What is the 21st Century Research Paper?
Deconstructing text
Writing the Body Electric
So you've done your research in a traditional sense, searching and finding several educational articles on the ERIC database about your Aim, APAed them for future reference, summarized them for later use. How should I write up the lesson plan for digital natives? Today's students are often labeled with, "continuous partial attention," perhaps expected in the era of Twittering, IMing, and Facebook. Is there any place left for pens and paper, writing a letter to a friend, or even an essay for a class assignment? Traditional production of meanings, teacher-assign/student-write/teacher-evaluate are evolving into more fluid, permeable scriptings. Once again, to ensure that our students are fully engaged in our instructional objectives, implementing current technologies into the classroom is an excellent way to experiment with developing successful lessons. Educause's Learning Initiative's 7 Things You Should Know About... offers a wonderful resource to keep current with the ever evolving educational/technological landscape. The "Horizon Report" is another annual resource that describes current trends in educational technologies.
All of these new Internet based applications are categorized as "social software." In an educational setting, these technologies are redefining what "text" means. Our understanding of the act of writing has been altered -- instead of an author, lists of friends post to bulletin boards, learning from each other, developing cumulative understandings of a body of knowledge. Open source, "collaborationware," or educational social software, ("ESS"), sometimes called "c-learning,"can create student-centered approachs to learning. Implementing technology in the classroom, therefore, requires finding ways for students to use ESS as a tool for learning.
For example, my unit plan on environmental education can be implemented using ESS by applying geolocation techniques during the field trip, and gathering the photos and captions together using Facebook. Keeping current with educational technologies enhances student interest in my assignments, making it more likely that my students will likely learn something during the field trip, and afterwords, when they are captioning the photos, and summarizing their field experiences. By centering the field trip on a map, the local community can also enjoy the fruits of the class experiences, enhancing the quality of life of an urban village.
But let's look at the most common expressions of ESS: the blog and the wiki.
"We Have Liftoff..."
There is a new layer of atmosphere in the 21st century: the blogosphere. The Weblog, or "blog," is the most common "social software" application. Students in college classrooms are often intimidated by mounds of paper handouts (assuming the copier isn't busted). A blog, like the one you're reading right now, allows instructors a low-cost alternative to publishing their course objectives and article clippings, with a unique immediacy with his or her students. Students can write responses to classroom questions quite quickly, and it is easy for teachers to find the responses (no stack of papers hiding the desk) and evaluate students almost contemporaneously with their writing activities.
Like air molecules engaged in Brownian motion, students freely share their ideas in a virtual extension of the classroom. Even academic professors are producing their own blogs, so many that there are now websites that simply compile other educational blog websites. Here's a list of some edublogs. Since 2006, awards have been given for the best ones.
Of course, 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.
Welcome to the Blogosphere!
So Blog On!
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 in the article, 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 with 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 Websites that offer multiple lesson plans in the groups content area and are not already on the lesson plan wiki, or 6 Internet lesson plans that directly relate to the group's Aim. Combinations of the two options are permitted. An 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 only have to :
- Reference/read the 'content material' resources to collectively come up with definitions of "blog" and "wiki."
- Determine a way their lesson plan can use a blog or wiki during instructional delivery of the lesson.
- Referring to the "7 Things You Should Know About..." resource, identify 3 kinds of ESS software listed in the resource, and describe how you might implement them in your classroom.
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