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backstage

Creative Commons licensed ( BY-ND ) flickr photo shared by iTux

I steal from Alan Levine quite often.

I am most proud of hauling away a backstage blog from an open course he co-facilitated as part of #YouShow15. Then yesterday during #tjc15 folks started asking me about the role of having a back stage blog.

 

 

 

 

So I wanted to show an example.

Once again stole from cogdog. He posted a final report from #YouShow15. I loved the work, even if it is a horrible slideshow article aka BleacherReport. What I loved the most, Alan’s work was 95% derivative and 100% original. He told a story using the words of others.

I wanted to try my own. So for the final event of #walkmyworld I attempted to make my own. It is a work in progress and you can read about it on my backstage blog.

Why a Backstage Blog?

Digital scholarship doesn’t count at most institutions, including mine. This is our fault. We need to tell our story. I also want to document the digital writing process. I try to document the evolution of my makes from pre-writing through the constant revision.

I also like having a place for quick thoughts Incoherent babble, overuse of alliteration, unfinshed and unrefined ideas.

If we want to be open and digital scholars we need to think out loud.

Metric mania
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Josep Ma. Rosell

I spent some time over the weekend really digging into Adam Lofting’s work with the metrics around #teachtheweb looking for insights into Marc Surman’s call for a Mozilla Academy by the year 2017.

You know family is town if you would rather spend the holiday looking at analytics rather than aunties. Still the numbers, and the KPI’s that came out of Portland shine a light on why a global movement is needed if webmaker….sorry….Mozilla Learning Networks is to be successful.

I am not a click counter by trade so I apologize in advance for my ignorance.

Retention

The problem, unlike relatives, users of webmaker tools leave pretty quickly.

The legacy webmaker tools, empowered users to read, write, and participate on the open web. Yet the conversion and retention rates are awful. After sixty days just over a half of one percent are still active and after 90 days the number might as well be zero.

Empowering tools means nothing without community.

People of #TeachTheWeb

The primary goal of the Mozilla Academy has to be connecting people. This will be done through both the Learning Networks and the Products.

The number of people within the Learning Networks is growing. The club data is still blank as that is a new initiative and the click counters are still debating what constitutes and club and a city.

In many ways I am trying to understand the vision and role of the Learning Networks. I kind of see a hierarchy of involvement. Maker Party evolves to club, club morphs into Hives, Hives become relatively independent and self sustaining.

All four of these levels fit under Mozilla Academy. Yet where should we put our efforts when discussing this global classroom?

Maker Party, due to this new vision, and a shift in funding, now are year round affairs. I am seeing this being conflated with the Mozilla Web Clubs. I disagree. Year round Maker Parties should be more flash events, that can be done with limited support.

Club First Strategy

Mozilla Academy is a lofty goal but when I look at the metrics that matter I think it becomes clear that building club capacity has to come first. Marc talked about the literacy, skill, and craft involved in the Learning Networks but these are simply metaphors to how enculturated one is in the discourses of the Open Web.

In a people first strategy you recognize that social capital, especially when you rely on volunteer contributors such as myself, is your greatest asset. We need to have a feeder system to move folks from skill to craft. We need people to use and evangelize the webmaker products and the Manifesto Values if we want to reach the KPI’s. More importantly you need people living on the Open Web.

Community Centered Design

The first goal of the Learning Networks should be the cultivation of community. The success of the Mozilla Foundation in the last few years has been nothing short of amazing (the fundraising especially). This growth rate  has required massive investments of time and treasure and has centralized much of the effort.

What I do not see is an uptick in social media impressions and sustained involvement as well. I think the metrics team needs to build (they probably do but its not in the public dashboard) and pay attention to the social media metrics as much as the tool use.

When you look at the #teachtheweb hashtag, the #mozacademy hashtag, discourse.webmaker.org, the IRC chat, and Google+ you see few interactions or the cultivation of relationships.  Engagement is notoriously impossible to measure but I know when I see silence in Web spaces.

I have seen new clubs from India start telling their story on Twitter. There has been an uptick of individuals on Google+ seeking entrepreneurial help (microbusinesses and the Academy..hmmm?), but it is quiet.

Without people the KPI’s are meaningless

Marc Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, asked for us in the #teachtheweb community to think about Mozilla Learning. He described the efforts to take #teachtheweb and scale it across the all of the Foundation’s efforts. He wants to build the global classroom. Marc has spearheaded Mozilla’s efforts to not only help bring the next billion users online but to also ensure users of the Web have the necessary skills and competencies to read, write, and participate in our networked society.

We have made the most effort is focusing on the know-how. Under the leadership of Doug Belshaw, we pushed Version 1.5 of the Web Literacy Map.

Michelle Thorne, Laura Hillinger, Amira Dhalla, and Merideth Summs. have taught me so much about designing learning activities for informal and distributed learning spaces.

The Badge Alliance, work that I do not follow as closely, developed a system that will bring these two efforts together and allow us to recognize the accomplishments of webmakers regardless of age or location.

