A Response to Lankshear & Knobel, New Literacies, Chapter 3

I would like to tell a story about an experience I've had over the last three weeks at school. After reading Lankshear and Knobel's third chapter, I realize that this was a "new literacies" experience, and I'd like to relate it to what I've been reading.

I'll start with the set-up. The State of Massachusetts had decided that all schools must create an assessment tool called a District Determined Measure, or DDM, for each course. The tool could be whatever the school wished to create, but it needed to measure each student's progress in some fashion. Progress was to be measured relatively for each student in the context of all students in a course. The State provided, typically, little guidance on how this was to be achieved. Most teachers in my school opted for a variety of pre- and post-tests. I spoke with my fellow physics teacher at length about how such a test could be scored in a manner that meaningfully and equitably measured individual progress. We quickly realized that an absolute scale would not suffice, and we threw some numbers around as examples of how we thought the scoring should work.

Later I realized that the solution was to use a relatively simple scaling formula, like what you would use to scale exam results up. I opened my favorite go-to tool, Excel, and starting tinkering. It didn't take long for me to construct the scale, and soon I was building a test template. I mentioned it to my supervisor, and she thought it could be used school-wide. With that in mind, I cleaned the Excel workbook up, added some more functionality and instructions, and made it available to all teaching staff.

Of course no one knew, for various reasons, how to use it or what it even meant.

I volunteered to make myself available toward the end of the school year, after the seniors had left (and teaching loads had correspondingly diminished). I held a series of group workshops, and then helped teachers individually. It turned out to be quite an exercise in teaching the new literacies to my fellow teachers.

As Lankshear and Knobel pointed out, a literacy can be new in the ontological sense of new technical practices and practices related to a new ethos (p.55). The technical practices involved going online, retrieving a file from the school's server, downloading that file to one's machine, and possibly emailing the file to a comrade. These practices were the most likely to have been mastered by the staff, though some older staff still struggled at this level. Then came the real fun - how to work with Excel.

There is an entire literacy of Excel, and most of the teachers had not developed an Excel practice. I am something of an Excel guru, so I was able to teach the specific practices necessary to complete the DDM scoring, but it was time-consuming. Many of the teachers were familiar with Word, some of them gurus, but Word skills do not translate to Excel - it's a different literacy! The teachers who struggled thought they struggled because they were not comfortable with the math, but the point of the Excel workbook was to make the math happen automatically. I had to keep in mind, while tutoring, that this was a literacy problem.

Some teachers wished to understand the underlying premise of the workbook, and this introduced another literacy - statistics. I kept it as simple as I could, and eventually crafted a response that easily conveyed the statistical underpinnings without actually broaching statistics itself.

What was even more surprising for me was the teachers' response to the other ontological facet of a literacy - the ethos "stuff." In this case, to make the DDM scoring work, teachers had to collaborate with other teachers teaching the same course and establish testing and scoring standards and protocols. I had assumed that the teachers of English Language Arts, say, were in regular communication with each other. This turned out not to be the case. Outside of email and maybe Google Docs, the ethos of digital participation and collaboration in the pedagogical affinity space was poorly developed. Certainly the teachers were aware of and some well-practiced in the personal digital-social space. I was heartened to hear that everyone enthusiastically agreed that more digital participation and collaboration in the pedagogical instance would be a good idea going forward.

I was glad to have been an enabler, and I was aware of seeing a lot through the lens of Lankshear and Knobel.

As a way of keeping notes, I list below, without elaboration, some phrases and ideas that jumped out at me in this week's reading:

• What counts as new? (p. 51)
• The new ontology: technical "stuff" and ethos "stuff" (p. 55)
• digital remix = "writing" (p. 67)
• "performing" software (p. 70)
• "folksonomy" and distributed expertise (pp. 75-76)
• Jenkins (2010): Web 2.0 is a business model (p. 80)
• proprietary, progressive, and participatory configurations (pp. 81-82)
  

A rocket's eye view - little and then tiny people!This is a bit of a cheat, but I couldn't resist the coincidence. The coincidence? This Daily Create was posted on the same day that my physics classes first got a chance to launch their rockets outdoo...

