The Digital Ties that Bind

I had an experience with technology while working on our EDUC 649 leadership presentation last month that really opened my eyes about the extent to which technology can forge connections that would otherwise simply not be possible.

The short version of the story is this: While researching issues relevant to students with disabilities, I interviewed my friend Amanda's husband, who is blind, about the experiences he had as a K-12 student. The stories he shared really changed how I thought about this topic, especially when he discussed how it was palpable to him that his teachers were often irritated by the extra effort required to accommodate his special needs. This is something I had never considered before, and I can say quite honestly that this conversation shifted my thinking about the responsibilities that teachers have to willingly and encouragingly support special needs students.

Sounds fairly straightforward, right? But this conversation would never have been possible without technology. Here's how it all went down and how various technologies played a role:

Amanda and I were friends in high school, but we lost touch after graduation. We reconnected a few years ago via Facebook. I am not particularly active on Facebook, but we really started catching up and keeping in touch last year when we both joined Twitter and started following one another's feeds. Via Twitter, I learned that Amanda had moved out West and gotten married. I "met" her husband and saw pictures of her new home through the photos she took with her iPhone and uploaded to Twitpic. I can honestly say that I have become better friends with Amanda via Twitter than we ever were in high school. We are in contact regularly and I am delighted that we've come back into one another's lives.

Amanda learned about the research I was doing on disability in education when I tweeted about it. She responded by sending me a Direct Message that read: "If you need any human input, my hubby is blind and would be happy to talk about his experiences." I had never met Amanda's husband in person, and had no idea that he is blind. I replied to her message that I would love to talk to him, and she sent me his contact information.

I emailed Amanda's husband, and accessibility technologies allowed him to use his computer to read my email. We both use Gmail and so we hopped onto Gchat, through which we proceeded to have an intriguing and thought-provoking conversation about his experiences as a student. Accessibility technologies enabled us to have the real-time chat conversation from which I learned so much.

Without these technologies, my encounter with Amanda's husband never would have been possible! It was quite an "aha!" moment for me -- I had never experienced technology in this way, and it opened my eyes to the possibility of forging real relationships and having real experiences through the technological mediums of the the virtual world. I haven't seen Amanda in person in over eight years and I've never met her husband, and yet they have both made a real impact on my life. As much as the conversation I had with Amanda's husband radicalized my understanding of the topic we were discussing, so too did the technological chain of events which resulted in the conversation itself radicalize my thinking about the possibilities of social networking.

What great power we have in our hands!

Venturing into the World of Edubloggers

Carla Beard is the mastermind behind The English Teacher Blog, and I find the work she does there to be very inspiring. While she writes a great deal specifically about English, she also writes about technology in ways that span disciplinary borders. She recently polled her students to solicit their musings about about technology, for example, asking this question:

"What is something you wish more teachers knew or understood about technology, especially technology in the classroom?"

The responses she garnered are very interesting, and she collected them in a series of posts that are definitely worth a look:

Classroom Technology Survey, Part I
Classroom Technology Survey, Part II
Classroom Technology Survey, Part III
Classroom Technology Survey, Part IV

Beard also uses her blog to share great links to tech resources for teachers from around the Web. Here are a few examples I found that are would be awesome to use in an English classroom:

• BBC's "60-second Shakespeare"
• The University of Central Florida's Digital Booktalk, which features video book trailers produced by students and designed to spark interest in reluctant readers.
• Teaching Copyright, which is a curriculum of 5 lessons designed to teach students about copyright laws.

This blog has inspired me to think about ways in which I might use resources like these to teach English in my own classroom. Technology can help literature come to life in new ways, and I sincerely believe that a multimedia classroom has the potential to make literary history more engaging for students than a traditional tech-free classroom. It can be really hard to conceptualize the people we read about in our textbooks as real people who experienced real things, and I love the possibilities that the Web offers to help these historical figures come to life for students in ways that might not otherwise be possible.

