Comments on The New Literacy and the CMS

• Why?
• Posted by John Turri , Asst. Prof. of Philosophy at Huron University College on October 14, 2009 at 5:15am EDT

• I'm very much against your suggestion of moving in this direction, via CMS or otherwise.

  We don't have a "new understanding of what literacy entails." Literacy is the same thing as it used to be.

  I spend too much of my time trying to get students to punctuate, capitalize, and, more generally, to not write as if they're tweeting or texting, etc. Those media are definitely not conducive to careful, reflective, critical discussion, or to good writing. And too much of what I mark already takes on the character of that coarse, casual, and unattractive style.

  And students can of course post their essays online, blog about their ideas, etc., on their own. There's no need for the university to facilitate this.

• New Media in the Classroom
• Posted by Karl Bakeman on October 14, 2009 at 8:15am EDT

• Joshua, Jenn Lena at Vanderbilt set up a blog for her sociology class last spring. At the end of April, she wrote some conclusions based on her experience. Some of her observations speak to what you have described. You can find it here: http://mysociologicalimagination.wordpress.com/

  A few highlights:

  1. The student posts seemed more thought out than typical papers
  2. A few folks from outside the class posted, but not many.
  3. She was disappointed that students didn't integrate the blog posts into classroom conversation.

• Open communities in Sakai
• Posted by Jaeques Koeman , Open communities in Sakai at Edia on October 14, 2009 at 10:15am EDT

• I agree totally.

  The University of Amsterdam uses a Sakai (open source collaboration & learning environment) instance, that is used to create communities around courses or academic topics of interest, and share this information with a broader audience in and outside the university. The platform can be visited at http://www.communities.uva.nl

  In Sakai, course or project sites can be made publicly accessible, allowing various audiences to join discussions, add content to wiki pages or even share resources.

  A nice example of publicly accessible student contributions can be seen on www.conflictstudies.nl (under conflict analyses).

• CMS/LMS - perhaps no, institution, perhaps yes
• Posted by Dr. Pepper , Academic-in-Training at Northeast US on October 14, 2009 at 10:30am EDT

• As far as LMS/CMS systems growing to adapt into this new paradigm, I would say don't hold your breath. They are 800 pound gorillas and they tend to be conservative rather than revolutionary. In addition to technical and business issues, you've got legal issues. An LMS maker may be held liable if there is some sort of breach by an outsider where they have access to student information such as grades - this falls under FURPA and can get them in trouble, which is probably another reason why they are conservative.

  Our understanding of literacy evolves, literacy is literacy, but that doesn't mean that it can't be extended. I disagree with Prof. Turri above when he says that the media is not conducive to careful, reflective and critical writing. There is no inherent or preprogrammed mode in these media that make them not conducive to such academic endeavors. The problem that Prof. Turri is experiencing is not a medium problem but rather a literacy and discourse problem. His students have not been apprenticed into academic speech and academic writing which is why he spends so much time correcting papers because students are writing as if they are tweeting. You can write an equally good and academically sound article on a wiki or a blog, just like you would on paper.

  I don't mean to sound overly critical, but I would have thought a philosopher would have a more analytical view of the world around them, which includes technology, and I would not expect a philosopher to have such an "old man waving cane at kids" attitude :-)

• protecting intellectual property
• Posted by KT , Prof of MIS at public teaching institution on October 14, 2009 at 11:00am EDT

• I don't object to having students write in currently popular venues (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). More writing experience (with good feedback) is better. And it's part of my subject matter to teach students to stay aware of technology trends and to adopt and use them effectively, where appropriate.

  However, I agree with John Turri above that we must teach students to distinguish between the lingo of texting and Twitter versus standard English. For example, in an effort to insist on less faddish communication, I dock papers and refuse to answer email from students who use those dialects.

  One advantage of the current CMS environment is that it can protect intellectual property. I have a responsibility to protect the material of the publisher/author and to offer it only to students who have paid for it and are enrolled in my class. In addition, I may want to share other protected material (articles, videos, etc.) under the fair use doctrine. Posting that material outside the protected CMS environment would violate the fair use exception because I would be making the material available to the public without regard to the copyright of the owners. I might even want to protect the intellectual property of my own work or my students' work. Students may want to publish their thoughts freely on the web or they may want to keep some ideas to themselves (business plans to launch some innovation, for example).

  I take advantage of a teaching moment to discuss these issues with the students when covering intellectual property, communication, and web marketing. We should use Web 2.0 capabilities with discretion. And the CMS environment should continue to offer protection for intellectual property.

• Blend the CMS with Web 2.0
• Posted by Michelle Pacansky-Brock , Director, Online on October 14, 2009 at 11:15am EDT

• For years, in my online teaching, I've blended my CMS with web 2.0 tools (particularly Ning and VoiceThread). My students would enter Blackboard, which I envisioned as the "train station" where they would come to understand their learning path for the week. From there they'd click out to the learning activities in Ning (write a blog post) or click out to VoiceThread to interact in a visually dynamic peer-based learning activity in which I would participate leaving video comments. Ever 3-4 weeks bigger assessments occurred inside BB utilizing the test canvas or a take-home project of some sort submitted through an assignment module.

  Ning and VoiceThread both provide options to be set to either private or public, giving you the option to select whether or not your students interact as a class or as part of the the larger web audience.

