Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Trajectories, Not Jobs

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skydeleteSome comment threads are actually readable. (Forget ones about politics.) And some comments in those comment threads are actually enlightening and instructive. Here’s one:

Donna Brewington White:

My kids do not dream of growing up and finding a job. They dream of creating (and selling) something or starting something… My 15 y.o. son sees his popularity on Vine as the beginning stages of his future work as a filmmaker. For him it is a trajectory.

For context, White’s response was to a post by Fred Wilson on the expansion of the highly popular writing and reading site Wattpad into Wattpad Studios, aimed at connecting “entertainment and publishing executives with Wattpad stories and creators.” And in case you’re not familiar with Wattpad, that means connecting them to thousands and thousands of kid authors who create and comment and commune on the site on a regular basis. I’m guessing some of those kids are in your schools.

Bu the larger point, I think, is this. Sites like Wattpad are places where kids can write about things they find interesting or are passionate about for an engaged, most often supportive community of readers, many of whom are writers themselves. Others, like Vine, or Snapchat, or YouTube offer other mediums and other audiences for kids to create and share. For many, this is the new normal.

Except in schools.

I wonder how many of our students feel the license and agency in schools to create their own “trajectory.” And I wonder what we, and they, miss by not making that a focus of our work in classrooms.

Wattpad Studios will no doubt bring kid creators more fully into the entertainment mainstream, to amplify their passions and good works, to grow their audiences. The good news is they’re not going to wait for us to figure it out.

(Image Credit: Zachary Young)

Reading Screens, Writing Screens, Teaching Screens

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I’ve been sitting here for the last few minutes trying to come up with a number, a percentage that captures how much of what I read is read on a screen as opposed to a piece of paper these days. My first thought was 90%, but that sounded too high, so I’ve been sitting here trying to knock that number down. It’s really, really hard. Just about all of my books are on the iPad, all of my bills are online, all the newspapers and magazines that I read regularly are on the Web, all the RSS feeds, the Tweets, the videos… This may be TMI, but there aren’t even any magazines in the bathroom any more.

Maybe, in fact, it’s 95%.

Which, as is so often the case, leads me to think about my kids and the reading and writing they are going to do in the next school year. For my son who’s 11, I’m guessing about 90% will be given out and handed in on paper. For my daughter, who is 13 and has “adopted” my old MacBook as her own, it may be closer to 75% on paper coming in and going out as I’m sure she’ll be asked to print most of what she composes on the computer. In either case, I’m guessing not much instruction or discussion is going to be centered on the ways in which screen reading and writing are changing the very nature of the acts. They’re not creating links. They’re not deconstructing them.

They should be.

Two great pieces by Scott Rosenberg and Kevin Kelly have me thinking deeply about this. Scott’s piece, “In Defense of Links Part 3: In Links we Trust” neatly captures so much of the shift around reading that I think it should be required reading for every teacher (since every teacher is a writing teacher.) I’m serious. Here’s a fairly short snip that gets to the complexity of reading and writing in links.

The context that links provide comes in two flavors: explicit and implicit. Explicit context is the actual information you need to understand what you’re reading…you land on my page and you might well have no idea what I’m talking about, since this is part three of a series. Links make it easy for me to show you where to catch up. If you don’t have time for that, links let me orient you more quickly in my first paragraph with reference to Carr’s post. I can do all this without having to slow down those readers who’ve been following from the start with summaries and synopses. Again, even if the links that achieve this do demand a small fee from your working brain (which remains an unproven hypothesis), I’d say that’s a fair price.

By implicit context, I mean something a little more elusive: The links you put into a piece of writing tell a story (or, if you will, a meta-story) about you and what you’ve written. They say things like: What sort of company does this writer keep? Who does she read? What kind of stuff do her links point to — New Yorker articles? Personal blogs? Scholarly papers? Are the choices diverse or narrow? Are they obvious or surprising? Are they illuminating or puzzling? Generous or self-promotional?

Links, in other words, transmit meaning, but they also communicate mindset and style.

Which isn’t to say that written texts don’t communicate mindset and style. But it is to suggest that interacting with links, both by simply reading them and by clicking on them, creates quite a different experience, one with more complexity and, I think, more potential. It’s not as simple as “links provide context.” The choice of what we link to speaks volumes about our interests, biases, agendas, and those cues are now a part of the reading interaction, a piece of what we as readers then use to make sense of the text.

Kevin Kelly’s piece in the Smithsonian Magazine, A Whole New Way of Reading, also gets to the complexity of these changes.

But it is not book reading. Or newspaper reading. It is screen reading. Screens are always on, and, unlike with books we never stop staring at them. This new platform is very visual, and it is gradually merging words with moving images: words zip around, they float over images, serving as footnotes or annotations, linking to other words or images. You might think of this new medium as books we watch, or tele­vision we read. Screens are also intensely data-driven. Pixels encourage numeracy and produce rivers of numbers flowing into databases. Visualizing data is a new art, and reading charts a new literacy. Screen culture demands fluency in all kinds of symbols, not just letters.

There is a lot going on in that paragraph, a lot about balance, about participation, multimedia, literacy and more. And a lot about the flows of knowledge vs. the stacks of knowledge that John Seely Brown and others write about in Pull.

So here are the questions I’m asking: Are reading and writing changing in these linkable, screen centered environments? If so, does the way we think about reading and writing literacy have to change to embrace these shifts? If so, what are we doing about that?

Right now, I think the answer in most schools is “not much.” In fact, I’m not sure many even realize the extent to which this shift is occurring. They have other things on their minds. (Case in point, see this snip from a local newspaper that Steve Ransom tweeted to me this morning.) Which is why I just sent these two links to the English Department supervisor and various others at my local high school and my kids’ two schools. As good as they are at what they do, my sense is that they need us as parents out here in this stew to send them this stuff to read.

Here’s hoping they click the links.

Nervous Writing / Well-Trained Teachers

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A couple of vignettes from the road last week that I wanted to capture briefly. Both have had me thinking over this very enjoyable holiday weekend.

I often show FanFiction.net in my presentations as an example of passionate participation. I happen to know a couple of kids (here’s one) who do fanfic on a fairly regular basis, and every now and then I check in and dig around for some good stuff to read. It’s usually not too hard to find. Anyway, Tucker has been checking out the Percy Jackson stories fairly regularly since after the fifth time through the series, I think the books are finally starting to lose their luster. Some of the Fanfic stories he likes more than others, but the cool thing is that he’s been thinking of trying his hand at writing something himself. But at almost 11, he’s still a little nervous about putting something up there for everyone to see, regardless of his own anonymity in the process.

