I’ve read a few articles written by teachers who hesitantly embarked on their own online classrooms, only to find that their experience and that of their students was much more positive than expected.  Though they’re still left with questions around effectiveness, they often make the point that this would also be the case in the brick-and-mortar environment.  (Stephanie Imig’s article “Innovative Writing Instruction” in the English Journal 99.3 (2010): 80-83 is worth checking out.)  Other teachers on the EC Ning have pointed out the following advantages to the online environment:

• “Online courses serve to meet students in the cyber-setting that many of our students inhabit.” — Tom Liam Lynch
• “I think the major benefit of online teaching is that it enlarges the world of the classroom. In my online courses I have had students from all over the United States and from as far away as China.” — J.D. Wilson Jr.
• “The argument many administrators use to keep the technology at arms length is the dangers involved. But that seems to me more of a reason to teach it than not teach it.” — J.D. Wilson Jr.
• Online courses “take into account different learning paces, styles and ability levels.” — Rachel Ernst

However, I’d never taken an online course myself.  What better way to learn more about it and see how it works?  So, for the month of July, I took one in Special Education.  Some of the shortcomings I observed were:

• No differentiated instruction.  While it’s so essential for a successful, mixed-ability classroom (a key topic in Special Education and the Inclusive classroom), I really didn’t see it demonstrated in this online environment.  So, I’m still asking, how would it be done?
• Minimal technology integration!  Surprisingly, there was very little mention of technological tools and methods that we could use in our classroom.  When we were resource sharing, I think there was maybe two of us that used technology resources, out of a class of twenty-three!  I remain puzzled by this one.  Why was this case?
• Very little interaction with the instructor.  Many of us posed questions in our posts that were never fully answered because the instructor didn’t participate in the discussions. There was a Question & Answer Forum but, again, the possibility of opening up a challenging discussion with the instructor wasn’t there; we asked questions, he answered them.
• Poor communication with fellow students.  Everyone was too busy meeting the requirements for their postings and really didn’t care to ‘connect’ with one another.  I wasn’t necessarily looking for life-long bonding, but I missed the general camaraderie.

It wasn’t all bad though.  As a confirmed intrapersonal/linguistic learner, I really enjoyed the number of resources we had access to and the time we were given to write and reflect.  I’ve come out of that course feeling very confident in my knowledge of the material and I found every bit of it fascinating.

I’ve also come away with some of my own ideas for an effective online class environment:

• Create a community.  Off the top of my head, you could use online conferences, interactive games, online teams, chats for think-pair-shares … I’m sure there’s many other ways to get it going.
• This goes with the first one — get to know your students!  How else can you meet their needs and “get” where they’re coming from?
• Interact everywhere.  When the students are discussing a topic, know when to jump in to enrich their learning and do it!
• The first three  all lead to this one — differentiate instruction.  Once you know your students, you can group them, assign different online tasks, activities and assignments, provide different levels of instructor interaction, etc…

Admittedly, a lot of my questions remain unanswered and I’m still not sure that an online classroom /community could ever take the place of a classroom filled with ‘real people’.  And really, the take-aways I just listed are equally true for the brick-and-mortar classroom, so I haven’t discovered anything ‘earth-shattering’.  For high school students, I can’t help but wonder if the way to go would be to give them the best of both worlds so that they are given the opportunity to learn the valuable skills and knowledge intrinsic to each one.

In an attempt to focus my thoughts and find a way to put all of that information into some kind of context, I took a step back by asking a fundamental question:  “To what are they referring when they use the term “new literacies”?  The first thing I looked at was this video — a brief scan of how different teachers tried to symbolize new literacies:

A few symbols jumped out at me: arrows, question marks, stick people, technology tools, and a globe.  The challenge with interpreting visual symbols is that they can be pretty subjective.  But, here goes … new literacies are related to communication, collaboration and enquiry by people and between people using a variety of technologies that can fuel global interaction.  I particularly liked the one piece of chart paper with a gigantic question mark; in that instance, I didn’t think of enquiry but rather that “new literacies” is, at this point, a big open question. 

Then I visited the New Literacies Collaborative Ning, and saw a prompt on the forum asking participants at the conference to post their initial ideas of new literacies.  Two points that emerged for me as I read through the posts were: the use of technology tools, and composing/interactive students.  Specific definitions listed actions that students should learn to perform in relation to online information and multimedia: locate, comprehend, synthesize, evaluate, read, write/compose, collaborate, communicate, and think critically. 

