Well, to say it has been an unusual week would be putting it mildly.  We closed the library and ended the school year. The media department debated Battle of the Books titles for 2010. In my professional world, I said goodbye to being a school library practitioner and an in-house staff developer.  And, along the way, along with all that other stuff, I took a 24-hour detour to the Arlington (TX) Independent School District for a keynote presentation: Rigorous Learning with 21st-Century Technology.

And I wouldn’t have missed that Texas trip for anything.

First, it must be said that to spend the night during the last week of school in a hotel with crisp clean sheets, a cleared-off desk, no clutter, and a sparkling-clean bathroom is a sensory pleasure of inimitable proportions. And, had I indulged in a little less sleep, I would definitely have availed myself of the breakfast buffet wafflemaker that turned out Texas-shaped waffles!

All joking aside, I was nervous about this keynote, because it was a new presentation topic for me.  But if I have learned anything in my year doing staff development, it is that we need to be having some serious conversations about how we assess the level of rigor in the technology projects that we design. Too often, the goal of technology integration is a fuzzy one:

“Just do something with technology to appease the ________ (parents, administration, Board, colleagues).”

But that’s clearly insufficient.  It’s about so much more than use. And even though the NETS objectives had been in place in our district, the depth of student learning wasn’t yet going deeply enough. Tech use was way up, but not the depth of learning.

And so I had multiple conversations with folks in academia and practice about how I would transfer my hunches about technology rigor to a large audience full of secondary librarians. 

I felt I needed some kind of graphic that would focus our conversation and give us a lens through which to look at and discuss the rigor behind student work. After many conversations, here is what I presented in Texas, with the caveat that I was certain it was a work-in-progress (click to enlarge):

It’s a series of four continuums (continua?) that converge to create rigor.  I purposely left motivation and creative behaviors out of the discussion because I wanted us to be looking at the academic accomplishments of students. That decision could be debated long and hard, but I think that when we first start looking at the ideas of rigor, we have to focus our lens.

I also consciously chose not to demonize any particular tool. There are great PowerPoints and bad ones; great Glogsters and low-thinking ones; outstanding student videos and insignificant ones. We have to see tools in the context of the instructional design.

The four continuums/continua are:

From retelling to synthesis.  I toyed with calling this “reporting” instead of “retelling.”  Great technology work needs to be more than just restating what other people have said. It should include the opportunity to take those facts and repurpose/mash up/pull together the themes and threads to create something new.  If you adopt this path, you’re automatically blowing the “give a topic and three bullet points” approach out of the water.

From decontextualized to authentic.  By “decontextualized,” I meant work that seemed to be in isolation from real life and real audiences, needs, interests, and goals.  Think Loertscher’s bird units. By authentic, I mean work that matters and resonates to someone: the student or the audience, and that is represented with authentic media. 

From teacher-directed to student-centered.  Rigorous student projects have the student in the driver’s seat, not the teacher.  That means that the format of the project does not necessarily follow the teacher’s formula.

From automated to informated (value-added).  I liberally borrow “informated” from Zuboff’s In the Age of the Smart Machine. Zuboff pointed out, in this 1985 book, that when once-human processes are replaced by mechanical/digital ones, they can do more than automate repetitive tasks.  They can actually informate or gather additional data that can be turned into useful information.  So when, for example, grocery stores went from having a cashier key in each price to scanning the UPC code, that level of automation enabled grocery stores to gather data about who was buying what and with what frequency. And that data could be turned into useful information: who buys both yogurt and KitKat bars? How low is our milk inventory? Similarly, in education, I see a lot of automation happening in K-12, in which what used to be done with pencil-and-paper is now being done with technology. Example: we used to gather isolated facts and put them on a poster board; now we gather isolated facts and put them in Glogster. Is there a real change in cognitive processes? Not really.

Finally, as my former student teacher and colleague Raya pointed out, “we swim in the pool of content.” Which means that no matter how amazing it is that the kids made a Glogster full of videos of people waving and saying, “Happy Valentine’s Day,” it’s irrelevant if Valentine’s Day (or waving, for that matter) isn’t part of the curriculum or content to be covered.

