Inflaming the infrastructure
A week ago, I wrote a quick response to a NWP
listserv (yes, listserv -ugh) thread about blogging vs. websites. I
meant it as inflammatory. Unfortunately, its content did not inflame
the discussion I was aiming at. A casual reference to being a happily
fault-accepting ex-Catholic did, however, inflame. Ah - to be
disruptive in an age of religiosity tumescent and secularism gone soft!
Anyway, it was a cautionary experience in blogging vs. listserv-ing
that will - ahem - serve me well in the future. Here’s the piece, revised and lengthened as a reflection on the National Writing Project’s Annual Meeting,
its intended audience now the blog project coordinators at the Omni
Hotel, who’ll get to read this as I fly disconnected across the
country.)
Website or blog? The question has no importance.
Digital
paper is important. You can use it to blog. To photoblog. To podcast.
To vidcast. To participate in bulletin boards like Tapped In and
Blackboard.com and Nicenet and (if you have the luck) Scoop. To MOO, to
Moodle or Mambo. To IM or email your mother and Skype / Gizmo her later
in the day. To have students drop PowerPoint or Keynote or iMovie or
Premier or Final Cut multi-media content to your school server’s “in”folder and access those files from home. To organize and tag and
javascript-include Flickr photos from your student teacher’s travels in
Indonesia. To download video clips from United Steaming for use in your
classroom. To set up a webquests and make Filamentality look primitive.
To tag lesson plans on your department weblogs, or to experiment with
loading them to something like Alan’s MLX,
for easy reference over time. To store and distribute excellent
professional development materials. To integrate web services into
something like the school’s OPAC. Etc., etc.
Digital paper, or
rather its lack, is important at this point. Maybe we should call it
digital space or Web. 2.0. I’d suggest that in this political moment,
most teachers’ lack of access to and familiarity with the use of it
should engage NWP as an advocacy organization. Web 2.0 (the
web-as-platform web, the read/write, listen/speak, view/produce web) is
emerging as most of us in k12 public education wonder why we are stuck
with Web .02 capacity in terms of infrastructure, support and time.
Models
of education blogs written, maintained and promoted by educators who
live in unreal worlds of infrastructure, support and time are almost
useless to me. Hanging out with Writing Project friends in Pittsburgh,
I realized that ever since I posted about access as a key issue
years ago, I should have focused my blogging almost exclusively on
writing project teacher consultants (TCs). As TCs, we’re uniquely
positioned to effectively advocate on local, regional, state and
national levels for a changes to infrastructure and support and time.
More importantly, all of our discussions about advocacy are rooted in
the values that Jim Gray
and colleagues began sharing 30 years ago, the odd notions that
teaching something means doing that something yourself, regularly and
for a real purpose; and the still odder notion that classroom teachers
are the best teachers of other classroom teachers.
Narrowing
the audience helps with blog block. Blogging feels like letter writing
again, something familiar, intimate, collaborative.
The six blog coordinators met today to, among other things, uncover what we’d learned from out 2+ years of working with Kern County Superintendent of Schools in providing Manila hosting and domain management for our TCs. I referenced two levels of learning:
- At BAWP, we learned how a single early adopter TC learns about technology and spreads his knowledge locally. With Bryan’s and Erin’s
and Robert’s support, I was able to “informally and on demand” learn
how to use tech, initially depending on instant messenger and Manila.
Those guys were incredibly patient and generous and flexible, willing
to coach and argue and even to learn a great deal about what it means
to use tech in a real classroom setting. A little bit of curiosity
satisfied with those tools spilled over into learning about operating
systems, security settings, multi-media production, file management,
web-based help and project management systems, voip and video
conferencing. And the knowledge I acquired from those three was then
shared with BAWP TCs and my schools’ teachers through the same tools.
And those TCs and teachers added to my learning. Some kind of threshold
knowledge got invisibly mastered and then independent discovery got
easier. - At a national level, we learned how single local
Writing Project sites spread their learning through the larger network,
demonstrating an instance of a disruptive technology working within a
decentralized organizational structure. Our use of Manila as a blog
tool and content management system grew organically and it grew without
the restrictions that come with local school district IT hosting and
tech use policies. It’ll be interesting to try to capture that
history at some point. Which site had the first Manila blog? (I’m
leaning toward BAWP, at least on the Kern server, but I think Albert in Chicago and Tom in Alaska were in there with their own installations of Frontier.) How did the next site get one - West Virginia, North Dakota, Chicago? How did that lead to more local WP domains - New York, Sacramento - and how did those domains lead to NWP’s blogWrite? Within those local domains, how did schools and programs get domains and blogs?
All of this connects to a presentation that Inverness Research’s
Laura Stokes gave at the Annual Meeting general session. I’ll try to
link to her slides here later, but the map captures some of it. She
emphasized that NWP is not just a professional development program or
model. It’s a national infrastructure for high quality, efficient and
reliable professional development in the teaching of writing. I think
that the two ìtechnological instancesî of that infrastructure in use
locally and nationally described above might just meet the criteria
that federal agencies look at when considering continued funding.
Certainly, those two instances grow naturally out of Jim Gray’s legacy - a decentralized, base-driven, collaborative, and powerful community of teachers who write.
[Revised after the plane ride and return to reliable connectivity. Original here.]