What is the 21st Century Research Paper?
Collaborative Writing
Blogging the Body Electric
So you've done your research, found several educational articles about your Aim, APAed them for future reference. How should I write up the lesson plan for digital natives? In the era of twittering, IMing, and dodgeball, is there any place for pen and paper? Once again, we need to reevaluate our writing techniques to ensure that our students are fully engaged in our instructional objectives.
There is a new layer of atmosphere in the 21st century: the blogosphere. Like air molecules engaged in Brownian motion, students freely share their ideas in a virtual extension of the classroom. Open source, "collaborationware," or "educational social software," (ESS), can create a student-centered approach to learning. The result, our understanding of the act of writing has been altered -- instead of an author, "mashed up" data. Even academic professors are producing their own blogs, so many that there are now websites that simply compile other educational blog websites. Although ESS origins date back to the 1940s, community learning, or "c-learning," is all the rage, and since 2006, awards have been given for the best ones. Here's a list of some edublogs.
Like any technology, blogs are misused and misunderstood. So you should use some online resources to help you clearly define your objectives if you decide to use a blog in your classroom. They are mainly used as a public diary, addressing causes and concerns someone may have. "Call and answer" techniques can be useful, where the teacher posts a question or activity on a blog, and student post comments with their own answers and ideas. Because the comments are publicly viewable, students often take more ownership of their responses, compared to writing an answer on a slip of paper, to be stacked up on a pile of papers, that only the teacher will read.
You are reading an education blog right now, the same one we used last week. How am I using my blog? Mainly as an online resource, and homework assignment poster for this class. I have many unpublished drafts, few online posts, and over time, I delete old ones after incorporating the best of their content into new postings. The reason I minimize postings is that the less computer-savvy students often "scroll into oblivion," and can't find the specific posting I'm referencing in class. This deletion technique weakens the organic evolution of blog writing, but makes it easier for "digital immigrants" to read.
Some of my other classes have different objectives, so my blog writing techniques vary from class to class. Blogging, in my opinion, will always be fundamentally teacher, or writer, centered. Our next style of writing, wiki writing, is much more collaborative.
Writing Wikis
The overarching theme to these modules is to avoid coding another static web page that is never updated and collects digital dust. Instead, we should challenge ourselves to develop collaborative editing and writing projects. One of the most common web applications teachers can use to develop student centered content is the wiki. A wiki is computer software that allows users to easily create, edit and link web pages. Wikis are often used to create collaborative writing projects, which make them excellent educational resources. Education Week recently published an article about wikis, citing several examples currently maintained by teachers. Look at two of the two wikis mentioned, and observe some of the similar and different qualities between them.
- Michael Horton's scienceinquirer is mostly list-based -- many good science teacher resources
- Jennifer Dorman uses her wiki, Dorman-Data-Digest, as a gateway into her website, blog and podcast, as well as a cornucopia of resources for various American history units, but no interactive writing either.
These wikis could easily be simply called websites as well, but the most important quality of wikis, again, is that many people contribute and edit the online content. Of course, the best wikis are the ones we write ourselves. My classes, collectively, have been building what, in my opinion, is the best lesson plan reference page on the entire Internet. All of you will be contributing to it as well. So let's get on it.
Evaluation
Homework #2
Deliverable #1: Each group will upload their Homework #1 research to their group's wiki page.
Deliverable #2: Each group will find either 3 lesson plan Webpages that are not already on the lesson plan wiki, 6 lesson plans already referenced on the lesson plan wiki, or some combination thereof. The Webpages must be directly related to your lesson plan Aim, so a Internet lesson plan on fractions is not appropriate to an Aim about factoring. Each lesson plan reference will include a hyperlink, and a few sentences describing why this is a good lesson plan for your Aim.
Deliverable #3: Each group will access the Blog WebQuest to fill out the remainder of questions on their group's wiki page. Students will make the following revisions to the WebQuest:
- Include the links above in this posting to help you with definitions of "blog" and "wiki."
- Each student will include two summaries of the articles found for last week's homework.
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