In Jenkins' article "Confronting the Challenge of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century" he outlines three issues that educators will need to deal with when it comes to technology: The Participation Gap, Transparency Problems, and Ethics issues. The ethics issues should be the focus when it comes to technology and its use in the classroom. Ethical ideas about plagiarism and audience (which is a major problem with teens when it comes to blogging or Myspace) should be reinforced in classrooms to all students, whether or not they are avid internet users. These ideas need to be taught in classrooms because they apply to all facets of life, but especially to those who are participating in online blogs, chatrooms or Myspace-type pages because students often don't consider audience when they are online.

An example is a young acquaintance of mine whose Myspace page is accessible to everyone, and who writes a daily blog chronicling her exploits. She is barely over twenty-one years old and was not taught that an online audience can be much larger than she could possibly imagine. She spends a great deal of time blogging about her "idiot boss" at work and the fact that she hates her job. She uses profanity. She has a unique last name. She's looking for another job. According to NPR, Human Resources personel look at resumes first. The second step is to Google the name of the person who is looking for employment. My young acquaintance's name comes up fourth on the list when her name is entered into Google, and any prospective employee is able to look on her site to view her drunken pictures, read about her terrible job and awful boss, and to make their first (and probably last) impression of her. I warned her to set her account to private and I hope she has. But, when I mentioned that her audience was much bigger than she had imagined, she seemed unfazed. It's difficult to teach what can only be imagined. But, it must be attempted. Kids should learn that their online audience may not simply be the cute boy who comes into the Dairy Queen for the Oreo blizzard on Thursdays. They should know that they could be telling their life-stories to the "butterschocth dairy-bar guy" with the mustache who drives the windowless white van. Teaching ethics and audience in general is a good idea.

Now to my argument about participation. I agree that there is a gap between the haves and have-nots and that it needs to be addressed. I agree that technology needs to be accessible. I agree that teachers should teach the media literacy, and help kids explore the nuances of online media, and that there is just as much disinformation on the web as their is information. I DISAGREE that teachers should teach the use of technology. We can't. I have a ten-year old friend who tutored me through my college technology class and earned us both a good grade. We can't expect to teach kids what they could teach to us. We have to teach them HOW to use their knowledge and power safely and responsibly. I DISAGREE with THIS statement: "What a person can accomplish with an outdated machine in a public library with mandatory filtering software and no opportunity for storage or transmission pales in comparison to what a person can accomplish with a home computer with unfettered Internet access, high bandwidth, and continuous connectivity. (Current legislation to block access to social networking software in schools and public libraries will further widen the participation gap.)"

Here's my beef with this. "You can't lead a kid to an internet with unfettered access and expect him or her not to spend hours on end staring at unrated video of 50 cent pouring chocolate sauce on his naked friend in a bathtub" (true story from our teaching practicum. One of many occasions when an internet filter would have been helpful). Don't get me wrong. I love my computer. I think every lower-class kid should get one of these if their parents are on welfare, so they can use it to take over the world from those who have inherited it. But, I think that unfettered access is irresponsible. I don't think having a Myspace account or twenty-four hour access to internet porn is beneficial to any student. And I don't believe that the rich kids with laptops are spending all their computer time playing algebra games or Sim-City. I think it's alright to block social networking software at school and libraries. I don't think that they make people smarter or raise their social capital. I believe the opposite.

So, I propose that every underpriveleged child should receive a Macbook with a wireless card, Comic Life, Imovie, itunes, iphoto, ichat, and all of the Microsoft Word and Powerpoint programs attached. I also propose twenty-four hour access to sites that will educate, entertain, and enhance social capital. I think students should have email accounts. I think that all computers should come with blocks on social networking sites and blogs until students have written a fifteen page research paper that they can send to Big Brother, explaining the nuances and difficulties of online communication. I think that Big Brother should be dressed in traditional Scotish garb, so as not to look scary or imposing. I think that my logic here is faulty, but I also think that Jenkins lives with Lando Calrissean among the clouds. Access and a prayer will not keep Darth Vader out of your kids' social network. The Empire will find your kids' Cloud City, regardless of how remote their little MySpace mining colonies are. The key is to teach our students how to use the Force that lives in all of them to resist the powers of the dark side. We shouldn't give them a Jedi's lightsaber until they have learned to construct their own weapons. Only then will we know that their training is complete.

Here's a few links for you...

http://www.starwars.com/databank/location/cloudcity/

This one could come in handy if your students are ever looking around for extended metaphors.

http://www.medialit.org/reading_room/article211.html

This one is especially interesting and helpful when you're looking for ways to understand and teach media literacy.

