Preparing Young Writers for Invoking and Addressing Today’s Interactive Digital Audiences

Twenty-first century technologies, in particular the Internet and Web 2.0 applications, have transformed the practice of writing and exposed it to interactivity. One interactive method that has received a lot of critical attention is blogging. The authors sought to understand more fully whom young bloggers both invoked in their blogging (their idealized, intentional audience) and whom they addressed (whom they actually blogged to, following interactive posts). They studied the complete, yearlong blog histories of fifteen fifth-graders, with an eye toward understanding how these students constructed audiences and modified them, according to feedback they received from teachers as well as peers and adults from around the world. The authors found that these students, who had rarely or never blogged before, were much more likely to respond to distant teachers, pre-service teachers, and graduate students than to their own classroom teachers or peers from their immediate classroom. The bloggers invoked/addressed their audiences differently too, depending on the roles that they had created for their audiences and themselves. The authors explore how and why this came to be the case with young writers

Writing to Learn: Blogging about Language Arts and Social Studies in a Grade 5 Classroom

Research has shown that writing to learn can support discipline-specific learning and thought development. Traditional writing strategies such as essays and journaling have been found to have a positive impact on recall of information, concept analysis and application. However, interaction with readers is not immediate with these methods. An environment where writers can immediately adapt to their readers’ feedback and become conversation partners for one another is the blogosphere. The purpose of this chapter is to describe how fifth-grade writers engaged in blog conversations with an audience beyond the classroom walls about their learning in language arts (LA) and social studies (SS) classes. The chapter also analyzes the ways in which feedback from the audience facilitated the fledgling writers’ “learning to write and writing to learn.

Laptop Technology and Pedagogy in the English Language Arts Classroom

The English Language Arts teachers in this qualitative study reported somewhat negative outcomes in social and material spaces in the context of laptop technology in their classrooms. These outcomes included: social isolation, limited communication with a teacher or peers, and off-task behavior. In an attempt to uncover the reasons for these rather negative results, the researcher analyzed these teachers’ classroom environments and instructional engagements with laptop technology, since these practices are believed to be reflective of these teachers’ current beliefs about instruction and technology’s role in it. Some of the reasons the researcher uncovered were: limited physical space, cumbersome furniture, poor technology infrastructure, and the largely instrumental use of technology in numerous learning engagements. The study suggests that school administrators and policy makers develop a strategic plan to address physical constraints in each laptop classroom and adopt “a different mindset” about teacher professional development, which would compel them to put more emphasis than they currently do on pedagogy before technology, rather than technology before pedagogy, to help these teachers constructively re-envision both material and social spaces around laptop technology in their classrooms

“It’s a Double Edged Sword This Technology Business”: Secondary English Teachers’ Perspectives On a School-Wide Laptop Technology Initiative

In response to national technology mandates, schools across the United States have committed themselves to laptop technology programs as a way to encourage student-centered learning and critical thinking in collaborative classrooms (Getting America’s Students Ready Report, 1996). This study reports on a great deal of teacher ambivalence about technology in English instruction, in the context of a school-wide laptop technology initiative. Four larger clusters of conflict contributed to this ambivalence: a) conflicts around institutional control in implementation of the laptop program and teacher agency, b) conflicts around political pressures for standardized testing and technology mandates, c) conflicts around technology uses in the curriculum and technology allocation in specific class types, and d) conflicts around professional identity and the challenges that both student and teacher technology use brought to these identities. The study concludes that these teachers needed to be given greater agency in planning and implementing the laptop technology initiative, and in revising their curriculum to embrace this new technology, as well as the necessary professional development to prepare them for such an educational innovation

Overwrought Copyright: Why Copyright Law from the Analog Age does not Work in the Digital Age’s Society and Classroom

In this article, the authors argue that copyright law, conceived of in an “analog” age, yet made stricter in our present Digital Age, actively stifles creativity among today’s student creators, both by its bias toward content owners and its legal vagueness. They also illustrate that copyright law is too stringent in protecting intellectual content, because physical and virtual objects are not the same thing. They conclude with a call to revise copyright for new media content that meets the needs of both content creators and pre-existing media content owners, and that, most importantly, benefits the education of the creative and innovative mind in today’s mediacentric classrooms