Teacher 2.0 & Student 2.0 communication in the 21st Century

Written on February 17, 2008 by Devon Adams

Social Software Interaction

Picture Originally uploaded by ChrisL_AK

I came across this photo while reading Liz Davis’ technology education website, and it struck me that there’s this mutation of communication online; I wonder how this fits into the framework of my class. There’s this overlapping between forums, blogs, and wikis, and I guess my reflection on each before combining them all would be in order.

When I began teaching online it was all about the discussion forums or discussion boards that I set up through MyPhpBB where my 120 high school students loved to write to one another about everything under the sun. (I lost my own Internet virginity by dialing into a local BBS when I was a kid.) Sometimes I would give very specific topics that I expected answered while other times I just let them play. I would even make areas called “This and That” that I promised to never grade. I of course lurked for my own job security and their safety. Over the next two years they would post an average of 100 posts daily. Yes, daily. This was an average of every single student posting every single day. Now that didn’t happen, but some kids would sit there all night writing and dialoguing while others would only hop on when I threatened their grades.

Then I graduated to blogs, I think that was mostly for my own narcism. I created my own blog and promised myself I would never censor it, and then after a year I asked the kids to journey with me by creating blogs for our Creative Writing class. Most did set these up, but we could never work on them at school because of the filters. Some kids stuck with it while others never ever posted. Looking back, I should’ve used RSS feeds to better monitor them. My own blog use moved back and forth between obsession and rare posts when my mother bugged me (yes, my only reader at times). I began reading a blog by Heather Armstrong who’s a former Mormon with a potty mouth and small child. She and her husband lived the life of professional bloggers. Yes, they were paid for sitting on their laptops at home all day. I loved it. I wanted it. I made a new blog. I sat around with my wife trying to pick a name, and we finally settled on Nooccar, raccoon backwards and still quite clever. It was going to be the best ever! And I’d make money, and Heather Armstrong would comment on MY BLOG! It never happened. Yes, we made the blog and we post..err I post way more regularly than my wife does, and our niche market has been diffused with all the other cool blogger parents out there. We still post and will continue to do so (Yes, Mom), but I decided I wanted to write more about the cool tech stuff I do. I have owned dcamd.com for a couple years, and it’s just been a static, rarely used Web 1.0 webpage for my work. I wanted something new, dynamic, something to be proud of. I would redo the whole thing as a Web 2.0 WordPress site! So here it is. I don’t know how many of my students actually realize that I redid the whole thing and if you go to other pages here, you will see that most of them are pretty empty. I try to post daily or every other day, but I am still learning WordPress.

Then we get to our third circle: Wikis. Okay, I will admit that as a research writing teacher, a website that the kids can just log into and change pisses me off. It makes publishing a joke, but even as I say that I know I need to make a change to my idea of publishing and of information in general. Information has become this gossamer web of philotics weaving and flitting through the atmosphere of thought. The ever changing and ever self-correcting, so I made a Wiki. I am required to use WetPaint wikis for several of my projects, so we made one for a conference. A colleague & I were presenting on online FanFiction, and we were looking for a new way to present to our colleagues. I suggested we make a Wetpaint wiki and she agreed. But she wanted to know what we print & copy. I said “Nothing!”, and after a few seconds she began to smile. She got it! We make it, add our theory and examples, and then we let our baby go out into the world. The presentation was well received. Another communication tool has worked!

In the 21st century our students mindset is that online they can be whoever they want, while at the same time they censor nothing! They are out there for anyone to see, but they hold nothing back. While discussion forums are more static, direct and anonymous, I see these linked more and more to the bottoms of wikis so people can discuss how they are collaborating, and then I see another aspect to all of this, which you are about to see, too. Pulling wiki information into a blog to generate a recorded, snapshot elsewhere on the original information. (Yes, I plan to post this to my blog AND submit it to my class Wiki). I have the above Venn Diagram open in Photoshop next to my post as I write it, and I wonder what’s in the center. What communication device goes there? What tool can we place in the very middle? And I almost want to take a simple out and talk about the learner. And then I realize that this isn’t a cop out. It is really who we need to be and who we need to help lead our students to be.

The 21st century students is the one who can take the various communicative philosophies and tailors them to their own learning by using the plethora of Web 2.0 tools that pop up on the internet every single day. Our students are more and more multi-tasking, task shifting creatures who reach out with electronic tendrils to snip pieces of information from a variety of different places simultaneously to (re)create their own meaning from everything around them all-at-once.

Our English 101 course needs to search for the medium between Student 2.0 and Student 1.0 (and of course Teacher 2.0 and Teacher 1.0). (Teacher 2.0? Ooooh, I make myself feel like a cyborg! Or a terminator! Cool!!) How do we create the course we know we need to make while still keeping it approachable to our 1.0 worlds? Something to sleep on (or in the care of my student teacher last week, on his keyboard!), I suppose.

Posted in blogger, blogs, eng101, flickr, forums, student2.0, teacher2.0, wikis