Last week when I told this story, a tech director raised her hand and said “You know, I think it’s interesting that your son is nervous about sharing his writing. Does he ever get nervous about his writing for school?” I thought for a second and said “Um, no…you know you’re right. He hardly thinks twice about that stuff.” She said “I’m guessing he’d be more motivated to work on his Percy Jackson story to make it good than he is his homework.” And ever since I’ve been wondering why we can’t instill a healthy nervousness every now and then into our writing process, now that we have these ready made audiences (or at least easily found audiences). All it would take is a willingness on our parts to let kids write about the things they truly love from time to time and connect that to an audience larger than the classroom. Shouldn’t be too hard these days…

The other story is less hopeful. At a collection of school leaders and IT people, one of the participants told the group that his school had bought a number of iPads for teachers and that they had scheduled a chunk of training on how to use them. Unfortunately for him, I had just read an exchange on Twitter where Gary Stager had made the point that I quickly made to the group: “You know, something like 1.3 million people have bought an iPad and I doubt any of them have gotten any “training” on how to use it.” The people in the room half chuckled, but one woman said “Our teachers won’t do anything with technology unless we give them training.”

Sigh.

We’ve done the same thing to our teachers that we’re doing to our kids, namely conditioned them to wait for direction on what to learn, how to learn it, and how to show they’ve learned it.

Writing for Live Audiences

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3,462

That’s the estimate, (give or take a few hundred)  of how many Expository Composition essays I read during my tenure as an English teacher not so too long ago. I was a process writing teacher, bought into Nancie Atwell‘s workshop approach and Donald Murray‘s revision voice from the very start. I actually loved teaching the revision process, the reflective part of reading what you wrote, testing it out in voice, scribbling in the margins and really trying to hear what the reader heard. The “final” copies always kinda bummed me out, because they were only final  for the grade.

I’ve written here before that writing feels way different now; publishing isn’t the end part of the process any longer, it’s somewhere in the messy middle, except on those few occasions when something I write actually ends up in print (or, god forbid, on a pdf.) somewhere. Bud and I have fairly regular albeit sporadic conversations about “connective writing,” the idea that we don’t just write to communicate as much as we write for connection, for response, whether that’s here in the blog or on Twitter or wherever else. That the audience is far greater than the teacher or the other students in the class. That connections happen when we write about the things we care about, when our passion shines through. In that light, somehow those 3,462 essays and the classroom they were written in seem like a lifetime ago.

But nowadays I find myself writing “live” more and more, in the chat box in Skype or during the Elluminate sessions we do in PLP or on a live stream at UStream. There’s no “process” in the writing other than quick response and reaction, making plain what’s in our brains at the moment. We write with little reflection, little thought, in many cases. And usually, we’re trying to multitask our way through many responses from different people responding to different questions as the stream goes by. We have to write in the flow, (flowwriting?) and it’s not an easy task.

As I write this, I hear the little typewriter sound of chats being posted to a Cover-it-Live session open in another tab, kids at Carolyn Foote‘s school in Austin, Tx who are backchannelling a panel presentation on technology and censorship and the book 1984. It’s hard to follow the conversation by just reading their chats without hearing the panel, but it struck me…did those kids get any prep on how to live write? (I just Tweeted Carolyn with that question. and I also chatted it to the panel. Let’s see what happens.) Are their certain skills or nuances around “flowwriting” for live audiences that we need to teach and nurture? Certain “rules” or norms for use? (Carolyn Tweeted a whole bunch stuff back, and now we’re chatting about it in the CiL room and she’s bringing the teacher in. Different way of communicating, huh?)

I’m not suggesting we stop teaching process writing and essays and such. But I continue to wonder how deal with the affordances of these new writing spaces for our kids and for ourselves. Is anyone teaching it? Should we be?

tl;dr

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So, might just be me, but I hadn’t run across the “tl;dr” thing until I was reading a Mark Pesce’s “What Ever Happened to the Book?” post from a few weeks ago. As usual, it’s a totally great piece about “connective reading,” one that explores the motivations of following links and the pressures that linked environments put on the act of reading. As a former English teacher, I love that conversation, and I see myself all over it:

The lure of the link has a two-fold effect on our behavior. With its centrifugal force, it is constantly pulling us away from wherever we are. It also presents us with an opportunity cost. When we load that 10,000-word essay from the New York Times Magazine into our browser window, we’re making a conscious decision to dedicate time and effort to digesting that article. That’s a big commitment. If we’re lucky – if there are no emergencies or calls on the mobile or other interruptions – we’ll finish it. Otherwise, it might stay open in a browser tab for days, silently pleading for completion or closure. Every time we come across something substantial, something lengthy and dense, we run an internal calculation: Do I have time for this? Does my need and interest outweigh all of the other demands upon my attention? Can I focus?

Not sure why, but I love thinking about this stuff. It’s fascinating to step back from time to time and go all meta on my own reading and writing. For instance, the process I’ve got down for using Google Reader and Twitter to lead me to lots (too much?) good stuff to read, then to save it to Delicious, or to read it later with Instapaper, or to snip it into Evernote, or to throw it up on Posterous, or even mix it into a blog post here (or there.) Looks a little different from what I did ten or five or even two years ago. The public nature of it all is a big enough shift for most, but my brain just operates totally differently now when reading and writing. Both are a participatory sports these days.

And I know I keep coming around to how my kids aren’t getting any of this in schools, and my frustrations as a parent that most of the good souls in the schools where my kids are don’t create links on a regular basis. Or that they’re not teaching “connective reading” in any real sense. That there not helping my kids with the challenges of this changed reading space, which, continuing from the snip above, Pesce makes pretty clear:

In most circumstances, we will decline the challenge.  Whatever it is, it is not salient enough, not alluring enough.  It is not so much that we fear commitment as we feel the pressing weight of our other commitments.  We have other places to spend our limited attention.  This calculation and decision has recently been codified into an acronym: “tl;dr”, for “too long; didn’t read”.  It may be weighty and important and meaningful, but hey, I’ve got to get caught up on my Twitter feed and my blogs.

