Tom Liam Lynch :: New Literacies, New Literatures

A new product from Merit Software called Bookpunch seeks to automate the writing process for students.  The site walks students through the writing process, which it breaks up into: Introduction | Topic | Pre-Writing | Writing–Opening Sentence | More Pre-Writing | Writing–Body | Organizing | Writing–Closing Sentence | Revising–Overview: Style, Sentence Structure, Grammar, Proofreading | Publishing

With each completed step, the site tracks students’ progress and always has link available which offers a writing tip, but only if needed.  The pre-writing process, which asks students to write fragmented replies to prompts, remains on the screen throughout most of the composition process, which I imagine could be very helpful for students whose thinking is anything other than linear (which my own certainly is).  While the site does tend to oversimplify the writing process–it encourages short clips of writing from the student because the site itself has the grander organizational structure in mind when it gives prompts–it might well be in invaluable tool for teachers of writing, a particular module, for instance, while the teacher has various other activities in rotation.

My recommendation would be to pilot a tool like Bookpunch with a small group of one’s most struggling writers and actively engage students in how the site does and does not help them in their writing.  You could easily do a test-run of the software at the cost of $59 for four months and a license for 25 students.  While not itself a knock-out, Bookpunch might be yet another rich tool of many in the writing teacher’s bag of tricks.

A Maryland high school will be using a virtual 3-D learning environment to learn about the eruption of Mount St. Helens.  The online environment was developed at Johns Hopkins.  In the year to come, the developers at JH will create a comparable moon environment.  eSchool News puts it like this:

A coalition that also included Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and the University of Baltimore is deploying the environment, which was modeled after a state-of-the-art, 3-D visualization facility at APL that was used for projects by the Department of Defense and NASA. The Virtual Learning Environment is the first of its kind in the nation, said Baltimore County Superintendent Joe Hairston.

I too was (and still am, albeit, less so now) enchanted by the idea of virtual learning environments.  The idea that students could engage in video game-like online learning environments to better understand academic content is the kind of thing that gets ed-techys out of bed in the morning.

But,

I had a conversation with a friend about a month ago that rattled the spell.  My friend has spend twenty years in the video game creation world.  He’s intimately familiar with what it takes to get games made, especially in the world of online gaming.  When I shared with him my infatuation with the future of video games in education–like the one mentioned above, I suppose, but mine was of Odysseus and having to solve literary riddles to get him home–he quickly squashed my hopes.

“The problem is that there’s no money in making high quality video games for schools.  Take World of Warcraft.  They had over $50 million dollars and seven years to develop it.  Education can’t compete with those kinds of numbers.  And because education can’t compete, it will forever get second-rate video games that kids won’t really buy in to.”

Ouch.  I say ouch because I think he’s right.  I still don’t have a defense of educational video games.  While Mount St. Helens erupting in 3-D might be exciting for those students who experience it, I can’t imagine it as the norm.  The norm, I’m afraid, will continue to look much more like Super Mario than World of Warcraft.

A journalism professor recently wrote with emphatic resistance to microblogging services like Twitter, which are having field-shifting effects on her profession.  At the heart of her piece is the following sentence:

I worry that microblogging cheats my students out of their trump card: a mindful attention to the subject in front of them, so that they can capture its sights and sounds, its smells and tactile qualities, to share with readers.

While I am often tempted to write off positions like the one above as technophobic, there is something more to it.  As  English teachers, I wonder if there isn’t a comparable concern in our field.  To what extent does the quickness of online publishing work against the writer’s careful sense of imagined readers?  That is, does such writing focus too much on the blogger’s own whim and speed as opposed to the needs of those who read it?

I’ve often wanted to have readers’ comments become a more dynamic part of web-page reading.  Below is a link of a WordPress theme called CommentPress.  danah boyd’s recent talk is posted on the page.  Note the way in which comments are left and linger on the page (though boyd’s ideas are always worth a look too!): http://wp.nmc.org/future/ideas/danah-boyd

What I find most exciting about the theme is the way in which it allows users to easily comment on the writer’s ideas without leaving them to wallow at the bottom of the post.  By placing the comments right along side the paragraphs (and by not having the comments scroll with the page) you get the finest example of social juxtaposition I’ve seen yet.  Well done CommentPress!

In this recent article in the New York Times, the case is made for moving away from traditional textbooks:

Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.

I think this is indeed the direction education is going in. But I also caution teachers from idealizing of students’ new literacies skills as in this passage:

“Kids are wired differently these days,” said Sheryl R. Abshire, chief technology officer for the Calcasieu Parish school system in Lake Charles, La. “They’re digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose and extrapolate. And they think of knowledge as infinite.

Let’s be careful not to mistake nimbleness for intellectual rigor, which is a frequent pitfall of ed-tech enthusiasts.  Another cautionary note: it’s important to be aware that the kinds of literacy skills we teach into are research skills, the kind of informational hide-and-seek that is indeed vital in "real-world" life:

“[Students] don’t engage with textbooks that are finite, linear and rote,” Dr. Abshire continued. “Teachers need digital resources to find those documents, those blogs, those wikis that get them beyond the plain vanilla curriculum in the textbooks.”

But, what will teaching literature look like?  Conducting Google searches is markedly not literary.  How will teachers of literature infuse their methods with new technologies?

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