The Last Good Draft? Don’t Think of the Technologies….

Here’s what I have. I no longer know it if makes sense. I feel it sure as hell seems senseless w/o the pictures, but I don’t have the time to format and embed them. I’m also worried that the last bit is just redundant meandering and nonsense. To be honest, I’m not sure that any of it makes complete sense anymore and I never got to the point that I wanted to use about Chip Bruce’s explanation of a parallel to Halliday. I guess that has to be a separate note somewhere, cuz I’m not sure how to fit it in. What I meant to write was something like this:

Chip Bruce has suggested that as we think of the roles that technologies play in education, “there is a parallel to Michael Halliday’s (1978) formulation about the reasons for the centrality of language study in schools: We need to learn technology, to learn through technology, and to learn about technology.” I would argue instead that we should revisit M.A.K. Halliday’s model and consider how it can be expanded to include these wider notions of literacy.

And then I wanted to talk through the ways that technology already fits into the Halliday model, that no new formulation is needed. I think that’s a different focus though, so I dropped it. Sadly, I think it’s also the one thing I’d really like to talk about. Oh well. The draft and then to bed.

This all began on Cindy and Dickie Selfe’s porch in Houghton.There was
a copy of George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant lying
on the kitchen table, and because I was supposed to be writing something else
altogether, I picked up their book, went out to a comfy chair on the porch,
and started reading. Gracie gave me an evil look, doing her best to keep me on
track, but I found the book interesting and finished a chapter to two before
going back to what I was supposed to be writing. What I found most interesting
about the book was the way that the discussion of Democratic and Republican
values could be extended to the challenges that educators face in the classroom.

Lakoff uses the metaphor of the government as a parent, tracing the idea back
to the founding fathers, and describes how the values underlying political
positions amount to a parents’ attitude toward children, who by the extension
of the metaphor are the nation’s citizens.

Republicans follow a strict
father model, according to Lakoff. The government takes the role of the father,
knowing right from wrong, and making decisions that reward those who are self-reliant,
those "whose prosperity reveals
their discipline and hence their capacity for morality" (9). The citizens
in this model, metaphorically the children, “are born bad, in the sense
that they want to do what feels good, not what is right. Therefore, they have
to be made good" (7).

Democrats, on the other hand, follow a nurturant parent model, believing that "children
are born good and can be made better. The world can be made a better place,
and our job is to work on that. The parents’ job is to nurture their children
and to raise their children to be nurturers of others" (12).

Republicans, Lakoff explains, win voter support because they focus on a strong,
moral stance—on “family values”—from a position of
patriarchal authority. Democrats, on the other hand, focus on issues, rather
than on the underlying values. Lakoff explains in the book’s Preface:

If the Democrats are to win in the future, the party must present a clear
moral vision to the country—a moral vision common to all progressives.
It cannot present a laundry list of programs. It must present a moral alternative,
one more traditionally American, one that lies behind everything Americans
are proud of. (xvi)

It’s not that Republicans do not address the same issues that Democrats
do. It’s a question of framing, of how Republicans position the discussion
of those issues so that they fall in line with the traditional family values
while Democrats are more likely to talk about the issues independently.

Now what
does this have to do with education? Plenty, especially when you consider
that the strict father model has led to standardized testing and No
Child Left Behind legislation as a way to reward those who are hard-working
and self-reliant and punish those who do not achieve. Lakoff explains the conservative
perspective:

Teachers should be strict, not nurturant, in the example they set for students
and in the content they teach . . . . Uniform testing should test the level
of discipline. There are right and wrong answers, and they should be tested
for. Testing defines fairness: Those who pass are rewarded; those not disciplined
enough to pass are punished. (84)

This authoritarian model of education is at odds with nurturant strategies
such as whole language education and Freirean pedagogy. The focus on students
who are good and can be made better with support and encouragement comes across
as lenient and indulgent. The underlying values fail to rise to the surface,
and the moral vision of these nurturant strategies go unexpressed. The focus
falls on the various ways of teaching rather than on the pedagogical goals
of the teaching strategies.

