Motivation and online discussion forums

A lot of teachers have their students use online discussions in their classes. Whether you use a closed blog that's only for members of your class or whether you have a more open structure where your students communicate with students around the world, you've probably come across motivation issues.

Pages & Bits by me

One thing I noticed a while back is that when my students received a lot of unsolicited feedback from students at other schools, they were initially excited with the sheer volume of responses. I would overhear conversations like this:

Student 1: "I got 12 comments on my post."
Student 2: "I got 15"
Student 3: "I heard Larry got 22."

These comparisons would go on until the students started reading the comments. Once they critically examined the comments they received, the conversation then focused on the quality of those comments. I recently published a study in the Journal of Educational Computing Research that examines the relationship between motivation and the quantity and quality of comments my high school students received on their Youth Voices discussions. I looked at motivation through the lens of Self-Determination Theory, specifically how comments affected students' sense of relatedness, perceived competence, interest, and value.

I found that while the quantity of comments received was related to two motivational factors, the quality of the comments was related to all four motivational comments. As a teacher what I've learned in practice and through this research study is that I think it's best when my own students comment at least twice as often as the actual posts they write. And more importantly, I've learned that teachers need to be clear in their conversations with students about what makes good comments. Some traits my students mentioned most frequently: the commenter took the time to understood the writer's perspective, the commenter took the writing seriously and was viewed as competent, the comment addressed specific aspects of the post, and the comment extended/added to/challenged the writer's thinking.

Live for you

An audio essay and song about a key to happiness. Been meaning to mix them together for a while now.

Reading and writing the web

Annotation 

For the past year I've been doing a bit of writing around tools that facilitate reading and writing on the web. In an article I wrote for the International Literacy Association, Annotating Online, I do some reviews of applications like Citelighter, Diigo, Crocodoc, and Mendeley. They all have their strengths for helping students write and collaborate while they conduct research

Another article I wrote for the ILA, Online Peer Reviews Improve Literacy Instruction, is about how I use Eli Review in my classes. In the article I also cite decades of research that have found that peer review not only helps writers improve, but even the act of peer review helps students improve as writers.

Ferguson in the classroom – today and beyond

A former student of mine, now in education herself, posed this question on Facebook: "Teacher friends, tomorrow is the day before a vacation [Thanksgiving]. How are you addressing the [Ferguson] grand jury announcement."

Still from Carlos' upcoming video

My response is longer than seemed appropriate for a Facebook comment box, so here goes...

First of all, I'll reframe the question: how have I been and how will I address the issues around Ferguson in my own media studies classroom? It really began on the first day of school this year when a student asked me if I'd been keeping up on "what was going on in Missouri." That student's question and a Teachers Teaching Teachers show with Dr. Marcia Chatelain prompted a piece that I wrote for the Guardian. PBS NewsHour also published How to talk to students about Ferguson written by Dr. Chatelain that's a great resource for educators.

Speaking of NewsHour, since we're a Student Reporting Lab my students' work was also featured on the NewsHour segment Teens reflect on impact of Ferguson unrest. Their work and that of the other schools in this segment shows thoughtful, student-produced commentary. So, in addition to addressing the opening question, I think it's important that educators not only discuss these kinds of issues in schools, but also share the wisdom that's generated by our youth with a larger audience. Our students have perspectives that need to be included in our civic dialogue.



An amazing resource for educators to bring timely civics issues like Ferguson into the classroom is KQED Do Now (if you're a science or arts teacher, there are also relevant activities for your students too). The weekly Do Now discussion for September 26, Should the members of a police force reflect the larger population? had approximately 600 comments from students from around the country. My students summarized that discussion for a Do Now Round Up in October, Diversity and police departments.

For many years I've collaborated with Paul Allison on youthvoices.net, which hosts the discussions of students in the classes of teachers mostly associated with the National Writing Project, but open to all educators. If you want to get a look at what teens are thinking, here's a sampling of the Youth Voices discussions about Ferguson and related issues.