Word up dawgs. I ain't had no grammar instruction for fourteen years, and I gots to be honest, I ain't even know what subjunctive means. But that don't matter. Seriously. It doesn't.

Williams made some sense this week. He wrote, "grammar and usage instruction should give students tools for discovering language in all its varieties. It should not be the basis for busywork and mindless drills." Fortunately, it seems that the busy-drillwork he refers to has largely disappeared, but I remember it well. It was diagrams and terms, and it was reminiscent of large drops of water repeatedly hitting me in the same spot on my forehead for hours on end. (I was never the recipient of water torture, I just remember imagining what it would be like, and in my imagination, it sucked.)

Williams also wrote something funny. "Students usually get excited about grammar and usage when they have opportunities to apply their knowledge." Hilarious. I'd love to see what he thinks excitement looks like. I'd also love to meet these excited youngsters, pirate some of their DNA, and clone them so I can teach grammar to "excited" kids, instead of actual kids. Who needs actual anyway?

Dean made alot of sense and, in effect, summed up how everyone actually learns grammar and usage conventions. We read it. We read it again. Then we copy it. Sometimes we may practice certain conventions that aren't grammatically correct and I think that's alright. Her approach was useful, because it looked into HOW authors used language to make their points. It didn't focus at all on what labels linguists would put on certain types of sentences. That would only serve to make writing confusing and would ultimately bore kids away from language and writing as something that's "too hard." Teaching terms (or acronyms) is pointless. It's a useless exercise in tedium. Teaching effective writing using example and discussion is quite useful. I've forgotten the names of many of the conventions and rules that I was taught in grammar school, (I'm feeling older than my generation X status using the word grammar school) but I still manage to follow many of them while I'm writing (although, I've been told by professors to limit my use of italics, and I in turn ignore their advice; after all, what do they know really?). Sometimes, as is apparent in my previous sentence, I don't follow the rules and regulations, and I do this by choice. But, I certainly don't know the grammatical or usage terms that sum up what I'm doing in my writing. And, I don't care to know them. And neither do the kids who we're teaching.

MY LINK
http://www.funbrain.com/grammar/index.html

Grammar games with basics for younger kids (5-8) or for kids who just don't know anything about nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. I played twice and I got perfect scores. I wish the Praxis was more like Grammar Gorillas.

Spandel, Williams, and a duck go into a drugstore. Spandel is looking for Tylenol, because Williams's list of things that writing instructors should and should not do when grading and commenting on students' papers is extremely overwhelming to her. Williams is carrying a duck under his arm. Williams takes the duck up to the counter and Williams says to the druggist, while pointing at the duck, "Give me a Chapstick. Put it on his bill."
But I digress.

Williams has some points that are well stated. Examples...

Comment in pencil. When people write in pen on my writing it ruins it. If it was bad before, your inky scribblings just made it worse. Congratulations.

Make comments brief. If you don't you'll spend an extra forty hours a week grading five paragraph essays about endangered otters.

Put the students' papers in stacks. Bad, better, best. Then, for fun, put giant eggshells over them, switch them around and see if you can remember which stack is which.

I think that Williams and Spandel are a bit at odds because Williams wants you to carefully adhere to 6=A, 5=B, etc... while Spandel believes that the only positive that comes from assessing students is assessment that is focused on helping, not ranking. I think the Federal government might have something to say about that Vicki.

And finally, about digressions. Coincidentally, I just wrote a bit in my latest bit of fiction writing, where the 13 year old narrator has something to say about digressions, so I'm putting the appropriate excerpt onto my blog page, to illustrate that, well... I digress. Here's the excerpt.

Sometimes it’s hard to get to the point of things, especially when it’s a story, and stories have a way of getting tied up with other stories. But, it’s important to tell about the SCUBA diving, because SCUBA diving was what started everything. At least I think it’s what started everything.
By the way, SCUBA is an acronym, which is another word for a new word that is a substitute for a whole bunch of bigger words. The point of acronyms is to make it easy to say something faster so everybody knows what it is. What I mean is, it’s much easier to say SCUBA, than it is to say Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, which is basically what SCUBA means. Look closely…

Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus.