Progressive educators who support these nurturant strategies must focus on
reframing, on foregrounding the underlying educational values, rather than
describing the various ways of teaching.

This same tension plays out in our educational work with digital technologies.
If we are to create sustainable environments, we must foreground the underlying
educational values supporting those environments rather than focus on the specific
strategies we employ in these various environments.

To see this strict father/nurturant parent metaphor in play, we need look
no further than the ways that our work is generally defined. There are many
ways that we identify what we teach in English language arts, composition,
and literature classrooms:

• media literacy
• visual literacy
• film literacy
• technology literacy
• multimodal literacy
• technological literacy
• game literacy
• out-of-school literacy
• adult literacy
• computer literacy
• emergent literacy
• multimedia literacy
• cultural literacy
• information literacy
• content area literacy
• early literacy
• adolescent literacy
• young adult literacy
• new literacy
• multiliteracies

And for us, the differences among these terms are meaningful and significant.
The challenge is that they are often meaningful and significant ONLY to us.
To the many people we encounter outside our discipline, these words and phrases
can be confusing. How well does the average family member understand the difference
between technological literacy, computer literacy, and multimodal literacy?
For that matter, would our colleagues who spend more time with literature be
able to explain such terms?

What we have here, friends, is a laundry list. The areas we teach end up broken
out in so many ways that the underlying values become hidden. General audiences
assume the most basic definitions, and the work that we really do is lost.

As an example, let’s focus on those literacy areas that have to do with
digital technology in some way. Cindy Selfe explains:

The prevailing cultural understanding of [technological literacy] as simple competence
with computers serves to misdirect the energy put into the national
project to expand technological literacy—limiting the effectiveness
of literacy instruction as it occurs within schools and homes in this country
and hindering efforts to formulate increasingly complex and robust accounts
of technological literacy.
(xx, Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century)

Though the political leadership has changed in the country since Selfe wrote
those words, the gap between the cultural understanding of technological literacy
and the more complex and robust understanding of technological literacy most
of us share persists; and as a result, there is still a lot of misdirected
energy expended in the pursuit of educational goals.

The reason for this misdirection is that the explicit nature of technological
literacy distracts from the underlying educational goals and values. When we
talk about digital technology in the classroom, too often what others hear
is a discussion of competence with those technologies rather than significant
literacy education.

Following the strict father model, students need to learn to read and write.
Their use of digital technologies should be limited to learning how to use
the tools available in the service of that goal. Focusing on game literacy
or film literacy simply diverts attention from the more significant educational
goals. Playing games, watching films—those things aren’t what’s
important from this perspective.

Most of us would argue that exploring game literacy or film literacy IS learning
to read and write. The problem is that the technologies hide what is going
on. Our challenge is to make the underlying educational values more obvious.
As Lakoff would say, we need to reframe the debate based on our values, not
on others’ conception of what we care about.

For most of us, what we value in our teaching is the ways that we encourage
students to expand their literacy by exploring the various digital technologies
available to them—a collection of resources that can include computers,
camcorders, audio recorders, handheld game systems, cell phones, and PDAs.

The general public, those folks who define technological literacy as simple
competence with computers, focuses on those digital technologies. They question
why, for example, students learn about the ways that video games work and never
think of the classroom exploration of the games’ complex narrative and
hypertextual structures.

What are we to do? How are we to reframe our work so that we get beyond simple
competence with computers? Don’t Think of the Technologies. We
have to focus on the literacy instruction, not on the technologies that we’re
using as part of the instruction. It’s contradictory in a way. To focus
on the ways that technological literacy goes beyond simple competence with
computers, we have to reframe the discussion to focus on literacy, rather than
technologies.

