Status Report on Research: Digital Writing Technology Use in the Secondary English Classroom

Status Report on Research: Digital Writing Technology Use in the Secondary English Classroom

Reading the article from Kairos, “Writing/Teachers and Digital Technologies: Technology/Teacher Training” by Anthony Atkins who created a survey to explore writing teachers’ attitudes and opinions about technology training on the college level inspired the development of my survey instrument. Items such as assessing a teacher’s computer competency, level and nature of technology training offerings, what technology support is available, and what resources would teachers suggest. I also wanted to design most of the questions as multiple choice so it would be easy to analyze the data quantitatively, but I also wanted to include opportunities for respondents to describe their use of technology in the classroom and offer comments related to using digital technology in the classroom and district support of technology. This way I can develop additional interview questions based on issues that arise from the surveys.

In deciding whether to use an online survey instrument, I was reminded how a number of older teachers may be apprehensive and uncomfortable with completing a survey online—as Prensky called those folks digital immigrants who prefer “print literature instead of online material” (quoted in Salajan 1393). And part of me still distrusts the anonymity promise of online programs and engines as Hea cautions in “Riding the Wave” when she says that web researchers need to know that using web data-gathering engines can complicate anonymity, privacy, and security (282).
I asked our site network engineer for the name of the person whom I would interview about what technology capabilities NPS has for teachers to use. Andrea Sykora is the senior director of technology for NPS, and I will interview her once I analyze the results of the survey.

I originally planned to survey the English teachers in my department and another school in the same district with similar student demographics—an urban population drawn from predominantly low-socioeconomic neighborhoods; however, a teacher in my department who transferred this year from that school indicated how unlikely those teachers would return completed surveys in a timely manner. I then sent an email to a former colleague of mine who is now an assistant principal of a different high school in Norfolk to solicit her help in having the English department teachers respond to the survey. She has graciously accepted to help me and has distributed the survey this week.

I originally created the survey on November 13 weekend and had my sister review the instrument for possible biased language. I made a few revisions and had a former colleague, an English instructor currently at TCC, complete the survey to measure the length of time to complete it. She said it took approximately seven minutes or so. To be on the safe side, I indicated in my survey cover letter that it would take 15-20 minutes, which allows time for teachers to add comments under certain areas of survey. I distributed the survey with a cover letter, which explained the purpose of the survey and the protection of anonymity, to my department on Wednesday, November 17 and asked them to respond by Wednesday, November 24. I believed if I allowed a longer deadline, it would not get done. I sent a reminder email on Monday, November 22.

As an afterthought, I thought about surveying an English department in a suburban high school with a predominantly white, upper middle class population to compare the results. Although I am not at this point interested in researching the inequities of access to and the cultural aspects of technology and cyberspace. However, I am mostly interested in building a foundational knowledge of digital writing technologies, but I am curious as to whether a disparity will be revealed in the results. Therefore, I emailed a former colleague at a high school in Chesapeake on Monday. She has requested that I email the survey and she will check to see if I need permission from administration to distribute this survey. I would rather have asked a Virginia Beach high school to complete the survey since I have heard that teachers have more free reign and access to internet applications such as blogs and YouTube. However, I do not have any contacts in that district.

I wish to triangulate the results from the survey and interviews accompanied with one or two lesson plans provided by teachers that include the use of digital technology. I am still considering if this will be helpful in the long run.

References

Atkins, Anthony T. “Writing/Teachers and Digital Technologies: Technology/Teacher
Training.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 10.2
(Spring 2005): n. pag. Web. 18 Oct. 2010.

Hea, Kimme. “Riding the Wave.” Digital Writing Research. Eds. Heidi A. McKee and
Danielle Nicole DeVoss. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, Inc., 2007.
269-286. Print.

Salajan, Florin D. “Student and faculty inter-generational digital divide: Fact or
fiction?” Computers and Education 55 2010: 1393-1403. ScienceDirect. Web.
29 Oct. 2010.

T. Street 11/2010

Does Writing Online Change the Nature of the Writing Act?

van Manen, Max, and Catherine Adams. “The Phenomenology of Space in Writing Online.” Educational
Philosophy & Theory 41.1 (2009): 10-21. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 15 Nov. 2010.