The first letter of each word makes the word SCUBA. There’s a bunch of other acronyms out there, but I think that sometimes people use acronyms just to make themselves seem smarter than everyone else. Like my mom. You can tell that she thinks she’s something special when she talks about Jerry and uses a bunch of letters like ADHD and ADD and EBD. And, she never tells me what the letters mean, so obviously these acronyms aren’t nearly as good as SCUBA. I mean, everyone knows what SCUBA is. Nobody but my mom and her shrink friends at the Center know what all those other letters mean. I don’t say too much about it though. She likes saying them.
See. I just told another story that has nothing to do with the story I’m trying to tell. But, if I didn’t tell it, then the story that I’m trying to tell wouldn’t be complete. Sometimes, there needs to be a bunch of little stories inside of a bigger story for the bigger story to be interesting.


That's all folks. Here are my weblinks for the week.

This first one is all about the place where I got dinner tonight. If you're vegetarian ignore this link. If you're a true honest to god carnivore. Check out Ted Cook's. Here's the history. Best bbq ever!!!!!!!
http://citypages.com/databank/18/888/article3865.asp

Now, back to English.

Looking for authentic audiences to help inspire authentic writing? Want to expand James Williams's legacy? This site has a bunch of links for magazines, lit journals and websites that accept and publish kids' submissions.

http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/basic/yngwrite.html

Alright, after spending last week talking about voice, and thinking about voice, and helping to teach a mini-lesson about voice and reading Spandel's "The Right to Find Your Own Voice", and reading about how voice is, "Like a river rising from the earth, voice carves a path through the thickest underbrush of verbiage, shaping the landscape around it, and retreating only when the source--the self--runs dry" (Spandel 128), I've come to a conclusion about my own voice that is unsettling. I've heard a few people say this about my writing and my speaking voice in general, but I've always written it off a bit as "just a passing impression." But, I'm realizing that the impression may be true to some extent.

My voice often reflects who I am, although I don't always want to admit that I'm a bit of an ornery weisenheimer.

So, with that said, I'm going to attempt to write about Harper's article and her toolbox metaphor without being my usual ascerbic, sarcastic, contumelious self (see I can't help but be me. I'm being sarcastic about being sarcastic by using as many synonyms for sarcastic as I can fit into this entry. Thanks a million Roget.)

I liked her article. I particluarly liked the questions and the way that she engaged the kids with how to use questions by putting herself out there. She has a real point about the fact that we rarely teach revision. I was the kid who Barron referred to as a "self-assured writer." I resented advice. Even if it was good. Only recently have I been able to take advice to revise. I always thought I knew the difference between useful and unproductive advice, but for some reason almost every revision that I saw, I saw as "useless." This was probably due to my insecurities, but it most likely came from the wording in the advice as well. I still have trouble accepting advice if it begins "Doesn't work" or "needs work, do this or that". I should know that they aren't giving me a command, but since it's worded that way, it's hard to see it as constructive advice. It'sgood for me to see advice that started with "Maybe" or "Perhaps." But, no one ever taught us to give criticism in that way. I still have trouble. When I read something that I really like and want to offer ideas, corrections, or suggestions, I tend to get over-excited and write, "Do this, then this, then that, then the other, etc..." And I don't mean it to be a command by any means, but I still write it that way. I'm too interested in their writing to think much about how I word my advice. That's something that I know I should work on. Tact.

Oh, yeah... And cutting down on my overuse of salty witticisms.

In keeping with the spirit of this little ditty, I'd like to offer one of my favorite websites, which is among my most used bookmarks and an extremely valuable resource. You'll probably think, "Joe buddy, I could have found this on my own" to which I respond. "Yeah. Probably."

Anyway here it is. http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/sarcastic

I forgot to post my link. I'm having trouble finding good internet sites this week, particularly when it comes to the infamous FPT. So I'm posting what I believe to be an awful website and the first one that pops up on Google and which all of our students will most likely refer to when trying to write in this form. It shows how the internet can post recipes for success that will end up producing wilted Brussel Sprouts. ENJOY!

http://712educators.about.com/library/howto/ht5essay.htm

What a piece of work is man? That's what I find myself asking myself after reading the three-hundred plus pages of how "to teach or not to teach..." What was the question again?

Oh yes... Let's "see the FPT for what it is: a helpful but contrived exercise useful in developing solid principles of composition" (Nunnally 71). Come on FPT!!! Are you gonna take this disrespect lying down? Stand up for yourself!! (Is it just me, or is it time to collect all of the PHD-type educational research people, who invent clever little acronyms like ZPD or FPT, together into a high-school classroom so they can be pelted with spitballs?) Come on Five Paragraph Essay, fight back against these left-wing, high-minded poetry-loving types! Tell them to go take a hike with their acoustic guitars so they can play Grateful Dead songs for each other. After all, you are the essay that got all of those upper-class white kids into Harvard and Yale!!! If you're not going to stand up for yourself, well, you should at least let Tracy Novick stick up for you!

