Okay, so which of these assignments would you pick if you could choose:

1. Write a 1,500-word essay explaining the theme in Animal Farm, using literary elements such as character motives, symbolism and imagery.
2. Give a 5-minute presentation that relates the theme in Animal Farm to some aspect of society today, making sure to draw clear connections to the events in the novel with the actions of a current government.
3. Take one chapter of Animal Farm and rewrite it by changing the plot to include one modern tool that was not available to the characters but that might have changed the course of their fate if it had been. That tool is the Internet.

I would actually assign all three of these, time permitting. The first one would be an in-class assignment that followed several lessons on theme, literary elements and a thorough brainstorming of those aspects of the novel. The second would be researched at home and presented in class, possibly by pairs of students. The third would be a group assignment, completed outside of class on the class wiki. Here’s how it might look:

The teacher divides students into groups, with each group is assigned a chapter from the novel. Each chapter is downloaded by the teacher from Project Gutenberg Australia, a site with free e-books, and placed individually on the class wiki. Student groups brainstorm during class the ways that having access to the Internet would have empowered the lower classes of animals on the farm. Specifically, in this chapter, what might the animals have been able to do to become less confused, to remember the past better, to gain a broader perspective, to check the facts, to compare prices of goods, etc…? How would this information have negated the growing power balance between the pigs and the lower animals? How would it have weakened the effects of the pigs’ propaganda? How might the animals have used the Internet to leverage information and prevent their original revolution from reverting back to the status quo? 

At home, the students would begin to change the plot of their chapter by going online and accessing the wiki. They could do this alone or in groups or by talking in real time over Meebo instant chat. The wiki would record each layer of changes to the story, showing who has contributed what and in what order. Over the course of a week, each student in the group would be required to edit the chapter a certain number of times at a minimum, say five edits. Some students would do more, and that’s fine, but the goal would be to achieve consensus about the finished chapter. The end product would be a collaborative work that maintained the tone and spirit of Orwell’s masterpiece but played with an alternate ending… all while indirectly analyzing and synthesizing highly relevant, modern issues (information as power, technology as the means of achieving justice, how information protects individual freedoms).

Once the chapters were completed, the teacher could have students do a number of things with the new products. If there were multiple classes, groups could read and discuss other chapters that parallel theirs (i.e if your group rewrote Chapter 3, what do other periods’ Chapter 3’s look like?). The teacher could set up online surveys and have students vote which chapters Orwell himself might have written (i.e. which best embody the author’s tone and the novel’s theme). The teacher could have students act out a dramatic scene from the new chapters. 

This assignment (which I thought up this morning while doing the dishes) seems pretty Google-proof to me. In other words, they can’t find the answers on the Internet (at least not yet!) and they can’t just copy and paste their way to a product. They have to really think before they write. The work would be original, collaborative and analytical (… if this happened… then what…). They would have to understand the characters’ motivations, as well as the “rules” of the fictional universe that Orwell placed them in, and, ideally, they would create new metaphors to replace the old. For example, if the pig Squealer is the metaphorical equivalent of a propaganda minister, then which character would become the blogger? Which the Googler? Which would hack his way through Napolean’s firewall? How would these roles change the characters personalities? Which characters, because they can’t read, would still be at the mercy of the totalitarian regime?

(CC Photo Credit: “Watering Hole” by TravelJunkieoz)

My initial reaction to this article was one of but of course it is plagiarism! When I work with students, I fight against them copying and pasting (without thinking) and changing words here and there and calling that their own work. What I really want from students is for them to think about the information, organize, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate the information from a number of sources before they write.

I am in full agreement and responded on Julia’s blog with this comment:

I’m afraid that students believe they are writing when they are merely searching for and rearranging information. This process seems to be an attempt to not have to think, because thinking is hard, and much of what we are asking them to think about has already been said/solved; in other words, they might be wondering why should they have to reinvent the wheel? Just to get a grade? Just because the teacher said to? This gets us back to creating problems for them to solve — new, relevant problems, where they can apply the existing information in novel ways. It makes thinking a bit more fun, but still hard. And that makes us have to do a bit of thinking as teachers, right?

