Dancin' With Myself

       I don’t know if any of you have been following particularly closely, but my blog entries seem to regularly wander into 80′s pop music. I’ve cited Devo, Re-Flex, Talking Heads, and here I am with a line from Billy Idol. But as always, this isn’t about music. In this case, it’s about writing, something one wouldn’t normally associate with the bad British rocker with the bleach-blond tangle and the Elvis-like snarl.

       In the early days of social networking, most online participants were pretty self-consciously anonymous. This tendency was equal parts self-protection and self-indulgence.

       The former was a natural reaction — if you had no idea who anyone really was online (and a lot of people were pretending to be someone else for very suspicious reasons), the best defense was to not be yourself, either. The latter, of course, was a way of getting something for nothing — if you couldn’t be yourself, it was fun and exciting to re-create yourself as someone else — older, smarter, better-educated, even a completely different nationality or even gender. In a real sense, it was “dancing with yourself” – you were creating a personna with which you could play. It was a perfect reflection of the overwhelming majority of the social-networkers back then — tweens, teens, and young adults, who were, in fact, trying to create themselves in real life at the same time. But it was a great deal more self-serving, a little less purposeful, and a whole lot more self-indulgent.
       There’s nothing really wrong with all that. But the overwhelming majority of “dancing” we do in our professional and educational lives is with someone else. That is, we select a partner, and we coordinate our moves and steps to fit what that partner is good at, or interested in. We certainly have our own flair, abilities, and personna, but that doesn’t solely define the purpose, or even the character, of the dance.
       Writing is like that — when we write, we certainly want to be creative, skilled, individual, maybe even flashy. But in so-called real life, we’re most likely writing for a purpose, and that purpose requires that we attend to someone else — our audience. If we’re writing an advertisement, we have to know who might want the product, and leverage their other interests to create this new one. If we’re a newspaper reporter, we should know the reading habits and abilities of the audience of our report. If we’re simply applying for a job and writing a resumé, we’ll have no chance of winning the job unless we incorporate our future employer’s interests into our story. We do this by opening up, watching, listening — stepping out of ourselves enough to become aware of the person we hope is watching us, to learn what they’re like, what they want, what they hold as important.
       As teachers, we have to be aware that writing online brings with it some challenges. Our students have their own habits — habits they developed long before we (or any other adult, for that matter) decided to watch. They will tend to be brief, and will feel justified in purposeful misspellings and Internet slang. But even more important, when writing online, they’ll naturally stop caring about audience, since the audience can be, well, anyone and everyone. The results at best self-indulgent, disconnected, and at worst, embarrassingly inept and even, perhaps, insulting. If you don’t know your partner, you’ll be constantly in danger of stepping on toes.
       This is not to mean that online writing in a social context has no purpose, or can only produce terrible results. All writing (on or off line) takes place in a social context, but good writing is self-aware, consciously recognizing that context, and leveraging it for increased effectiveness. Like all things in education, there has to be a “smart person” in the room, guiding and critiquing the student to focus outside of himself. With such guidance, the student will improve, as will the massive amounts of content almost all young people produce online every day.
       Dancing with someone else is almost always a lot more enjoyable, as well as being much more valuable. Besides, I really can’t say I ever liked that Elvis-like snarl….

If not you, who? If not now, when?

        It's here -- a standard, in amongst all the other writing standards, that specifically addresses what it means to be a writer in the 21^st Century...

Writing Standards K-5 - Grade 5 Students: Standard 6.

With some guidance and support from adults, use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing as well as to interact and collaborate with others..

       This standard is one of the new Common Core State Standards adapted by the Kentucky Department of Education, now in training for implementation in the fall. It makes succinct what our students already know: that writing for most purposes involves collaboration and connection. And the way in which students connect, collaborate – even write – is online.
       It’s in the Standards, so will it be in instruction? The process of “deconstructing” the standards in preparation for designing lessons is fully underway, and this standard (as of April 1, 2011) has yet even get that far (see KDE's list). But does it need to be? Is the fact that it’s a separate standard mean that, in fact, it needs separate “air time?” In an ideal world, no, if, in fact, it was already uniformly distributed throughout the other standards, and a teacher's practice. That is as it should be. In the world of higher education and professional work, most writing is connected. Nearly all readers are interactively connected to the writing they consume. Even further, a lot of writings (from textbooks to encyclopedias) are now produced collaboratively online, with many authors, and constantly negotiated content changes and additions. The implication is, in the post-secondary world, writing without interactive connection is rare, and so addressing it separately would be like addressing auto repair without electronic diagnostics.

        That’s the world our students already live in, and is most certainly the one they’ll join when they leave us. Although my “research” is anecdotal and incomplete, I’m thinking it isn’t the world most of our teachers live in. That means, if left to their own devices, chances are that most teachers won’t view this standard as that important. Many may not even know what it means. With that knowledge, the standard probably needs to be specifically addressed, and that is the intent of the Common Core Standards as written. But when, and by whom?

        As a tech integration specialist, I’m pretty used to being invited to the party late. A professional development class is being designed, or a unit is being built, and someone has the idea that, maybe, it should have a technology component. (After all, a lot of folks are talking about technology, so we probably ought to include something!) So I'm called. But when that happens, inevitably, I walk into a room in which the big decisions about content and pedagogy have already been made. The results are a lot of clever graphs and images.

        In the digital age, is it really possible to start a discussion about pedagogy without technology? For this argument, I’m setting aside the revolution implied by a lot of technology tool use – knowledge construction, project-based instruction, student-driven learning, the trifecta generally associated with online and connected learning. Let’s just stick with Standard 6 above. We’ll take something really easy – a personal narrative about some incident in a student's life. Traditionally, a teacher would establish a rubric, pass out instructions, collect the results of the assignment, and grade them. If the lesson needs more "real life" connections, that might change the assigned writing topic. And the impact of my coming into the party late might be that the students are asked to read the instructions online, type them up in Word with some nice added clipart, and upload the results into a learning management system. Good, we’ve got technology in.

       Did we cover the standard? Did the student “publish?” Did they “interact with others?” Did they “collaborate?” Obviously not. To truly reflect the standard, we could redesign the lesson, and have students publish their writings as blog entries, providing for online peer comments and suggestions, and then have that feed a collaborative rewriting process through a wiki. This approach (very different from my “upload Word document” example) actually addresses the intent of the standard. But the changes have a profound impact on the original lesson performance expectation, the rubric, work completion, and grading, so adding this standard would require major changes to the original lesson design. The point, of course, is that it is not possible to begin the lesson planning process without having already selected the technologies, and incorporated their implications into how students write, learn, and are graded.

        It’s a standard, but the standard simply asks the same question the students themselves are asking their teachers: If not you, who? If not now, when?