One of the things I try to stress in all my teaching is the idea of perspective taking, where students consider complex issues from multiple angles. Harvard's Visible Thinking protocol, Circle of Viewpoints, is one way to foster productive discussion around sensitive issues like Ferguson by considering the perspectives of many different stakeholders.

For example, a student of mine has interviewed members of our local police department to find out how they are responding to incidents like the Mike Brown shooting in our own community (e.g. Dillon Taylor, Darrien Hunt). By the way, this student journalist I'm talking about is the one I mentioned in the third paragraph, the one who asked about the events of Ferguson on the first day of school this year. While his classmates race out the door at the end of the day today for Thanksgiving holiday, he'll stay after school to finish his video.

These curricular conversations have been happening over the Ferguson issue and other important ones throughout the year and will go on long after the media storm passes. To me what's important is the role that media creation and productive online discussion has in the lives of our students, our future leaders.

Making teachers happy

Some of the happiest and most effective teachers I know are the ones that incorporate the concept of making in their teaching. Personally I see it in arts teachers when they're preparing for a showing or performance, or the chemistry teacher in the lab.

Here at the Project Zero Perspectives conference: Making, Thinking, and Understanding conference in San Francisco this weekend that's organized by Casie, I've started reminiscing about all the learning by making that's been going on in my own classroom and with the adult learners I work with at other times.

At today's conference David Perkins set the tone by noting how, among other things, the maker movement transcends traditional disciplines and prescribed studies. That sentiment was amplified in a session by Jen Ryan who discussed the Agency by Design (AbD) research done with Shari Tishman and Edward P. Clapp, that's identified two core concepts – making empowers learners and that empowerment leads students to recognize that they are fully capable of redesigning their world for the better. At the end of the day, Daniel Wilson noted that much of Project Zero's nearly 50 years of research has shown that learning is active, social, and visible.

Since making is a prominent feature of the conference and in education today, I thought I'd share some of the maker projects of the adult students I worked with this summer in the Michigan State University Master's in Educational cohort in Galway, Ireland. It showed me again how joyful teaching can be when we make things.

• Raspberry Pi'oneering in your library, Kelly Boston
• Harnessing the wind, Katie Findley
• Paper circuits and exponents, Joy Zaher
• Number gaming with Scratch and Makey Makey, Jennifer Stillwell
• Paper circuits and mapping in the elementary classroom, Erin Polski
• If given a choice, what would you make?, Christa Hanley
• Converting and resizing with 3D printing, Rachelle Galang
• Teaching symbolism in the ELA classroom with circuits, McKenzie Wallace
• Fashion and the maker movement, Chonsey Pogue
• Scratch with special needs students in mind, Alicia Sansing
• Squishy circuits text connections, Kristen Fenzau
• Creative introductions for the first day of school, Stephanie Cairns
• Learning grammar with little bits, Joie Marinaro
• Projects to make with a dead computer and other discarded electronics, Andy Foord

The glory of unfinished learning

Photo by Sarah Beth Anderson

If you're a writing teacher, you've probably encountered the following situation: a colleague from another discipline waves a student paper at you and complains "these kids can't write." It happens to me at least once a year.

In the past I've told these colleagues that maybe the assignment wasn't clear enough or that perhaps they should treat this as a draft, as another step in the writing process, that surface errors are most likely related to performance – not competence. But a lot of times content area teachers don't plan on doing multiple drafts of a paper, and I sense that they walk away from our conversation even more convinced that student writing skills are on a gradual decline.

But I just came across a book that sheds more light on this. According to Lee Ann Carroll in Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers, research shows that student writing appears to be weaker when they encounter new and unfamiliar expectations. Student writing develops because they must take on new and difficult roles in a discipline that they've probably never encountered before. It's reasonable to assume that students' new learning is creating all the cognitive load and that their early writing reflects this.

