Leave the essay grading to the machines...

Grading essays is easy. Over the years, I have laid out anchor papers for each grade category in my four point scale, 4-1, for our local standardized test in order to illustrate for my middle school students the characteristics of papers in each category. They generally pick it up pretty quickly. My 7th graders can tell me which papers have strong word choice, a variety of sentence types and  descriptive language. Forgive me if I don't panic at the news that computers can do this well.

Let the machines have the grading. Grading essays is easy. Preservice and novice teachers can identify errors and assess the readability of a student paper with very little support. Grading isn't the hard part and it is better left to AI. As a teacher, I don't want to take up my pick axe and try to race a steam shovel. I'm much rather focus on helping students do the things that only humans can do. 

In Results Now, a book about the rich potential for improving outcomes in schools, Mike Schmoker argues that students should write more in schools and teachers should grade less in order to improve literacy development. Basically, the argument sounds like this: teachers can focus too much time on providing feedback to students who do not have sufficient time to practice the skills and tasks the teacher is assessing. Students can become overwhelmed at best, and discouraged at worst, in their writing practice. Professional writers will tell you that writing requires regular daily practice and routine setbacks. Traditional grading and feedback can interfere with the development of young writers. 

In her book Grammar to Enrich and Enhance Writing, Constance Weaver argues in favor of a generative rhetoric in writing instruction rather than a corrective rhetoric. Simply put, she suggests that we ought to teach students how generate strong writing, instead of teaching them what not to do, a commonplace approach to working with developing writers. We need humans to establish a generative rhetoric in schools. 

 The hard parts are the things we need humans to do. We need humans to create a community of writers who share their work and respond constructively to each other's work. We need humans to teach and support processes for generating ideas, planning and drafting. Humans can help humans think through the purpose and audience for written work and help students revise with those essential pieces in mind. Humans can expose students to different genres and written structures. Humans need other humans to learn how to generate strong writing. Let the machines highlight errors. 

An elephant of a sandbox #change11

I’ll be blogging in response to a webinar series offered by connectedlearning.tv at the invitation of the National Writing Project’s Digital Is.

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In last week’s webinar, Philipp Schmidt, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Peer2Peer University (P2PU), spoke with host Howard Rheingold and a small panel of doctoral students who study connected learning.

P2PU, a grassroots online open education project, strives to provide high-quality, low-cost educational opportunities. Currently, P2PU offers a myriad of free, online courses.

Schmidt offered three questions to begin the discussion about scaling online learning:

How do you scale online courses that don’t stink?

What are new ways to recognize achievements?

How do you assess 21st century skills?

Now, days after the webinar, having viewed the archived session and consider these questions, I have the found the answers and they are ready for publication in this blog.

The correct answer to all these questions is: YES! (Any lower-case response, or response not in bold should receive only partial credit.)

My confidence in this answer comes from hearing Rheingold say to Schmidt about learning online, “It is still early.” 

It is worth noting that someone of Rheingold’s long experience hesitated to draw conclusions about online education. At this stage great questions serve to guide thoughtful inquiry.

The interchange made me remember the tale of the blind men and the elephant. In the old Indian tale, each man touches only a small part of the elephant, and therefore describes the elephant as something consistent with the part he can feel.

Having completed my second P2PU course in their school of education, I can look back at my experiences in those courses and talk about the excellent facilitation and the community building I experienced in the courses online sessions. To me, that is online learning.

Having participated in a couple of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), I can point to those experiences, all exploratory and positive, and say “that is online learning.”

But it is early. So, I remember the blind men and the elephant. In my passionate interest to explore and discuss online learning, I may just have a hold of this elephant’s tail.

Still, from my vantage point here at the tail, I  found myself disagreeing with the doctoral students in the discussion when I watched the archived web session. One of the participants made the claim that unless the courses offered certificates that academic institutions or employers recognize, time spent in open courses is akin to time spent watching soap operas. This is certainly not the case from my side of the elephant. The doctoral students in the webinar have their own position on this elephant of open online learning. Whatever appendage of the beast they have their hands on, the student researchers in the discussion seemed to think that certification is the most important thing in online learning. I feel confident that many of my “classmates” in the #change11 MOOC and my most recent P2PU course would disagree.

