the whole world

Well it is 5 months of blogging and time to reflect on how this blog thing gets started:

Have a great weekend. I am going off the grid next week so you will be hearing more from Tannis. See you in September.

the more fun part

I have just found, and really enjoyed reading, Teaching Adventures in the Delta. In this blog, Eddie describes his life as an eighth-grade science teacher in Lake Village, Arkansas. It seems that he is new to this gig and is exploring the possibilities ~ he talks about inquiry-based approaches, standardized testing, setting goals and creating a curriculum.

The qualitative part of the big goal is the more fun part ~ we get to say what the students will actually get out of "8th grade science." Part of putting this together was creating "essential understandings" for our subject matter. "Essential understandings" are the key points/questions a subject asks in order to carry out its method of inquiry. To put it a better way, "what are the questions that this field asks?" and "what is the whole point of this field?" Not to brag, but for once the philosophy major had a direct application to my work. The idea behind this part of the big goal is that if we get our students to understand the "essential understandings," then they'll have an easier time understanding the reason behind why we are learning the subject matter of "8th grade science" or any other subject. Some of mine are:

• Science gives us a way to support what we believe with good evidence. If other good evidence comes along that goes against what we believe, we have to change our minds.
• Structure determines function (what something is made of determines how it works)
• How can I understand the world through my 5 senses and my brain?
• What is the pattern that is developing?
• Given these results, what is going to happen next?

from What I've been doing

That Eddie sounds like a pretty smart cookie.

The fun part for me is watching this story unfold and being reminded how fresh and exciting this teaching thing can be. He writes in a way that makes you really feel you are right there in the Delta embarking on an adventure.

welcome to the blogosphere alpha

AlphaPlus has created a blog to share ideas, links, news and information about literacy and employment training in Ontario and elsewhere.

Two members of the AlphaPlus staff, Flora Doehler and Maria Moriarty are the main contributors to this blog.

Flora has been at AlphaPlus since 2001 and has worked in the information and resource service and as a web developer and designer. Flora is a painter, an accomplished gardener and nature lover. Her favourite place to be (when she’s not at AlphaPlus) is Bear River, Nova Scotia.

Maria has worked at AlphaPlus for more years than she cares to remember. She has worked in the information and resource service and in supporting research and research in practice projects. Maria is an enthusiastic, if amateur, gardener, an avid reader and baseball fanatic. Her favourite place to be (when she’s not at AlphaPlus) is in one of her two home towns, Montreal and Dublin.

They are making a lively, collaborative space where we can share knowledge, experience and questions about adult literacy and employment training. This blog will connect people, and ideas so that we can all learn from each other and can respond to changes, challenging times and opportunities as they come up.

Maria and Flora will post information and links to adult literacy, resources, issues, questions, good news, and sometimes not so good news. They invite adult literacy workers, practitioners, researchers as well as employment training agency staff to share information, ideas and questions on the blog.

blogging with professionalism

Okay - this will be the last blog about blogging for a while. But I wanted to take up the conversation about professionalism on the blog and the question Wendell raised: Whose views am I representing, to whom, and to what end? Blog posts often feel to me like snapshots. They open windows and offer insights that can be deep and wide but also fleeting. Rebecca Blood says in Waging peace: using our powers for good,

The weblog form itself encourages spontaneous blurts. But there are people from all backgrounds on weblogs and beyond, composing carefully considered opinions every day. And that, I think, can be our mandate. To spend a little bit of our weblog time in trying to understand the truth of those who see the same events, differently; in trying to illuminate the inexplicable human beings that surround us.

How to do that? Here are excerpts from RB's 10 Tips:

Determine your purpose. Know your intended audience. ...Knowing for whom you are writing will allow you to adopt an appropriate tone. Be real. ...Speak in a real voice about real things. A weblog is the place for strong opinions, whether about politics, music, social issues, gardening, or your profession. The more engaged you are with your subject, the more interesting your writing will be. Establish your credibility. To the best of your ability, be truthful. ...Understand that on the Internet, your words may live forever, ...I propose a set of Weblog Ethics; think about your own standards, and then adhere to them.

We are experimenting with how to achieve all of this in one space - how to be appropriate and authentic, personal and professional, a strong voice and credible, engaging and respectful of our audience. We are counting on you - our readers - to help us. RB concludes in Waging peace,

In the twenty-first century, the world demands that we broaden our view, not narrow it further. ...The insightful weblogger has an opportunity to elucidate and navigate the unknown for readers instead of pulling the gate shut behind them. The webloggers have always been Web travelers. Let us bring home thoughtful stories of little-understood cultures, especially when that culture belongs to the man [or woman] next door.

blogging with passion

Judi asks, "Should blogging be more free ranging and not restricted to a topic?"

Some bloggers create what might be termed a web journal and write on daily events or interests. Some bloggers choose a structure, or prism, through which to view the world. They blog on a number of topics but always in relation to, for example, 3 good things that happened today or instances of lowercase l.