I reviewed this article because it explores the realm of online writing in a philosophical sense which provides insights as to how teachers can think about their pedagogy in using digital technologies in the English classroom. Max van Manen and Catherine Adams explore the question of whether the space in which writers write online affect them differently than older technologies such as ink pens and typewriters(10). They conclude that “online computer technologies intensify the phenomenology of writing—they speed up, accelerate, compel, draw us into the virtual vortex of the experience of writing” and raise the “potential loss of reflectivity,” the “easy publicness of publishing to the Web,” and the “complexity of human relation through text”(21).

At first glance, the reader of this blog is asking how this relates to the use of digital writing technologies in the secondary English classroom. I believe that three points that van Manen and Adams discuss raise interesting considerations for the writing classroom, but only two will be discussed.

Albeit, their discussion of the writing act itself is romanticized for and more relevant to an audience of serious writers/composers of text. High school students, however, are located toward the opposite extreme of writing whereby they are writing in school to accomplish a task. But now, they are writing outside of class more using mobile technologies.

1)The authors discuss how much more intimate writing pen to paper is and how cross-outs and editing are still visible when composing text on paper, but reflection lacks when composing text online (13). The cross-outs are forever gone and cannot be recalled, which renders the text, as van Manen explains, “perfect already (though we may know it needs more editing),” that typing and keyboarding “cast text in the presentable type-face of public font,” and that the words are “strikingly clean, professional and ‘published’”(13). When students see their writing on the screen, they see it as published already; therefore, it needs no revision. van Manen and Adams offer that in the online writing space “words seem to invite rather than resist revision,” but simultaneously, and “ambiguously, the words already appear perfect and finished, near ready for publication” (13). With this insight, English teachers can begin a discussion with herself as instructor and with students about what is the extent that revision is needed in online writing. This discussion will lend itself to considering purpose and audience.

2)Another point the writers make is that composing online has the immediacy of conversation. As soon as the student composes the text online, it is out there in cyberspace. The experience of “editing, writing, editing follows much closer to our train of thought”(18). Because students are more expressive in their teen years and because they express impulsively without reflecting or thinking about what they say, the same issues become problematic with writing online. Perhaps English teachers can use this as an opportunity to foster reflection and thoughtful consideration when publishing texts online—especially in social networking sites where students often post without considering the consequences of what they post in cyberspace.

I imagine English teachers discussing “socratically” the insights the authors offer here about the phenomenology of space in writing online, and I see the possibilities of what that insight can open pedagogically in the digital English classroom.

T. Street 11/2010

Teachers Still Rule in Writing Instruction-Not Digital Technology

Lenhart, Amanda, Sousan Arafeh, Aaron Smith, and Alexandra Rankin Macgill.  “Writing, Technology and 

     Teens.”  Commissioned by Pew Internet and American Life Project and The National Commission on

     Writing.  24 April 2008.  14 October 2010.  <http://www.pewinternet.org>

This Pew Internet and American Life Project study conducted with the National Commission on Writing offers insight into what teens think related to school writing, personal writing, and computer-based writing—not how to use digital technology in the writing classroom.

This study initially began with eight focus groups including 73 youths, grades 7-12 in which 47% were male, 53% female, 80% white, 16% black, and 20% of the focus group participants came from households with less than $40,000 income. 

What prompted this research were the results of the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NEAP); it revealed a drop in basic writing level proficiency scores among 12^th graders, from 26% in 2002 to 18% in 2007.  Another concern is the fact that “two-thirds of salaried jobs at large American companies require writing of some kind,” which companies believe is a vital skill. 

Current research looks at the influence of technology in the university classroom, but since technology use is increasing in the homes and at schools, the Pew Project wanted to assess “the state of writing from the students themselves.”  The Pew study revealed that 94% American adolescents, “nearly all demographic and socioeconomic categories,” use the internet, and many use it multiple times a day.  The location from which a teen uses the internet often determines the quality of her online experience. 