So, it begs the question, I think, what do we do? Just like I alluded to a changed reality in the Facebook post yesterday, there is a changed reality here, too. The act of reading and writing is different. The habits are different. And it’s still changing and evolving, just like reading and writing always have, but with what feels like, to me at least, more speed. No one is teaching our kids.

Assuming you didn’t go “tl;dr” to this post, what ways are you thinking about or actually implementing change around reading and writing instruction in your classrooms? How are you helping your kids read and write differently? What’s different about the way you read and write today compared to ten years ago, and what are the implications? Reflect away.

The End of Books? (For Me, At Least?)

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So, let me say at the outset that I love books. All my life, I’ve been a reader of books. I have at least 1,000 of them in my home (on shelves, in stacks on the floor, in boxes in the basement.) I have books of every type; novels, non-fiction, story books, picture books and more. Life feels better when I’m surrounded by books.

And I love the fact that my kids love books, that Tucker spent an hour at the public library yesterday, gliding through the stacks, pulling books down, sitting cross legged on the floor, testing them out, that the first thing Tess wanted to do when we moved last fall was organize her books. I totally understand why living in a house full of books is worth upwards of like three grades of literacy in school schooling.

So, with that bit of context, let me try to explain how my book loving brain got really, seriously rocked the other day, rocked to the point where I’m wondering how many more paper books I might accumulate in my life.

Last year, I put the Kindle app on my iPhone and downloaded a couple of books to read. I was surprised in that the experience actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The first book, a great novel by Anita Shreve, was not much different from reading on paper. The story flew by, and other than being surprised when I got to the end (because I didn’t know how many pages I had left to go) it was a great reading experience. But non-fiction wasn’t so great. If you look at most of the non-fiction books in my library, you’ll see they’re totally marked up, underlined, annotated and messy. It’s the way I attempt to cement in those most important points, and it helps me recall the good stuff in a book more easily. On the Kindle, I could highlight, and take a note, but it just wasn’t as useful. The notes were hard to find, and the highlights just weren’t feeling as sticky. I wasn’t impressed; in fact, it was frustrating.

Last week, when I downloaded my first book to my shiny new iPad, things improved. The larger screen made a big difference, creating highlights and typing in reflective notes was a breeze, but I was still feeling the same frustration with the limitations; just because the pages were bigger didn’t mean the notes left behind were any easier to find, and stuff just felt too disjointed. I kept searching for a way to copy and paste sections of the book out into Evernote, albeit a clunky process on the iPad, but still worth it if I could make my notes digital (i.e. searchable, remixable, etc.) My searches didn’t come up with anything, and I finally turned to Twitter and asked the question there. Ted Bongiovanni (@teddyb109) came to the rescue:

@willrich45 – re: iPad Kindle cut and paste, sort of. You can highlight, and then grab them from kindle.amazon.com #iPad #kindle

Turns out my iPad Kindle app syncs up all of my highlights and notes to my Amazon account. Who knew? When I finally got to the page Ted pointed me to in my own account, the page that listed every highlight and every note that I had taken on my Kindle version of John Seely Brown’s new book Pull, I could only think two words:

Game. Changer.

All of a sudden, by reading the book electronically as opposed to in print, I now have:

  • all of the most relevant, thought-provoking passages from the book listed on one web page, as in my own condensed version of just the best pieces
  • all of my notes and reflections attached to those individual notes
  • the ability to copy and paste all of those notes and highlights into Evernote which makes them searchable, editable, organizable, connectable and remixable
  • the ability to access my book notes and highlights from anywhere I have an Internet connection.

Game. Changer.

I keep thinking, what if I had every note and highlight that I had ever taken in a paper book available to search through, to connect with other similar ideas from other books, to synthesize electronically? It reminds me of the Kevin Kelly quote that I share from time to time in my presentations, the one from the New York Times magazine in 2006 titled “Scan This Book“:

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

And I also keep thinking about what changes now? How does my note taking in books change? (Do I start using tags and keywords along with adding my reflections?) Now that I can post my notes and highlights publicly, what copyright ramifications are there? How might others find that useful? And the biggest question, do I buy any more paper books?

I know others might not find this earth shattering, but this is a pretty heady shift for me right now, one that is definitely disrupting my worldview. And it’s, as always, making think of the implications for my kids. What if they could export out the notes from their own texts, store them, search them, share them? Yikes.

I’m sure I’ll be reflecting on it more as it all plays out.

Writing on the Internet

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Just a couple of quotes that I’ve run across of late to add to the reading and writing conversation. I love this one by Donal Leu:

Another difference from earlier models of print comprehension is the inclusion of communication within online reading comprehension. Online reading and writing are so closely connected that it is not possible to separate them; we read online as authors and we write online as readers [Emphasis mine.]

And this from Deborah Brandt at the University of Wisconsin Madison in a great article from the Chronicle titled “Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers“:

Some of the resistance to a more writing-centered curriculum, she says, is based on the view that writing without reading can be dangerous because students will be untethered to previous thought, and reading levels will decline. But that view, she says, is “being challenged by the literacy of young people, which is being developed primarily by their writing. They’re going to be reading, but they’re going to be reading to write, and not to be shaped by what they read.” [Emphasis mine]

(See also Kathleen Blake Yancey’s wonderful essay “Writing in the 21st Century” if you haven’t already.)

I know as a long-time high school expository writing teacher (who really misses that classroom), my curriculum would be decidedly different today than five years ago. There would have been a lot more situated practice in reading as a writer and developing the skills necessary to track and participate in the distributed conversation that hopefully occurs. I find it fascinating to consider the ways in which social technologies afford all sorts of potentially global, immediate connections around what we write. And I still think that a basic shift here is that we can no longer look at publishing as the final step in the process but see it instead as somewhere in the middle. Maybe even see it as the start of something.

Interested to hear from teachers who have begun to rethink or rewrite curriculum in light of the potentials of the technologies.

New Reading, New Writing

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A great essay by Steven Johnson in the Wall Street Journal this weekend “How the E-Book Will Change the Way we Read and Write” has me thinking hard once again about reading and writing skills and literacies as we move toward an even more digitally integrated world of texts and links. It immediately made me think of one of my other favorite essays on the topic, Kevin Kelly’s “Scan this Book” from the Times a couple of years ago, not necessarily because I agree with everything that both authors discuss but because each makes me take a look at my own reading and writing process through an adjusted lens.