Some bloggers choose a participatory or web 2.0 structure. They set out conditions for users to create content such as ideas for improved living, creating vocabulary definitions, secrets, good finds, or resolving ethical dilemmas.

Some select a single topic for their blog and write only about that topic. And some choose a primary topic but give themselves some latitude to digress a little from time to time. Wendell thinks that, "running multiple blogs about multiple topics (e.g., literacy, sports, family news, medical breakthroughs, life on Mars... ) is more reader friendly than one blog with multiple topics."

As with most writing, the type of blogging you do depends upon the audience you wish to reach and your underlying reason for blogging. Your choice of topic(s) and structure(s) will help you create a readership and/or hook into a community of people who have similar interests. Blogging with passion and compassion will both deepen and widen your connection to the networks in which you participate and, perhaps, the transformative potential of blogging.

blog guests and lists

The Literacies Café is proud and happy to welcome our first guest blogger, Nancy Friday from Alpha - see the post Are you a blogger?

If anyone would like to join Nancy, please get in touch. After Nancy and I worked out a couple of bugs we found the process easey peasey.

Judi asked if there was a directory of blogs. Wendell suggested that "maybe Literacies would like to serve as a kind of link-hub for blogs". We are compiling a list of blogs we think may be of interest to literacy people - you can see the link to our blogs of note in the sidebar to the right - but this list is by no means comprehensive. We do not really have the resources to research and maintain a fully fledged directory. We will find out what NALD is doing about this and keep working on our 'blog roll'. We ask our readers to help by contacting us with any good blog links you would like to see included in our list.

Are you a blogger?

In my work world at the AlphaPlus Centre right now, blogs and blogging are very current. The AlphaPlus web site will soon feature a blog and the staff is learning about blogging by checking out blog sites.

A blog (short for web log) is a web site presented in the form of an online journal. Blogs provide reflections or opinions usually on a particular topic. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, media and web pages related to its topic. Readers can leave and read comments in blogs which can create a sense of community.

A blogger is someone who maintains a weblog, or contributes to a blog as a guest or by posting a comment to a blog entry.

I first explored blogging by setting up a free personal blog at Blogger. I learned that I could set up a basic blog fairly easily, but without a topic to commit to, my blog had no future.

I recently discovered that literacy colleagues in Toronto have blogs like this one. Finding colleagues who are bloggers gave me the courage I needed to post my first blog comments in this blog! I feel connected and now I read this blog every day. And look, now I am posting as a guest blogger!!!

Wendell Dryden, a literacy instructor from St. John, New Brunswick has posted comments here and I discovered his blog called qualities – communities – literacies, part of an action-research project where he is learning about using and facilitating online learning and networking within the context of basic adult education.

Last week I found a blog by David Warlick from Raleigh, North Carolina calledLast week I found a blog by David Warlick from Raleigh, North Carolina called 2¢ Worth. His blog banner reads: “2¢ Worth of believing that learning about the world can be as exciting as the world really is.” That’s a blog I can get into!

Tracey and Tannis in Toronto. Wendell in New Brunswick. David in North Carolina. Blogs, I have happily discovered, are places where I can meet up with like-minded people around the world and learn and share in the process.

I am beginning to feel like a blogger - just a baby blogger taking baby steps. I feel that I am in good company and hope you will join us.

Are you a blogger? Do you have a blog journey story to tell? Add your comments and take that first blogging step!

Nancy Friday in Toronto (with a lot of help from Tracey - thanks!)

new literacies in the blogosphere

Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear have a blog called
everyday literacies that "explores and comments on everyday practices of producing and consuming texts of whatever kind in meatspace and cyberspace."
You can download their new book A New Literacies Sampler.
Here is the table of contents:

1. Sampling “the New” in New Literacies by Colin Lankshear & Michele Knobel
2. “You Won’t Be Needing Your Laptops Today”: Wired Bodies in the Wireless Classroom by Kevin M. Leander
3. Popular Websites in Adolescents’ Out-of-School Lives: Critical Lessons on Literacy by Jennifer C. Stone
4. Agency and Authority in Role-Playing “Texts” by Jessica Hammer
5. Pleasure, Learning, Video Games, and Life: The Projective Stance by James Paul Gee
6. Digital Design: English Language Learners and Reader Reviews in Online Fiction by Rebecca W. Black
7. Blurring and Breaking through the Boundaries of Narrative, Literacy, and Identity in Adolescent Fan Fiction by Angela Thomas
8. Looking from the Inside Out: Academic Blogging as New Literacy by Julia Davies & Guy Merchant
9. Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production by Michele Knobel & Colin Lankshear
10. New Literacies Cynthia Lewis

P.S. - What is a meme?

The term meme (rhyming with theme) refers to a "unit of cultural information" which can propagate from one mind to another. Examples of memes: tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothes fashions, ways of making pots, or of building arches. A meme propagates itself as a unit of cultural evolution and diffusion — acting in many ways similar to the behavior of the gene. Read more at Wikipedia.