This all reminded me of the 1972 Donald Murray essay, "Teach Writing as a Process, Not Product." In the essay, Murray notes that since most English teachers were trained to analyze a product like a sonnet by Shakespeare and that they focus their critical attention on student writing as if it were a product. According to Murray, the problem with that approach is that a teacher's "attack does little more than confirm the student's lack of self-respect for their work and for themselves." Murray instead argues that teachers should "glory in the unfinishedness"of student writing.

So now when a colleague approaches me with the complaint that writing teachers like me aren't doing enough to prevent the next generation's slow slide into illiteracy, I've got another answer. Content area teachers might anticipate initially weaker writing as students deal with new concepts in unfamiliar disciplines – that's a sign that they're learning.

Then I'll advise them to make sure their assignments are clear and to build in some time for revision.

DIY photo gifts

Whether it's the holidays or some other special occasion, homemade gifts are often the best ... and cheapest to make. Everybody's got photos, and everybody can make stuff out of them. Here are some DIY photo projects my students did in my photography class this year.

Out of Eden

Paul Salopek has embarked on a seven-year Out of Eden walk across the earth to create a "global mosaic of stories." I'm looking forward to talking with the people from the Out of Eden Learn team later today about their efforts to create a community of learners around Salopek's journey. Join us here if you want to learn more.

Digital Learning Day 2014 - Students as teachers, part three

On February 5 my photography students will be having their own DIY photo gear film festival. I've written before (and even before that) about how students show themselves to be capable teachers if given the chance; this is another example of what happens when we put students more in charge of their own learning. The assignment was to create some do-it-yourself photography gear on a shoestring budget. For example, the video below shows how one of my students created a stabilizer for $25, a piece of equipment that could run as much as much as $200 if purchased retail.

Here are some of the other student videos:  Lupita, Cassadey, Gaby, Evan, Sean, Claire, Sarah, Allegra and Steven.

One of the common denominators in these projects is the joy that can be seen in the making of these projects. Of course they also learned a lot in the process. The next step in this sequence is for these same students to use these pieces of equipment in the documentary they're producing this quarter. Should be interesting.

Growing a food curriculum

Tomatoes Before Frost by me

The local food movement is well established, and with it comes a growing interest in bringing food sustainability into the K-16 curriculum. Over the past couple of years on Teachers Teaching Teachers we've had conversations with locavore educators from New Orleans at Our School at Blair Grocery and New York City's The Green Bronx Machine, with the director of Fresh the movie, and also with the people from Wooly School Garden.

Maybe because it was the end of autumn and I'd just harvested the last of the veggies from my own yard, maybe I was just hungry, but whatever the case when I was at the NCTE annual convention this November I attended two workshops that focused on food. One workshop, maybe the best I've ever attended at NCTE, showcased a partnership between BreadLoaf with students from the Navajo Nation and at Fern Creek High School in Louisville, Kentucky – the Navajo Kentuckians. The Navajo students and the teachers from Kentucky provide a powerful example of what can happen when educators mix food and learning. Students in the Louisville school have even shown gains on recent state tests that, according to the teachers, are due in part to their program. Another presentation at NCTE shared what Dr. Alan Webb and colleagues have been collecting at FoodCurriculum.com a website that has lots of good info and resources for teachers interested in starting some edible education.

In addition to dedicated and passionate educators, something that stands out about the efforts mentioned above is their cross-curricular nature. Students are connecting literacy, chemistry, biology, business, botany, health, and politics, to name a few – and the they're highly engaged in the learning. And maybe most significantly, a common denominator in all these stories is how they're transforming their communities for the better.

Gettysburg Address lessons – for students and elected officials

USA by J.Ghouse

November 19, 2013, is the sesquicentennial of the Gettysburg Address. Learn the Address and Getty Ready are two quality educational resources that have been created to help all of us appreciate that 272-word speech. Like a lot of teachers, my students and I will analyze the text of the speech and even get to attend a webinar with Ken Burns on November 18. But as I look over the Address in preparation of the anniversary this week, I can't help but contrast the disingenuous rhetoric of current elected officials to Lincoln's dignified language.