A Reflection on Week 2 of INTE 5340

One trick I use for dealing with the demands of my work is to build and rely upon templates. Templates are great because a certain amount of the task at hand (and sometimes a lot of the task) is embodied in the template, and the work-flow is much more efficient. The problem with a template, though, is that the template can become stale, or the work-flow become automatic. I like tinkering with my templates, though, changing and improving them, and I think this allows me to avoid being stale and automatic over time. I try not to lose sight of what the work is asking of me, and I try to stay committed to and mindful of the work.

I am feeling more confident in my navigation around the various pieces of this course, and this week I started building templates and habits that will carry me through the course. My high school is still in session, and it's the very end of the year and there are a lot of things to finish up, so it is still difficult to keep up with both schoolwork and coursework. One more week . . .

As the school year winds down, my thoughts turn to next year. I want to pursue this idea I have of using story to teach physics - specifically, having the students express physics in their own stories. By reading Lankshear & Knobel on literacy, I think that I may gain a broader perspective on physics-as-story, something along the lines of a physics literacy.

I posted the following:

• My first and second TDC assignments
• My Audio AB assignment
• My Response to L&K Chapter 2
• My first and second Critiques
• My four Peer Comments (1 2 3 4)
• and this Reflection

I would give myself a 9/10 for the week - again, I was pretty happy with my work. I am particularly fond of and adept at audio production, so I was glad to have an audio assignment to sink my teeth into. I loved reading Lankshear & Knobel's second chapter. Even though I felt like I was barely hanging on to the language and ideas, I knew I was getting into the meat of their thesis, and I am eager to read more. Finally I feel like I'm starting to settle into this course, and I'm beginning to get a sense of how all the pieces will begin relating to and amplifying each other.

Once upon a time a young college student named Bill decided to become a schoolteacher.Every day he went to school with great joy and taught his students.But one day he followed an urge to do something different, and he became a piano tuner.Because of t...

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A Response to Lankshear & Knobel, New Literacies, Chapter 2

As Lankshear and Knobel laid out their trajectory in the second chapter, I felt like I was drowning in all the new vocabulary. I've never read sociology, and this was a new use of language for me, and I struggled to hang on. There were a few landmarks that I felt I could focus my eyes on, and I will come back to them below. I began to trust my navigators (L&K) and relax, and by the end of the chapter I felt that I almost could understand and apply that summary sentence on page 46 (and repeated on the last page of the chapter). I'll type it out here, just to plant it more firmly in my head: literacies are

socially recognized ways in which people generate, communicate, and negotiate meanings, as members of Discourses, through the medium of encoded texts (p. 50).

I love a sentence like this, each word chosen so carefully, concise as a poem. The sentence serves as a guide, it's a story unto itself. Some pieces of the sentence are familiar to me from other sources. I recognize the idea of generating and negotiating meanings from cognitive neuroscience, for instance.

There were three distinct landmarks that jumped out at me. When Lankshear and Knobel wrote of social practices being "performed (p. 34)," it rang a bell for me. I am a professional performer (both as a musician and as a teacher), and it is not difficult to find performers who consciously practice (in the critical sense) and who come to see almost any activity in life as a performance. Another landmark was in the discussion of encoded texts:

Perhaps what is most important about literacy as a social phenomenon is that it enables people to do what cannot be done by orality alone (p. 40).

It was the word "orality" that struck me, and made clear for me the contrasting idea of encoded texts. The third landmark was this phrase: "a particular 'configuration' of literary practices: a literacy (p. 49, quoting Barton and Hamilton 1998)." I actually read the colon as an equal sign. These three pieces from the chapter helped me to hold the chapter's main sentence (from page 50, quoted above) in my head.

So I can read a sentence and convince myself that I know what it means. As a teacher, I know that real understanding comes with making actual use of the sentence. In the beginning this will mean making mistakes; misusing words, stumbling over meanings, applying concepts incorrectly. It is no different than struggling to learn and use Twitter and Blogger and Photoshop etc. Trying to read a book about literacy is a kind of literary practice. Here goes:

I can see that in my classroom I am trying to make my students literate in science generally, and physics specifically. I wish to create a Discourse of science students who can generate and negotiate physics meanings through the media of equations, explanations involving technical vocabulary, diagrams and graphs, digital simulations, and tangible demonstration equipment. In particular, I insist on seeing all of our encoded texts as narratives to some extent, in the belief that narrative, or story, is the most natural and accessible meaning vehicle.