  Personally, I applaud Joshua's ideas and think literacy has certainly evolved now that we have entered a digital, global society. Our students need new skills to make sense of the information around them and these skills include participating with global audiences. Interestingly, I've presented VoiceThread in this context to many, many educational audiences in the past year and nearly every single time there has been an ardent voice in the audience who has shot the idea down due to concerns about FERPA. Like anything else in education, if a tradition or policy becomes an obstacle to meeting the educational needs of our students, perhaps it's time to reshape it for the 21st century. I don't think that would be too difficult and if it was a priority to us, we'd make it happen wouldn't we?

  I too am waiting for Tapscott's audio book. I've seen the hard copy and it looks really good!

• IP is sometimes a red herring
• Posted by Dr. Pepper , Academic-in-Training on October 14, 2009 at 11:30am EDT

• While I agree that as professionals we need to protect the IP of materials that we use that are not produced by us, we don't need an LMS to do this. We do have electronic reserves in libraries that often times duplicate this function. As far as student and faculty IP... this depends on the institution's policies on who exactly owns the IP.

  Many faculty give away their research articles to publishers and never see a dime. In other cases universities own all of what you do for a particular class - so if you design and implement aides and guides for a class the university might own them. As far as what students do, this may fall under state or federal legislation like FURPA.

  I do agree with KT though in that there is no one medium to rule them all. You do need to know what medium is best suited for the message that you want to have broadcast and for the pedagogy that you want to pursue.

• blackboard & public discussion
• Posted by Laura Winton , Theatre Department at University of Minnesota on October 14, 2009 at 11:30am EDT

• I think that we're overlooking something here. Students need to be able to post things and work out there ideas within the context of a class/room. In other words, there's a time and a place for only a few of your peers to see what you've written and comment on that before you put your ideas out there on the web for the whole big world to see and comment on. Students need to be able to try ideas out and make mistakes and even say something stupid or misinformed to get to an informed intelligent opinion. Let's not be so quick to push them out into the world.

• Or maybe the dumbest generation
• Posted by Justin Thyme , Psychology at SDSU on October 14, 2009 at 1:00pm EDT

• If you've spent any time teaching this "smartest" generation that you speak of in this article, you might actually view them more as the "dumbest" generation: http://www.dumbestgeneration.com/home.html

  They can't read. They can't write. Far too many are not prepared for college, but EVERYONE should go to college, right, even if they can't do the work?

• Posted by John Turri on October 14, 2009 at 1:45pm EDT

• Dr. Pepper,

  You don't sound over critical, just a bit panglossian.

  Of course it's not "inherent" in blogs, etc., that they can't result in good writing and insightful thoughts. I never said it was. My point is that these media are not conducive to such things. They make is less likely, not more likely, that students will develop the skills necessary to write well.

  This is not about learning "academic" writing. It is, in the first place, about correct spelling and punctuation! Such virtues are not restricted to what gets produced in a course. But the conventions of texting and tweeting promote another set of habits entirely. And you're not setting your students up to succeed if you ask them to write well in a space where the predominant habits and norms make it much less likely that they will write well.

• this is the type of discussion we want our students to engage
• Posted by Joshua Kim on October 14, 2009 at 2:45pm EDT

• John, Karl, Jaeques, Dr. Pepper, KT, Michelle, Laura and Justin....thank you all so much for putting the "conversation and debate" into this space. I've printed out everyones comments and need to think on them. I'm at the point of agreeing with the last persons post that I read.

  This conversation reaffirms, I think, my belief in the value of pushing what goes on in our classrooms out into the wider world. I understand KT's concerns about intellectual property and fair use - and agree we need a place to protect materials - but it is not the articles I want to be open but the students creations and the debates.

  I love Michelle's idea of Blackboard as a "train station" - and her use of Ning and Voice Thread and other tools feels like the way to go. The FERPA debate is one I'd like to hear more about.

  The book I'd love for everyone involved in learning technology to read is Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters by Scott Rosenberg. I'm just finishing this up now (the dead tree version - Audible is charging 2 credits - which I actually think it may be worth). One of my takeaways from the Rosenberg book is that blogging and other public disintermediated social media accrues benefits to the writers and the small circle of people who are deeply invested in a topic.

  We can use our college courses and learning tech. tools to help our students go up the 10,000 hours of practice needed to gain expertise in communication with this new medium. The cost of unpolished or unreasoned or just bad stuff ending up on the public Web (from student publications) is exceedingly small compared to the potential benefits to learning when students move from consumers to creators, observers to participants in our discussions.

• IP protected in Bb? Maybe not
• Posted by Jared Stein on October 14, 2009 at 5:30pm EDT

• Several folks have suggested that posting IP from third-parties through a password-protected CMS is allowed for under Fair Use. This probably is not the case. The TEACH Act provides even less liberty for posting digital materials, especially if you intend to use them semester after semester. Library reserves are different beasts, as they are part of a library.

  Quite frankly I can't clearly state what _is_ allowed under Fair Use or TEACH, though the language is pretty clear about what isn't.

• Not everything should be public
• Posted by Another Comment on October 15, 2009 at 3:15pm EDT

• Ditto on Laura's comment above. Requiring students to post on the open internet should be closely aligned with course objectives. In some subject areas, it is just not appropriate, as students work through reflections or ideas in the context of a class discussion that "the world" may not understand.