But what was different in my reading of the Johnson essay as opposed to the Kelly essay was my ability to interact with it through Diigo. Over the last few months, I’ve become more and more enamored with Diigo as a tool for notetaking and bookmarking, sure, but as a platform for some interesting conversations. And, while I’m not sure Johnson even knows of its existence, it’s already bringing to fruition many of the social reading potentials we’ve been thinking of as futuristic. The idea that I can not just annotate a paragraph or a sentence or one idea on a webpage but that I can engage with others in sharing our thinking about that particular sentence or idea is at once powerful and daunting. I mean, imagine the meta conversations we might be able to have over different passages in the classics once they all get scanned and put online by Google (or someone else.) As Johnson writes:

As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity — a direct exchange between author and reader — to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.

I’d say that is a pretty profound shift, wouldn’t you? One that is not so well understood and, in many cases, not even desired by many “traditional” book readers out there.

So when you compare the un-annotated Kelly essay to the marked up Johnson piece (this link lets you see all the notes), there is a vastly different feel, for me at least. And it would be even more different if you would add your own annotations to the piece. In my presentations, one of the most powerful examples of how this particular tool is a potential game changer is when I show this article, “Is Technology Producing a Decline in Critical Thinking and Analysis” in the un-annotated form and then turn the highlights and conversations on. There is nothing but critical thinking and analysis happening there as supported by, um, technology. The irony is palpable.

Is social reading and social writing in our kids’s futures? I don’t think there is much doubt about that. More and more I’m finding Diigo annotations and notes cropping up on the articles and essays that I read, and by and large I’ve found the commentors to be serious, thoughtful and articulate. In other words, while they do add volume, they also add value. Those of us who are mucking around in these new reading and writing spaces have no formal training in it, obviously, just a passion to connect and a willingness to experiment and engage in conversations around the the topics that interest us. But there are skills here that if developed with some intention (read: taught and modeled) can improve literacy in interacting with texts and people in these digital spaces. As always, however, we have to begin to see this shifts as natural progressions in the evolution of reading and writing and not simply tools that bring a temporary WOW! factor to the process.

Writing to Connect

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So a number of different threads are congealing in my tired brain regarding writing and blogging and why we do all of this stuff. The post that finally led me to try to get this down was Bud’s Brain Dump on NCTE where he quotes council president Kathleen Blake Yancey as saying this:

If you are writing for the screen, you are writing for the network.

Oh. Yeah. How nice that is to hear, isn’t it? Not “global audience,” but “network”. And as Bud unpacks his conference experience, you get the sense that this whole blogging thing may finally, finally, finally be tipping over the edge in terms not just of a tool to publish but of a tool to connect.

And that is a crucial distinction, I think. Yes, we write to communicate. But now that we are writing in hypertext, in social spaces, in “networked publics,” there’s a whole ‘nother side of it. For as much as I am writing this right now to articulate my thoughts clearly and cogently to anyone who chooses to read it, what I am also attempting to do is connect these ideas to others’ ideas, both in support and in opposition, around this topic. Without rehashing all of those posts about Donald Murray and Jay David Bolter, I’m trying to engage you in some way other than just a nod of the head or a sigh of exasperation. I’m trying to connect you to other ideas, other minds. I want a conversation, and that changes the way I write. And it changes the way we think about teaching writing. This is not simply about publishing, about taking what we did on paper and throwing it up on a blog and patting ourselves on the back.

This after-the-publishing part is difficult because we are forced to attempt to do it in filtered, restricted, contrived spaces for learning, spaces that are not conducive to this type of writing or learning. Barbara Ganley (who was featured last week in the Times as a “slow blogger”) is consdering this as well.

As a college teacher, I thought I was all about collaborative learning, about students taking responsibility for their learning and their lives–together–but how can you do that within an artificial environment? Within a closed environment?…Teaching and collaborating and learning and working inside an academic institution have absolutely nothing to do with how to do those things out in the world.

And I continue to wonder if the two are even possible to combine. Those of us who write to connect and who live our learning lives in these spaces feel the dissonance all the time. We go where we want, identify our own teachers, find what we need, share as much as we can, engage in dialogue, direct our own learning as it meets our needs and desires. That does not feel like what’s happening to my own children or most others in the “system.”

Barbara’s post is worth reading not just for her own reflections but for the connections she creates in the writing process. She took me to Scott Leslie, whose post “planning to share versus just sharing” is as one of the commentors called it, “another doozy.” Scott writes about how frustrating this dissonance is, how difficult institutions make it from a tradition and culture standpoint to make this kind of learning happen.

In all of this lies the tension of the world “out there,” outside the walls, this great unknown, or more likely, this great potential wrench in ointment to what we’ve been so darn good at doing for all of these years. I can’t tell you how many “why me?” looks I get from people who listen politely to my presentations but then probably want to go home and throw up. And I think it’s because they’re not writing for the network. They’re not connecting, seeing the value, feeling the network love. Scott nails it:

Now I contrast that with the learning networks which I inhabit, and in which every single day I share my learning and have knowledge and learning shared back with me. I know it works. I literally don’t think I could do my job any longer without it – the pace of change is too rapid, the number of developments I need to follow and master too great, and without my network I would drown. But I am not drowning, indeed I feel regularly that I am enjoying surfing these waves and glance over to see other surfers right there beside me, silly grins on all of our faces. So it feels to me like it’s working, like we ARE sharing, and thriving because of it.

Oh. Yeah.

(Photo “A fractal night on my street” by kevindooley.)

Engaging Writing in the Classroom

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So here is the money quote from “Turn Teen Texting Toward Better Writing” from the Christian Science Monitor last week:

Our student bloggers and digital writers of all backgrounds are part of a journaling culture which America has not seen since the great age of diarists during the Transcendental movement, when Thoreau and Emerson recorded their daily lives for eventual public consumption. Failure to harness that potential energy would prove a terrible misstep at this junction in American education.

The author of the essay, Justin Reich, a Ph.D. student at Harvard, makes the case in a pretty interesting way, weaving in research, classroom observations and personal experience in a way that I find pretty compelling. Especially because he seems to really understand the “connective” or network aspect of the writing process.

Or, we can embrace the writing that students do every day, help them learn to use their social networking tools to create learning networks, and ultimately show them how the best elements of their informal communication can lead them to success in their formal writing.