The NCTE/IRA site ReadWriteThink provides an example of the way this reframing
can be done. ReadWriteThink publishes lessons on a wide range of subject areas,
for the K-12 classrooms—from literature to composition, and from technical
writing to critical thinking. Each of the lessons on the site uses the same
basic structure: 

• an overview of the lesson activities
• the underlying NCTE/IRA standards
• the supporting pedagogical theory
• the estimated lesson time
• the required resources necessary for the lesson
• the instructional plan
• and suggested reflection and assessment activities

Additionally each includes an “Internet connection.” This Internet
connection is the highlight of the lesson plans in some ways. ReadWriteThink
is part of MarcoPolo, a nonprofit consortium of education organizations and
the Verizon Foundation, dedicated to providing the highest quality Internet
content and professional development to teachers and students.

All MarcoPolo resources, in accordance with the funding grants agreement,
include Internet-based resources. Typically the lessons use Web resources,
and partners are urged to include student “interactives” in as
many lessons as possible. For MarcoPolo, “interactives” are essentially
Flash or Shockwave tools that either present information, serve as online graphic
organizers, or produce print-based artifacts such as newspapers and brochures.

Despite this focus on Internet resources, the collection of over 500 lesson
plans on the ReadWriteThink site was designed to engage students in authentic
and meaningful language learning, with the Internet component included
in pedagogically appropriate ways. The site’s design is based on literacy
engagements, as defined by M. A. K. Halliday (1982). Literacy engagements simultaneously
involve:

• learning language
  (as students listen to language and use language with others in their everyday
  lives.)
• learning about language
  (as students try to figure out how language works, engage with their teachers
  in focused instruction on how language works or in critiquing its impact),
  and
• learning through language
  (as students use language to learn about or do something).

While all three literacy functions—learning language, learning about
language, and learning through language—operate in any literacy event
that makes sense to a learner, teachers, according to Kathy Short (1999), frequently
find it instructionally useful to highlight one or more of these functions
at a time (at least in their minds) so that they can consider which curriculum
experiences are most likely to engage learners in that specific literacy function.

Once teachers determine the experiences they want to highlight, they can sort
the lessons by the literacy engagements (in addition to grade level), to find
the resources the will address those language functions in the classroom. Digital
technology is included in each lesson, but the focus is on
the literacy engagements. In other words, the site strives to foreground the
educational value of strong literacy skills rather than listing the technologies
that students will explore as they work on the activities.

Literacy frames the site. This focus on literacy does not mean however that
the site ignores the ways that technologies shape our notions of literacy.
It is simply that the definitions of reading and writing are expanded to take
into account more complex and robust ways of reading and writing—and
students are asked to engage in this process of reframing what it means to
be literate.

Let me share three examples. Defining Literacy in a Digital World asks students
to create a working definition of literacy that they refine and explore as
they continue their investigation of the texts that they interact with at home,
at school, and in other settings. The lesson Star-Crossed Lovers Online: Romeo
and Juliet for a Digital
Age invites students to use their understanding of modern technologies to make
active meaning of an older text by creating their own modern interpretation
of specific events from the drama. Campaigning for Fair Use: Public Service Announcements
on Copyright Awareness asks students to explore a range of resources on fair
use and copyright then design their own audio public service announcements
to be broadcast over the school’s public address system or posted as
podcasts.

These three lessons engage students in standard literacy activities: persuasive
writing, research, literary analysis, and expository writing and analysis.
All three engage students in activities that focus on learning through language
and learning about language. Literacy frames the lessons. Yet at the same time,
students clearly engage in technological literacy activities. Focusing on literacy
does not mean that we forget about the technologies. We have simply reframed
the way that we address them.

This is the work that we must do to create sustainable educational environments.
We must foreground the underlying educational values—in our case, the
importance of literacy education and a literate community—rather than
focusing on the various strategies and technologies that we employ in pursuit
of those values.