Watching the newly formed design team work has been nothing short of amazing. They hold each other to such a standard of excellence, work at a break neck pace, and quickly figured out how to play inter-office games on GitHub

Overall, in the three years that I have been involved, Mozilla have scaled up the efforts to #teachtheweb. Never before have I seen or felt the sense of urgency that Mozilla has created around this effort, especially in the last two quarters. Must have been something in the water in Portland. The growth of the #teachtheweb movement has been huge. The year over year results of every metric presented at the March board meeting are astronomical. To keep this movement going because the know-who matters just as much to the #MozAcademy as the know-how.

What was once envisioned as a loosely federated group of like minded people remixing and hacking together teaching kits has become a shiny soup to nuts pre-packaged curriculum.

Let’s not forget the importance of kn0w-who.

The LMS Creep

While I am proud of what we built I also a little scared. I worry that in our commitment to protecting the open web we may close off possibilities for learning. We may not = recognize how central  know-who is to #MozAcademy

The metrics presented at the board do not tell a story of engagement and connection. They are the stories of siloed events across the globe. #MozAcademy has to bring these stories together. We just do not talk, read, and write in social ways. A major push in the coming development needs to be not just increasing the frequency of engagement but also the quality of engagement.

For all those numbers there was very little interaction across the old webmaker properties. The #teachtheweb hashtag was active among fifty or so users. The discourse community, while still new, does not attract many activities.

Mozilla Learning seeks to bridge the need. To fill in the back stories of the impressing growth, and most importantly to turn active users into active community members.

I am seeing words such as modules, defined pathways, need for assessment. These are not necessarily bad but they are design constraints that can negatively impact a learning space.

I don’t hate the click counters of the world. Watching Adam Lofting and his team work has been inspiring. I have written frequently that analytics is the most important writing tool not taught in school. When ever I speak at business education groups about technology I make the point that no business student is college or career ready without an understanding of analytics.

Yet when it comes to #MozAcademy the pedagogical goal rather than some KPI must come first. The data must serve the learning, not the other way around. Let’s use data to see how our pedagogical goal is either enhanced or inhibited by the goals we make.

Martin Hawksey reminds us of Norman’s law of e-learning in that all tools used for learning become an LMS once a threshold of users is reached.

I disagree. I think we can build an openly networked #MozAcademy without becoming a stale MOOC. In fact in many ways Mozilla was a MOOC before that was even a thing. Does it make tracking things harder. Sure. Do decisions take longer? Yes. Are designs different. Yep. It is also better.

Leadership and Learning

If the #MozAcademy is going to succeed we need to focus on the Academy as a tool to recognize, hone, and utilize leadership.

Marc wrote:

I am sick of the tired meme in education that, “students know more than their teachers.” I am starting to question the idea of teachers as simply “co-learners.” If you find yourself in situations where you consistently know more than the teacher it time to find a nee teacher.

I might be biased about the role of leadership in learning. I grew up in Boy Scouts. The idea that we lead folks to new understanding is baked into my worldview.

People will matter in the #MozAcademy. One year ago I knew nothing of CSS. Today I can mess up webpages in ways I never thought possible. This is due mainly to anyonynmous folks on the web but when I get really stuck Atul Varma and Stefan Bohacek

We need to provide webmakers the tool to cast a wide net for help.

Community is the content of the Academy. That is the only way a curriculum on leadership and agency can be built. We need leaders who can curate community to get at learning that matters.

Towards a Better Way

Marc asked about the kind of learning we seek in the Academy.

Maybe its the English teacher in me trying to eliminate needless modifiers but I wonder if we what we are trying to get at is “learning.” Nothing special or creative, just plain old cognitive apprenticeships….I mean distributed apprenticeship,…I mean apprenticeship.

Yogurt, just plain, Yogurt.

I worry about the #MozAcademy being swallowed by the MOOC monster. We need to bake the social into Mozilla Learning.

I suggest stealing the model that the Digital Media Learning Hub is developing. They build a class on stories. It is a forkable push and syndication model rather than a pre-packaged learning pathway.

The instructional design is loosely based on Jim Groom’s #DS106. He, Tim Owens, and Alan Levine, are getting real close to building an RSS interface to use in education. If the three stooges can make it happen I am sure Mozilla can.

Let’s build this City on RSS

Check out connected courses for an earlier iteration and the current dmlcommons. Lets build #MozAcademy on the backbone of others stories. Lets let RSS be the skin pulling it all together.

Mozilla has some of the coolest developers I know working on this project. Lets make the Mozilla Academy look like Planet WebMaker. I could imagine being able to filter feeds by continents, Mozilla Web Clubs, or by topic. This of course requires tagging and humans suck at tagging, but it would be neat.

On Assessment

We need to count what matters. The Badges and the metadata that points bac to different webmakers needs to be the metric that matters. Carla and the digital literacies badge alliance have talked about a federated badging system but I think the Academy and Mozilla Web Club badges need to be the gold-standard.

Instead of collecting easy to use, but wildly uninformative likert data lets curate stories. Take the open and reflective question stems from the pre and post questionnaires in the curriculum and turn them into a multimodal writing prompt.

 

On the Tools

Watching the field reports and research coming out of Africa and India enlightens us all. After playing with the webmaker app and prototyping and early versions of Tiles, I began to realize that the webmaker app might make a great UI for the Academy. That can be the doorway to the Open Web.