I agree that that is the choice. No one is denying that much of what students (and adults for that matter) are writing wouldn’t be worthy of publishing under traditional standards. But the fact that kids are writing and publishing in a variety of texts, traditional or not, is, I think, a wonderful reality, one that if we know how to leverage it gives us great opportunities to help kids get better at all types of writing.

21st Century Literacies from the NCTE

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Paul Allison tweeted out this update from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) exec committee last week in terms of how we need to think more expansively about literacy in the context of these shifts. As a former English teacher and NCTE member, I find these couple of lines to be of particular interest:

Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable.

I think that one word, “malleable” is a fascinating choice (and a fine SAT prep word, by the way.) The ideas that these literacies must now be adaptable and bendable to meet whatever comes down the pike is a pretty big shift in thinking. Literacy, in other words, just got a lot harder to measure on a standardized test.

I’ve written before about the idea of a “network literacy” that is almost a requirement these days. I want to write more about that shortly, but a lot of what the NCTE is putting out there moves toward that. The idea of “build[ing] relationships with others” and “shar[ing] information for global communities” as English literacies is a pretty wild shift on some level.

If nothing else, this goes to the heart of connective reading and connective writing that we’ve been talking about here and elsewhere now for years. Reading and writing is still about the ability to understand and to create texts of various types, but it’s increasingly more now about connecting to other ideas, other people, and other conversations.

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Individualized Networked Learning

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I’ve been kind of hanging out on the periphery of the ongoing discussion about informal learning and networks and groups that has been bouncing around the last couple of months, but a post from Teemu Leinone and specifically a snip in the comments started something in my brain. Here is the snip:

The problem of the edublogasphere (and actually the whole blogasphere) in the context of learning is that people in the sphere do not – at least often – form any groups (an entity of individuals with an objective).

As I’m trying to think more and more deeply about what networked learning really means in the context of how I might want my own children to apply it their own lives, I think this quote struck me because it made me consider how little I’ve actually engaged in group learning around a particular objective within the network. It is, as Teemu says something that doesn’t really appear very often. This has become, for me at least, a very individualized experience. I’ve referred to it in the past as “nomadic learning” because it happens in a very non-linear, concrete objective-less way. (Technically, I think most are attaching the word nomadic to it because of the mobility of the technology to learn, not the randomness of it.) My learning has a general focus and direction, to be sure, but it’s trajectory is determined by whatever is in my aggregator or on my screen at the moment. There are no written down goals or outcomes that I am attempting to achieve which is one of the reasons this is so different from classroom learning.

Additionally, while I am absolutely “writing to be read” here, meaning that I am conscious and on some level hopeful that others will read and engage in these ideas, I’m not reflecting on these ideas with the direct purpose of advancing the the conversation among a group of others that are connected in our study of this topic. If no one responds or engages, that’s ok. More than anything, blogging, in essence writing is a way for me to cement my thoughts into my brain, a purely selfish act.

But what I think struck me about Teemu’s post is that it makes me wonder about the potential of that group focused study that I could be doing yet am not. And why there seems to be so little of that. I think on some level, the independence or randomness of this learning is what makes it powerful, that it can be about anything that we are passionate about at any given moment. But I guess I wonder if maybe I shouldn’t be reaching out more to others to create groups around more focused topics of study, or whether that would work for me.

Just some pre-dawn thinking while struggling with a big cookie hangover…

(Photp by pbo31)

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Pushing Writing Literacy

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So what does writing literacy look like in the context of these Read/Write Web tools? I mean think of the many different ways that we “write” in our networked lives, ways that differ from the modes that were in primary use just 10 or 15 years ago when I was actually teaching students “how to write” (whatever that means.) Here’s just a quick list of the different ways writing occurs for me today:

  • Blogging, which, when I have the time to do it, means expending some intellectual sweat into synthesizing ideas and reflecting on the things that I am reading. It’s writing that is intended to engage; I constantly put myself in the reader’s shoes and try to anticipate reactions and responses because (surprise!) the reader can.
  • Commenting, which, when I have the time to do it (and I’ll stop adding that from here on out) is meant to probe or support or question. I wonder, is there a “literacy” to commenting?
  • Writing articles or essays for publication, which is the most traditional writing that I do these days. The sense of audience is still present, but there is a huge difference in the way it settles over what I write. I know I may never get feedback on those pieces, that I may never engage in a conversation around the ideas as I do here on my blog. And that changes the voice, the tone, and the style. (Writing books would probably fall in here as well.)
  • Tweeting, which has become a bizarre new micro genre, hasn’t it? Tweets are pretty narrow in scope for me. I Tweet  to update my presence (“On a propellor plane to somewhere.”), to ask a question, to respond to others’ Tweets, or to play. But the asynchronousness of it makes it difficult. I’m writing for response, but I’m not as patient about getting that response as I am with my blog. And obviously, it’s mostly reaction, thin thinking, not sweat.
  • Chatting or IM, which I am surprised at how much I do, usually in Skype and Gmail. It’s more synchronous, I don’t care as much about misspellings and errors, it’s conversation. But the way I chat certainly varies depending on whom I’m chatting with.
  • Writing in video or audio, which I don’t do so much, but have a couple of ideas that I’m working on. Writing in pictures, digital storytelling, can be very compelling and useful but require a different way of thinking about the message, no?

And I’m sure there are others. But I wonder, with all of these different ways now of communicating in writing, does that change what writing literacy is?

All of this comes from a recent post by Barbara Ganley, one of my favorite all-time bloggers and one of the few teachers I think I would actually get into a four-walled classroom with again. In her Creative NonFiction course at Middlebury this fall, she’s leading her students into a whole bunch of different writing environments in ways that I find fascinating. I mean, think of what that course would have been a decade ago. Pretty much essay. Pretty much paper. Maybe some hypertext. Maybe some getting outside the classroom in limited ways. But check out her unit on the uses of multimedia to “write” online. Not only will her students be blogging, they will be creating group “Twitterstories“, linking to pieces of art and posting links to the class Flickr group, writing in one-sentence hypertext shorts, and creating digital stories using the tools outlined in Alan Levine’s 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story resource. And more.

Barbara blogs about the course, saying:

This is the most challenging course I have ever taught because I’m asking my students–right from their first days as undergraduates– in large part to unlearn how they have been taught to read, to write, to connect with the measure of their own work. [Emphasis mine.]