In short: Don’t Think of the Technologies: Know your pedagogical values
and focus on the basic underlying literacy goals that frame your work.

Works Cited

Halliday, M. 1980. Three Aspects of Children’s Language Development: Learning
language, Learning through Language, Learning about Language. In Oral and
Written Language Development Research, Y. Goodman, M.H. Haussler, and D.
Strickland (Eds.), 7-19. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Short, K. 1999. The Search for "Balance" in a Literature-rich Curriculum.
In Theory into Practice, 38(3), 130-137.

CCCC 2006 Review: M20 Info-Ecology, Info-Architecture: Growing and Designing Rhetoric for Critical Technography

CCCC 2006 Review—Will Hochman’s review of the session that I keep referring back to has just become an incredible help to me. I’m stuck trying to figure out sustainability for this silly presentation and was googling around. Thank you, Will :)

Another Try (without the pictures, so it may not make sense)

This may seem stupid, but I’m putting it down nonetheless. It’s just the start. And it’s better with the pictures, but I’m not positive enough about what I’m doing to add them yet.

Don’t Think of the Technologies:
Know Your Values and Frame the Debate
This all began on Cindy and Dickie Selfe’s porch in Houghton. There was a copy of George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant lying on the kitchen table, and because I was supposed to be writing something else altogether, I picked up their book, went out to a comfy chair on the porch, and started reading.

Gracie did her best to keep me on track, but I found the book interesting and finished a chapter to two before going back to what I was supposed to be writing. What I found most interesting about the book was the way that the discussion of Democratic and Republican values could be extended to the challenges that educators face in the classroom.

Lakoff uses the metaphor of the government as a parent, tracing the idea back to the founding fathers, and describes how the values underlying political positions amount to a parents’ attitude toward children, who by the extension of the metaphor are children.

Republicans follow a strict father model, according to Lakoff. In this model, government takes the role of the father, knowing right from wrong, and making decisions that reward those who are self-reliant, those “whose prosperity reveals their discipline and hence their capacity for morality” (9). The citizens in this model, metaphorically the children, “are born bad, in the sense that they want to do what feels good, not what is right. Therefore, they have to be made good” (7).

Democrats, on the other hand, follow a nurturant parent model, believing that “children are born good and can be made better. The world can be made a better place, and our job is to work on that. The parents’ job is to nurture their children and to raise their children to be nurturers of others” (12).

Republicans, Lakoff explains, win voter support because they focus on a strong, moral stance–on “family values”–from a position of patriarchal authority. Democrats, on the other hand, focus on issues rather than the underlying values, according to Lakoff. He explains in the book’s Preface:

If the Democrats are to win in the future, the party must present a clear moral vision to the country–a moral vision common to all progressives. It cannot present a laundry list of programs. It must present a moral alternative, one more traditionally American, one that lies behind everything Americans are proud of. (xvi)

It’s not that Republicans do not address the same issues that Democrats do.
It’s a question of framing, of how Republicans frame the discussion of those issues so that it falls in line with the traditional family values that they project while Democrats are more likely to talk about the issues themselves independently.

Now what does this have to do with education? Plenty, especially when you consider that the strict father model has led to standardized testing and No Child Left Behind legislation as a way to reward those who are hard-working and self-reliant, and punish those who do not achieve. For those of us who work with digital technologies in the classroom, the issue surrounds the way that our work is generally defined, the ways that our work in education is framed.

There are many ways that we identify what we teach in English language arts, composition, and literature classrooms:

• media literacy
• visual literacy
• film literacy
• technology literacy
• multimodal literacy
• technological literacy
• game literacy [???]
• out-of-school literacy
• adult literacy
• computer literacy
• multimedia literacy
• cultural literacy
• information literacy
• adolescent literacy
• young adult literacy
• new literacy
• multiliteracies
• content area literacy [???]
• early literacy [???]
• emergent literacy [???]

