Richardson Reading Activity

Here’s the stuff that jumped out at me from the first two chapters of Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts. (Will Richardson, 2009.)

Chapter 1

“‘The original thing I wanted to do,’ Berners-Lee said, ‘was make it a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write.’” (p. 1)

This was a statement by Tim Berners-Lee on his vision for the Internet in its early stages of development. I like this quote because it summarizes my goals for the tech portion of SI. I would like us to find ways to read/write/and collaborate on the Internet. I feel one of the most interesting experiences at SI is getting a chance to share ideas with other educators in an environment where you have the luxury of time. I hope to explore our blogs as one tool that can enable us to stay connected at the end of the summer when we return to our busy lives and classrooms.

“The world is changing around us, yet as a system, we have been very, very slow to react. Our students’ realities in terms of the way they communicate and learn are very different from our own.” (p. 5)

“[William D. Winn]: years of computer use creates children that ‘think differently from us. They develop hypertext minds. They leap around. It’s as though their cognitive structures were parallel, not sequential.’” (p. 7)

I’m not sure how much I believe this much ballyhooed idea that young people interacting with computers and other digital devices are changing their cognitive maps. I hear it from time to time, and I’m sure the research is compelling, but it just doesn’t sit right with me. I do, however, agree that nothing is more boring than a pencil-and-paper activity. This year I gave an extremely reluctant writer a pencil-and-paper writing assignment that he steadfastly refused to do. He said, quite bluntly, “I don’t write papers. I could text it to you.” Naturally I told him that was madness. But what if I didn’t? What if I’d designed writing activities for a device and situation with which he was comfortable? Could that have been a gateway for other forms of writing? Or at least made him a better text messager?

“Before you attempt to bring these technologies to your students, please be selfish about their use in your own learning practices.”

I think this is an important point to remember as we begin SI. During the Institute, you will experience a variety of different techniques and strategies. The ones that stick with you, the ones that transform your work and teaching, will be the ones you make a commitment to using. But making regular use of the things we learn (like blogging) is the only way to be ready to fully integrate them into our classrooms.

Chapter 2

“This creates a digital filing cabinet for students to archive their work and, in effect, creates a space for an online portfolio of work.” (p. 22)

I think that using your blog for an online filing cabinet of your writing is incredibly useful. I return frequently to my blogs to find pieces of things I’ve written or links I’ve shared with my class or whatever other information I’ve stuck on there.  It’s handy to have writing that is accessible and linkable from anywhere in the world. When I put something on a blog, it’s not chained to hard drive.

“And in a world that is moving more and more toward a business model of the collaborative construction of content, learning to work with far-flung collaborators is becoming an important literacy.” (p. 27)

This is the skill I’d like to work on this summer–how can we collaborate at distance? How can we stay connected as a group when we scurry back to our respective crannies of the tri-state? How can we help our students be literate in a world where increasingly your co-worker isn’t in another cubicle but maybe on another continent? Hopefully our early experiments with blogging and RSS will get us moving in that direction.

“…blogs facilitate what I think is a new form of genre that could be called ‘connective writing,’ a form that forces those who do it to read carefully and critically, that demands clarity and cogency in its construction, that is done for a wide audience, and that links to the sources of the ideas expressed.” (p. 28)

I think Richardson’s idea of this new genre is interesting. I like the idea of a blog entry being a new animal. I initially drafted this paragraph on paper–an ancient and static publication medium limited to one user at a time (two if you’re real good buddies) and not currently supporting hyperlinks. This response to Richardson activity doesn’t really fully explore the connectability of blogging, but look what happens when you throw in some hyperlinks.

“The differences between blogging in this manner and writing as we traditionally think of it are clear: Writing stops; blogging continues…But writing becomes an ongoing process, one that is not just done for the contrived purposes of the classroom.” (p. 30)

“Blogging continues.” I like that idea. Last year, I worked with a group of students at a creative writing camp sponsored by MUWP. As part of the camp, we set up blogs for each camper. They published one piece of writing a day on their blog as part of our daily routine. Some of the campers continued updating their blogs throughout the summer. The camp ended eleven months ago. The last update to a camper’s blog was last week. She had some thoughts on the suffering of left-handed persons. I think this is a piece of writing she may never have bothered to complete, but her blog gave her a sense of audience enabling her to type it up and spin it out there for people to take a peek. This was a piece of real, authentic writing, in her voice, speaking to a concern unique to her experience, not written for any contrived purpose, but just because she had an outlet.