As an English teacher I marvel at the Address every time I read it. There's the elegance of the sentences – the antithesis and epiphora – and the subtlety of the asyndeton. And there's the diction – the repetition of "dedicate"; the optimistic tone of the Address due to words like noble, endure, live, struggled, consecrated, brave, resolve. Finally there's Lincoln's deft craftmanship, the movement through time and place as the speech unfolds. The paragraphs progress from the past "four score and seven years ago" to the "now," and finally to the future, to the vital "unfinished work" of the "great task remaining before us." The speech physically takes the reader from the continent to the battlefield as a whole and ultimately to "this ground" where the people were gathered for the Address. (This all is summarized in the presentation that I share at the bottom of this post.)



That's how I think of the document as an English teacher....

But as a citizen I can't help celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address without wondering what Abraham Lincoln would think of the people who now lead us. I think he'd be disappointed in our many politicians who choose self-interest over problem-solving, politics over people. Addressing the many issues now facing America will take the kind of courage and self-sacrifice for the common good that Lincoln and his audience knew all too well; in contrast, our current leaders fret over alienating voters with the reality of what it will take to actually dedicate ourselves as a people to the great tasks before us.

On November 19, 2013 there will be no shortage of officials who will use the occasion of the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address to stage splashy press conferences. But in my mind the real legacy of the Address is the optimism President Lincoln conveyed to a people during one of the most trying times in American history, an optimism that was based on a realistic assessment of the situation and the recognition of the self-sacrifice in the struggle for the common good. Today we don't need attractive leaders who can recite some phrases from the Gettysburg Address; we need people who understand that our nation is being tested much like it was 150 years ago. We need leaders more like my students – people who know that when you're being tested, it helps to have some answers.

Generating authenticity

Goodbye Summer by Gabriela Zabka

I've written before about my ongoing concern to get my students to appreciate the value of what's taught in school, based on the work of the late Jere Brophy. Part of my solution is to meet the students where they are by using authentic writing situations that call for the use of authentic rhetorical devices. For example, on the first day of school a couple of weeks ago, I asked my students to write what was on their mind, and the most frequent response was "college." So some of the work we're doing now in my senior English classes capitalizes on their preoccupation with their post-high school plans – an authentic writing situation.

First, a word about authentic rhetorical devices: To begin this year I had success with the idea of generative rhetoric. I was fortunate enough to attend a workshop at the annual meeting of the National Writing Project with Richard Graves and Sherry Swain a while back where they introduced the idea of generative rhetoric, based on Francis Christensen's 1967 work, A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence. In essence the workshop facilitators led us through an exercise where we crafted and appreciated the elegance of participial phrases and cumulative sentences like the following:

Now that I can have her only in memory, I see my grandmother in the several postures that were peculiar to her: standing at the wood stove on a winter morning and turning meat in a great iron skillet; sitting at the south window, bent above her beadwork, and afterwards, when her vision failed, looking down for a long time into the fold of her hands; going out upon a cane, very slowly as she did when the weight of age came upon her; praying. – from This Way to Rainy Mountain, by N. Scott Momaday

This lesson is described in detail in the article, "The Final Free Modifier – Once More" by Graves, Swain, and Morse. For me, what ultimately works about this activity is that it asks students to think of someone special, doing something. It's an assignment that's very real and significant to them. The activity is wonderful by itself, but it can also be a springboard (or be the opening or closing sentence) to the type of college or scholarship essay where students describe an important person in their life. So now I'm thinking about how the underlying structure of things like the compound sentence or a device like anaphora might help convey the significant thoughts of my seniors. More on that later....

Now, back to authentic occasions and meeting the students where they are now: College essay and scholarship applications are difficult for my students to write because they're taught to be humble and self-effacing. To alleviate this issue, I'm doing a sequence of assignments that asks the students to generate information from the significant people in their lives.

Activity 1: Before they start drafting their application and scholarship essays, I have them gather information about themselves. This first activity is based on "How to Play to Your Strengths," an article from the Harvard Business Review. I have my students interview three people who know them well – friends, family members, mentors, coaches, etc. – about the students' strengths (i.e. their best self). Then the students complete an assignment called the Reflected Best Self.