And for us, the differences between these terms are meaningful and significant. The challenge is that they are often meaningful and significant ONLY to us. To the many people we encounter outside our discipline, these words can be confusing. How well does the average family member understand the difference between technological literacy, computer literacy, and multimodal literacy? For that matter, would our colleagues who spend more time with literature be able to explain such terms?

What we have here, friends, is a laundry list. The areas we teach end up broken out in so many ways that the underlying values become hidden and the meaning is lost. General audiences assume the most basic definitions, and the work that we really do is lost.

As an example, let’s focus the list on those literacy areas that have to do with digital technology in some way. Cindy Selfe explains:

The prevailing cultural understanding of [technological literacy] as simple competence with computers serves to misdirect the energy put into the national project to expand technological literacy–limiting the effectiveness of literacy instruction as it occurs within schools and homes in this country and hindering efforts to formulate increasingly complex and robust accounts of technological literacy.
(xx, Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century)

The reason for this misdirection of energy, if we apply Lakoff’s explanation of the ways that values frame the ways that people interpret what they encounter, is that the explicit nature of technological literacy (or whichever term you prefer) distracts from the underlying educational goals.

As Lakoff might say, we need to know our own values and reframe the debate based on those values, not on others’ conception of what we do. For most of us, what we value in our teaching is the ways that we encourage students to expand their literacy abilities by exploring the various digital technologies available to them–a collection of resources that can include computers, camcorders, audio recorders, handheld game systems, cell phones, and PDAs.

or something like that…

This stupid presentation

Regardless of whether I end up in Lubbock, and more on those roadblocks later, I have to come up with this presentation for the session; but the damned thing is making me crazy. I can’t figure out what the hell I’m trying to say. Maybe I’m in that stupid place that we all end up in when we have a title/abstract that made sense months ago but now doesn’t make sense anymore.

So where am I? This is the abstract:

“Don’t Think of the Technologies: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate” George Lakoff in Don’t Think of an Elephant, suggests that we need to know our own values and reframe debates based on those values, not on others’ conception of what we do. This presentation describes the values embedded within NCTE’s successful and popular ReadWriteThink website and the practices that grow out of such values. ReadWriteThink is based on the premise that sustainable digital environments must focus not on the technologies themselves, but on the literacies and pedagogies they support. Accordingly, when people ask how to use software to teach, they are in turn asked how they already teach–or aspire to teach. The advice they receive then emphasizes how technologies can support their current or future practice.

Okay, I can use the "Don’t Think of the Technologies" part of the title; that
really is the point. We have to focus on the literacy instruction, not the technologies
that we’re using as part of the instruction. Sure "the medium is the message,"
but we need to foreground on the message part. And naturally we talk about
how the medium shapes the message and vice-versa. But if asked what we teach,
we focus on the message, the communication, rather than the medium, whatever
it may be—it’s always some technology.

So right, I can deal with the pre-colonic. The post-colonic though. Sigh. Okay,
"Know Your Values" works too. Our values lead us to focus on the literacy
interaction, the message. Moreover, they focus our attention on whether and how
the technologies fit the literacy interaction in question. Our values are what
ends up focusing our efforts on the discrepancies among definitions of technology
in education. As dear Cindy explained:

The prevailing cultural understanding of [technological literacy] as simple competence
with computers serves to misdirect the energy put into the national
project to expand technological literacy—limiting the effectiveness
of literacy instruction as it occurs within schools and homes in this country
and hindering efforts to formulate increasingly complex and robust accounts
of technological literacy. (xx, Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First
Century)

Not only do we consider how these differences affect our teaching,but we
also ask students to pay attention to how these definitions shape their
interactions with the world around them. It’s oppositional in a way—to
focus on the ways that technology in education goes beyond simple "competence
with computers" we are better off focusing on the educational goals and
allowing the technology part of the equation to slip into place naturally.
It can be simpler to expand technological literacy by taking the focus
off the technology and attending to the literacy. That all feels okay to
me. I can come up with something that relates to that part of the title.