One of my students turned me on to Vsauce, a collection of YouTube science (and other) videos created by Michael Stevens. I've since been referred to Vsauce by quite a few people. The videos have become quite popular. Here is one ostensibly on what ...

I'm going to keep with the theme of science videos as stories this week. As I've explained before, I think a good science explanation works like a story. The cause and effect present in a science explanation can act as a narrative arc, with a beginni...

My classroom has no windowsI miss the sky so muchBut I see stars and planetsSo close that I can touch(The Daily Create for June 17 2015 at ds106)

A Reflection on Week 1 of INTE 5340

To end the week on a funny note. Typical reaction to DS106 (on the homepage)... https://t.co/OQAD11ls94

— alicia hill (@durangodagz) June 14, 2015

Have you ever watched a cat enter a room for the first time? I'm that cat. I sneak in past the door and creep around the periphery of the room, hugging the wall. I take my time. I sniff everything. I circle the room, and then start checking under all the furniture. I crawl into any open container and sit for a minute. I jump up onto all horizontal surfaces. It will be quite a while before I venture into the open, but when I do it will be with authority.

The big issues this week were mostly navigational - figuring out how to find and be found (posts and tweets), how to coordinate the parts of my network, how to find my way around the course materials and around ds106, how to manage the deadlines and expectations, how to employ the many communication channels among the class participants. It's all a work very much in progress, but progress I made.

I thought a lot about what makes a story "digital," and whether being digital makes a story fundamentally different. I thought a lot about literacy, multiple literacies, whether the words "literacy" and "story" are tossed around too much or too little. I wondered why everyone isn't required to study sociology at some point in their lives.

I posted the following:

• My first and second TDC assignments
• My Visual AB assignment
• My Response to L&K Chapter 1
• My first and second Critiques
• My four Peer Comments (1 2 3 4)
• and this Reflection

Though I struggled (as always) with time management, I was pretty happy with my output. I like getting my writing head loosened up, and I began to reach out to classmates on Twitter. I've always read Twitter, but I'm eager to establish a habit of tweeting. I would give myself a 9/10 for the week - I was pretty happy with my work, and I put a lot of time into tweaking my social media infrastructure so it will work well for the course.

I did not dive particularly deeply into L&K's first chapter, but I'm looking forward to the second chapter. I made careful note of the references to Gee and Rheingold - I hope to pursue some of their work before long.

Finally, I love telling stories and I love being funny, and I'm glad I will be doing a lot of both this summer!

(The Daily Create for June 13 2015 at ds106)

A Response to Lankshear & Knobel, New Literacies, Chapter 1

The teachers were all dreading the professional development session. It was to be two-and-a-half hours of how to implement the Common Core Curriculum in our technical high school. "I guess we're supposed to all become Language Arts Teachers now" was a common refrain in our grumblings. It turned out to be one of the best PD's we've ever had.

The consultants had a well-thought-out and comprehensive framework about literacy. The idea was that the word "text," as used in the Common Core Standards, could be quite broadly interpreted. It didn't mean just written text. As a physics teacher I already considered "text" to include graphs, charts, diagrams, and equations. But these consultants had done their homework. For an example they described a possible outing to a work site by one of our technical programs, carpentry. The task would be to inspect a damaged deck, create an estimate for repair or replacement, and consult with the homeowner. Each of these three tasks involved skills that could be considered literacy. The damaged deck was a "text" that could be "read" through inspection. The "text" was then interpreted through the means of creating the estimate, which itself was another text. Finally, the interaction with the customer, determining his needs and budget and presenting an appropriate proposal, was all interpretation of another text.

"Wow, I hadn't really thought of it that way" became a new refrain. The anxiety around implementing the Common Core Curriculum was replaced with a certain excitement around utilizing this new idea about literacy.

The first chapter of New Literacies was basically a summary of how the concept of literacy has changed over the decades. I was afraid that it would be a dry run-through, but Lankshear and Knobel steered through the details with a steady eye on their destination - their own interpretation of "new literacy." I was surprised by how much of the summary I recognized. I guess I've been around for a while! But I had never connected all the dots in quite the way that Lankshear and Knobel had. By the time the summary had gotten to "The radical 'multiplicity' of literacy" (p. 21) the memory of that professional development session had popped into my head and I knew I would have to write about it.