Activity 2: Have students write letters to three generations (their peers, their parents, and their grandparents) for advice about the high school and post-high school transition. We talk about formatting personal letters (see graphic at bottom of this post), and how to address an envelope. I suggest they do the following in their revisions:

• Tell the addressee about where you are in your high school life now and what your tentative post-high school plans are,
• Ask them about their own high school and post-high school experience,
• Ask them for advice about how to go about finishing high school and about college, 
• Finally, ask them for advice about how to live a fulfilling life.

Activity 3: Now they're ready to compile a story inventory for college essay prompts. And finally, once they choose the most compelling story, they can begin drafting their admissions and scholarship essays.

retrieved from http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/interactives/letter_generator/

Appreciating the language of "I Have a Dream"

Photo by Madelina James

In honor of this Wednesday's 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the famous words delivered that day, I put together a resource to help students appreciate the language of the "I Have a Dream" speech. Of course the moment in history is significant for many reasons, but I think it's also worthwhile to appreciate the elegance of the words themselves.

It's one thing to say that the speech is powerful, but it's another to identify reasons that account for that power. That's what this lesson is meant to do (link to the PDF).

Copyright rights ... and Fair Use for educators

copyright confusion by me

Are you an educator grappling with copyright issues? Still not quite sure about terms like Creative Commons, Fair Use, and Public Domain? As I was putting together a presentation on copyright and Fair Use for educators (at bottom), I thought I'd share what I've learned.

Although I admire Larry Lessig's work and the good people at Creative Commons, it's important to realize that CC is another licensing scheme. I've found that even if educators understand CC, they still can be unclear about how copyright is really a balance between the rights of owners and users like educators. So let's say you want to use a copyrighted work in your teaching. Can you?

The short answer is you CAN use copyrighted material in your teaching because of the Fair Use provision of the Copyright Act of 1976. The Code of Best Practices does a nice job of explaining the ethical, legal, and pedagogical questioning that all teachers and learners should engage in as we consider the use of copyrighted materials.

In her book Copyright Clarity: How Fair Use Supports Digital Learning, Renee Hobbs uses an example from one of my students. After the book came out, we interviewed Renee on Teachers Teaching Teachers, #184.

Since we're all pressed for time, here's a condensed version the original TTT podcast. The first seven minutes are Renee laying out her thinking on the culture of sharing in education. For the next six minutes Renee leads me through applying the Code to my own students use of copyrighted images, and why it's an example of Fair Use. That's followed up by two student examples – one from Paul Allison and an example from another student of mine.

My big takeaway: In recent years, legal scholars have found that courts return again and again to two questions in deciding if a particular use of a copyrighted work is a fair use:

• did the unlicensed use "transform" the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than that of the original, or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original?
• was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount, considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use?

What I like most about the Fair Use Doctrine is that it's really up to educators to model the ethical behavior that was the intent of copyright law all along.

Spelling

Here's a bit on spelling rules I shared with my students recently. Feel free to use it.

Improve your spelling from csloan

Teaching the "Letter to an Elected Official"

Capitol by Abby_B

One way for students to learn how to become productive citizens is to craft a piece of argumentative writing for an authentic audience – a letter to their elected officials. The challenge is how to make sense of all the information on controversial issue. To make this proces manageable for my students, I've been using the gun control resources on the KQED Lowdown and the KQED DoNow websites, which have provided a good springboard for more sustained research writing and discussion. Here's how last week looked in my classroom.

Day One: As of March 2013, KQED has seven resources under the gun control topic.