When I get to the part about literacy in my presentations, I always ask how many of the teachers in the room are teaching their students to read and write in different modes, in hypertext, with art and photos, in audio and video, using all of them combined. I’m surprised if I get more than a hand or two going up. And I’m sure that what’s happening in Barbara’s class isn’t happening in very many other college courses either. Traditional writing is absolutely still important, but writing is more complex than just text on a page (usually a paper page) these days.

Makes me wonder, with all of the different ways in which I write, all of the different audiences I write for, all of the different ways I attempt to communicate and engage in conversations and connections around my ideas, it makes me wonder whether we’ll ever see these many modes of writing as important enough to teach our kids.

(Photo “Hand (made)” by 3blindmice.)

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Student Books on Lulu

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A few months ago when I ran a two-day workshop at Chris Lehmann‘s Science Leadership Academy, we talked about how easy it is for students to be publishing, not just in digital forms but in traditional print as well. Chris even went so far as to hang a sign on one of the shelves in the school library that read “Your Books Here” or something to that effect. Well, George Mayo, who has been doing great work over the past couple of years with his seventh graders in Virginia, and who attended that workshop, has helped his kids put together a book that is now for sale at Lulu. It’s a set of personal narratives titled “Stories from the Past.”

The book is a compilation of narrative essays, written by my seventh grade students, telling the stories of their grandparents, parents and other relatives. These essays show the amazing diversity we have at Silver Spring International Middle School. The stories range from a guerilla war in Ecuador, to WW II and the Great Depression, to two survival stories from the Holocaust, escaping Vietnam during the war, and many more.

It’s a free download, and it costs about $12 to get the paperback version. As George writes “The students are amazed that they are actually published.” In a few weeks, the book will be available on Amazon, Borders, and Barnes and Noble. And, I’m sure, it will have a place in his school library.

Now how cool is that?

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The Water Buffalo Movie

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Karl Fisch points to The Water Buffalo Movie which is just an amazing example of the connections that are possible these days. Watch the movie and read Karl’s take:

I know some folks will fail to see the relevance in this, and will talk about standards and curriculum and mandated testing. But I guess I don’t see how this could be any more relevant – this is life in the 21st century (ironically demonstrated by very non-21st century water buffalo cultivation). This is 12 days from problem to solution, and 24 days from problem to Internet-viral-movie-extended solution that may impact hundreds or thousands. Shouldn’t we be teaching kids about this stuff? Can’t we address the curriculum and standards in ways like this? Shouldn’t we be helping prepare them to be really good at using these tools in both their professional and personal lives to impact the world around them? Shouldn’t we be helping prepare our students to change the world?

Not much more needs to be said…

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Commenting Evolves

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So how would it be to comment not just on total posts but on individual paragraphs within posts themselves? From a writing teacher’s standpoint, I think it would be pretty awesome. You could annotate specific sections of blog posted essays or stories and then leave more general comments at the end. Other people (students) could come in and leave their own pointed feedback. It would come pretty close to the type of handwritten comments that teachers have been leaving on student work (for better or worse) for ages.

Well the folks over at Future of the Book are working on it. Check out this text by Mitchell Stephens where, after selecting a section from the left hand margin, you are basically able to click into a specific part of the post and offer feedback. (Here’s a particularly interesting back and forth on one section.) Pretty cool, I’d say. Even cooler is that they’re planning to release this as a WordPress plugin at some point. Talk about being able to debate certain points within the whole.

I seem to remember someone else trying this sometime back. Now just wait until we can voice annotate parts of posts…

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Reading and Writing with RSS

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Via Blogs for Learning, a new site from Michigan State, comes this pretty interesting article “The Technology of Reading and Writing in the Digital Space: Why RSS is crucial for a Blogging Classroom” by David Parry from the University of Albany. It has a higher ed slant, but is very relevant to younger students as well. Some relevant quotes from the article:

  • “One of the most significant concerns about using blogs in the classroom is that students often feel as if they are doing the same writing, just placing it on the web. Since context determines meaning, the method and message of writing necessarily changes as students compose for the internet; however, many academics fail to convey this information to students.”
  • “If one simply transfers the “book-way” of writing onto the digital space, students have learned little that they could not have gained from more traditional writing assignments. The situation may even be worse than one of unnecessary reconfiguration, for in the digital medium, writing often produces technological frustrations which, if not offset by other gains, leads to negative experiences for the students. Since the context of writing has shifted in the digital, it is important to demonstrate to student how authorship itself has shifted in the age of the digital.”
  • “To write “well” in this space students need to learn not only how to cite and link, but indeed to package their writings in a different way. RSS helps accomplish this goal.”
  • “The speed of reading in the age of the digital has changed, and we need to help students navigate this…Reading on the internet requires two separate skills: one, the quick analysis to find what is worth reading, and the second, a switch to slow analysis to carefully consider what has been found. What RSS does is allow students to make this distinction, to receive content as “bits” easy to scan, and then to select what they want to read.”

I think it’s great to see some more pedagogy centered articles about RSS coming out.

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More Henry Jenkins

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A few more thought-provoking lines from Henry Jenkins’ new book “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.“ It’s been giving me quite a bit to chew on in the 30 or so pages I’ve read. I think he has an amazingly perceptive read on how access to people and ideas change the equation in the classroom. Just for some context, these are all from a chapter titled “Why Heather Can Write” which was expanded from an article published a couple of years ago in the MIT Technology Review. It’s primary focus is on kids turning to fan fiction, in this case, Harry Potter fan fiction. But the larger conclusions are pretty powerful, I think.

First, there is a discussion surrounding Paul Gee’s so-called “affinity spaces” which says that “people learn more, participate more actively, engage more deeply with popular culture than they do with contents of their textbooks” (177).

Affinity spaces offer powerful opportunities for learning, Gee argues, because the are sustained by common endeavors that bridge across differences in age, class, race, gender, and educational level, because people can participate in various ways according to their skills and interests, because they depend on peer-to-peer teaching with the participant constantly motivated to acquire new knowledge or refine his or her existing skills, and because they allow each participant to feel like an expert while tapping the expertise of others.

