Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

A New Sense of Reading

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Mia Zamora:

These days, the role of the reader is much like the role of the learner (in a 21st century digitized context). I see a kind of inherent transformation in both of these roles. Reading used to be a more solitary act, bound to a private and somewhat intimate domain. (Imagine being curled up for some time with a good book…add a fireplace and a big comfy chair). The act of reading in the analog world has always been about reception and private mindscapes. But, today (with the advent of E-Lit), we are presented with a new sense of reading, which necessarily includes a step into an open interactive world, a step marked by vivid agency and choice. In many ways, I see today’s learner positioned like that new kind of reader. Twenty-first century readers and learners must grapple with an open networked world of possibilities, they must exercise their own agency, effectively, in order to determine their own course of meaning.

I think this last part is especially difficult to understand for those who don’t spend a lot of time reading digital and/or online texts. Reading as a social, interactive act, that you have new responsibilities when you read networked texts is a foreign idea for many reading and writing teachers (and others.) Reading is no longer just consumption; it’s participation. We read and click. We read and comment. We read and share. We read and archive. We read and remix. We read and revise. And on…

The obvious complexities of all of that require new literacies that the current Common Core standards don’t address. But more, it requires a shift in mindset, in our stance as we approach the texts we are reading. For most of us who have been using social media to learn over the years, these skills and dispositions evolved out of necessity. I don’t think many of us were “taught” how to interact with connected texts. We have an opportunity now to help our kids understand and develop ways to read deeply and powerfully in digital environments, but only if we can do that for ourselves.

Curators Rule the World

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Joe Coleman:

We’re now at a point where curators rule the content world, by collectively deciding whether content gets amplified or lost. As a result, quality of content is again starting to win out over quantity, with an assist from smarter search algorithms and the death of content farms. As power continues to shift to the curators, great long-form content continues to increase in value, as it’s shared and consumed by more and more people. Today, one exceptional, widely shared essay is far more valuable than a thousand disparate tweets.

The “better filters” conversation is an important one. But I don’t think it’s just about algorithms. At the end of the day, while the technology can help us aggregate potentially relevant and interesting content and information, if we don’t have the “curation” skills to make sense of it for ourselves, it doesn’t really matter much.

And, while curation may mark the return of the long form essay, just because it’s shared doesn’t mean it will get read. There is still a lot more work and thinking to do about how to cultivate reading and writing habits in ourselves and in our children that reflect the opportunities and challenges of this writing-rich moment.

Like…now that our kids have access to an authentic audience, why don’t we give them all sorts of opportunities to write about the things THEY care about in ways that have a real purpose and meaning in the world. Becoming a great writer starts with developing a passion for writing, something we too often extinguish in schools.

On Blogging: Finding Peace With the Pit

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I haven’t gone all meta on my blogging in a while…

There’s never a dearth of people I meet who come to the idea of blogging and feel that pit in their stomachs. “What would I blog about?” “Who would want to read what I write?” Or even, “I can’t write at all.” I try to assuage their fears by reminding them that they don’t have to write manifestos or tell stories of their personal lives. That blogging can simply be a link to a good read, a short snip for flavor, and a few sentences of reflection. Start slowly. Build if and when it gets more comfortable.

But what I don’t tell them is that even though I’ve been doing this blogging thing for 11 years, I still feel that pit more often than not. And that’s especially true when I try to push into longer posts or when I attempt journal articles or even think about books. Invariably, I struggle with huge doubt. I start thinking about all the really brilliant people who I’ve interacted with over the years, those thinkers and writers who fry my brain, who seem so confident when they write in blogs or articles or books. People who are manifestly smarter than I. (There are many.) I imagine these people reading what I’m writing and rolling their eyes, picking apart my shoddy logic or argument, tossing my ideas on the scrap heap of failed thinking around education. I literally feel their disdain. 

Most times, I’m able to push through it. Sometimes not. It’s a constant struggle that, in the end, I think helps me to grow as a blogger and a writer. Even though it would be nice just every now and then to feel a little swagger around my ideas, I never want to feel so secure in what I’m thinking and writing that I stop feeling at least an ounce of two of “oh crap” when I press “publish." 

So, yeah. You want to be a blogger or a writer or a creator of any type of artifact that you share with the world? You’re going to have to find peace with that pit. Not everyone is going to like your stuff. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Because the good news is that most often, if the pushback comes, it’s about the ideas and not about you. Which is as it should be.

The Sorry State of Standardized Writing

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A couple of items from the world of writing and assessment have been niggling at me of late.

First, news that the Hewlett Foundation is sponsoring a $100,000 competition to create automated essay scoring software that, in theory at least, will do as good or better job of assessing student writing on standardized tests than the current human graders do. I get the reasoning behind this. Current “scoring mills” have turned test essay readers into skimmers, and the reality that the more kids write regardless of quality the better they score are well documented. And as currently structured, there is no way current assessments do anything to improve student writing. As always, it’s a time and money issue, but my initial reaction to this is if we value writing enough to make sure every child can do it reasonably well, we should also value the time and effort it takes to evaluate it reasonably well.