And stick up for you she did! With no less than a somewhat persuasive, stick to the formula FPT (sorry acronym -haters, but I'm making a subtle sarcastic point to get you ROTFL, or at least giggling a little). Tracy's FPT is no ordinary FPT either. This one compares thee to a Shakespeare sonnet. That's pretty high praise. Tracy's point is that it's a good thing that Shakespeare had a rigid form like the sonnet to strictly adhere to, because it's the structure itself that allowed old Will I AM to "...make a point more deeply." She goes on to say that "the themes and emotions could only be delivered quite that way in a sonnet" (Novick). She's probably right. I bet Shakespeare would have ended up writing television scripts if he were alive today, because all of the form-haters gave up on the five-act play so they could invent the Sit-com. Poor Will would be reduced to sitting in a room with Dick Wolf ripping stories from the headlines for the 26th season of Law & Order.

I'm going to stop here and get serious for a minute. I don't care if you like or dislike the FPT. But, I do care that it's abbreviated. Abbreviation, jargon, and lingo is a ridiculous way to make yourself and your colleagues feel superior. Rocket scientists don't use it. A black hole is a black hole and a sun spot is a sun spot (I stole this from the Astro-Physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who visited the Daily Show last week). If rocket scientists don't feel the need to re-name the wheel, then why in the name of all that may or may not be holy, do educational psychologists feel like they have to invent their own jargon? Is time being saved by using FPT instead of Five Paragraph Theme? No. All that's happening is the guy who abbreviated the three words into a clever acronym gets to feel special when he happens to overhear a TA at the campus watering-hole talking about having to read 150 crappy FPTs by Thursday to return to their Freshman comp students.

Finally, for my fifth paragraph, I'd like to sum up by saying this. Some people like the FPT. Some people don't like it. It can be useful, and it can be a recipe for ineffective writing. Tom Romano is too busy reading confessional poems to even bother with it, and Shakespeare would most likely be the lead writer for The Simpsons or The Family Guy or Law & Order were he alive today. And, in his spare time, he'd write free verse.

First of all, this link is to part of the Annenburg Website and provides a bunch of great stuff for middle school teachers

http://www.learner.org/channel/workshops/middlewriting/prog1.html

It's got mp3s from Linda Reif and workshops about writing poetry, creating community, and multi-genre writers. There's a great deal of useful material on this page so check it out, especially if you're one of those brave souls who plans to spend many years in the company of pre-teens.

Now to the reading. Does anyone remember that show "American Gladiators" where a bunch of regular people would compete in such events as "The Human Hampster Wheel" and "The Obstacle Course?" Anyway, the best event was "The Joust." In it, the two contestants stood on top of a platform, high in the air and they were each armed with what appeared to be a giant Q-Tip. Then they'd swing the Q-tips at each other's heads until one of them fell down into the blue padding far below.

I think that James Williams and Tom Romano should participate in this event. But, in my conceptualization of it, there would be a bunch of middle-school students surrounding the mats at the bottom of the pedestals, and each student would be standing by, ready to tell their life stories. Either way, Romano can't lose. If he knocks Williams off the pedestal, Tom can stand far above and laugh as the elitist and pretentious Williams is bombarded with student Autobiography (which apparently is the bain of his existence since students do not "...have interesting stories to tell; typically... because they have not lived long enough" (Williams, 284). If James knocks Tom Romano into the pit of teenagers... well Tom would probably smile, give them all high-fives and then show them all kinds of interesting ways in which to tell their stories. Either way, Tom wins. The losers, unfortunately, would be the kids who are dismissed and disrespected by Professor Williams and his "my way or the highway" elitism.

Williams claims that "good assignments state the task in rhetorical terms; they ask students to report or describe or narrate or analyze or interpret or evaluate. In addition they rarely include more than one rhetorical task." I would like to thank whatever Higher Power that may or may not exist for somehow keeping me out of Mr. Williams's writing class (Oh, wait, he NEVER TAUGHT), for had I been in it, I probably would have had to give up writing altogether and become a Rocket Scientist (a vocation that I have no aptitude for). I may not have been a very good rocket scientist, but at least I wouldn't be forced into being a boring writer who is equipped only to perform one rhetorical task at a time. When I'm reading Williams I find myself asking myself, "Is this guy is serious?"

