homoLudens

“Oneís self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find depreciated.” - George Eliot

This was written primarily for an audience of teacher consultants working for the National Writing Project. It has implications beyond the reach of that one, excellent teacher support organization, so it’s posted here as well.

Today’s the real end of summer, the day before the first day of school here in San Francisco, a sort of educator’s April 14. I feel like something is due. So, hazarding some depreciation of digital investments, I want to pay up with a honest exploration of some issues that have been ”taxing” my thinking for awhile. The mix of  Web-based edGateway and f2f discussions that occur over time are difficult to remember, so bear with me as I risk repetition of some themes from those discussions. Or, if you’d rather, just “write off” what follows.

The National Writing Project’s (NWP) technology initiatives have to meet lots of program and organization goals. Lots and lots. This requires prioritization of goals. I look at all NWP Design Team (D Team) work SOLELY from a local Writing Project  perspective. I want what I do with the D Team, with the Technology Liaisons (TLs), with the Tech Liaison Advisory Council (TLAC), and with NWP in general, to directly benefit the tech work of my local Writing Project site. I know not everyone shares such a “me first” attitude, but the position is defensible from a classroom practice perspective. When a student works on an I-Search project for me, for example, I don’t expect her to promote, contribute to, and forward my work as a librarian or teacher. I will use that work, though, to promote myself, my department, my library, my school. I get “promoted,” but in service to the student. There is an essential distinction there.

Gary O. reminisced on the D-Team board recently that several years ago “the idea of a significant number of Teacher Consultants (TCs) producing innovative, intellectually valuable, well-researched, self-published Web sites was out of the question.” If we take “several” to mean within the last three years, that’s historically inaccurate. In the fall of 2000, three Bay Area Writing Project TCs attended a D-Team meeting in Berkeley. We were there to report on a 2 year-long project in Oakland called “Embedding Technology in Curriculum.” We’d learned some important things since the project’s beginning in 1998:

1. That Web site building from scratch was not going to work for our teachers. It was too skill-intensive and too time consuming.
   
2. That we as WP TCs had as much to offer in the area of digital writing as any of the tech gurus beside whom we worked. We knew teachers, classrooms, and kids; they didn’t. They really, really didn’t.
   
3. That we needed a tool, a digital environment, that was easy to use.
   
4. That, after extensive testing, Blackboard and WebCT and Manila filled the bill. They worked. Teachers used them. They and their students had “innovative, intellectually valuable, ??? self-published Web” pages.

Back then, our experience and insights weren’t anything special in the world of educational integration of technology. Lots of folks were discovering the same things. We were, however, completely ignored in that D Team meeting. Ignored to the point that I later wondered why we had even been invited. Tools for “innovative, intellectually valuable, ??? self-published Web” work were available. The D Team simply was not interested in hearing about them from us.

All successful local WP work of necessity promotes and contributes to the nationally scaled work of the NWP, technological or otherwise. But such promotion and contribution derives from what happens at local sites with local TCs in their classrooms. To date, NWP’s technology program does not  benefit my work as TL, TC or teacher. I think it should. And I think the absence of such benefit betrays an unfortunate distancing of D-Team and NWP technology priorities from the immediate needs and desires of classroom teachers.

What I’m saying is that easy Web reading and writing environments have been available for quite awhile. Kids know this better than most educators. In the August 14, 2002, Pew Internet Project report, entitled The Digital Disconnect: The widening gap between Internet-savvy students and their schools, one summary finding states, “Students urge that there should be continued effort to ensure that high-quality online information to complete school assignments be freely available, easily accessible, and age-appropriateñwithout undue limitation on studentsí freedoms.” (The whole report is well worth reading.)  The students urging this are already using easily accessible tools to produce “innovative, intellectually valuable, well-researched, self-published ” work.

When kids are learning to write, when teachers are learning to teach writing, they throw away a lot of paper. They make mistakes and crumple it into balls to toss into the trash can or at the back of someone’s head. They fill whole pages of it with word-for-word encyclopedia articles and swear on their mothers that it’s their writing. They sketch images of Spider Man and Wonder Woman on it and think about flying. They fold sheets of it over and over and over into tiny, tight squares as secret notes to their potential sweethearts. They swear they will never write again and then they use another piece of that hated paper to write a stunning poem about the rain because the crazy lady from the library speakers’ program said poetry could be “tight” and she sure was tight.

Web workspaces have to be as easily available as paper. Teacher consultants and their students need access to forests and forests worth of digital paper.