I understand the legacy webmaker apps, x-ray goggles, thimble, and popcorn have issues. The Goggles update was a much needed refresh. I was glad to hear from Andrew that the transition away from the older tools, especially Thimble,will be gradual. They were are great. I would not be where I am today if it was not for Thimble. I am starting to play in more industry recognized spaces like jfiddle and codepend, but Thimble got me started. Even poor neglected Popcorn is still awesome (hint: resurrect a Zeega like experience for an upcoming prototype…Its Easter resurrection is on the mind).

Products and free tools have always defined Mozilla Learning. I realize that now, and see it as something we should embrace. Redesigning the tools for a mass-audience can differntiate Firefox on OS and build in the serendipitous learning Andrew wants.

After reading about the interplay between brand, product, and Mozilla Learning using the  new suite of webmaker tools might makes sense. I also think it fits with the long term version of Makerfox and the Foundation as a whole.

Your whole team needs to be proud of what has been accomplished in the last three years. Looking forward to 2017.

BTW in terms of naming I favor Webmaker Academy. Say it three times. It rolls nicely off the tongue.

Barriers do arise in schools. Many students live behind walls, both real and imagined, dictated by the needs that survival necessitates.


creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Mike Kniec

Words and meaning have power,  and this makes learning a political act. School should never be done to students rather students should do their learning on to the world.

I truly believe we have education backwards. We strive for college and career readiness hoping to grow GDP with a flow of technical workers as means for civic contribution. Instead we should worry first about community and civic readiness. Then, and only then, will college and career follow for those who have been robbed of their agency and culture.

When students leave schools wanting to make communities a better place they engage in literacy practices steeped in academic discourse. When kids see how they can “get theres” by being an agent in the world many realize life requires learning beyond high school.

Community, as a thread, permeates Maisha Winn’s retrospective on her research. In Exploring the Literate Trajectories of Youth Across Time and Space Winn described a series of ethnographic studies that draw heavily on the socio-cultural work of Heath and the literacy as action found in the work of Cole, Gutierrez, Lunsford,  Smagorinsky, Street, and many more. Winn first described out of school spaces for learning and then either found similar spaces or  applied these lessons to more formal learning spaces.

African Diaspora Participatory Literacy Communities

Winn describes African Diaspora Participatory Literacy Communities to encapsulate the poet cafes and bookstores she studies:

ADPLCs, as literacy or literary-centered events outside of school and work communities that combined oral, aural, and written traditions through an exchange of words, sounds, and movements that privileged a Black aesthetic

She then describe many of the tenants of learning found in socio-cultural views of learning. Lately, and I think too often removed (or maybe all inclusiveO from their theoretical base, this framework has been labeled connected learning. It is interesting to see Winn draw on many of the same principles.

Winn’s  description of learning matches Gee’s adaptation of Community into Affinity Spaces.

Like other open mics, POSA, is an invitation to both novice and seasoned poets to share their writing in a space that promotes reading, writing, thinking, and activism, as well as collabo- ration among elders and children. V.S. Chochezi and Staajabu, the mother daughter poetry duo also known as Straight Out Scribes (SOS), begin with saying “hello,” in several languages punctuated with a decidedly urbanized “What’s up!”

She draws Gutierrez’s ( 2008 ):

concept of “sociocritical literacy”—that is a “historicizing literacy” that privileges the lived experiences and legacies of participants—provided the much needed space to analyze the activities of both classes against the backdrop of a history of Black poets and writers.

This notion of learning as a sense of community around a shared purpose was traced back to The Black Arts Movement which

unapologetically sought to incorporate a Black aesthetic into visual and performing arts along side the Black Power Movement, which advocated self-determination and self-definition among Black Americans

What is interesting is this Black aesthetic, as of all  American History greatly influences our cultures. You see this in the rise of hip hop culture. I actually stumbled into a similar space for learning in Cambridge, MA.

What made the ADPLC a space where learning thrived was community and a shared purpose.

Poppa Joe and Mamma C

Winn then described a few formal learning places that drew from the same history and values of the out of school places. Once again community came first.

When describing one classroom Winn wrote:

These student poets used the Power Writing circle to build community while reading original compositions aloud in an open mic format, much like the venues I observed in Northern California, and engaging in giving and receiving feedback. In the context of these literacy communities, Poppa Joe and his guest teachers taught by modeling.

Culturally responsive classrooms were also central to the Winn’s thesis. Yet she noted these were often hardest for classrooms. Winn and Latrise P. Johnson explored culturally relevant pedagogy. They describe how it means much more then reading a book with a black kid on the cover.In fact Winn notes that the most successful spaces drew on student lives:

used the material of students’ lived experiences, such as disproportionate contact with law enforcement and police brutality, as resources for rich dialogue and their struggle to translate the dialogue into writing

As Peter Samgorinsky pointed out recently on the XMCA listserv this work reflects recent scholarship by David Kirkland who detailed the many powerful ways black youth challenge dominant narratives.

Winn points out that it is the arts that are the dominant path to having students write their own story on to the world. She noted:

I also learned how theater arts builds community and supports marginalized youth as they build and sustain literate identities.

Learning from Winn

Literacy instruction is identity work. It is political. The question was posed on the XMCA listserv about recreating these experiences in the classroom.

