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June 14, 2012

Teaching writing in the digital age

digital writingNew digital tools and “spaces” for writers are forcing teachers to rethink exactly what writing is as today’s students embrace digital, multimodal forms of communication, a School of Education faculty member told colleagues recently in a presentation, “Real Reasons to Write: Engaging and Motivating Student Writers.”

The talk by English education faculty member Sara Kajder was part of a recent Summer Instructional Development Institute hosted on campus by Pitt’s Center for Instructional Development and Distance Education.

Sara Kajder

Sara Kajder

Digital writing, Kajder said, “is anything that involves the computer or some type of digital tool that’s going to allow you to hop online.”

In thinking about digital communication, faculty need to ponder what it means to write digitally, as well as how to create meaningful opportunities for students to do that sort of digital composing, and how to assess their work. Digital communication is a different task that requires assessment different from other forms of writing, she said.

Kajder recounted a situation in which a prospective graduate student submitted a YouTube video in place of a written essay in his application to the English education program. The video showed his progress in learning to break dance — from his awkward first efforts to polished performances on stage. He submitted it as a demonstration of his capacity to learn and to make the case for the unique contribution he would make as part of the program.

“It confounded our admissions committee,” she said.

“He showed us capacity, I think, in this space, to pick the right mode and the right medium to demonstrate his learning over time,” she said. But, although the student had excellent grades and experience, some colleagues balked, arguing, “This isn’t a piece of writing.”

The experience prompted conversation that extended beyond the value of multimodal communication.

How many people are brave enough to display what they don’t know as they learn something new? she asked. “Think about that one thing that you’ve always wanted to learn. Could you capture yourself on video and broadcast it for the world through YouTube as you continue to learn and move and grow?”

Kajder said no one on the committee had ever used YouTube to learn to do something, or had even considered YouTube as a place to be used for that purpose.

“We have other patterns,” she said. But “the majority of the students who are applying to our programs right now are coming with a very different kind of literacy footprint. … And they demand that our classes recognize that as well, as valid and as writing work.”

New literacy footprints

As a test, Kajder said, she asked her students to download an application that tracks time spent on different tasks.

For one week, they were to capture the logo of any social media page they went to more than five times that week and on which they stayed for at least 10 minutes each time. She did the same thing.

After a week, she’d collected 10 icons. Her students, however, typically had gathered hundreds.

Kajder admitted her first thought was to question the number of online writing spaces that she’d never even heard of, then to ponder how students could meaningfully spend time in digital spaces.

“It led me to change my pedagogy in a way that I wanted them to be thinking about intentional digital composition: How you use those modes and media to communicate with a specific audience in the same kinds of valued ways as we are composing in other spaces … but to also be thinking about how to use digital media and social media to be a better learner.”

Kajder’s students use a variety of communication forms in her classes: They blog, vlog (video log), tweet and create wikis that are used as collaborative study guides shared not only with Pitt classmates but with students in similar programs at other universities.

Her students aren’t working just as a small community of practice of 30 or 60 students in a classroom, she said. “We’re working with several hundred pre-service teachers who are all thinking and working together around similar tasks.”

In contemplating writing, her students use the MAPS framework, considering the Mode/media, Audience, Purpose and Situation in their writing. “Writing digitally has disrupted for them what it means to write for an intended audience and what it means to write through image, what it might mean to write and speak aloud in reflective practice,” she said.

“We should be leveraging and creating text inside our spaces that are useful outside the classroom,” she said, noting that her students — pre-service teachers — rotate between blogging and vlogging on a weekly basis when they are in the field.

Their posts are reflections of their practice, what they are learning and what goals they are setting, she said.

Often they turn their cell phone cameras on themselves from the school parking lot at the end of the day to create their vlog and receive feedback from peers before they’ve even arrived at home.

Kajder said the students are required to post once a week. Typically, she said, they post 12-15 times per week.

She also asks students to tweet, noting, “You can only collapse so much of your thinking into a tweet.” The exercise is similar to one in which she asks students to synthesize the day’s learning into 25-word explanations as their exit ticket from the classroom.

The condensed explanations are the reverse of more typical assignments in which students must describe what they’ve learned in lengthy written papers and in presentations at the end of the term.

“How many 15-minute presentations can you possibly watch?” she quipped to the faculty audience, describing an alternative assignment she has used.