1. Randomly assign students to read one of the seven articles in the collection of articles from the KQED. 
2. Individual students list the most important points of the article they were assigned; they write a brief summary of that article and cite the source using MLA format. Remind students that the most significant information might not only be in the story’s text (like facts or expert opinions) but might also be found in an image or graphic. Note: Although citing sources isn’t a typical part of a letter, in this case it is important for at least three reasons: 1) they are representing themselves as serious students to their elected officials and should demonstrate their academic skills, 2) citing the source might help educate the reader of the letter, and 3) the citation provides concrete support for their opinions.
3. Divide students into seven groups and have them share their summaries with others who read the same article. 
4. Once students read their individual summaries, the group agrees on the most important five points from the article and creates a collaborative one-paragraph summary that best represents the ideas of the group. Here’s an example summary from my class. 
5. Groups present facts and summaries to the whole class while the other students organize the information into facts and opinions that could be used to support more gun control and those arguments that could be used to oppose more gun control (see page 1 of the resource packet “Pro/Con information sheet.”) Although gun control is the issue I'm focusing for this lesson, the handouts in the lesson are more open-ended and can be used for any controversial issue

Day Two: Using the information found in their reading and note taking from Day One, students will complete a draft of a letter to an elected official in today’s class. In doing so, students must synthesize information from at least two sources

1. Individual students review their notes from Day One where they categorized the facts and opinions into two columns – one column for the information that could be used to support the argument for more gun control, and another column that includes all the information that could be used to oppose the argument for more gun control. 
2. Students rank (in order of importance) the top ideas or facts in each column. This is also a good time to discuss how some facts can be used to support both sides of the argument (example: “Gun manufacturing in the U.S. increased from 3.7 million in 2007 to 6.1 million in 2011” could be combined with other information from this FactCheck.org graphic to support either side of the argument). 
3. Research your local elected officials stance on the topic by reading information on their government website as well as information gleaned from news stories. Based on the official’s views, choose one to write the letter to. If the students aren’t sure who their elected officials are, look them up on the Common Cause website. 
4. Write a draft of the letter using the activities found on page 2, “Writing the Draft.” Tell the students not to worry too much about formatting issues right now, the important thing is to try to get the gist of their thoughts based on their reading and note taking so far.  
5. Revise the letter using the activities found on page 3, “Revision Guide.”

If you want more details, here's a link to the actual lesson plan.

Teaching curation in the classroom

Cowboy by me

My media students have been using some KQED Lowdown resources lately to try to understand the gun control debate. As my students and I have studied this issue for the past few weeks, a couple of things have occurred to me. My first observation is how complex many issues are today. It can be difficult for students to write a simple thing like a piece of argumentative writing, or participate in a classroom debate, when there's so much information on the topic. Trying to get a handle on an multifaceted issue can be overwhelming for all of us. This leads me to my second observation – researching wicked problems like gun violence in America might be better undertaken in collaborative groups not only in classrooms but also in larger connected learning environments.

Here's how it went in my class.

Currently KQED has seven resources under the gun violence topic. I started off by dividing students into seven groups and had them examine one of the resources. Individual students first wrote a summary of their article's main points. Next they shared their summaries with their group members. In the end the group was responsible for one summary that best represents the ideas of the group and then presented to the rest of the class. Here's an example summary from one of the groups in my class.

To make doing these activities more manageable, I've always appreciated objective educational resources that have been assembled by experts, for example EBSCO Host Connection gun control resources and ProCon's concealed gun fact sheet. These are packaged to make researching more efficient for students and teachers, but I've also begun to realize that the act of searching for articles and discussing the merits of sources is an integral part of learning how to thrive in a knowledge economy. That's why I'm doing more collaborative research projects in my classes now on sites like Diigo, Delicious, and Gooru. One project that gets at what I'm moving toward is this shared Gooru collection that has been added to by Paul Allison's students in New York City and my students in Utah.

I've found that the most effective groups consist of informed individuals. Once we go through the process of collaboration and curation, we're much better able to articulate a stance on complex issues.