Anna Aguilar noted a memory of a teacher creating a Zine. Smagorinsky stressed the role of coaches. I couldn’t agree more. We need to realign schools so that students are empowered by designing the community. I was intrigued by this idea in the listserv:

 For Ilyenkov, language is not the ideal, but its ‘objectified being’, its material form. The ideal does not exist in language for Ilyenkov, or in other material phenomena, but in forms of human activity.

In many ways writing instruction must be attached to a human activity. Technically it already is an activity but it is one students are forced into and motivated by exploring new identities in memes or engaging in coaching relationships such as in Soccer.

In fact Michael Cole posed these questions after reading Winn’s work:

[How do we] better understand how the special teachers, those who were involved in
local community literacy practices/values/histories, managed to include
them in their public high school classrooms with all of the rules,
regulations, standardized testing, etc. that is involved.

Does such boundary shattering require exceptional people?
or perhaps

What are the boundaries to such boundary shattering??

Community Matters

These efforts do take exceptional people. They also require us to challenge the boundaries, such as limited views of literacy.

Our fascination with accountability reform is at the heart of ripping away what Winn values. Kirkland, as Peter points out, notes how limited assessments of what counts help to dissuade youth as school is done to the them.

Winn wants learning done onto the world. As Michael Glassman (again on the XMCA listerv) noted Papa Joe and Mamma C did more than teach language arts. We must recognize community where ever it exists.

Another barrier arose around accountability based reform and that is the removal of the arts from schools. Content rich instruction and arts that allow students to do the identity work necessary to be civic and community ready.

Can these exceptional teachers exist. Yes. Are they rare. Yes, that is the definition of exceptional. Are they only found in school? No.

Gender representation on Flickr has always bothered me. Women, like in many fields are woefully underrepresented and often over sexualized.

I am not as worried at the blatant images of sexism I find, such as the one below when I used “hack” as as a search term. The bias is not that overt. It is more the unaware bias that reinforce the ideas of what it means to be a scientist or engineer.

And it is partly my fault.

Last night I needed an image for a post on design research. This methodology often draws on the metaphor of engineering. So I searched Flickr, filtering for creative commons only, and all I got were pictures of white men. I had to scroll down quite a distance for any reference to a female engineer.

So I decided to try all the letters in the STEM acronym. What I quickly discovered was I helped to create the gender bias. For when I signed out the results weren’t good, but they were better. Just by favoriting and following photographers I am reinforcing gender roles.

Here are the results:

Scientist

This search result was not that bad before and after I signed out. Yet it did improve some once logged out. Women represented 6 out of 13 pictures of real life human scientists. All of the images celebrated science.

Some of the top results were posted by people I already follow (which is very few) as I saw the same picture.

Technologist

The results for technologist were also more  gender neutral and some of the smartest voices in the field, many who happen to be women, showed up in the results. Given that “technologist” is a new term in the lexicon I decided to search for computer scientist as well. Still there are so many voices I respect in the field I do not see in the photo stram

A female was in the first picture, followed by screenshots, and then math valentines that, while humorous, could be construed as a method of sexualizing the efforts of women in the field. These are followed by a wonderful poster of Grace Hopper and a women studying in algorithm book poolside.

Engineer

Engineer is by far the worst. There is a picture of a woman on a slide about engineering 2.0 but that is about it. You have to scroll far into the stream if you want images of female engineers. Really far if you want an image of a woman leading a team of engineers.

Mathematician

I am happy to say that mathematician presented a hopeful picture. Images of women far outnumbered those of men. The second picture was of Ada Lovelace and a woman name Mary Ellen, who seems to have many fans.

How to Help

We need more creative commons of images of women in STEM fields. Especially in Engineering. If you have a Flickr account and have images of women, females, girls, or those who don’t fit the gender dichotomy please share. Please license your work with a Creative Commons license that allow others to use this work.

Be weary of algorithms. I was unwittingly reinforcing bias in the people I chose to follow. Be deliberate in the spaces you curate.

Our goal should be to make it so anyone searching Flickr for images in the STEM fields should see real-life people, regardless of gender, doing real life work. This will require us to be deliberate in highlighting images of the underrepresented.

I look forward to not finishing the Digital Media Learning Commons course on design based research. In fact it might be my most favoritist unfinished thing since #ccourses.

Not because I won’t participate in all the activities. That’s a given. This course will never be finished because good design rarely is.

USA Science and Engineering Festival 2014 (201404250028HQ)
cc licensed ( BY-NC ) flickr photo shared by NASA HQ PHOTO

Few tools or spaces ever reach perfection. So I kind of look at formative experiments as always trying to get better.

I hope to build both my know-how and my know-who in terms of design research (I stole this from the Informal Assessment article I have been reading…Spoiler: I think the three part model that Lemke, Lecusay, Cole, & Michalchik propose would be a great methods framework. Tip: Follow and play on the companion blog ).

I am in the very nascent phase of a design research project #Questiontheweb. My intention was to create the materials in the open, then provide PD and activities to teachers, have students network. More on how that’s gonna evolve later.

In fact the updates will come right after you folks help me figure out what to do.

I also want to think about formative design in terms of my work with Gear Up. Gear Up is the ultimate design research project. The goal is simple, change lives. The methods fluid and messy. I wasn’t around to write the last proposal. I will be in 2018.