Instead of students presenting to their team of professors, they were asked to create and post a 10-minute video online that one faculty member from the program would review.

The students also were required to have three peers view and respond to their video and to have two outside readers — members of other English departments who work in the same specialty area inside the discipline and who provide expert feedback.

Kajder said the majority of students demonstrated higher understanding over time and found the work contained in their videos was more relatable to their thesis work than were written papers.

Lessons learned

Beyond the lesson of valuing different modalities of writing, Kajder said it’s wise to take it slow in moving assignments into other formats. Her first goal was to recognize that she shouldn’t change every assignment, but should start out with one per term. “I was going to start small and scale it up from that point and make sure that that worked well.”

In addition, “public matters,” she said, noting that her students often have wanted to keep their classwork “in a password-protected safe bubble” as a blog or wiki within Blackboard.

“Those projects have never gone any further than just being a class project,” she said.  Rather, when the assignments have been to use more open spaces such as PBWiki or WordPress  (which can be password protected, but also have the capacity for removing the protective settings), “those projects and pieces of work can have greater meaning and they actually become much more purposeful outside of the classroom space,” she said.

Digital tools

Kajder outlined a number of digital tools she has embraced in her classroom, including five that she said she can’t teach without.

• Video Ant, a tool that enables users to annotate video. Kajder said she asks students to facilitate a discussion on videotape, “then go back and take it apart later to see what actually happened in that discussion.”

• WeVideo, a free online video editing tool that doesn’t require a computer, just an Internet connection and Flash capacity.

• Qik, a live-streaming application that enables users to log in from a phone with video capabilities to stream content to other viewers. Kajder said some students, with permission from the speaker and organizers, used Qik to stream a conference presentation for fellow students who were unable to attend.

• Screencasting tools such as Screenr.com, Screencast.com and Jing, free tools that enable users to make a video of anything that appears on their computer screen and sync it to audio. Kajder said she uses it for providing feedback on assignments: Students submit their work electronically, then using Jing, she creates a video-based feedback that’s returned to them in the form of a link. Screencasting also is used for peer feedback, she said.

The top five

Kajder’s five must-haves for teaching are:

• Evernote, a free online database tool that enables users to tag documents in folders that are searchable and accessible across multiple digital devices.

• The Kindle app, which doesn’t require a Kindle reading device. Kajder said students use it to annotate text on the device of their choice then put it into Evernote, enabling them to share information across communities.

• Dropbox, a file service she uses for receiving students’ coursework.

• Delicious, a social bookmarking tool that allows users to post and tag bookmarks across multiple devices, rather than on a single device. Users also can follow others to see their bookmarks, she said, noting that it can be used as a timesaving search tool that narrows content down. “If you’ve spent the time to save it in Delicious, you’ve already filtered the web for me,” she said.

• Twitter, which she uses in class by assigning a scribe to tweet a synthesis of the day’s learning.

Through her research on tweets, Kajder said she’s discovered ifttt, which allows users to create a “recipe” to grab content from social media sites and put it in a selected location. For instance, “I don’t go to Twitter every day to see what someone has posted,” she said. “Instead, I set up a recipe. If my students tweet, it automatically gets put in a folder in Evernote that I have labeled ‘Tweets.’”

She said, “I like knowing I have control over the tools and that content gets pushed to me instead of me having to go out and get content.”

Other tools

Kajder said she’s also come to rely on a Magic Wand wireless portable scanner to obtain scans of things students are working on in class and a digital pen that can record and sync writing to the audio.

Assessment

Kajder said the availability of these digital tools has forced her to change her teaching. “I have to understand how a multimodal composition comes together,” she said.

While students may choose to produce more conventional forms of work, such as writing an essay, Kajder offers them the option of creating multimodal texts, noting, “My evaluation has to be different based on the two products.”

She said, “My goal is not to necessarily create students who are multimodal composers, but students who are smart, articulate thinkers who understand how to learn about their learning and are motivated to choose the right medium that fits for them in communicating what they know and understand.”

*

Links to video of Kajder’s presentation are posted at www.cidde.pitt.edu/teaching/summer-instructional-development-institute. Also posted are sessions on motivating students to complete reading assignments by Mary Margaret Kerr, chair of the School of Education’s Department of Administrative and Policy Studies, and on process-oriented guided inquiry learning by Franklin and Marshall College chemistry faculty member Rick Moog.

—Kimberly K. Barlow


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