New Digital Media: Teachers' Roles as Trustees

The GoodWork® Project at Harvard University has been studying how individuals strive to achieve work that is “excellent in quality, ethical, and engaging to the worker” (http://www.goodworkproject.org/research/digital.htm). Much of their recent work has turned to digital media --- cyberspace --- in which youth engage in social as well as work activities.

Pettingill (2006) reports on the trust that youth place in internet sources. She found that participants who engaged in social networking sites daily were “more likely to cite Wikipedia as a trusted source for information. Subjects in this subset also had a tendency to search for content that has a perspective similar to theirs and exhibits consistency with other sites” (p. 7). Moreover, the researcher determined that teachers are regarded as trustees, “particularly regarding how to choose credible sources of information” (p. 9).

All right, teachers: raise your hands if you are comfortable with new digital media. Hands down.

Okay, I’ll start again. What is new digital media?

When digital computers became ubiquitous, our homes became sites for the Internet and computer games. Yet those media were only the beginning of new media, however. Online publications have emerged. Typographic press has been transformed through image manipulation software and desktop publishing tools.

Thus, new media represent new forms of digital media and remake traditional media forms. Think of CD players and their reincarnation, IPODs. VCRs became DVD players, and those are being supplanted by fascinating applications of video and audio streaming. Most importantly, information is shared and modifed by a number of users. No longer do intellectual property rights carry sacrosanct, individualistic meanings for composers.

In a recent study, ETS ("ICT Literacy Assessment Preliminary Findings", 2006) found that most students possess undeveloped Internet comprehension. Additionally, students seemed unable to critically reframe traditional media into new digital media genres.

Students rely on their teachers as guides to collective mapping as to what is and is not credible in the new digital media world. So, teachers, raise your hands if you agree with the following statement: “Teachers in the 21st century need to gain fluency in use of the tools of new digital media in order to help students ascertain credibility of the information they encounter online.”

I, for one, have my hand raised skyward. I’m starting tomorrow. I’m going to take a risk. I’m writing an e-mail to the Technology Coordinator in my building to inquire if our school has any policies about teachers and students blogging as part of public school instruction. Yes, again I will be extending past the curriculum mandates. Yes, my rebel status will rise in conversations. And, more pragmatically, my time as an English teacher will have a new layer of response added in what is already a time management nightmare. Sure, I will have to spend careful time monitoring students’ comments. Yes, I anticipate that I will receive phone calls, e-mails, and maybe even a few personal visits from parents and guardians who will voice concern about public posting of student work. But my instincts and pedagogical beliefs tell me it will be worth it.

I feel that more important than collegial critique is my role in Vygotsky’s (1978) Zone of Proximal Development as someone who can scaffold students’ learning. Who knows? Maybe, someday, when my students have long forgotten my name and face, they may encounter an Internet scam and know how to assess its value. Maybe one of my students will figure how to distinguish between sources as entertainment or superficial information from those of scholarly research when a personal crisis occurs.

In all likelihood, my influence in asking students to participate in a classroom social networking website will have more immediate results. New digital media in the classroom may introduce opportunities for us to have conversations about ourselves, the various personas we all embrace, and the occasional vulnerabilities we all feel in our lives and world.

Those chances to reach out transcend any classroom risk or traditional and new media applications: real conversations about lives lived penetrate the heart of lifelong learning.

Resources

ICT Literacy Assessment Preliminary Findings. (2006, 03.31.08). from http://www.etc.org/ictliteracy
Pettingill. (2006). Trust Without Knowledge: How Young Persons Carry out Research on the Internet [Electronic Version]. The Goodworks Project Papers, 48, 1-17. Retrieved 03.31.08 from http://pzweb.harvard.edu/eBookstore/PDFs/GoodWork48.pdf.
Vygotsky. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hard versus soft data?

Eighteen months ago, I was really lucky: I received a grant from the SMARTer Kids Foundation. In my technology-deprived high school, SMART Interactive Whiteboards are more myth than mainstream. Yet I was going to receive one due to a research project I had proposed! It was titled, “Look! Johnny and Janey Can Read: Enhancing the Literate Lives of Teens through SMART Board Interactive Whiteboard Technology.” I wanted to study whether students’ overall literacy levels could improve by utilizing both print and visual texts, with the SMART Interactive Whiteboard as delivery vehicle within the traditional public school classroom.

Since the Call for Proposals included the criterion “should have a sound, rigorous research methodology,” I designed a mixed method research design.

Now let it be said: as a qualitative researcher, I was most interested in analyzing data on students’ learning processes. I like to observe then tell the stories of students’ lives as learners. This project would take most of an entire school year, and I was keenly interested to compose four narratives about students who fit the description of “the children we worry about the most” (Hankins, 2003).

However, I was conscious that quantitative research is still more highly prized. Thus, I offered to code and analyze via SPSS to describe frequencies of identified variables; one sample T-test with test variable “curriculum track in English class;” paired sample T-test, with variables “score on previous standardized test” and “think of self as literate;” and, comparisons of pre- and post-test assessment indicators. Ultimately, I wondered, “Would incorporating SMART Interactive Whiteboard Technology enhance student performance on mandated statewide testing?”

