some new bell or whistle every week just to try to show the kids how hip and with it we are (my students have never been deceived about this, and frankly, neither have I. I knew me in middle school <shudder>). It strikes me as flexibility, but with purpose. I will remain open to adding new tools into my toolbox, but I will only introduce them into my classroom when I have a clear view of how they might enhance learning and am fluent enough in them to help students troubleshoot and find solutions when things don't go exactly as planned.

Cool Tool Review #1 - GoAnimateforSchools

I'm not gonna lie, this website was not nearly as fun to play with as I had hoped. I mean, making cool little animations, adding voices and text, and bringing a lesson to life sounds like a fun way to do class prep, but I'm not convinced this is the right tool for doing it.

On the one hand, GoAnimateforSchools seems to have spent a lot of time thinking about the safety of K12 students with intense privacy settings and PG content for animations, which I'm sure would be reassuring for many educators. That security comes at a cost, however, with teacher accounts (meaning the teacher can make videos to show students but students don't get to make their own videos) running $79/year. If I were to subscribe for both myself and enough logins for all of the 125 students I typically teach in a year, it would cost me $447/year for the Higher Ed version or $298/year for the K-12 version. In other words, teachers better bring their grant-writing skills to the table. They do offer a two week free trial for a teacher and 50 students, so an instructor could test it out with students to see if there is any merit to it, but videos made during the trial can't be shared beyond the closed group.

You know, unless you know how to make a screencast on screencast-o-matic.

I worked way too hard, for way too long, to create this ridiculously short video. I had thought I would make multiple videos using the three different types they offer (Business Friendly, Whiteboard Animations, and Video Infographics), but life is too short to keep messing with a software that doesn't automatically save changes and wouldn't let me return directly to the edit page after previewing my video. 

With enough time spent reading the sites blogs, doing tutorials, and exploring samples of what others have made and used the program to teach, it could be an okay tool, but I am not prepared to invest that much time into something that may not be worthwhile. I'm hoping some of the video and animation tools that others in this class are reviewing will prove to be more user friendly at a lower cost, both of time and money.

Produsers, Prosumers, and the Job Market

When I think about participatory culture in my personal life, I know I am pretty actively involved in it. I see pictures of cool hairstyles on Facebook and adapt them to my daughter's head. I watch youtube tutorials on crochet patterns and then make my own version of them. I'm inspired by online recipes all the time, though you better believe I'm using parsley instead of cilantro (you can keep your nasty soapy-tasting herb, Interwebs!). I post pics of what I've made on social media and generally link to the websites that inspired me in the comments. At this point, going to Google images is one of the first steps in my creative process for most projects I undertake, from Halloween costumes to craft ideas for my daughter's classroom parties to illustrations for my lecture slides for my composition classes. It's a little jarring when I find I have to actually pay for instructions or inspiration, though I am sometimes motivated to do so.

I bought a kit that came with an instruction booklet
and materials to make this guy and some of his
friends last year.

This mermaid blanket, on the other hand, I adapted from a
YouTube tutorial.

One of the struggles I've faced that has kept me from fully engaging in this sharing culture, however, has been a lack of access to certain technologies. Every time I post a picture of a fancy braid I've done in my daughter's hair, someone comments that I need to have my own YouTube channel to teach others how to do it. I'm not at all opposed to sharing my expertise and am flattered that other people are interested in this hobby of mine, but I lack the camera crew, or technology that could stand in for one, to actually enable me to film myself braiding and then edit it for mass consumption. 

Bet you wish you could see how I made this happen!

 Now, I could go out and buy a new camera and tripod and editing software to launch my new, clearly viral hair tutorial series, but since I'm a writing instructor rather than a hairstylist by trade, it doesn't seem like a wise financial investment. It's entirely possible that I could find ways of adapting my smartphone or iPad to this purpose with decent and inexpensive results, but again, I'm not sure it's worth the investment of my time given my day job.

I think this struggle of access and investment is at the heart of the issue of pursuing an open culture in education. On the one hand, when we already have the necessary skills and access to technology, we teachers are pretty inclined to share. The birth of the meme below is a good illustration. It started as something that I said on the fly in class as I tried to explain to my students what their essay introductions needed to accomplish without devolving into the rigid structure of the five paragraph theme. My students responded well to it, and I thought it was funny, so I shared my illustration on Facebook because I thought it might prove useful to one of my teaching friends, or at the very least, entertain them. One of my friends and colleagues was so entertained by it that she deemed it worthy of a meme and spent a few minutes turning it into one, which she then shared as a comment. My friends loved it and wanted to share it, so we decided to make the image public. I'm told it was even printed off and now hangs in a couple of university writing centers around the country.

Look Ma, I'm a meme!

I loved every bit of sharing this particular nugget of wisdom. I loved the positive feedback. I loved the sense of connecting with my fellow teachers. I definitely love the picture my friend chose that reminds me of one of my other common van references involving Chris Farley, living in a van, down by the river. But most of all, I loved how easy it was to share.

That ease is important to me, not because I'm lazy, but because I have so many demands on my time and need to use it wisely. My effort has to match the payoff, at least to some extent. This meme is fun, but it has yet to lead to a hiring committee deciding to put my CV and letter of application into the interview pile. I've spent countless hours in the last year revising part of my dissertation into a chapter for an edited collection, however, because I'm hoping it will one day do just that for my job prospects. I fear that not just tenure committees, but hiring committees, would view any online sharing of work, no matter how rigorous or grounded in research, as essentially as frivolous as a meme and therefore not worthy of academic consideration. For those who have tenure, it may be possible to work from within to change the expectations of the system, but for those of us still trying to break into full-time or tenure-track positions in higher education, being completely unselfish about sharing our expertise in open formats (that we may need to spend considerable time/effort/finances learning) could lead to us not being able to do pesky little things like pay our bills and feed our children/selves. 

I'm curious how such open-source content creation is viewed in K-12 settings in terms of hiring and promotion. Is there space in a typical teaching portfolio to showcase such materials? Does the collaborative nature of so much of it raise concerns of plagiarism or padding ones resume? 

I would imagine that districts would love the flip side of the equation, though. Textbooks are such a financial investment, yet they are so often obsolete by the time they are produced, distributed, and used for a few years. Then again, maintaining the technology that students use to access "free" content online is also expensive and a constant battle against becoming obsolete. Additionally, the digital divide or participation gap is a real problem in school districts with high poverty rates. 

I guess, overall, my thoughts are that we are moving as a society towards a sharing economy and that is going to impact our classrooms. While it is a boon for teachers to have access to all that their peers are willing to share, that access doesn't automatically erase the obstacles to education that are endemic in our current education system, which is built on the exploitation of underpaid instructors and which perpetuates the class and segregation lines we have developed over our history as a nation. Still, I believe this open and participatory impulse is a move in the right direction and I would like to contribute to it more as my skills in doing so increase (here's hoping through this course!).