Seems I’m forever saddled with Bloglines backup these days, and it’s so frustrating not to have the time to read and think and write as much as I’d like to. And then when I do have the time, I read such interesting stuff that it’s hard not to take extra time to read and reread and dwell on the ideas. I’m starting to think that in my perfect blog world, I would have only about 20 kick butt feeds in my aggregator that I could just slowly chew through and breathe with, and then turn into some decent blogging. When I feel like my blogging sucks, like I have the past couple of weeks, it’s not about the writing. It’s about not having the time to read. I think that’s one of the most interesting things about this practice, by the way, one that not a lot of people really understand until they do it. Learning to me does not come very much from transcribling my life as it does capturing provocative ideas and deconstructing their meaning and relevance in my own practice. That’s where this becomes a lifelong learning addiction, in the connections between the reading and the writing.

The good news is that not everyone blogs like Barbara Ganley, ’cause if they did, I’d manage only five or six feeds max. Her latest post covers the ways in which she’s getting out her students’ way even more through blogs and podcasts and digital storytelling. She talks about teacher as DJ:

I believe wholeheartedly in having a huge stockpile of exercises and assignments in my pocket, and then ditching them all for something that evolves, that emerges from the learning community and the learning moment.

She talks about learning as a process, not an event:

So I am comfortable viewing the course as a living organism that will often take us places unanticipated at the beginning of the semester or even at the beginning of the class hour. This is an essential characteristic, I believe, of a successful blogging teacher.

And she writes about reinvention:

I have resisted setting up many guidelines for the stories–I want them to feel their way to their stories from this moment here in time. And right now, many of them are surely thinking that I have lost my mind–they look for the due dates; the detailed, clear instructions for success; and they really wonder why we aren’t just sticking to notebooks and keeping their creative writing, for the most part, private, between covers where for many of them it has lived since they were children, or slipped to the professor only when absolutely necessary…And we will blog–sharing the bumps, the pleasures, the questions, the discoveries. Already they feel self-conscious about posting, but that they are writing about that self-consciousness in their opening posts shows a willingness to speak honestly. Even i this opening week, the comments they leave one another illustrate already what the connectedness of social software can do for our students–they do not feel isolated in their learning, and if they feel a connection with others, well then, they will engage with the learning opportunities the group offers.

That is such good writing, and such good reading of the kind that makes me promise myself that in my own reinvention I will make time for my own process every day as an important part of my learning.
—–

Now I’m not saying there is anything necessarily bad about the old (or should I say current) forms of writing conferences that teachers have with students. Having taught writing for 20 years, I know the positive effects of sitting down and speaking with a reader’s voice can have when reacting to student writing. (By the way, one really excellent book on this subject is Lad Tobin’s Writing Relationships : What Really Happens in the Composition Class.)

What I AM saying, however, is that now we have so many other ways to share feedback and create opportunities for readers to respond to writing. Ways that in some respects I think can be even more effective than the traditional method where we will always find it hard to escape our role as teachers and become real readers in our students’ eyes. Ways that with a little planning we could do safely. For instance:

The Distributed Conference—Have students post writing to a blog. Point other students, mentors, public types to it and ask them to post reflections/feedback either in comments or on their own blogs (assuming they have them.) (This is how I look at the writing “conferences” that occur about the ideas on my blog.)

The Audio Conference—Capture the voices of the teacher and student by recording it on the computer (or MP3 player). Advantage: It’s easier for the writer to return to the ideas expressed in the conference and reflect more effectively. Becomes part of the portfolio or archive.

The Screencast Conference—This time, capture the conference with Windows Media Encoder (free). Advantage: Writer can refer back to the discussion AND the markup and can subsequently reflect on the conference more effectively which can then become a part of the student’s writing portfolio. And, of course, the screencast is archivable, too.

The Skype Conference—Ask the writer to convene a Skype conference call with mentors, friends, other teachers, family members, or a mixture thereof…anyone outside of class. Have the writer read the piece (publishing) and then listen to the reactions of the listeners. (This could be more structured for the listeners in terms of the types of feedback they should be giving.) Record the conference, and have the writer reflect on the conversation. And, of course, it becomes a part of the portfolio.

The Skype Conference Take 2—Post the piece to the blog. Invite readers to volunteer for a Skype discussion. (It occurs to me that this would be a very cool thing to try with a blog post…hey wait a minute…)

HERE’S WHERE YOU GET TO PLAY ALONG… Ok, so I’m opening up a Skype conference call at 3 pm EST tomorrow (12/15) about this post to discuss these ideas which I will record and subsequently post as an addendum to this post. (Huh?) If you want to take part, my Skype name is willrich45. I’ll take the first three people to respond. Any takers???

So with some pointers from Barbara Ganley, I’ve been doing some reading on hypertext theory and over the past couple of days have immersed myself in Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print. The second edition came out in 2001, just before the blog explosion, but the table is clearly set by what he’s writing. This is probably the first of a couple “capture the main ideas” type posts about the reading.

We’re in “the late age of print” which captures the feeling I have about paper texts so well. Bolter says that the possibilities for print have pretty much been played out (2) and that “Digital media are refashioning the printed book” (3). Inherent in this discussion is the idea, I think, that hypertext is forcing us to shift our thinking as to the value of print.

In the late age of print, however, we seem more impressed by the impermanence and changeability of text, and digital technology seems to reduce the distance between author and reader by turning the reader into an author herself. Such tensions between monumentality and changeability and between the tendency to magnify the author and to empower the reader have already become a part of our current economy of writing (4). [Emphasis mine.]

