“The more forms of communications children use the stronger their core literary skills.”

Zoe Kleinman of the BBC reports that “The more forms of communications children use the stronger their core literary skills.” This claim is based on work done by the National Literacy Trust in England. The story ran under the headline “Children who use technology are ‘better writers.’”

These findings support the data that we are gathering through a project supported by the California Department of Education’s Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) program. Our study involves 500+ 4th and 5th grade students, 37 teachers, lots of technology, and some really focused professional development supported by the Area 3 Writing Project.

In the first year of our study, gains in technological literacy have gone hand-in-hand with gains on standardized literacy assessments. (One of the big questions we had going into the project was whether the gains in digital literacy skills would translate/washback/affect literacy skills as measured on standardized assessments. So far the data points towards gains in both areas).

On a related note, I see that Jason Ohler is going to be giving an ISTE webinar next Tuesday on Digital Literacy: New kids, New Media and New Literacies.

How a Tech Company Can Respond to Critical Review

I want to save this post from Techdirt about how Microchip responded to a negative product review.

It’s funny, self-deprecating, clearly acknowledges the criticisms and either explains how the company is going to fix them or why those decisions were made in the process. Even if you don’t know anything about the company or these products, there are a lot of things that anyone in any business can learn about the way Microchip handled this.

Accessibility, Curb Cuts, and Classrooms

Item #10 on Jacob Gube’s Six Revisions blog has me thinking further about Universal Access and Disability. A faculty group at UC Davis has been meeting and talking about these issues and about classes for 2010-11. We’re not sure where we are going with these discussions yet, but the idea that “accessibility is not about degrading the overall user experience” is related to much of what we have been discussing. How does rethinking access and disability make us rethink classroom spaces (both virtual as well as physical)?

Can Universal Access and Disability be used as a giant curb cut for higher education? How would a course experience be different/reshaped if we provided different types of access? (And of course our discussions keep circling away from disability towards more general discussions of teaching methods, but then someone always brings us back to students and disabilities in a very grounded way).

My main thought here is that Gube’s post has a certain synergy with our discussions.

Braille for the Sighted or the intersections of writing, design, and rhetoric

As part of a faculty group, I have been thinking about access and disability. Cathy Kudlick passed on this link to an interview with Graham Pullin. It has me thinking about design, disabilities, and our interfaces with technology/literacy/knowledge. That is, how do we understand the “texts” that we produce through the objects/material that carry those texts.

While I draw on Donald A. Norman’s work when I teach Literacy and Technology or Writing in Electronic Environments, I do not know that I have yet figured out how to relate design to writing. The best treatment of the intersections of design and writing still seems to be Design Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design by Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller. I wonder how we could use this book with the Writing, Rhetoric, and Composition Studies program at UC Davis. There is a synergy in the book–an intersection of writing, design, and rhetoric that feels vital.

Peter Kittle’s Session on Distributed Expertise at NWP’s Digital Is…

At the NWP Digital Is… conference, Peter Kittle is asking us to write about something we are learning. I have decided to write about how I am learning to use WordPress. Here is what I have written:

how to shape up a wordpress blog

I’m trying to tap into what others know. I’m looking at friends’ blogs. I’m surfing the web through links. A lot of my time is frustration. I think that looks great. I wonder how I do it.

Since I only have a couple of minutes (10-15) in the evenings to play with blogging, I am trying to balance daily or every other day blogging with the time I spend setting up the blog and the other tools on it.

I am so new to it at the moment, that I am not even sure that I’m happy with the url I have selected. So I wonder how much time to spend writing on the blog and how much time to spend learning the interface/tool. It’s a strange moment of paralysis.

[I wonder about how to hook this entry up with the NWP Ning?]

The next round of writing that Peter is asking us to take part in is thinking about how Lave’s terms apply to our activity. How does semiotic domain, community, practice, legitimate peripheral practice, situated meaning, and/or distributed knowledge relate to my learning about WordPress?

I guess the notion of semiotic domain relates to what I know already about blogging. I know quite a bit. I used to blog all the time on blogger. I mean I taught grad courses where we not only blogged but we even had our final exam as a blog. So I know the semiotic domain of blogs, but I haven’t written on one or thought about the design of one for 4 years. So it is this strange moment of disjuncture.

Peter’s next task for us is to consider how to represent our learning in terms of writing, sound, or image. I’m behind and I do not complete this activity. (Still writing on semiotic domains).

History of the Internet in a Nutshell

Cameron Chapman’s History of the Internet in a Nutshell is an excellent quick overview of it all.

Wizz-e and Living Books (learning to read in the post-Mosaic 1993 age)

Wizz-e reminds me of the versions of Just Grandma and Me (1992) and Green Eggs and Ham (1996) CD from Random House’s Living Books.

In the early and mid-90s, those CDs suggested a whole new way in which kids would be interacting with (i.e., reading) books. They were precursors to web sites such as Poisson Rouge. The phrase “literacy as clickable” seems to capture the shift.

And while I am in the mid-90s nostalgia mood, Nicholas Carr’s echo of John Taylor’s lament that when “it comes to music or any other form of art, the price of our ‘endless present’ is the loss of a certain ‘magical power’ that the artist was once able to wield over the audience. I suspect he’s right” recalls for me Sven Birkets’s beautiful, if misguided and plain old wrong, The Gutenberg Elegies.

Integrating Blogs, Podcasting, and Digital Videos

Stacey Shubitz, session chair for our upcoming NCTE session, has a blog post about the session Integrating Blogs, Podcasting, and Digital Videos.

NWP discusses our EETT project and VoiceThread

The National Writing Project site has a feature on how VoiceThread Ties Together Student Voices, Images, and Writing. It is drawn on the work we are doing with Elk Grove USD as part of the California Department of Education’s Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) grant.

ICTs reshape lit practices, National Library of Medicine and Looking for Whitman

As ICTs reshape literacy practices, they are dramatically altering the distribution of research in both the sciences and the humanities. Pre-Mosaic, pre-1993, the National Library of Medicine online book collection would have been unthinkable as would Looking for Whitman as would Eileen Myles’s take on poetry and the language poets and the 33+ responses it generated.

Publishing and the distribution of research findings shift. Publishing and the ways we talk about poetry and keynote talks shift. But what is happening in the classrooms of our schools and universities? Are they shifting? Are they recognizing that digital literacy is…. now, not the future?

The National Writing Project’s Digital Is…. project/conference is next week in Philly. It promises to show us cutting edge pedagogies, reports from classrooms around the country, and projects galore.