A physics teacher named Frank Noschese wrote and hosted a series of essays on the concept of pseudoteaching. Pseudoteaching is activity that looks like teaching, feels like teaching, but no learning is taking place. One of the guest bloggers was Dere...

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I just finished editing a small collection of vignettes that my wife had written over the last two days. They weren’t terribly long, but editing is intense work, and I was hoping to put her off for a few more days.

I’m a little freaked out that my grad school course just started, and I have to get this first assignment done tonight, and I still have to email my marching band about the weekend’s gig. I email an elaborate note called the marching orders, with directions and times and a weather forecast. Saturday’s parade is one of the biggies of the season.

And I’m still working at my high school full-time. The seniors are gone, but I’m trying to get the juniors out in one piece. They gave me room coverage today, which ate up my free time. I’m giving a workshop next week to the other teachers about an Excel file I programmed for dealing with some state-mandated testing, so I’m trying to prep for that. Everyone is grateful for the file I created, but no one understands Excel.

My piano-tuning customers haven’t heard from me in weeks, they’re starting to get ornery, but they’ll have to wait. July is around the corner.

So I wasn’t feeling especially generous with my time when I got home tonight. I know, my wife makes me dinner and everything. Please, Please, she pleads, edit my pieces. They’re sitting as drafts in her blog, waiting for the Publish button.

Random act of kindness. What does random mean? My wife isn’t a stranger, editing her stuff is part of the matrimonial give-and-take. Of course I’m always kind to her. My daily routine isn’t exactly spontaneous. I guess it’s that I gave in. I relented. I listened to the god who says Come on, what the hell is so important? I refused to be reluctant, but instead gladly gave of my time, gave in to generosity. I do love her writing. I love her. So does this count?

(The Daily Create for June 11 2015 at ds106)

While writing my last post, on pseudoteaching, I was compelled to change my Teaching Framework a little in response.  I was thinking about when and how the learning actually happens in my classroom.  According to Frank Noschese's concept, tea...

One of my favorite parts of the 1989 movie "Look Who's Talking" is when the infant tries to figure out how to drive a car.  You just put the little stick into the hole, move your foot back and forth, and move the big circle around.  We've all seen it done, how hard can it be?

We've all seen what teachers do, too, thanks to years of schooling.  As with the car-driving baby, our picture of what teachers do was formed when we were children, but that doesn't stop us from thinking that we know what teaching is.  How hard can it be?  We know what it looks like, or, more to the point of this blog post, we know it when we see it.  We know what it should look like.

Legibility

I first encountered the concept of legibility in a blog post by Venkatesh Rao in his blog Ribbonfarm.  The concept was originally expressed in a book by James C. Scott called Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.  I'll quote Rao's excellent summary of how the failure comes about:

Here is the recipe:

• Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
• Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
• Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
• Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
• Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
• Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
• Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly

The big mistake in this pattern of failure is projecting your subjective lack of comprehension onto the object you are looking at, as "irrationality."  We make this mistake because we are tempted by a desire for legibility.

The Illegibility of Teaching

I read this article just as I had started teaching again after a 25-year hiatus.  I was being reminded of what I love about teaching and what annoys me about teaching.  I realized that I had found the perfect concept for describing what annoys me: though everyone thinks they know what teaching is, teaching is largely illegible, even to other education professionals.

This illegibility is never attributed to the observer's ignorance.  It is always seen as a sign of chaos in need of order.  The preferred order is for the classroom and the teachers and the students to have a certain "look."  This might mean signs of "discipline," an atmosphere of "quiet, steady diligence," or the appearance of "motivated" students led by an "engaging" teacher.  Whatever signifies legible order for the observer is the ideal, even if that order results in no actual learning.  One of my school principals insisted that he could poke his head into a classroom and tell at a glance if a teacher was "getting it done."  Legibility is more important than education.  More to the point, education is to be found in the legibility of the enterprise rather than the results.

I don't mean to complain, I'm just trying to understand.  Certainly there are bureaucratic, political, and commercial forces pushing education in directions that suit their various non-educational agendas.  This happens in all spheres of life, and it is easy to spot and understand.  What bothers me is when intelligent and well-intentioned people confuse complexity with irrationality.  It is very difficult to correct this misperception.