I got a kick out of how similar the definitions were to the one I formulated for digital literacy.  But, more importantly, I started to wonder how “new” this literacy really is.  If we remove what makes it new – current technologies/multimedia – couldn’t all of those action words be applied just as easily to the “old” literacy?  Within the context of “old” literacy tools – books & print media, paper, pens & pencils, typewriters – was it ever considered enough to be able to simply use them?  Hasn’t education always involved a two step process: first, develop a competency using the tools and then, second, learn to locate, comprehend, synthesize, create, etc.?  If a student can read the words on a page, but can’t comprehend them or reflect on them, would we ever consider them literate?  Certain aspects of writing change with the new technology, particularly in terms of collaboration and the potential for a global audience.  But, has it not always been important to teach students about the importance of audience?  And then there’s the “old-fashioned” writer’s workshop  – writing and learning collaboratively is not really “new”.

Another video then caught my eye on the Ning.  (Heads up: this is a long one. You need around 90 minutes to watch the whole thing.) After watching it, I was left questioning the use of the word ‘literacy’ in the term “new literacies”. 

(Here’s a link to the PDF of the presentation slides.)  Near the beginning of his presentation, Yong Zhou clarifies how he is using the word:  “literacy is the basic ability to function … to live in the community.”  Is that literacy, or is that competency?  When he talks about global competency as a new literacy, it’s not clear why he wants to recontextualize it that way.  I absolutely agree with what he’s asserting; our experience is increasingly global as distance becomes a non-issue, and young people need to build knowledge, understanding, and empathy beyond their own backyard.  But, is that literacy?  Or, is it competency coming from knowledge and understanding, just like studying law makes you a  competent lawyer (as opposed to a literate lawyer).  Literacy is essential for global competency, but I’m not sure about global competency as a ‘new literacy’.

In the end, I’m still left wondering about “new literacies” but now my questions are a little more specific.  Shouldn’t literacy be defined separately from the tools and skills needed in the development of literacy?  Is it not problematic to include any subject area knowledge under the ever expanding umbrella of “literacy”?  Would it not be better to emphasize the importance of literacy in the process of acquiring any subject area knowledge, including global competency?  Is there a danger of ‘muddying the waters’ too much  – could the required focus on the core literacy that results from reading and writing be lost?

I called them on it, and they sheepishly grinned at us before they started to share what they were doing.  It turned out that they were taking the conversation virtual, and it had gone in a more global, multimedia direction.  Based on what we were discussing, they had selected the information they wanted to find, accessed text and images online via their iPhone, and then created new knowledge from what they had viewed.  Those of us who were offline enjoyed what they had to share, once we’d brought them back to our field of conversation (like they’d been away on a virtual field trip).   

As someone who reflects on what it means to be ‘multiliterate’ or ’21st-century literate’, I felt I was given a glance at a bit of this new literacy.  In fact, what I saw them do reminded me of something I’d read recently on Stanford’s website, quoted from the National Higher Education Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Initiative:  

ICT proficiency is the ability to use digital technology, communication tools, and/or networks to define an information need, access, manage, integrate and evaluate information, create new information or knowledge and be able to communicate this information to others. (emphasis mine)  

However, I believe there’s even more to consider under the umbrella of digital literacy.  Kevin Hodgson, on his blog “Kevin’s Meandering Mind”, recently blogged a complaint about technology in his son’s 6th-grade classroom being reduced to learning shortcuts in Word:    

What about creating? Composing? Publishing? Exploring (not games)? Web 2.0? (emphasis mine)  

Combining the action words in Kevin’s questions with those that are in the definition on the Stanford website, digital literacy thus expands well beyond the ability to perform a task, write a text message, or play a game.  Students should be able to: define, access, manage, integrate, evaluate, create, communicate, compose, publish, and explore.   

This morning I googled “digital literacy”, and was reminded of something else.  In Google’s Digital Literacy Tour (a joint effort with iKeepSafe) the emphasis is on internet safety:  appropriate contact, appropriate content, and appropriate conduct.  (By the way, both of these sites offer free curriculum resources for educators that are well worth bookmarking.)   