Fast forward to 2008. I’ve completed the qualitative aspects of the report and am now beginning collaboration with a colleague who will check (and probably heavily edit) my quantitative data. You can view the qualitative component of my report at http://smarterkids.org/research/library_subject.asp.

This week, I received my first response to the article I wrote. The response was, honestly, a backdoor compliment at best. Yes, the person who found me through the internet was delighted that my students had received and learned through the SMART Board so positively. She knew of many qualitative and anecdotal reports with similar findings. Yet, she required “hard data” to sell her own district on the merits of capital investing toward SMART Boards in their district classrooms.

Hard versus soft data, hhhmmm? There's that issue of researcher bias emerging again. And the targets seem to be almost exclusively qualitative researchers.

Regardless of socio-economic class, race, or gender, all students have tremendous abilities to be critical readers of their worlds when offered the tools for success. Drawing from a Freirian (1992) perspective, I help learners to struggle for academic success “not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform” (p. 34). This social justice orientation raises complicated issues about power and knowledge and does contain bias. As a teacher-researcher, I must constantly identify ethical dilemmas. Our lives as practitioners and our lives as partners, members of cultural communities, and political citizens are intertwined richly. As Haraway (1988) argues,

“…only partial perspective promises objective vision. All Western cultural narratives about objectivity are allegories of the ideologies governing the relations of what we call mind and body, distance and responsibility. Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see” (p.583).

I believe a false dichotomy of objectivity and subjectivity, between the personal and professional, pervades educational thinking. Actions in many domains of all teachers’ lives contribute to praxis. While I argue that a teacher cannot leave one identity at the public classroom door and assume another elsewhere, I also recognize that teachers, students, and their families do not always share the same values. We live in a pluralistic society. Values are a community standard. I constantly debate issues of justice versus caring (Noddings, 1984), and I reconcile the two by creating a classroom climate that is safe, meaningful, and consistent with community contexts.

I will leave you with questions to ponder. How many quantitative researchers offer climates where all students have chances to be successful? In what ways do quantitative researchers really know the humans they are studying and, so, live in conscious states between personal and professional --- never really leaving one to become solely the other? To what extent do quantitative researchers accept and identify their own areas of biases?

Hard data versus soft data are jargon, and distinctions between the two rise from an accepted American binary cultural system. Do quantitative researchers seek to escape binary thought and attempt to navigate the multiplicity of learning possibilities in our postmodern world? Let's just say it: all researchers have bias. As teacher-researchers, our focus must become how to reconcile that bias with the humans we observe in the constant goal to foster educational reform.


Freire, P. (1992). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.
Hankins, K. H. (2003). Teaching through the storm: A journal of hope. New York: Teachers College Press.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of the partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599.
Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Generational divides

Texts that changed our lives are not our students’ texts

A recent professional development seminar for our high school English department asked me to consider and write for twenty minutes about the following question:

“What book changed your life?”

I couldn’t remember one particular book, but a vivid story did come back to me. Every Sunday afternoon of my childhood was spent in the same way: my mother, my younger brother, and I would visit my maternal grandmother, a widow. I can still see my perch on her brown couch with its red diamond pattern and the oil painting of the brunette woman at the piano over my head. I imagined that the pianist was my mother.

Certain, very specific rules accompanied my brother and me on those Sunday excursions. Television and radio were forbidden. We were required to sit politely, listen attentively, and talk when asked a question. We were not to play games, run around, or cause any commotion, and we were absolutely not to divulge the inner workings of our own 1000 square foot home, three miles away.

We were allowed, however, to read.

I took full advantage of what I perceived as this exception to civility. I read all of my mother’s Nancy Drew mysteries, and then inhaled my brother’s Hardy Boy series. I read --- albeit abridged --- Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. I cried when the spider died at the end of Charlotte’s Web.

And I learned to yearn for those Sundays spent reading, for dedicated times to explore ways of seeing and knowing and living beyond my very provincial small town, whose boundaries even then seemed to kick the breath out of me.

I liked that writing assignment a lot, and I considered asking my students to complete the same assignment. But then it occurred to me: I was a Vietnam War child. Mine was the first generation to watch a war broadcast live on the evening news. The mass media as we know it today existed only in the imaginations of a rare few: Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Marshall McLuhan.

Which media would my contemporary students remember with nostalgic fondness? I suspect their texts are a lot closer to Barney than Isaac Bashevis Singer, more Simpsons than Sounder.

National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) executive committee has asked its members to think more intently about shifts in literacy.

Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable.

In an era when our students are blogging, adding to wikis, accessing podcasts, watching webcasts, and social networking, what are we, as teachers, doing in our classrooms to enrich their full literate lives?

We need to move beyond fear of our own inabilities to access new media. We need to treat literacy as more than a functional skill -- one's ability to read and write --- and, instead, as a sophisticated set of meaning-making activities situated in specific social spaces.