This book should be titled "How to Disengage and Bore Students Enough so that the Uninteresting Talent-Free Little Twits Won't Bother Trying to Express Themselves (as They Have Nothing Interesting to Say in the First Place, (since, after all, they're kids, not real people)). If there is one thing that Williams book has plenty of, that would be a strong voice. Strong meaning Irritating.

Romano on the other hand is refreshing. Not only does it present alternative ways to engage kids in writing, it also made me a better writer by reinforcing how certain genres or styles work. One example is his explanation about how to better convey dialogue. He also adds many examples of student work, and acknowledges difficulties that arise when assigning multi-genre papers. He also is careful not to discount all other types of writing, like expository writing. He just thinks that it could be much more interesting if accompanied by a poem.

One thing is certain. I would like to Take Tom Romano out for a beer, right after he knocks old James Williams off of his pedestal with a giant Q-Tip.

http://teacher.scholastic.com/writewit/poetry/karla_home.htm

This site is pretty interesting because it provides an authentic audience and a way for kids to write for an audience. The reason I dig it is because it's mainly a poetry site. Williams addresses that writing needs to "do something otherwise it is an empty exercise." The problem with poetry is that kids often ask the question, "What's the point?" and there's no easy answer to that question. When I was asked in a creative writing class, "What is poetry?" my response was "A profound waste of time." My professor (a great one) said "Exactly. Television is a waste of time, poetry is a PROFOUND waste of time." I didn't mean it that way, but after discovering some great poets and engaging in the writing of poetry, I began to change my attitude. This site offers prompts, brainstorming ideas, instructions on where to go and how to revise after you've started, and a way for kids to publish and share their writing with students in the same, or different grade levels. This site can offer a community and help to inspire poems that do something.

Williams talks about writing as a social action and dismisses any arguments about the merits of workshops in teaching composition. I agree with this idea and find that the best writing and most interesting writing comes from a collaborative place. The difficulty, and he does acknowledge it, is in creating an environment that is ideal and supportive.

My personal experience with collaborative writing has been positive. I've watched people do it while I was a stage manager in New York City, specifically while working with students who were graduates of NYU's Experimental Theatre Department, and the process and results were amazing. I've found that my own writing and ability to generate ideas has been much improved when I included others in the process. For example, I wrote a children's novel and I wrote it while a 9 year old sat next to me and did the illustrations. We brainstormed and then I wrote while she drew. I'd write five to ten pages, using her artwork to help inspire what I was writing, and then I'd stop and read it to her. She'd tell me what she liked, what was funny, what wasn't, and she would add ideas. We did this twice a week for about three months and without thinking about it, we went through every stage of composition; from invention, planning, drafting & pausing through reading, revising and editing. The order always varied, but we hit each one. The publishing part happened on a small scale and hopefully the larger scale will come someday. When I write for classes, my wife is involved in editing and revising (lucky I married a teacher and former editor and proofreader). These collaborative experiences have been wonderful.

Not so great are my experiences in English classes. Ironically, they weren't too bad on the few occasions where we wrote in workshops in High School. I'm from a small town and I knew all my classmates because we were together for years. It was easier to critique and provide help in revising, mainly because we often chose who we worked with, and we knew that our grades were on the final product. The problems with these workshops is that none of us were very good when it came to the final editing process and we would normally say "Great" even when we knew that the writing wasn't so great. We didn't know why it wasn't good, so the easiest and most socially cognizant statement to make was, "Really good!"

College was the opposite. It was people ripping your paper apart, tearing up ideas and generally trying to prove that they were writing experts. This usually happened through veiled personal attacks about anything and everything. The reason that college workshops were so ridiculous and unconstructive is that they were poorly organized, and there was no common goal. On every occasion where I was forced to give my drafts to peers while in college, I left the classroom and threw all of the papers with my classmates' comments on them into the recycle bin. Had I taken their advice or let them influence my work, I would not have written good papers. I think this is because they had no stake other than to try to prove to me that they're smarter than I am. They generally weren't that much smarter than me.

My main point here is that workshops can be fantastic but the dynamic in the groups needs to be positive and that can't happen just because the teacher says, "Make the comments and critiques positive," or with controlled grouping. In every instance where writing workshop has been positive and helpful personally, I've been able to choose who I work with. Choice is key. Whether I choose an expert editor like my wife, or a kid who likes a good story, the choice of who is involved in my writing is the major factor that helps me to become a better writer.