Poetry, Mosaic Ceiling (Washington, DC)
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by takomabibelot

This is the third installment on “How to Teach Poetry with Images.” For the first installment click here and for the second click here. As a refresher my brother, a TESOL teacher in TX, asked about teaching figurative and connotative language. I suggested poetry.

In our last post we discussed authoring poetry using images. Let us now turn to responding to poetry. Using images to analyze the word choices authors use aligns well to the CCSS. It also moves beyond the peck and hunt of, “Find a poem that uses a simile, a metaphor, allegory, etc.”

How It’s Done

Sue and I use canonical poetry for this activity such as: Preacher, Don’t Send Me by Maya Angelou

Preacher, Don’t Send me
when I die
to some big ghetto
in the sky
where rats eat cats
of the leopard type
and Sunday brunch
is grits and tripe.

I’ve known those rats
I’ve seen them kill
and grits I’ve had
would make a hill,
or maybe a mountain,
so what I need
from you on Sunday
is a different creed.

Preacher, please don’t
promise me
streets of gold
and milk for free.
I stopped all milk
at four years old
and once I’m dead
I won’t need gold.

I’d call a place
pure paradise
where families are loyal
and strangers are nice,
where the music is jazz
and the season is fall.
Promise me that
or nothing at all.

  • Have students complete read the poem and complete a free response.
    • If you want to scaffold here are a few prompts:
    • What struck you forcibly?
    • What might be “clues” to meaning?
    • What puzzled you?
    • What words hold deep meaning?
  • Then have students circle words or phrases that affect the tone of the poem. Tone refers to the poet’s attitude toward the material and/or readers. Tone may be playful, formal, intimate, angry, serious, ironic, outraged, baffled, tender, serene, depressed, etc.
  • Have students circle 10-12 words or phrases you feel contribute to the tone of the poem.
  • Then have students list the words.
  • Here is an example from a student
1. when I die
2. ghetto
3. rats eat cats
4. grits and tripe
5. I’ve seen them kill
6. need
7. please don’t
8. promise me
9. streets of gold
10. milk for free
11. pure paradise
12. jazz
  • Then have students search for images of that poem either in a magazine or using the web.
  • Give every students an “image tableau.” (fancy way of saying construction paper).
  • Explain to students they are to arrange the images on the tableau based on the meaning of the poem and how the words affected tone.
  • Put students in small groups and have them explain their tableaus.
Student Example of Image Tableau
Student Example of Image Tableau

Using the tableaus creates a space for students to consider how word choice affects meaning.

We put the birch on the top, but we focused on being able to go only one way. There is a traveler… We picked the sigh thing because of the stanza of him sighing. We put the picture to the side because it is not important.-Student discussing A Road Not Taken

I noticed that certain words contribute to the point of the poems more. The images gave me a picture. The image tableau showed what was most important to the writer in the poem. Discussing with other people gives you a chance to hear others’ interpretations. -A Student

 

 

Hackasaurus. CC BY-SA Mozilla Foundation.

It began with a dinosaur.

Telescope Mirror Segements (NASA, James Webb Space Telscope, 04/14/11)
cc licensed ( BY-NC ) flickr photo shared by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

As part of #walkmyworld we were asked to consider our mirrors. I am going to try to keep hacking at Palindrome Poems but they are really hard. Instead I turn to Mozilla’s efforts to #teachtheweb. Way easier than poetry…..

Hackasaurus

On November 19th, 2011 my journey as a Mozilla webmaker began. I attended a #hackjam sponsored by the National Writing Project and organized by Andrea Zellner.

So many wonderful people were there: Paul Oh, Melissa Techman, Ian O’Byrne, Chad Sansing, Nate Otto (maybe…somebody was there snapping lots of photos…it may have been Trent Kays)

We were attending the NCTE conference and found a coffee shop with free wifi for an improv hackjam. Andrea threw it together quickly on Twitter. The learning lasted but the wifi didn’t. Either way I became enamored with the tool and the hackasaurus mission

Thus my journey began. I quickly joined the Hackasaurus Google Group and that summer I organized my first hackjam at the Massachussetts New Literacies Institute I used to organize.

I got involved in the listserv and started posting and sharing ideas with Atul and Erin Knight. Still I knew little of the overall mission and efforts to develop Web Literacy (nor of @toolness ability to make really cool stuff).

Badges and Web Literacy

At the same time Ian began to dive deep into badges…real deep. It began when we asked Dan Hickey to serve as discussant on a session we organized  at AERA about assessing learning on the web. Dan basically called us out for our positivist reductionist efforts to only assess the residue of learning.

This brought Ian to badges which brought Ian to Doug (when he was badge lead) which brought us both to web literacy.

Ian went full force into the badging research and spoke at length of the importance and future of badging. So much so that I and the organizers issued him this NSFW Brevity badge for discussing badges. Meanwhile Doug, Ian, and I followed similar research paths in our dissertations (we jokingly argue about who first relied on the tired  alliteration trope  of C’s and digital literacy first ….update I win).

When Doug switched primarily to the web literacy map we followed. Ian more closely than I until recently.