Where I run into the biggest trouble is the "Frame the Debate" part of
the title. What debate was I imagining that anyone needed to frame? To
be honest, I can’t tell you. I’m not sure who exactly it is that I’m debating.
I guess the debate is over how we talk about technology in education; but
who am I trying to convince of that position? Darned if I know. Maybe the
point is that it’s not a debate for us so much as the conversation. If
the "prevailing cultural understanding of [technological literacy] as simple competence
with computers"—and I believe that it still is—then we
need to talk about technologies in education in ways that focus on the
cultural values that are in line with our own values. When we talk about
digital technology in the English language arts, composition, or literature
classroom, too often what others here is a discussion of competence with
those technologies rather than significant literacy education. There are many
ways that we talk about and identify what we teach:

• orality [but I think this one can’t be included if it’s to make sense?
  hmm… I dunno]
• media literacy
• visual literacy
• film literacy
• technology literacy
• multimodal literacy
• technological literacy
• game literacy [???]
• out-of-school literacy
• adult literacy
• computer literacy
• multimedia literacy
• cultural literacy
• information literacy
• adolescent literacy
• young adult literacy
• new literacy
• multiliteracies
• content area literacy [???]
• early literacy [???]
• emergent literacy [???]
• aural literacy [???]

And for us, the differences between these terms are meaningful and significant.
The challenge is that they are often meaningful and significant ONLY to
us. To the many people we encounter outside our discipline, these words
can be confusing. How well does the average family member understand the
difference between technological literacy, computer literacy, and multimodal
literacy? For that matter, would our colleagues who spend more time with
literature be able to explain such terms?

I guess this is all the "debate"—how we talk about our work
to the general public.

I guess my argument is that we have to focus on literacy, and expanding the
definition of literacy itself, rather than sub-dividing literacy and
adding descriptors that tap so many differing areas, we should focus on unifying
and expanding. I think. I dunno.

Hell, all that to just get through the title. So the abstract itself then.
You know I never write this way. Why the hell am I having to think things
through this way now? This is totally silly. But the abstract.

George Lakoff
in Don’t Think of an Elephant, suggests that we need to know our own values
and reframe debates based on those values, not on others’ conception
of what we do.

Surely I’ve dealt with that sentence. Next part.

This presentation describes the values embedded within NCTE’s
successful and popular ReadWriteThink website and the practices that grow
out of such values. ReadWriteThink is based on the premise that sustainable
digital environments must focus not on the technologies themselves, but on
the literacies and pedagogies they support.

Hmm. I should be able to do that part in my sleep. But the part that is problematic
for me is the "sustainable digital environments" piece. Well, the
word sustainable in particular. I don’t have a handy argument for the
reason that focusing on literacy leads to sustainability. Maybe the argument
is simply that technology in education has to go beyond simple competence
with computers. Whether we are talking to colleagues, students, families, administrators,
or the general public, the focus must be on the education that takes place
in the spaces rather than on the technologies in those spaces. It just feels
like such a wishy-washy argument. I need to read up on sustainability, but I
really don’t have much time left. Hell. I’ll come back to this, but let’s
get through the abstract. Next part…

Accordingly, when people ask
how to use software to teach, they are in turn asked how they already teach—or
aspire to teach. The advice they receive then emphasizes how technologies
can support their current or future practice.

Now I know what I said that part originally, and it sounds good, which is how
it got into the collaborative version of the abstract. I’m not totally sure
how it connects to ReadWriteThink however. It came from my rambling about
when I was at Daedalus. When teachers using the software (or thinking about
using the software) wanted to talk about how to use it in the classroom,
I always turned the conversation back to what they were already doing. Tell
me what you’re already teaching, tell me what you value pedagogically, and
I’ll tell you how to tap digital technologies. Don’t start with the technology.
Start with the pedagogical goals. But how do I connect any of that to ReadWriteThink?
No one is asking me how to do any of this for ReadWriteThink. Maybe I have
to pretend or conjecture here. I wish I could make those two sentences go
away.