And then another key item came up in the search result.  On the Digital Citizenship and Creative Content site, educators can sign up for free lesson resources designed to teach students to become good “digital citizens”.  As they explain, students have access to digital content but they may not necessarily be aware of how digital rights work, or what constitutes the ethical use of digital files and why this is so important.   

Bringing it all together, I’m proposing my own draft/working definition of digital literacy:  

The ability to define the digital content needed and then to safely and ethically use the appropriate digital technologies to access, explore, manage, integrate and evaluate content in such a way that will facilitate and enhance the end results of communication, creation, composition, and publishing.  

From the short time that I’ve spent researching digital literacy, I get the sense that a clear definition is needed.  How else can we fully understand what our students need to learn and what we need to look for in terms of assessment and evaluation?   

I’m starting with this draft version and I’ll see where it takes me.  Comments and suggestions are always welcome!   

(Photo by techburst on Flickr)

In my first stumble, I found a column on the New York Times website. It’s written by Ben Zimmer, a graduate of linguistics from Yale and linguistic anthropology from the University of Chicago.  The first article I read - “Webinar” - is a playful exploration of recent neologisms and, with the massive cultural shift brought on by technology in recent decades, there are a multitude of such words and  phrases.  After enjoying that one, I browsed the others and found a wealth of material that I can see being useful in future language/grammar lessons: “Cellar Door”, “Social”, and “No”.         

In my next stumble, I found a recording of Virginia Woolf.  According to the description of this video on YouTube, “this is the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice. It is part of a BBC radio broadcast from April 29th, 1937. The talk was called “Craftsmanship” and was part of a series entitled “Words Fail Me”.”   

These two approaches to words — the linguist and the writer — are very different from one another, though they’re both playing. Just off the top of my head, I picture either of them as possible prompts for students to work on a creative word play project.  The recording of Woolf would also be a great supplementary piece to a reading of “A Room of One’s Own” in a writing class. 

Prompted by Ben Zimmer’s mention of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” in his “Webinar” piece, I see the potential of creating a lesson that starts with Carroll’s poem and then expands to an exploration of current day neologisms.  Following a short grammar lesson on sentence structure and parts of speech, the students would create word walls of nouns and verbs around a particular theme or subject area.  Using the word walls, they could then create their own neologisms/word combinations and do one of the following:

• write a prose and/or poetry piece that incorporates them;
• create a graphical representation of what one of their new word creations would look like if it existed;
• build their own crossword puzzles with their new words, with clues requiring very succinct definitions. (Check out the Crossword Puzzle Games website as one example of an online tool for making puzzles.) 

By extension, I can also see how this could be used in a Business Studies class.  For example, in a unit on advertising or product management, the students could explore how new words have been created by businesses to name and/or promote products.  The word wall exercise would then be a great tool to use to generate ideas for creating their own product or advertisement. 

Another interesting angle for a Business Studies class that’s looking at communications, management, or human resources, could be the whole notion of ‘corporate speak’.  Every corporate culture has a language, and a prerequisite for becoming a member of that culture is to understand and participate in that language.  In groups, the students could examine ‘real-world’ examples (which can be found on corporate websites) and then create their own for their ‘company’.  It could then get interesting if one student from each group moves to another group and has to learn that language.

Finally, out of curiosity, I googled “word play” and “Jabberwocky” and found some additional lesson ideas:

“Learning Grammar Through Wordplay”: A lesson that uses articles from a newspaper (in this case, the New York Times) to expose students to new vocabulary and grammar rules, and then encourages students to create their own text applying what they’ve learned.

“Basic Grammar Review Using Jabberwocky“: This lesson incorporates a grammar review and has the students rewrite the poem to apply their understanding.  The creator recommends that this be done for diagnostic assessment.

“Manipulating Sentences to Reinforce Grammar Skills”: A short lesson that uses text from a novel to help students review parts of speech, while also allowing some wordplay using synonyms and antonyms.  This would be easily adaptable to any text that is currently being studied in the class including, but not limited to: news articles, web/media text, poetry, etc…

Another great resource worth checking out is the multimedia profile of the book on the Bookdrum website.  It provides rich background material about the history and the people of the south that is seen through Scout’s eyes.  For students, it will add a different dimension to the experience of reading the novel, with images, music, maps, and videos.