I remember the long, long hours of reading and responding to tens of thousands of essays during my English teacher days. The turnaround wasn’t always fast. The notes and marks and narrative comments on the page went largely unread despite the fact that I didn’t give a grade to most pieces. I spent as much time as I could holding conversations with kids about their writing both one on one and in small peer groups. The best assessment and advice came in that analysis and feedback where we had a chance to reflect and experiment with the writing. I know that many of my students learned to really appreciate failure in that process because it was a safe place to try things, to push their practice without any stakes, high or low. I know at the end of the day that every child, including my own, should reach some level of expression that allows them to communicate ideas clearly and compellingly, but I also know that the paths to that place are varied and filled with stops and starts. It’s a highly complex process, much more than putting comma in the right place and simply varying sentence structure (though both of those can’t hurt.)

Having said that, it’s scary to see what passes for acceptable writing on the state tests. Yesterday, Michael Winerip’s piece in the New York Times showed examples from the state scoring guide of writing from the state high school English Regents exam that should be scored a 1 on a 2-point scale:

These two Charater have very different mind Sets because they are creative in away that no one would imagen just put clay together and using leaves to create art.

I’m wondering why that would even get one point. Are we really satisfied that student is sufficiently ready to communicate in writing to the larger world? I get the tension here, too:

If the standard is set too high, so many will fail — including children with special education needs and students for whom English is a second language — that there will be a public outcry.

But if the standard is set too low, the result is a diploma that has little meaning.

But will machine scored essays fix this? The Hewlett Foundation seems to think so:

“Better tests support better learning,” says Barbara Chow, Education Program Director at the Hewlett Foundation. “Rapid and accurate automated essay scoring will encourage states to include more writing in their state assessments. And the more we can use essays to assess what students have learned, the greater the likelihood they’ll master important academic content, critical thinking, and effective communication.”

Look, I’m on board that kids should write more, and that learning what a student has learned by having her write is better than having her fill in bubbles for questions she can use her phones to answer if we let her. But here’s the problem: this is more about money than it is about serving kids well. Let’s be honest, while it may be less consistent and more complex, and while it may take more time and money to get it right, human graders have a distinct advantage over machines when it comes to writing: emotion.  I love the way the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) puts it:

Automated assessment programs do not respond as human readers. While they may promise consistency, they distort the very nature of writing as a complex and context-rich interaction between people. They simplify writing in ways that can mislead writers to focus more on structure and grammar than on what they are saying by using a given structure and style.

Here’s what I know will happen once we move to the machines: we’ll help kids learn how to write what the machines want instead of focusing on the power and beauty and uniqueness of human communication. I can name a slew of brilliant writers who would probably fail the test because they wrote in a unique, compelling style that went far beyond our traditional thinking around “good writing.” Sure, in the name of efficiency we can choose to set the bar low and reward kids for putting together a sentence that’s barely readable but conveys a simple thought regardless. But why wouldn’t we choose something better? 

In the end, I’m getting tired of “efficiencies” when it comes to education. But that’s a larger discussion of priorities that really needs to be left to another day…

What Creates Interaction in Facebook (and Elsewhere)

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While this is meant for Facebook pages, I think these ideas probably hold true for wherever we blog and post:

The main highlights from the study, published on the Facebook for Journalists page, suggest journalists with Facebook pages should take note of the following facts:

Starting the conversation: Posts that include a question or call to action from the journalist received the highest amount of feedback;

Personal analysis is effective: Posts that included the journalist’s analysis and personal reflections had 20 per cent more referral clicks than that of an average post;

Images work: Photos received 50 per cent more likes than non-photo posts, and journalists who shared links that included a thumbnail image in the link preview received 65 per cent more likes and 50 per cent more comments than posts that did not include images.

What do you think?

(Now if I could just find an image…;0))

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.

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.

Writing to "Build the Larger Conversation"

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So, Kathleen Blake Yancey has been an influence on my teaching for a good long time, all the way back to the mid 1990s when I was doing research on professional teaching portfolios during a sabbatical from classroom. Her work and ideas have been an important part of the conversation around teaching and writing, and her stature as former president of the National Council of Teachers of English makes her a well respected voice among those trying to understand the changes we’re all experiencing now. So it was a great treat to be able to do a virtual sit-down with her earlier today and talk about how the importance of reading and writing has grown, how these technologies are impacting our thinking of how to best teach literacy, and the very fun and at the same time complex moment in history we’re living through right now.

The one teaser point I’ll throw out here deals with why we need to think of the function of writing very differently. It’s not a new concept if you’ve frequented these parts, but it’s just so validating to hear someone like Kathi articulate it as well. It’s this: an important value of writing today is not simply to communicate but to get others engaged, to build a larger conversation around what we write. As she states in “Writing in the 21st Century” (a must read, btw) writing is now “newly technologized, socialized and networked.” And I wonder to what extent those currently teaching writing (which I think should be everyone in a classroom, btw) really get that on a practical and pedagogical level. As she says in the interview, none of us really know what the answers are right now, but we are at a tipping point of sorts at least in our recognition that something “large” is happening, and that it’s going to have some “large” effects on our teaching and learning lives.

Unfortunately, we had a couple of short drops from uStream in the middle, so the embedded videos below are in three parts. Also, here is the extremely engaging chat transcript that Sheryl was nice enough to capture. It’s all good stuff, and if you do invest the time to listen, would love, as always, to hear your reactions.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

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.