I’m not sure where any of this leaves me. A lot of rambling and I still don’t
know completely what I am doing. Damn it all anyway. Maybe if I publish this
and reread, I’ll be able to figure it out. Or maybe I"ll skip the rereading
and go deal with the laundry instead. There’s just too much to do if I’m
to get in the car anytime soon. Bleh.

NCTE Web Revisions

This afternoon I’m in the second meeting on the Web revision, based on suggestions from MSU’s WIDE Research Center. So far we’re focusing primarily on getting terms defined and group roles determined. Our job for the next meeting is to go look at our areas of the Web site and come back with details on the user and action roles that people comes to the site with.

One of the things that bugs me about all of the sites that we have looked at as examples is the choice to use a lot of real estate at the top of the page for logos. I just don’t get it. Yes, you want to identify the organization, but is it worth giving up such a huge piece of the page? I don’t think so, especially for those folks working with lower resolutions. Between the tabs and menubars I have in Firefox, some of these pages end up giving at least a third of what I can see away to a big area of color with a logo. Examples: MSU, AMA, CCCC. There are ways to include the logo, still be clean and elegant, and not give up so much space.

The most interesting thing to those folks who might visit the NCTE site is the discussion of adopting folksonomy for all of the resources on the site as well as the ability to comment on anything that appears on the site. There’s also a goal of having remote publishers who add news and such for the site, and whose writing will go through a filter before being published. Of course, that brings up the issue of quality control for folks on staff. It’s going to be a awkward issue to work out, though it can easily be solved by demarcating visually and textually the difference between official statements and material and the shared materials posted by the general site visitors. Also discussing personalized pages, the long-discussed myNCTE pages which we have been talking about for years. Eric Crump and I discussed such things what feels like decades ago.

The hardest thing for folks to grasp seems to be the issue of action-based and role-based ways of using the site. It’s just differentiated browsing. Just as we provide different ways to learning in the classroom, we have to allow different ways to get to the same information online.

Consistency is an issue for me as well. We’re talking about designing whatever we need for action/role-based navigation, but so much is already set by the CCCC site. It’s said that CCCC is different, but it’s a real mistake to switch around branding and navigation on various parts of the same site.

Does Home Internet Access Improve Academic Achievement? | PBS

TeacherSource | learning.now . Does Home Internet Access Improve Academic Achievement? | PBS:

“Researchers noted that for the first six months of the study, Internet access appeared to have no effect on GPA. However, “Internet usage did predict GPA obtained after one year of home access.” This pattern continued through the end of the study, the researchers observing a correlation between home Internet access and higher grade points. They also correlated home access with higher standardized test scores in reading: “More time online was associated with higher reading comprehension and total reading scores.” They attributed these results to the text-heavy nature of Internet”

More likely to have a mobile, use the net, listen to radio and read papers: it’s the girl

Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | More likely to have a mobile, use the net, listen to radio and read papers: it’s the girl: “girls aged 12 to 15 are more likely than boys to have a mobile phone, use the internet, listen to the radio and read newspapers or magazines. Only when it comes to playing computer and console games do boys overtake girls.”

Columnists – StatesmanJournal.com

Columnists – StatesmanJournal.com—some interesting assumptions of the decisions that are being made and the reasons for those decisions (all w/o any info to back them up).

News from Reading Today Daily : PBS blog will examine how technology is changing education

News from Reading Today Daily : PBS blog will examine how technology is changing education:

“The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) yesterday unveiled a new blog called learning.now, which will address how new technology and Internet culture are significantly affecting the ways educators teach and children learn. Host Andy Carvin describes the new blog as being “at the crossroads of Internet culture and education.” Visit the new blog at http://www.pbs.org/learningnow.”