Web Literacy Map

At first I hung out on the peripheral of the web literacy map development. My teaching schedule for the first year never allowed me to join the calls.

This was also at the height of Google+ when there was more than seven active users (for you Roz). I would reply to Doug’s queries there. We debated the use of nouns over verbs, the role of synthesis (an issue I am still pushing today).

Doug, once again great work. Though I think the web standards still fall a little short in capturing the complexities of making meaning in online spaces. Yes navigation is central, and a good predictor of those who succeed during inquiry tasks, but there is much more the standards do not capture. for example the reading of multiple sources, external storage systems (notes,Evernote, etc), remixing knowledge old and new are not really reflected.

I can’t wait to see and help the project unfold.

Me as a Mentor

Meanwhile I was actively trying to align my teaching and learning with the Web Literacy Map.Ian and I felt it was important that the Mozilla Foundation’s Web Literacy effort get coverage in traditional academic channels. One this would legitimize and spread the word in formal learning spaces; second the academy is filled with great thinkers by design.

We began to write and publish about the web literacy map and used our role as Area Chairs of the Literacy Research Association to sponsor Doug coming to speak to movers and shakers in literacy research.This semester I am on a research fellowship. One of my three goals is to conduct research and learn in the open on the Web Literacy Map. I want to do research that helps communities and not just citation counts. Relevance and rigor in research to me means making a difference.

Me as a Webmaker

I have been thinking about how to represent my open research work on the map. Sure the map will stand on its own but what did I learn during the process?

I am thinking (I know its a lot of me but this post started with a mirror metaphor so bear with me) that I should try an auto-ethnography. In my process of learning how we should teach the web I am learning how to build the web.

The more involved I get with the Mozilla #teachtheweb community the more skilled as a webmaker I become. I would love to trace my learning.

A year ago I still styles HTML using tables. It was the only way I ever knew how to make pages look the way I wanted. Now I am customizing CSS and playing with animations. All of this was made possible because of webmaker.

Data Sources

  • Pre-2001 –Mainly social consumer of web
  • Teacher websites (2003- begin building websites to teach)
  • Blog posts-I was a late blogger. I didn’t start until 2007 (because I had a session accepted on blogging).
  • Transition to WordPress (owning my own content).
  • Tweets (started late…2008 but focus on #hackasaurus and #teachtheweb hashtag).
  • Blogposts-Examine posts categorized as #teachtheweb or tagged with webmaker.
  • Makes on webmaker.org (wish I didn’t delete my drafts).
  • My Browser history (looking at HTML/CSS tutorials).
  • My search history (looking for tutorials).
  • Posts to Git.
  • Post to discourse.webmaker.org

I don’t have much ethnography experience and zero auto-ethnography (can this be done after the fact?) but my journey captures the networked learning that occurs in open spaces. It is as much social and interest driven as it is skill determined. I learned by doing and teaching. I taught by doing and learning.

My Future Mirror

Gear Up

When I project my future reflection I have two hopes that start to materialize in the vapor. The first is connecting the webmaker efforts with GEAR UP. This organization lives at the corner of formal and informal learning spaces and is committed to bettering the lives of American youth who may not otherwise make it past high school.

It is a perfect fit for Mozilla’s effort to #teachtheweb. It is also a perfect match for Ed Partnerships which oversees the GEAR UP program and recognizes the importance of STEM education.

New Haven-A Hive City?

This reflection is just starting to show up (reading the HIVE Cookbook) and may just be my mind playing tricks on me but if I look hard enough I might see this reflection in the mirror some years from now.

I imagine a partnership with SCSU, YALE, CRISP, NHPS, libraries, and businesses. We are building a lab school on campus I could see this outreach program baked into the school as a community HUB.

Both of these goals would take a strong effort for this reflection to become reality. Like all future reflections the mirror may crack or the light may shift before the future becomes reflected in truth.

CC BY-NC-ND. Charis Tsevis. Design Walk: Analog VS digital. Flickr
CC BY-NC-ND. Charis Tsevis. Design Walk: Analog VS digital. Flickr

We had a wonderful call today. We have begun the process of finalizing the edits to ship version 1.5.

Listening and learning from everyone who joins the calls always impresses me. Today we returned to the spreadsheet and began to hack away.

We started with Marc Lusser summarizing everyone’s general concern with the Connecting strand. Simply too much overlap and unobservable outcomes. The group decided to hold off on addressing this bug and focused mainly on the Designing for the web competency.

The competencies are now locked in this release. We are now finalizing the skills. In other words We will do our best to make sure skills fall in only one bucket for V 1.5 but won’t change the buckets until V 2.0. So for example in Connecting we will try to make sure the skills are differentiated and observable under each competency.

Turning to Designing for the Web

As a reminder this competency, “designing for the web” was split from accessibility to strengthen the weight of each. The design element of the map always felt inadequate, and if the web will be open to all  it must also be accessible to all. We had scoped accessibility well, but we didn’t get at what design meant.

Doug, Jamie, and I had a wonderful conversation over on the git issue. Then Cassie came in and dropped some deep knowledge on us from a designer’s perspective. Doug summed it up as:

Thanks @cassiemc! Really useful to think through the different types of design. Just to pull them out of your comment, they were:

  • Visual design (graphic design, branding, style, illustration)

  • Interaction design (user interface and sometimes html/css)

  • User experience design (the overall emotional and practical journey through an experience)

As we were revising the designing for the web competency today I kept those words and LRA feedback about aesthetics in my thoughts.

