Bridging Literacies

Dear Readers!

For this semester, my ongoing reflection on literacy and technology connections has been posted on my two course blogs: EDRD 7360 and EDRD 8550. Please visit these blogs and join our conversations.

In a recent article, Cuban argues that university professors are slow in adapting 1-1 laptop technology in creative and innovative ways as appropriate for the content they teach. More specifically, he reports that higher education faculty tends to use a wide range of technologies for productivity purposes, such as preparing for lessons, email correspondence, and Internet searches, as opposed to exploring and implementing innovative instructional applications. The article is an interesting read and it offers food for thought for educators and policy makers in both universities and K-12 settings.

In exploring the potential of educational blogs for the classroom use with pre-service teachers in one of my methods courses, I have recently noticed a difference in the perceptions of the role and functions of blogs in educational settings that my students and I have. While I see educational blogs as open spaces for dialogue about educational issues within and beyond the classroom walls, I do not see them necessarily as non-restrictive forums in terms of the ideas shared, as perhaps some of my students or other educators do. Neither do I perceive them as merely electronic adaptations of personal journals or diaries. I believe that personal matters should be contained to personal communication that can be facilitated using tools such as email, phone, or password-protected online networks.

Unlike writing for informal and personal blogs, writing for educational blogs requires from bloggers to follow the etiquette, norms, and social conventions of public writing. Yet at the same time, I do not see such writing as necessarily a third-person, detached kind of writing often required from the writers of public official documents, for example. Such writing discourages creativity and shuts down individual voices.

I also think that issues of privacy and personal safety and the appropriateness of the ideas shared in the educational blogsphere should always be on educator- bloggers’ minds. Since neither personal nor formal writing experiences as described-above seem to meet the demands of the new powerfully interactive communication format that blogs afford us, we teacher educators must re-appropriate the use of blogging for personal communication and the norms of public writing to fit our educational goals. As such, I believe that, educational blogs should be exemplars of professionalism and models of the content and the writing style suitable for student audiences.

This fall, I have invited my pre-service teachers to explore some of the characteristics of such writing as they began their blogging journeys in my course. Our working checklist addresses issues such as:

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· <!–[endif]–>the use, purpose, and function of educational blogs;

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· <!–[endif]–>the language and writing conventions for such spaces;

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· <!–[endif]–>the ideas, resources, and conversations encouraged or discouraged;

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· <!–[endif]–>privacy and personal safety issues;

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· <!–[endif]–>the boundaries of wit and humor; and

<!–[if !supportLists]–>· <!–[endif]–>the differing perspectives/opinions, and their acceptance or critique in a respectful manner.

I would like to invite the readers of this blog to join us in defining the kinds of literacy and writing expected from teacher educators and their students on educational, as opposed to personal, blogs. What kind of writing and social practices should educational blogs model to teacher and student bloggers?

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Today more and more students use certain nascent technologies, such as the Internet, gaming software, video conferencing, web pages and weweblogs (“blogs”) to communicate and read and write, both at home, and in outside-school settings. The challenge for us teacher educators – who are technological “immigrants”—is to provide our younger, technologically “native-born” students with both expertise in their virtual world, and also critical perspectives on its place in the real world. This weblog provides a forum for constructive conversations among pre-service and in-service teachers, teacher educators, students and parents toward achieving these goals. More specifically, the weblog serves the following objectives:

• To learn how to weblog;
• To respond to others’ thinking and ideas, educational policy, and recent research trends in a thoughtful and critical manner;
• To share with others ideas, tips, and resources about literacy and language arts instruction in general and in particular with modern technologies;
• To model to our students meaningful, respectful, and thought-provoking collaborative learning with modern technology tools;
• To encourage and model multimodal composition;
• To create space for celebrating our best writing pieces;
• To create a community of learners through a multi-channeled interaction with peers and the audiences beyond the classroom wall.