My favorite poet is the lovely Frank O'Hara, for example, and I've been able to find some great resources online that would help introduce his poetry to students. (O'Hara actually attended the University of Michigan as a graduate student in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and so you can imagine how delighted I am by proximity!) While I love reading O'Hara's poetry from the pages of from my dog-eared copy of his Collected Poems, I am completely enchanted with the ways in which technology has helped me experience his poetry in new ways.

Over at YouTube, for example, I found this video of O'Hara reading his poem "Having a Coke With You":



The official Frank O'Hara website also offers several other video clips and many audio clips that would be great to use in the classroom. To teach O'Hara within the wider context of the New York School (an artistic movement with which O'Hara was affiliated), I might also show the students video of poets John Ashbery and Barbara Guest reading, or perhaps this video of Jackson Pollock working on one one of his "action" paintings. Resources like these (which are literally at our fingertips!) can help show students what O'Hara and the other New York School artists looked and sounded like, and can thus make this entire aesthetic moment in time seem that much more real and accessible. I can't wait to have the opportunity to put these and other resources to work, and I'm grateful to Edubloggers like Carla Beard for blazing a path for the rest of us.

For your reading pleasure, here's the low-tech version (if you could call a poem posted on a blog "low-tech") of a Frank O'Hara gem:

"Today"
by Frank O'Hara

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they've always talked about
still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They're strong as rocks.

(1950)

Teachers and Social Networking: Cleaning Up My Digital Act

Our inaugural discussion of educational technology, and especially our conversation about digital footprints, has really gotten me thinking about my own online presence.

For the most part, I would say I've tried to be very careful in my online self presentation. I use Facebook and Twitter, but in both cases I employ security settings judiciously in order to strictly limit access to my profiles. Even though these sites are "private" I've also tried to be cautious regarding the information that I post about myself within them, never assuming that there's any real privacy in the world of social networking.

Although I would consider my online presence to be fairly benign, however, I definitely think I could do some work to professionalize my digital persona. I have certainly been guilty, for example, of posting Facebook statuses that aren't exactly the height of professionalism. Here are a few status updates that I just plucked from my profile as examples:

I just tried to pay for coffee with my blood donor card.

Every watt of energy I can muster this week must be pressed into the service of academic productivity. (Sorry, unbrushed hair. Your time will come.)

Just found myself doodling hearts int he margin of a book I'm supposed to be reading for one of my final projects. Impressive scholarly thinking, no?

Do you see what I mean? While this kind of rhetoric isn't exactly harmful, it certainly doesn't lend itself to the kind of polished image I'd like to develop as someone just entering the field of education. While I also use Facebook and Twitter to share things like books I love and awesome interviews I've just heard on NPR, I've been just as likely to post links to Lolcats. I'm definitely looking forward to learning new ways I might use social networking technologies to aid in the development of my professional image, and I'm also hoping to eventually use what I learn to help my students make smart choices about their own online activities.

While learning to navigate the waters of social networking in this way can be intimidating, I truly don't believe that severing all digital is necessarily the right thing to do. It's very likely that our online presences will be examined when we've become job candidates, and really I believe that the effective use of online social networking might actually have the power to bolster a candidate's profile. After all, technology isn't going anywhere. Schools face increasing pressures to incorporate the technologies that students will need upon graduation as players in the workplace or higher academia, and instructors who can successfully navigate the world of these technologies are prime candidates for the job. I'm very much looking forward to continued discussions on this topic.

In the meantime, here are some links I've seen recently that seem relevant to our recent conversations:

• "New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology" is a great article in the New York Times about a teacher who orchestrated a staged cell phone smashing so as to make a statement about using phones in class.
• Here's a link to a story in the Charlotte Observer about teachers who have been fired or otherwise punished because of content on their Facebook pages.
• Here's an article in the Washington Post which asks, "Do the risque pages matter if teacher performance is not hindered and if students, parents and school officials don't see them? At what point are these young teachers judged by the standards for public officials?"
• Finally, here's a CNN story about relationships between students and teachers on social networking sites.