Maybe these doctoral students, working to complete their own certification requirements in varying education contexts, have a view of the world right now that says learning is pursuit of certification.

In the web session, Schmidt acknowledged the importance of thinking about learners and their motivations and pushed back on the notion that open learning must yield tangible rewards, saying, “It is great to be a sharer.”

Here are some other questions Schmidt posed for the group’s consideration:

What are good pathways from interest to learning?

What support mechanisms are needed?

What is the role of content?

The challenge for educators exploring online learning is to answer these questions by asking question. When I begin to draw conclusions, I will remember that it is still early. Again, a correct answer to these questions is “YES!”

The great invitation of online learning, especially in open virtual spaces like P2PU, filled with discussions, challenges and communities, is that the whole thing feels less like the elephant of traditional education and more like a sandbox. Educators can take their questions about online learning into the Schmidt’s sandbox where, through play and exploration, they might arrive at some answers. Or maybe better questions.

Thinking collaboratively and creatively about digital texts and tools... #change11

Author: Samantha Penney, samantha.penney@gmail.com 

I recently read a Twitter feed discussion between educators about this graphic, which was published on the University of Southern Indiana's website. They were critical of this arrangement of tech tools, calling it "arbitrary foolishness" and generally "disappointing." I tended to agree, but the discussion brought me back to an article I read recently by Alice S. Horning, "The Psycholinguistics of Literacy in the Flat World," where she claims that our use of language is evolving, especially in digital environments and that texts themselves are going through an evolutionary process.

Her article reminded me of working with some high school seniors who were creating a Prezi on the evolution of video games to accompany a larger paper they'd written. They used an image showing an evolutionary chain of famous video game characters as an inspiration to draw their chain. So I wonder about the potential for evolutionary chains as an organizing structure to think about digital texts and tools. I generated a Prezi to capture my thinking, and also as a place where participants in a professional development workshop might explore these ideas together. Alas, due to tech issues with Internet access at the conference where I was presenting on education and technology, this Prezi went largely unused.

Reading Geetha Narayanan's introduction on the MOOC today with her commentary about the lack of emphasis on creativity on the web, I want to invite MOOC participants to engage in a discussion of texts and tools in this (potentially) creative space, if only because I'm guaranteed that MOOC participants will have Internet access, something we can't say about an ed tech conference in 2012. Check out the Prezi below. The link you need to edit is in the Prezi.

You say you want an evolution? #change11 on Prezi

Learner, not lurker... #change11

I’m still captivated by apologies on the MOOC. Lately, I notice blog entries where participants label themselves “lurkers.” While I understand the term as it relates to Internet culture and discussion boards, I read it as a form of apology or a caveat to informal, infrequent participation in this course which so often doesn’t feel like a course.

For my own part, my work in open courses ebbs and flows. At times I am a virtual version of the student who sits up front and raises his hand a little too much. Other times, I’m the person who asked to survey a popular course, only to show up late, unfamiliar with the material being discussed. These analogies come from traditional education because that is how I understand my participation in any course.

As a learner unbundling content relevant to me I have to make sense of how I am learning, what I am learning and how reading and writing fit in my daily life. In order to completely understand how I am learning from a MOOC, I have to also set aside my traditional schooling and consider other challenging and rewarding- informal- learning experiences. I have to think about how I learn to parent.  

Coming back to this MOOC, despite my late arrival and my occasional “lurker” status, the course will impact my work. I will read Howard Rheingold’s new book and think about the implications for reading instruction in public schools. I will think about how attention probes might inform some burgeoning reading intervention ideas like Internet reciprocal teaching.

I want to set aside the term “lurker” for myself and think about participation in an open course as something that ebbs and flows with my life. I prefer “learner.” I also want to revisit every apology I have had to make for falling behind in a course I paid handsomely for that didn’t meet my needs.