I think we got close on the competency:

Designing for the Web

Enhancing visual aesthetics and user experiences

  • Using CSS properties to change the style and layout of a Web page
  • Demonstrating the difference between inline, embedded and external CSS
  • Improving user experiences through feedback and iteration
  • Creating device-agnostic web resources

To test this theory out I decided to go apply the skills to the work of a design team. I went and found Cassie’s great blog posts on her teams irl meetings. I then read her reflections and tried to annotate the post using the skills and looking for holes.

An unknown is where should interaction design live? We left it out of designing for the web because it is in the definition of the competency of coding/scripting: creating interactive experience on the web. Should interaction move under design? Is it the wrong modifier for experiences under coding?

[iframe src=”https://hypothes.is/a/CF_z-9UTR56Vckhs3_EaVA” height=”300px” width=500px”]

Much of Cassie’s post stressed the importance of user testing in the design process. I think we captured that well:

I do wonder if we are only improving for user experience. There is so much more we can improve upon through feedback and iteration. Maybe user feedback is only one type?

[iframe src=”https://hypothes.is/a/9jlslZI9SqyGpUs3eBXYlw” height=”300px” width=”500px”]

Maybe iteration should be separated out into it’s own skill. That is one thing we did not capture. When you watch the slide show Cassie posted you see iterative design in situ. Do we need a skill to speak to this process?

[iframe src=”https://hypothes.is/a/NPQKe6tlS5GYqi_2ovyK3w” height=”300px” width=”500px”]

We also revised the screen size, mobile vs desktop skill. Looking at what the team is cooking up I think we wrote a skill to match

[iframe src=”https://hypothes.is/a/IiUwKvVAQB-dxF8OODWyyQ” height=”300px” width=”500px”]

I didn’t annotate for the first two skills about CSS but they are all over the pictures and the aesthetic last step. It’s interesting that such talented artist consider this their last step. When you watch the slide show you see design influencing every step of the way.

Looking Forward to Connecting

One of the major take aways from the last two weeks of calls was the need to address the Connecting Strand (which is why I threw out a click-baitish title last week). There is just too much overlap in the skills and ill-defined competencies. Plus we don’t get at the knowledge work teams do. Read through Cassie’s blog. We are missing something fundemental, though I do not know what it is or how to boil it down.  We are going to hold off expending any mental capital on this until after v 1.5 ships. When we get there, though, I want to watch the spaces where Mozilla builds, learns, and leads in the open.

Exploring the competencies in the wild allows us to test the validity of the skills we try to identify.

 

self-programmable

The Literacy Research Association annual conference presents young scholars such as myself an opportunity to grow our thinking. You can challenge scholars, sit down with literary heroes and examine trends in the fields. It is home.

Each year the new president, who planned the program gets to host an integrative research review. The session, one of the most important o closes out the conference.

This year LRA focused in on  A Conversation about the Contributions of Content Knowledge and Strategic Processing to Reading Comprehension and it was hosted by Anne Marie Palinscar.

The panel included many of my heroes in literary research. First there was Palinscar, who helped to reshape the world of comprehension instruction with the work of Reciprocal Teaching. Anne Marie provided a wonderful literature review of comprehension strategy instruction.  Then Maureen Auckerman reminded us of how strategy instruction is transactional and reviewed the research on transactional strategy instruction. Rachel Brown described the current backlash against strategy instruction. Koider Mokthari, reminded us that background knowledge is just as, if not more important as a mediator during strategy instruction. Finally Shelia Valencia noted that what counts as comprehension is culturally defined.

Slide from Rachel Brown’s presentation

 

Why this Mattered to Me

Beyond the already stated that the four people on the stage have greatly influences my thinking as a literacy educator this session mattered because I can trace my academic lineage to the ideas of Reciprocal Teaching.

My doctoral work was completed under the guidance of Don Leu at the New Literacies Research Lab. I served as a part of a team who worked with a great cohort from Clemson under Dave Reinking. Together we developed and tested an instructional model of Internet Reciprocal Teaching that built off the early efforts in strategy instruction.  As a 6th grade teacher I often used reciprocal teaching in my classroom.

Background Knowledge Matters

I have also been thinking about strategy instruction in terms of the caveats shared by the presenters. Background knowledge does matter. Knowing more is always better than knowing less and when you read a text when you are familiar with you do better.

Culture Matters

Comprehension is also culturally defined. Knowing more isn’t just declarative knowledge. It is knowing the specialized language of discourse communities. Take Football for example. I enjoy American football and stay well read so I can be the smartest loser in my Fantasy league. My son is into the other soccer. For some reason he has fallen for Liverpool and wants to read up on games. I have tried to translate the articles from British but I struggle. I do not know the language of soccer fans nor do I speak British. Reading an article about a sport from another culture can be anyone’s Waterloo text.

This is true not is sports but in education as well. When Valencia was thinking I could not be helped to think back to David Kirklands work in A Search Past Silence where he documents the meaning making practices of black males. These practices are rarely recognized in school.