I also tried one more thing. I created a set of questions that would flash on the screen before my keynote, just as movie theatres show previews.  I wondered if that would help focus some of the early-birds and set a tone. As I talked with my host, Lorie Bruns, she thought she might like to try something similar with quotes … and that had me wondering how powerful a presentation could be if the tone were set with quotes from students.  Before the keynote even began, I was already getting new ideas! (The link is at the end of this post.)

Oh my gosh, the most amazing conversations happened as the keynote unfolded.  I learned from Marcia that it’s really important to have folks talking to each other during a presentation, not just me.  But it’s a vulnerability: if you get an audience who isn’t in sync with your message, you’re stuck (I padded my presentation with a lot of extra slides I took out at the break, just in case). And if they love talking to each other too much, the presentation train starts to lose steam.  This group hit the balance perfectly.

Here are some of the nuggets I took away from what people said:

• Do we need to know the kid in order to know whether or not he/she synthesized? (Hmmm …. my hunch is that we should be able to evaluate student work without knowing the kid, but it’s food for thought.)
• Do we use this graphic to evaluate student work or instructional design? (My answer: both.)
• How much does our own prior knowledge factor into how we evaluate student work? (My hunch: a lot, as we often disagreed on how we’d place a project along one of the continua.)
• Why don’t we spend more time talking about student work? (That one lingers in the air.)

I also put out a Twitter hashtag (#aisd) to see if we could get some virtual conversation going. And I’ll be honest: it scares me to do that. It means you open yourself up to public criticism.  But I have had decent luck with this in the past year, so I offered up a hashtag.  And although only a few people Tweeted, it was so valuable to me — and, to some of their followers who then talked with them about it — to others, I hope.  As a presenter, it’s such a valuable reflection tool, because you can see where your presentation’s high points and takeaways were. And sometimes, you can be reminded of something you said spontaneously and haven’t documented anywhere. So far, the value far outweighs the panic.

So, although it is 1pm and I am still in my jammies, panting for breath, I am grateful for the myriad of experiences this week has brought me.

Now, summer begins.  There’s still work stuff to do (ALA next week, some work for the School of Information, and launching the summer ed tech course I’m co-teaching in the School of Ed), but it’s all work I look forward to and at a much more leisurely pace. Summer also means lots of time to catch up on reading, more time with family and friends, more laundry that’s in the clean pile, not the dirty one. As life’s hectic pace slows down, there will be more to say about leaving the practitioner world, too.

As my tired brain searches for a conclusion to this blog post, I am amazed at how grateful I feel about what is to come.

Arlington keynote slides, including links to student work

Slides of pre-keynote thinking questions

Our school district continues to adopt new 2.0 tools and give students a greater online voice.  A lot of excitement comes with the introduction of these new ways to share what we know.  As we roll out these tools at the elementary level, we spend a lot of time talking about online safety and etiquette.  Digital Citizenship, after all, is one of the key ideas of the NETS*S.

And unfortunately, danah boyd’s recent audience hadn’t gotten the Digital Citizenship lesson when, at Web 2.0 Expo a few days ago, the conference organizers placed a large Twitterwall displaying live Tweets prominently behind her onstage.  Unable to see what others were saying about her and her content, she felt the audience slip away from her and into their own cycles of negativity, a sort of mob mentality focused directly on her.

Backchanneling, or the process of giving live commentary on a face-to-face presentation, it was used to great effect at the SLJ Summit this fall and has, for me, been a real benefit.  I like hearing the Big Ideas emerging from other sessions and feel it gives me a more holistic sense of the value of the conference.  And in LibraryLand, the Tweets tend to be thoughtful, if not plain old complimentary.

So danah’s experience (you can view her keynote here, though the Twitterwall is not represented in the video) shook up many of us, and we engaged in a passionate impromptu conversation on Twitter.  Buffy summarizes both danah’s experience and our conversation on her blog.  Please take a look. 