Annotation and reading comprehension

It might not mean much, but as I was recording some scores in my gradebook today, I noticed the difference between my students who annotated versus those who didn't annotate a sample AP English Language multiple choice passage. Out of the 65 students who took the test, 33 of them annotated but 32 didn't. The people who annotated the passage scored on average 9% higher than the students who didn't. I always encourage the students to read with a pencil in hand, but it's not a requirement; now I'm rethinking that. The image on the right is of a student of mine who had a perfect score, and I couldn't help but notice the rich annotation on the passage (arrows, summary, brackets, quoted materials). I haven't had the time yet to do more than a cursory view of the research on the effect of annotation on reading comprehension, so this could just be a coincidence.

And even if it isn't an isolated phenomenon, we all know that correlation isn't causation. Maybe annotation makes more effective readers, or maybe more effective readers annotate. Still, it does make me wonder....

Writing connected research

Adventure by Ben Harvey

In my last post I wrote about the connected research and social scholarship that's happening in my classroom. The most significant way those things manifest themselves is through the discussions that my students post on Youth Voices. The students search for information about their inquiry as they learn to navigate different resources and then post the most interesting things they discovered on their Youth Voices blogs. After all the blogging and discussing at the end of the unit, they distill the most compelling information into the traditional research paper format.

Is their writing that's done for the screen better than their writing for paper, or vice-versa? I don't know. But what I do know is that I need to prepare my students for both types of composition, at least for the immediate future. And I also know that students now need to understand how to access and assess information from a lot of different sources. For example, some of these databases and resources I use are open; others are locked behind paywalls or only accessible through library subscriptions (more on that later).

If you're interested in doing this yourself, here is some information about the resources and databases the students use as they blog and discuss their findings:

• Read some Opposing Viewpoints about a current political issue. 
• Using the date range advanced search feature in Google, read recent news articles written about your topic. 
• Search using the Gale database available through our school library.
• Search the EBSCO database, available to all students in our state. 
• Use the Google top-level site operator, read the different types of information available through .org .edu .mil .gov .info etc.
• Interview experts with extensive knowledge of your topic.
• Search Twitter and blogs for real-time information. For this and all posts do the assessing credibility exercise

Connected research and social scholarship

As my seniors work through a research writing unit in my English class, the ideas of connected research and social scholarship become more apparent.

Ball o' fire by Reid Bell

For me connected research refers to the many interactions my students have, not only with each other through shared docs and such, but also to their direct communication with "experts." Even in my pre-digital classroom, I'd have students interview experts, so that much isn't really new. But seems different now is the rate of response the students are getting from knowledgeable people via a variety of channels. Increasingly, my students are finding that their chosen experts connect primarily through one channel: Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.  And when my students finally track down the expert and their preferred method of contact, the response rate has been greater than in the past.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a retiring biochemical researcher who'd received countless competitive grants in his career. He said that when he first began as a researcher, the important thing in obtaining funds was the ready access to state-of-the-art labs and a cohesive research team. But now what he's seeing is that the big research grants are going to those people who collaborate by sharing the resources of labs located around the world while assembling a team of people with diverse perspectives. The idea was reinforced when I started coming across articles like "Science 2.0" and more recently in books like Dan Tapscott's Macrowikinomics.

In Social Scholarship: Applying Social Networking Technologies to Research Practices, the Computer Research Association states that "fewer individuals will be able to carry out their work without connecting with their peers, experts, and mentors via electronic networks."

A similar sentiment is echoed in the Horizon Report's 2012 Higher Education wiki on New Scholarship: "Increasingly, scholars are beginning to employ methods unavailable to their counterparts of several years ago, including prepublication releases of their work, distribution through non-traditional channels, dynamic visualization of data and results, and new ways to conduct peer reviews using online collaboration. New forms of scholarship, including creative models of publication and non-traditional scholarly products, are evolving along with the changing process. Some of these forms are very common — blogs and video clips, for instance — but academia has been slow to recognize and accept them. Proponents of these new forms argue that they serve a different purpose than traditional writing and research — a purpose that improves, rather than runs counter to, other kinds of scholarly work." 

I suppose this is all just a subset of what's meant by connected learning. And maybe I'm just more aware of it now, but I'm seeing more connected methodologies manifest themselves in the digital and traditional writing my students compose now.