Pseudoteaching

This brings me to a related concept called pseudoteaching.  This concept is defined by Frank Noschese in his blog Action-Reaction:

The key idea of pseudoteaching is that it looks like good teaching.  In class, students feel like they are learning, and any observer who saw a teacher in the middle of pseudoteaching would feel like he’s watching a great lesson.  The only problem is, very little learning is taking place.

What is so seductive about pseudoteaching is its legibility, not its effectiveness.  Everybody is happy: the teacher feels great, the students know exactly what is expected of them, any visitor to the classroom is suitably impressed.  What makes everyone happy is that no-one's misconceptions or misperceptions are being seriously challenged.  And that's also why so little learning is taking place.

Here we have a mutually-agreed-upon legibility, what Timothy Slater has called the Hidden Contract.  Inasmuch as we all agree that a classroom should look like this, and as long as the classroom in fact does look like this, then everyone is comforted by the apparent order (or apparent lack of chaos).

One of the guest pseudoteaching entries in Action-Reaction is Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos by Derek Muller.  He describes the phenomenon of student satisfaction with pseudoteaching this way:

Research has shown that these types of videos may be positively received by students.  They feel like they are learning and become more confident in their answers, but tests reveal they haven’t learned anything.

And what is meant by "not learning anything?"

Students have existing ideas about scientific phenomena before viewing a video.  If the video presents scientific concepts in a clear, well illustrated way, students believe they are learning but they do not engage with the media on a deep enough level to realize that what is presented differs from their prior knowledge.

(Read more about Muller's research here: What Puts the Pseudo in Pseudoteaching?)

Rationalizing Teaching

One way to "rationalize" teaching so it is more legible is to simplify the end result.  As Rao points out,

. . . a reality that serves many purposes presents itself as illegible to a vision informed by a singular purpose.  Any elements that are non-functional with respect to the singular purpose tend to confuse, and are therefore eliminated during the attempt to "rationalize."

If the end result of teaching is reduced to, say, students passing a certain test, then teaching itself can be rationalized and made quite efficient and effective.  The IQ test, for instance, was originally developed as an expedient military management tool.  It has become the very definition of intelligence in the minds of many, reducing a complex human trait to a single legible number.

There is a kind of learning called procedural learning.  Procedural learning is the first step toward acquiring a skill, and it usually involves practicing a procedure, recipe, or algorithm until it can be performed correctly and automatically.  It is a favorite goal for teaching because the path to successful learning is quite straightforward.  Procedures, even complex ones, are ultimately rational, and thus legible.  A classroom that is focused on procedural learning is also legible. 

There are those who would like to define education as being simply this: learning how to successfully execute a procedure.  I, for one, would prefer a definition that encompasses a great deal more.  As a physics teacher I value rational thinking, the interplay of perception and concept, creative problem-solving, and the exercise of judgement when executing procedures.  I also value observing, dreaming, and play.  Can any of these preferences of mine be successfully taught?  Should I even try?  When does the goal become so complex that it becomes illegible to me, and I fall into the traps of rationalizing or pseudoteaching?

Maybe I could define education as simply this: learning how to convert an illegibly complex experience into a legible one without falsely rationalizing it.

I've been wanting to add a WOWSlider slideshow to my blog. WOWSlider is a little application that creates many different kinds of very cool sliders. The application generates a collection of files:an engine folder which holds the CSS, JavaScript, and...

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I have an assignment to create a Networked Learning Space, and I have been thinking of how to set it up. There needs to be a hub of some sort at the core of this NLS, but which social tool would be best for my purposes? I have been checking out various LMS apps (Canvas, Edmodo) and existing network spaces (edWeb, Google+), but the answer has been in front of me all the time.

I don't have a Facebook account (I know, I know, it's a long story . . .), but my band does. The account is maintained by our musical director, and of course I visit it all the time, and send him things to post. It dawned on me that the band page is not like a regular Facebook page, so I did a bit of research and discovered that Facebook pages are quite different from Facebook profiles. I'll need a FB profile to create a page, but I can ignore that if I want and use the FB page for my NLS. Cool! Plus I'll be able to be another editor of my band's page, so I can help out.

Here's the link to my band's page - the Marching Milkman Band!

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