Talking while the teacher is talking: learning in the back channel of #change 11

I’ve experimented with back channels in my 7th grade language arts classroom. On occasion, I used it as a way to focus students’ attention during Socratic circles. The outer circle of students, three times larger than the inner, armed with netbooks, had to respond on a wiki page discussion thread to the participants’ comment during the discussion. The outer circle recorded questions, reactions and quotations from the one participant they tracked. Since I was working with adolescents, the silent social opportunity during the Socratic circle kept everyone active and engaged, which can be a challenge when the outer circle has to sit quietly and record on tally sheets or some other paper record to track the conversation.

So, I believe in the potential of back channels and was excited to participate in the chat room during both of Howard Rheingold’s live sessions for the MOOC this week. From past experiences in Blackboard Collaborate, I’ve grown accustomed to the webinar format and I bounced my attention from the chat thread to the video feed of Rheingold’s presentation. It was interesting to participate this way. He taught us that there is no such thing as multi-tasking, just task switching. According to Rheingold, we pay attention costs with each switch.

With that learning in mind, I reflected on my participation. Between the two sessions I felt at times engaged, rewarded and distracted by the chat.

I wonder: What are the implications for teaching and learning in back channels, when participants effectively talk while the teacher is talking?

I’m thinking of ways participants might revisit the back channel transcript to support ongoing thoughtful participation and so that we might better understand the potential. Here are three possibilities I see for using the back channel transcript:

1. Have participants search through a transcript of the back channel and code their responses based on how they feel their participation impacted their attention to the session or their learning.

2. Ask participants to connect the small, quick discussions with other discussions online. For example, search for discussion forums and comment threads elsewhere online where participants might extend their conversations. (A quick teacher discussion in a chat room might easily connect to some of the larger group discussion threads on edutopia.org, for example.)


3. Ask each participant to identify the most important post in the back channel and blog about that immediately afterward.

Please add any suggestions you might have in the comments.

The Most Important Writer in America

I read the Common Core Standards' list of informational texts that illustrate the complexity, quality and range of student reading for grades 6-8. (Page 58... I’ll wait.)

“John Adams, Frederick Douglass, Winston Churchill, Ann Petry and John Steinbeck. Where is Keith Barry? How could you make a list of informational texts for 6-8th graders and leave off the work of the most important writer in America?”

Maybe you’re familiar with the other names- Douglass and Churchill- but you’re drawing a blank on Keith Barry. Well, don’t feel bad because I’m not that familiar with his work, either. Still, even though I don’t read his work, I believe Keith Barry is the most important writer in America for 6-8th graders. He blogs for Wired Magazine on the topic “Autopia.” Among other automotive things, he writes about the pursuit of the accident-proof automobile. He interviews engineers and rides along while they test drive cars equipped with auto-pilot. In this new age in education, as we usher in common national standards and we think about reading instruction that might inspire students to think in innovative ways about science, social studies, and math, we ought to consider new text types about innovative research happening now.


We can keep Harriet Tubman on the list. Like I said, I don’t really read Barry’s writing. I’m an English teacher, a bibliophile. If you don’t watch me closely, I’ll recommend Vonnegut to a freshman basketball player. I’m so out of touch, I will recommend Isaac Asimov’s I Robot to help students understand the perils of technology instead of handing them Discover Magazine. I think Ted Conover is a really contemporary author of informational new journalism.

Here's Conover's blog.

Did you go to his blog? Did you see his picture? He’s an old guy. And I think he’s a contemporary author.

Why?

Because I’m an old guy. I’m not as old as Isaac Asimov, but I’m old. And white. By definition I’m in constant peril of being out of touch. If you asked me to create a list of informational texts to illustrate quality and complexity, I would probably make a list similar to the Common Core's, leaving out anything that relates to now, which is why I need to keep reading things like Keith Barry’s blog. I need to declare that Keith Barry is the most important writer in America. Maybe he’s so important just because I can follow him on Twitter. While I'm at it, I could follow the people Keith Barry follows on Twitter. In that way, I could try to stay in touch.