And after you have, take a moment to think about these questions (Buffy also has some thoughts for you to consider):

1. What Web etiquette lessons have we not yet taught well enough in our K-12 environments so that this can be minimized in the future? 
2. The audience that Tweeted most likely had their real names affiliated with their Twitter account, so we can’t really chalk up this behavior to the oft-referenced idea of online anonymity.  How can we help our students recognize, as Steve Dembo often says, that their online life is their “New Permanent Record”? Could this situation be a teachable moment for our students to practice empathy?
3. Many of us, in some point in our careers, will sit on a conference planning committee.  How did the physical placement of the Twitterwall screen play into the outcome danah experienced? Would moving the Twitterwall so it no longer shared the stage with the keynote have changed the tone of the experience?
4. Before this month’s AASL conference in Charlotte, the AASL Forum listserv had a passionate discussion of live blogging or Tweeting from sessions.  Some saw it as a way to compliment the speaker, other speakers found it rude and a sign of inattentiveness to the moment.  I have to say that in my session in Charlotte, someone sat right up front and was clicking on her cell phone the whole time.  The nerve! I thought, in my best Nathan Detroit accent.  It was only afterwards, when I skimmed the Tweets tagged #aasl2009 in Twitter, that she had thoughtfully Tweeted what she saw as my most meaningful ideas.  It really helped me see where my presentation had resonated.  But if such behaviors hinder you as a presenter, should you have the right to request that people close their laptop lids and put their cell phones away?

Oh, yeah.  And Happy Thanksgiving.

Over the summer School Library Journal floated out the idea that many children’s authors would consider doing a free 20′ Skype author visit.  That sounded just great to a third grade teacher and me.  We scoured the list for the authors with the most appeal to our kids and sent a few Tweets to inquire.  No dice.  (But we’re not giving up!)

But in the meantime, I had also heard from Michelle Bayuk, head of marketing for Albert Whitman, that Whitman was going to launch five Twitter feeds: one for the narrator of the Boxcar Children and one in the voice of each of the four characters. 

AND, as I’ve mentioned before, I learned that the Boxcar Children (which remains a favorite with our second and third graders) is now a graphic novels series!

There was just one hurdle: how could we connect our young learners with the five Twitter feeds without having them log into Twitter (which restricts access to users over 13) and with all the feeds appearing on one page? We just wanted the Boxcar Twitter feeds, not everything else.

Leave it to my intrepid (and, sadly, about to depart) student teacher Raya, who figured out a way to get the Twitter feeds we need and embed them into our new media center wiki.  Voila! We had what we needed.

Now we had a cool opportunity to talk about how there are many ways to tell a story in the 21st century: with “regular” books, with graphic novels, AND with (a safe version of) Twitter. 

Our wheels started turning.  Would Michelle consider Skyping with our kids?

Michelle had an even more interesting idea: let Boxcar ghostwriter and editor Wendy McClure do the interview!

So we planned a three-day set of activities in lieu of the regular book talks we give when kids come to check out:

• Day One: Introduce/re-introduce kids to Chapter 1 of the chapter book, graphic novel, and Twitter feed
• Day Two: Talk about the role of an editor, with a role-play in which I played the author and Raya and the class played the editor.  (See our efforts on Etherpad - a wonderful tool! - here). Talk about what comprises a good interview question.
• Day Three: In classrooms, kids and teachers worked HARD to create great questions.  They then came to the media center for the interview!

Wow! Our kids did a phenomenal job.  Even with a double-class, they were glued to the screen, poised, attentive, and did ask great questions.  Best of all, they listened for the answers because the answers mattered to them.

We didn’t have the typical author visit, but we had something that empowered our kids to do their best and to think more deeply. And next time they get a paper back from their teacher with editing suggestions, I bet they’ll think just a bit more about how all authors have editors, even the famous ones!

Thanks so much to Michelle and Wendy for giving our kids the chance to dig into some authentic work and to feel proud of their results. There is a wonderful feeling that comes over a media center when kids are really engaged with what they are learning about, and we’ve had three great days of that.

You can view:

• our Boxcar Children Skype plans (they didn’t go exactly according to Hoyle, but it worked out OK!)
• our Etherpad page where we modeled the author/editor relationship
• our school library blog post with more details!