That resonates so powerfully with the way I reflect on my own practice as a blogger and with this community: constantly motivated to learn because of the connections that I have to the community of learners in this space. And it’s powerful because of the way learning is nurtured. As Jenkins says

In the classroom, scaffolding is provided by the teacher. in a participatory culture, the entire community takes on some responsibility for helping newbies find their way.

I love the language that Jenkins uses as well when talking about the potential effects of the fan fiction world on learning.

What difference will it make, over time, if a growing percentage of young writers begin publishing and getting feedback on their work while they are still in high school? Will they develop their craft more quickly? Will they discover their voices at an earlier age? And what happens when these young writers compare notes, becoming critics, editors, and mentors…As we expand access to mass distribution via the Web, our understanding of what it means to be an author–and what kinds of authority should be ascribed to authors–necessarily shifts.

Our students have a plethora of opportunities to publish right now, and more are opening up each day. (In fact, Barbara Barreda is writing about just such an opportunity in her blog.) When are we at least going to start thinking about the possibility of publishing work instead of just handing it in? I think that’s one of the most powerful shifts this is bringing about in our classrooms. If we don’t start considering the potential of publication soon, we’re going to find ourselves more and more irrelevant. As Jenkins puts it, we now live in a world “where knowledge is shared and where critical activity is ongoing and lifelong.”

Not surprisingly, someone who has just published her first online novel and gotten dozens of letters of comment finds it disappointing to return to the classroom where her work is going to be read only by the teacher and feedback may be very limited.

Finally, Jenkins writes eloquently about the new power our students have in this culture.

They are active participants in these new media landscapes, finding their own voice through their participation in fan communities, asserting their own rights even in the face of powerful entities, and sometimes sneaking behind their parents’ back to do what feels right to them. At the same time, through their participation, these kids are mapping out new strategies for negotiating around and through globalization, intellectual property struggles, and media conglomeration. They are using the Internet to connect with children worldwide and, through that process, finding common interests and forging political alliances…In talking media pedagogies, then, we should no longer imagine this as a process where adults teach and children learn. Rather, we should see it as increasingly a space where children teach one another and where, if they would open their eyes, adults could learn a great deal. (Emphasis mine.)

I just find that to be such a powerful articulation of what’s happening to learning in this new world. And I just don’t think many if any of our schools are really looking through this new lens very clearly yet. How are we supporting these types of connections in our curricula? How are we helping our students to become globally conversant? To what extent are we really handing over the power of these tools and teaching them how to use them well?

Much to think about…

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How Blogging Connects

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Kim is writing powerfully about her practice, and a few days ago she posted this:

Here’s the amazing thing about blogging for me. When I go home to my family or talk to friends, noone really wants to talk about education, or my ideas, or drop out prevention, or student achievement. Mystandard response to “how was your day?” is “great” and that’s about it. But I still have my students, school and it’s challenges swirling around in my head a substantial percentage of the time. So now I find blogging and it’s an instant connection to others who are interested in the same thing.

Amen. How many people have passions that they can’t share because they are too esoteric or because geography separates them from others who share it? This is about connection in so many ways, on so many levels, but none more profound than the one that brings us to meet via our ideas in this virtual space. It’s so very cool, and so very powerful when you think that just a few years ago it, for all intents, couldn’t be done. That is what makes not having the time to read and write so frustrating…the connection weakens.

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More Teacher Blogs Blooming

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So this “High School’s New Face” Conference has been really interesting and another example of how the people out here in Western New York are working hard to move schools and education in a different direction. There are about 150 educators here with each school bringing at team of teachers and a building principal or superintendent They have been split into four cohorts: Engaging the 21st Century Learner, Connecting the 21st Century Learner, Designing a School for the 21st Century Learner, and Leading the Way, the last for the administrators. The idea is that the different teachers from different districts take different strands and then will get back together after the conference to teach each other what they learned and hopefully have meaningful discussions about how to move forward.

I’ve been working with the Connecting group to learn about the tools, and I have to say that despite some connectivity issues, they have been absolutely great. We did two sessions yesterday (the last until 9 pm.) two more today, and will have one more in the morning…a total of almost 16 hours together! We’ve listened to students from local districts and from the Met School in Providence talk about what good teaching and learning is. (One of the students from the Met school read an incredible poem he had written basically about how the school had saved him from drugs and crime in his neighborhood…it was absolutely amazing.) We’ve teleconnected with an educator in Kansas, and tomorrow we’ll be hearing from the creators of Tech Valley High. It’s just been very well planned and delivered, and I’m just getting a really positive vibe about all of it.

The 50 or so members of my cohort are already producing some interesting content too. Kim Moritz who is a principal at a local high school, is asking some great questions about her curriculum. Beth McIntyre is already reading and thinking and writing about what she’s reading and thinking. And there are others who are just starting. We have our own Mother Blog and a cohort wiki as well. We’re getting there. As always, it will be interesting to see how much of it sticks, but if the conversations and ideas are any indication, much of it should.

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Beginner Blogging Bliss

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Welcome to Ellicottville, NY where I have about 30 teachers and administrators in the room for the first session of what will be three days of immersion into blogs, wikis, podcasts, rss feeds, social bookmarking sites etc. AND pedagogy! (What a concept.)

So before we set up Blogger blogs, I give them my impassioned warning about how you have to be willing to talk (or blog) to the empty room, but that if you keep writing good stuff, people will find you. I draw the “Long Tail” on my tablet, give them strategies to find other bloggers, tell them how to comment on other posts and link back to their own. “Keep the faith!”

Then we make blogs. Five minutes. I tell them to read first, then write. To break intellectual sweat. To reflect, think, post. To…ah, whatever. Just post. But, of course be patient. Keep at it. The comments will come. Don’t…

When wouldn’t you know it. Like that moment in the big Bingo parlor when you call out “N-34” and someone’s hand shoots up declaring victory, someone in the room says “Hey! I got a comment!” Six minutes after posting.

Six.

I run and put her blog up on the big screen. Even I am impressed. Six minutes. How did that happen, I ask? (Maybe I’ll tell them after dinner.)

I think we’re gettin’ it…

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Grade 8 Blogging Community: A Powerful Story

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Konrad Glogowski has an amazing post today about his grade 8 students’ blogging experiences, and it’s one that should be trumpeted far and wide in this community. Imagine being a part of this:

My community of grade eight student bloggers became so big and so engaging that I spent every spare moment reading and writing within this community. My class community suddenly blossomed and I started seeing myself as an important part of the classroom community and no longer as a teacher who peddles content. I became a participant in a series of dialogues. I witnessed the emergence of a semantic network, one where all links, all interactions were based on meaning.

