Kathleen Blake Yancey wrote this great piece about writing in the 21st century, so I was not going to miss this session!
How is literacy different now – not just the tools.
Community
Cramped definition of writing – what does writing look like today?
Writing is happening in new and exciting ways
Historical context –
- Personal + response
- Discipline & punishment – punitive
- Cartoon + humour
- Protest – graffiti, posters
- As a process different types of writing
- Writing model is made linear ( in learning institutions)
- Digitised – publishing opportunities
- Connecting + visuals (colours, images impact on writing)
- New & exciting ways to connect – part of the process – which medium and why??
- Now not just the computer or screen BUT web2.0
WRITING TODAY IN SCHOOLS – activities to try
1. Blogging from school to the world
- Discussion board
- Answering about book
- Different criteria – not words but response to others (respect, regard for others)
2. Becoming Jane Austen
- Character/ persona of someone you study
- Relationships with others, thoughts
3. Information Ecology
- Owned by others, gated, bureaucracy
- New model = online
- Answer a question using only blogs
- Map the journey
- How do we decide what is trustworthy and what is not?
- Academic, mainstream & alternative sources
- Need to be explicit so students can be explicit
- Time Magazine top 25 list of blogs
4. Blogging as Learning in Action
- Where do we see poetry in the culture – how is it poetic?
- Blog of unnecessary quotation marks
- Signs – changing over time and the assumptions they make
WRITING TODAY
- Need to de-construct
- “out in the culture” & blog about it to share with others
- embrace learning together – participation
- tool set (blogs, wikis, twitter) to control – which tool to use when to connect to others???
PARTICIPATION NOW
- experts and lay people composing knowledge
- citizen knowledge – available to participate in science projects –
- built into the model of scientific data gathering
- citizens journalists composing news
- “I” reporters
- started as a result of crisies
- when people are helping each other there is greater trustworthiness
- history is being made before our eyes – primary sources
- now people are reporting why
- citizens composing power
- eg Iran – twitter, blogs
- blog is a tool that connects to other tools