We live different literacies every day.

Strategy Instruction Under Attack

I also recognize strategy instruction is under attack. It was deliberately left out of the CCSS. Furthermore Dan Willingham,  just published a piece questioning the efficacy of strategy instruction. I have yet to read the article but Willingham, while brilliant and approachable, is the fertilizer for the well written astro-turf of conservative edreformers bent on privatizing urban education. So the issue matters.

Strategy instruction is also not without issues. Rosenshine and Meister (1994)  completed an in-depth meta-analysis and found effects sizes varying from .32 (using standardized tests) to .82 (using research created tests). Palinscar and Brown (1984) even noted the lack of transfer of these skills. I belive the wide variance in effect sizes is due to the small and meaningful bump strategy instruction has for our neediest readers, but for proficient readers we maybe wasting their time.

While the metaphor of mind as computer is not new I do not steal it from socio-cognitivists. I poach here more in line with the hacking and making communities that the educational psychologists. After all today’s Self-programmamble readers find themselves situated in contexts that constantly collapse across online and offline spaces and networked and unnetworked audiences (boyd, 2012).

selfprogrammable

Defining Self-Programmable Reading

The etyomology of self-programmable reader traces back to my dissertation. I tried to name a phenomenon building off a term I stole from Jenna McWilliams, “reading with mouse in hand.” As we moved to trackpads I remixed the term as “reading with cursor control.” I was trying to capture the comprehension monitoring and navigational skills I noticed in the most skilled online readers.

Rand Spiro challenged this construct during my dissertation defense. I had to go back and rename the construct, which of course meant reexamining my data to see if in the act of naming I messed up the “fit” on my evidence. I settled on strategic text assembly. This fit the comprehension monitoring I observed (speeding up and slowing down reading rate and more frequent scrolling) and my theoretical lens of cognitive flexibility theory.

Then came #ccourses (connected courses)  an online community started by giants in the field of #connectedlearning. The objectives of the course were to try out and encourage the values and principles of #connectedlearning into higher education. In order to build up background knowledge for one of the makes we were asked to read (Castellas et al…Fix this citation)

It was there I was introduced to the term self-programmable learner.

and a new type of personality, the values-rooted, flexible personality able to adapt to changing cultural models along the life cycle because of her/his ability to bend without breaking, to remain inner-directed while evolving with the surrounding society

Then we read a piece by Jon Udell on redefining education. Udell tells the story of a friend looking for an employee:

Another version of this same story comes from my friend and former BYTE colleague, Ray Cote, who runs his own software and consulting business. Over dinner a couple of weeks ago, Ray told me that he’s not looking for people who “know” one or another language or framework, but rather for those who can motivate themselves to rapidly acquire these and other contexts as needed.

These ideas  morphed  for me at #LRA14. I think we need strategic reading 2.0. It isn’t a set of practices good readers do in their head but the flexibility to make meaning in ever shifting contexts. A self-programmable reader can acquire and remix knowledge while traversing socially complex texts.

Self-Programmable Reading versus Strategic Reading

Self-Programmable Reading foregrounds knowledge building

While transactional strategy instruction accounted for the importance of background knowledge, in practice these strategies (deliberate goal setting actions) are often still taught out of context or with role sheets. The strategy and not the knowledge is brought to the foreground.

Background knowledge does matter. This is one of the the most stable findings in the history of reading research, but this maybe shifting. While those who know more about a topic will always comprehend more of a text a self-programmable reader maybe able to account for a lack of background knowledge. They can recognize holes in their knowledge and then know the right questions to ask and where to go to ask these questions.

Self-Programmable Reading is Production based

I am not the first, by any means, that comprehension needs to be production based. Peter Smagorinsky and Kristine Gutierrez have influenced my thinking here for a long time. More recently #connectedlearning and the focus on production centered learning has influenced my thinking of meaning making.

I agree with Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey that text based talk and text based discussion are at the center of reading comprhenension. When you make reading a production based activities these two elements get intertwined. When students get involved in makes they have to discuss and analyze the text they read.

Self-Programmable Reading is Collaborative

If you are not familiar with the recent work of Jill Castek, Carita Killi, and Julie Coiro I implore you to seek it out. They have been investigating online internet inquiry activities in small groups and comparing this to individual readers. Suprise, surprise collaboration improves comprehension. This of course goes back to the original ideas of reciprocal teaching.

Collaboration though isn’t just about learning gains it is essential in digital spaces. Meaning making is not a singualr act. We do not mean strategy instruction. It is not about novice reader internalizing what good readers do. Instead it is more about strategy exchange. Self-programable readers use strategies like tools and fork them to meet their needs and the specific context in which they are reading.

It is Strategy Exchange Not Strategy Instruction

Self-Programmable Reading Agency and  Identity work

Agency matters in education and we do identity work when we read, write, and participate in the web. These values must be central for self-programmable readers to develop in their classroom. All the talk about lexile levels and text complexity in the #CCSS ignores this fact. The #CCSS only mention motivation once. To ignore motivation in reading is to ignore the sun in farming.

The debate around leveled texts is the same as well. Choice matters. Reading, writing, and participating give us the chance to try on multiple versions of “me.”…to be continued..and maybe actually edited someday.