Regarding the influence of digital technologies on student writing, participants indicated where and how they use computers depended on the requirements of the writing assignments as well as access to computers.  Two-thirds teens preferred to complete writing assignments by hand compared with 16% who preferred computers, and most claimed the decision was based on their teachers’ preference.  The results were similar for personal writing.

This report also discovered how teens define writing and do they consider electronic communication use as writing.  Teens still subscribe to the traditional notion of what is writing and view their electronic devices as communicating “even though it is text-based.”  However, most black students saw electronic communication as writing more than their white counterparts.  Teens can distinguish between formal and informal writing and do admit that their technology-based writing bleeds into their school writings such as using emoticons and abbreviated words.

Ultimately, teens stated that what motivated them to write in school was not whether they were able to use digital technology, but it was what the teacher demanded of them, the knowledge of the teacher, how much time they spent writing in class, and the feedback they received from their teacher.   

As a high school teacher, I believe this study is valuable and should be read by all content teachers because it informs about how teens use electronic devices in their everyday lives, and understand that writing matters to them personally, and that they make decisions about writing according to audience and situation. And that the teacher is still the primary influence in students’ learning in the classroom.

The only drawback of this study is that it only included a small sample of minority students, which isn’t helpful for urban public school teachers to determine the true impact of computer-based writing. This definitely leaves a gap in the research of minority users.

T. Street 11/2010b

The Writing Classroom: Surreptitious Students in the Digital Underlife

Mueller, Derek.  “Digital Underlife in the Networked Writing Classroom.”  Computers and               

      Composition 2009: 240-250.  ScienceDirect.  Web.  25 Sept.  2010.

Imagine standing in line for hours to purchase concert tickets to see Elton John.  You wait a long time, you pay a high price.  You get them.  You are there on the lawn listening oh so attentively to Elton John.  Suddenly, you become cognizant of the chattering around you…while EJ is singing!

If EJ can’t get 100 percent of the attention of all concert patrons, how can a professor or teacher expect to get the same in a classroom of 30 “fidgeting” with electronic devices?

These folks are “backchanneling,” or what Derek N. Mueller redefines as participating in the “digital underlife,” during an event that requires attention on a focal speaker.  We see it all the time at faculty and conference room meetings. 

Mueller cites many scholars and professors opposing the possession of and/or use of Internet-connected computers in the classroom.  They claim students are too distracted to absorb what the instructors are instructing as such was the case in Illinois.  Administrators at the University of Chicago Law School demanded that classrooms block Internet access to prevent “technological distractions” (241). 

Mueller takes a more reasoned stance.  He first outlines the research on the economics of attention citing Robert Brooke’s ethnographic study of students’ “subsidiary activities” in a first-year writing class (243).  Brooke relies on anthropologist Erving Goffman’s contention that “underlife behaviors are a normal part of institutional  life.” Also, Brooke defines underlife as “the activities individuals engage in to show that their identities are different from or more complex than the identities assigned them by organizational roles” (243).  Students are simply asserting their identities in a virtual space that they control within a real space that they have no control.

Since Mueller recognizes and accepts that this “digital underlife” is a reality in the writing classroom, or any classroom, he posits that teachers  see it as a “productive dimension,” rather than what Brooke calls “contained” and/or “disruptive” dimensions (246).  Students are making connections between what’s being transmitted in the classroom with what’s transpiring in their lives—they’re making connections, mediating meaning, and asking questions.  Isn’t that the aim of learning?  Mueller, among other ideas, suggests that writing teachers create time with students to discuss how both they and the instructors use mobile technologies, thereby making “the array of attentional demands more tangible” (248).

This is an age-old problem that has plagued classroom teachers throughout history; the only difference is the device by which students, and adults, “distract” themselves.  However, I cannot devise a way to use body language or facial cues transmitting across the room while I am teaching into a productive dimension, but I do see what Mueller proposes with digital technological distractions—make them a part of the learning in the classroom.  Using Facebook, Twitter, and blogging are intriguing for the writing classroom, and we can incorporate a rhetorical foundation for their use.  If national technology conferences allow their attendees, even encourage them, to use these digital devices to interchange with each other about topics covered in these conferences, couldn’t we (teachers) attempt to make it work in our classrooms? c                                                                     

                                                                                                                               T. Street 11/2010