Echoes of Jay Rosen, no doubt. And echoes of the connective reading that we must do when we are “empowered” by the ability to enter space with the author. As we read, we connect to ideas and personal knowledge with the intent to respond, not simply to passively, internally grapple with the meaning. Bolton connects this to Plato’s Dialogues which “invite the reader to participate in a conversation and then denies him or her full participation” (104). Not so any more.

What I’ve found especially interesting is how he discusses the network necessary for electronic writing.

If linear and hierarchical structures dominate current writing, our cultural construction of electronic writing is now adding a third: the network as a visible and operative structure. The network as an organizing principle has been present in many forms of writing; indeed Homeric oral poetry shows that the network is older than writing itself.After the invention of writing in the ancient world, it became the writer’s task to establish his own network comprised of references and allusions within the text and connected to the larger network formed by other texts in the culture. From that time until the advent of electronic writing, the referential network has often existed “between the lines” of text;that is, in the minds of readers and writers. Now, however, the network can rise to the surface of the text (106).

Digital technologies call into question the traditional treatise in which the writer assumes control over the argument. And this is the way we teach exposition today, without ever thinking that what is written may be connected to other ideas or interpretations.

Why should a writer be forced to produce a single, linear argument or an exclusive analysis of cause and effect when the writing space allows a writer to entertain and present several lines of thought at once? (107)

What a concept. This idea that a text speaks with a singular voice does not as easily stand in these new writing environments:

Publishing is fundamentally serious and permanent; a scholar or scientist cannot even retract his own previously published argument without embarrassment. A dialogue, on the other hand, speaks with more than one voice and therefore shares or postpones responsibility. A hypertextual essay in the computer could in fact be fashioned as a dialogue between the writer and her readers, and the reader could be asked to share the responsibility for the outcome. [Emphasis mine.]

Really good stuff, much of which seems to validate the shift in thinking that we’re going to have to complete in order to fully prepare our kids for what’s out there. That’s not to say that we don’t continue to teach linear forms of writing as well. But we have to begin introducing the idea of transactional writing, of writing in and for networked audiences that are invited into the conversation. The more they understand that writing is a part of a process of learning and not just a product of it, the better off they will be.
—–

I’m home sick today. I should be sleeping. Instead, I can’t stop reading and learning. So much to know…

I missed this post by Jay Rosen a month ago, luckily linked to by Ken Smith who has been blogging greatly lately and who I’ve been catching up on today. This is the way of connective learning, isn’t it? Based on personal passions, asynchronous, spontaneous, complex…

Jay says

Sure, weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they’re opinion forming. But they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out, re-building it around new stuff. Come to some conclusions? Put them in your weblog, man, but just remember: it doesn’t want to conclude.

People trying to explain their attraction to the weblog form say it’s conversational, two way, personal, a medium for the individual voice— plus interactive with our untold wealth in information, and fun. All true. Doc adds something: weblogging is an inconclusive act— and that’s attractive, part of the fun.

I love that. But it’s so different from the way we teach writing now. The paper essay is a statement of opinion. The Weblog entry is a statement of opinion in progress. I’m not saying we shouldn’t teach the former. But if we believe the future rests in digital communication (which I do, btw), how can we ignore the latter? If our students don’t have the skills to negotiate their learning instead of state it, are we really preparing them for their futures?

So I’ve been thinking more about the whole “connective writing” idea and its potential importance as a unique genre of writing in this “new” Web environment. They way it’s framed in my brain, it’s a type of writing that is inspired by reading and is therefore a response to an idea or a set of ideas or conversations. It is writing that synthesizes those ideas and remixes them in some way to make them our own and is published to potentially wide audiences. Because it is published, it is writing that then becomes a part of a larger negotiation of a truth or knowledge that is evolving in the larger network. And finally, it is writing that is written with the expectiation that it too will be taken and remixed by others into their own truths by this continuous process of reading, thinking, writing (and linking), publishing and reading some more.

As I’ve thought about this, one of the key ingredients has been David Weinberger’s idea that texts no longer have value based on what they contain but on what they connect to. So, now that we can publish easily, now that markets or schools or (your plural noun here) are conversations, now that paper is becoming more and more irrelevant as a communication platform, we need to repurpose our texts (in whatever medium) from being simple containers of ideas into being complex connectors of ideas. To me, that represents a very significant shift.

In the last couple of days, a number of people have pointed to a great article at Kairos titled “Why Teach Digital Writing?” that begins to get to this idea of connective writing:

Computer technologies allow writers with access to a computer network to become publishers and distributors of their writing. And chances are they will get feedback, sometimes immediately. Therefore, audiences and writers are related to each other more interactively in time and space. Writers can easily integrate the work of others into new meanings via new media and rescripting of old media—text, image, sound, and video—with a power and speed impossible before computer technologies. The depth and breadth of this type of collaboration—both implicit (“borrowing” from others) and complicit (communities of writers)—may be one of the most significant impacts of computer technologies on the contexts and practices of writing. This context presses up against larger issues of intellectual property, plagiarism, access, credibility of sources, and dissemination of information

At some point, we’re all going to have to shift our thinking about some of the ideas in that last sentence. (Talk about a disruption.) But on the current topic, here’s the money quote:

When we put it all together, the ability to compose documents with multiple media, to publish this writing quickly, to distribute it to mass audiences, and to allow audiences to interact with this writing (and with writers) challenges many of the traditional principles and practices of composition, which are based (implicitly) on a print view of writing. The changing nature and contexts of composing impacts meaning making at every turn. [Emphasis mine.]

There’s more here too, much more, that I will get to at some point. But I’m thinking about how we begin to move our students, young students even, away from container texts to connector texts, about how we start to prepare them for a world of conversations (as David Warlick implores) and negotiations and meaning making instead of meaning taking.

And, almost more importantly, I’m wondering how we move our teachers to doing this as well.