One thing I really like about Konrad’s blogging is that he points me to so much good stuff about learning theory in the context of telling his stories about his students. Here, he references the community as networks of semantic relations that Stephen Downes writes about, Brufee’s “community of knowledgeable peers,” Bereiter’s “progressive discourse,” Scardamalia and Bereiter’s “intentional learning” ideas, and others. It’s a veritable feast for the brain, and it teaches me. And the best news is that he’s documented his transformative experience and plans to teach me, and us, even more in the days to come.

What really jumps out at me here is the power of the idea that we can now create learning communities of meaning that are much more powerful than communities of proximity. This community that I am a part of is testament to that. We are self-directed, nomadic learners, moving purposefully down paths that interest us, engaging in conversations, building connections and networks around our passions and our zeal to know more about them. We share our experiences to confirm our own understanding in the context of the community, hoping to teach, I think, and hoping to move the discussion forward. Is it strange that I get butterflies when I read things as powerful as what Konrad writes? That I can’t wait to make sense of it through blogging, to figure out what about it resonates? That I can’t wait to point others to it? Konrad is writing about his students here, but I think this could easily describe what we as edbloggers do as well:

…the idea of knowing in this community as“the intentional activity of individuals who, as members of a community, make use of and produce representations in the collaborative attempt to better understand and transform their shared world.”

A lot of us will be proximate next week at NECC, and that is always a good thing, but we’ll continue to learn from each other regardless of where we are. As long as, of course, we remain willing to contribute. In the case of kids, Konrad has found the best of both worlds:

That’s when I realized that this class community was truly engaged, that its members were interested in pursuing knowledge as researchers who are passionately involved and not as students who need to absorb the content.

How cool is that? Read the whole thing…

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Assessing Blog Posts

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So, using David’s questions about blog assessment, here is how I might assess this post as I write it (with some commentary on the questions along the way.)

1. What did you read in order to write this blog entry? Yee Haw! Blogging starts with reading, and I read David’s post, which leads me to blogging. (I read some other stuff, too. See below.) And I think an even more interesting question to add is “What was your process of reading?” In the previous post about Net Neutrality, I worked between three or four different readings to assemble the ideas contained in the posts. There was nothing linear about it, which is another aspect of reading/writing literacy in hypertext environments that really interests me.

2. What do you think is important about your blog entry? I think the importance here is the deconstruction of the process and the inherent reflection that goes with it. Sometimes blogging is work, and it’s when I’m crafting a post (as opposed to writing it) that I know I’m involved in some real learning. As a blogger/learner, it’s crucial that I recognize and understand the decisions I make about what to write (based on feel and audience), how to write it, and when to publish it.

3. What are both sides of your issue? Well, some feel whatever you do in your blog is blogging. As is well known, I disagree. I do think this reflective assessment about the blogging can point to the power of reading, thinking, synthesizing, writing and reading some more.

4. What do you want your readers to know, believe, or do? I would add learn to that list. And I would also move this up to second in the list (if we are looking at this as process.) The audience aspect of blogging is central to the task, and if we’re not aware of what our purpose is, we won’t communicate it well. This is the Donald Murray school of anticipating the readers questions, responses, reactions. We have to become the audience (if there still is one, of course.)

5. What else do you need to say? I’m not sure this question works for me, because I’d hope that if I had more to say I would say it. What about What have you learned from the process? or How will you find out more?

Regardless, some good initial thinking on how we might begin to teach the metacognitive aspects of blogging.

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Changing the Mindset

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Doug Noon posts about an interesting paper from Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel titled “Blogging as Participation: The Active Sociality of a New Literacy” that does a nice job of framing the difference of mindeset between the traditional view of the classroom and the emerging view.

I think the underlying premise between the two mindsets is interesting: “The world is much the same as before, only now it is more technologised, or technologised in more sophisticated ways” vs. “The world is very different from before and largely as a result of the emergence and uptake of digital electronic inter-newtorked technologies.”

I know I keep coming back to MySpace, but if nothing else, what’s happening there should be a starting point for just how much the world really has changed. The ability to network widely changes everything, and the kids and adults at MySpace are showing it.

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Social Books

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Last month, if:book released news about Sophie, a project that is aimed at changing the way we think about books. The bottom line is that reading and writing are changing, and as more and more people step into these social Web tools, more and more will be expected of them. There is much to be intrigued about here (from the .pdf):

Sophie will blur the lines be­tween reading and writing in a way past the capabilities of print books. Imagine that I’m reading a book: I find something that I disagree with. If it’s a print book, I might write “This isn’t true,” or, if the margins are wide enough, I might start scribbling an explana­tion of why I think it’s not the case. Were I using Sophie, I could add a note – a note that’s longer than the book, if need be. If I own the book, I could attach that note to the book permanently. Or I could spin new note off as its own, linked, book. Or to go furthest of all: if I have permission to do so, I could rewrite the content entirely.

Other sorts of less confrontational commentary will also be pos­sible. If I’m reading a book and I find something that reminds me of a webpage, I can attach a link to it. I could pass this annotated book on to a friend; she could read the book, read my annotations, and attach her own. If I had a hundred friends, they could all do the same…

Sophie will make it possible to integrate the writing of the report with the slideshow that would have accompanied it. Sophie treats all media equally: if adding a slide show would be helpful to a primarily written report, the student can add it on to the page it’s intended to illustrate. No longer do you need to switch from Word to Powerpoint.

Sophie will live in a networked environment. This will be possible in many different ways. As mentioned, Sophie books can link to other Sophie books. However, the two Sophie books don’t have to be resi­dent on the same computer: the linked Sophie book could very well be on a remote server over the Internet…

Books aren’t the only thing that can be remote: resources used inside of Sophie – for example, streaming video – can be remote. Because Sophie is extensible (see below), it can also link to or include information outside of Sophie – a webpage, for example, or informa­tion from a database. You could put an RSS feed inside Sophie; you could update a Sophie book with information from a blog.

Where does Sophie end? It should be clear that Sophie is not just an environment for creating and reading books in – it’s an environ­ment for creating and reading that’s conscious of its place in the ecosystem of information.

Apparently, a beta is coming soon…