Thinking is hard. Original ideas are the hardest to produce. It’s much easier to cull a few online sources, gather the thoughts of others who have been down this road before and remix the voices into something that is, if not original, at least uniquely arranged. But what do such student products actually reflect, aside from (usually) varying degrees of plagiarism? Good Googling skills, mostly. Perhaps exposure to a variety of perspectives on an issue, if students took time to absorb the ideas as they arranged them into paragraphs. Maybe a better understanding of how others would answer the question or present the thesis. 

It’s very tough to make a case for true synthesis when reading a patch-work quilt of (hopefully) attributed ideas. And few students go the extra mile by adding personal reflection, much less their own original take, to the mix. They figure if it’s long enough, it’s done. 

Running their work through plagiarism detection websites is not the answer… Getting them to remix more thoroughly their compilations and attribute their borrowed words more accurately will not get us to true synthesis; it’s just a more tortuous path to the same end: the glorified summary.

What I see as the real problem is that teachers are continuing to assign the types of independent work that we were assigned as students and that our parents and possibly even grandparents were assigned as students. In English, this might be a take-home paper that explores the theme of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, for example. Or one that asks students to explain the gun/flag metaphors in the novel. A quick Google of “theme” + “metaphors” + “Animal Farm” easily produces numerous sources and an endless possible melange of ideas. Before the Internet, these assignments year after year made more sense because high school students who wanted to glean the answers from someone else would be out of luck unless they had access to Cliff’s Notes at a local bookstore or knew a student from last year’s class who’d saved their paper. Even then, at most they might be able to find one source. Not 250,000 from a single Google search. 

Clearly, these particular wheels have been invented. And reinvented. Over and over. The answers to these assignments are not only in the back of the book, they are at the tips of our students’ fingers. And this makes them seem perfunctory and incredibly boring, just one more hoop to jump through, rather than an opportunity to produce something altogether new and different and perhaps even personal. How many 15-year-olds in the past half century have explained the theme of Animal Farm? Millions! What possibly new could be added to the discussion, so why not(!) just survey the field and see which explanations you could edit and edit into one that you agree with? The internet has become a infinite recipe book and there is simply no need (in a busy student’s mind) to experiment with Metaphor á la Orwell when there are hundreds and thousands of proven recipes ready to use.

So the onus is on us, I think, as teachers to come up with better assignments for independent work. If we must assign essays on theme and metaphor, we can assign them as in-class essays or timed writing tests (giving students no class time to survey the online field). But we need other, better assignments for independent work, ones that can’t be Googled, copied or pasted, ones that are meaningful and personal and require thinking (analysis) and creativity (synthesis). 

What do those look like? And how hard will they be to come up with year after year? 

In my next post, I will present one possibility. I would love to hear your thoughts, too.

Tomorrow’s New York Times will publish an article titled “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?“ by Motoko Rich (posted online a day early– another in a long list of reasons why I love online news!). Apparently this is the first in a series of articles that the Times will publish in an attempt to explore how technology is changing the way people read.

Obviously, this is a great concern to newspaper publishers and journalists, because it seems pretty clear that print-based media is dissolving before our eyes. If they don’t or won’t fully adapt to a 24-7 online platform, these news companies will simply die. It’s not just a matter of environmental choices or economics or reader preference, it’s the expectation that readers today have for media that is interactive and highly flexible. The young people interviewed in this article aren’t satisfied with their parents’ ‘one-way,’ linear reading experiences; they want to interact with the news and/or manipulate the narratives. And once you’ve had a taste of that, it’s hard to go back to just reading or watching the news.

One anecdote that I found interesting appears on the last page of this article. The reporter interviewed a teenager who was diagnosed as a child with learning disabilities. He said he finds reading books difficult but excels in online reading:

In a book, “they go through a lot of details that aren’t really needed,” Hunter said. “Online just gives you what you need, nothing more or less.”

When researching the 19th-century Chief Justice Roger B. Taney for one class, he typed Taney’s name into Google and scanned the Wikipedia entry and other biographical sites. Instead of reading an entire page, he would type in a search word like “college” to find Taney’s alma mater, assembling his information nugget by nugget.

Experts on reading difficulties suggest that for struggling readers, the Web may be a better way to glean information. “When you read online there are always graphics,” said Sally Shaywitz, the author of “Overcoming Dyslexia” and a Yale professor. “I think it’s just more comfortable and — I hate to say easier — but it more meets the needs of somebody who might not be a fluent reader.”

Karen Gaudet, Hunter’s mother, a regional manager for a retail chain who said she read two or three business books a week, hopes Hunter will eventually discover a love for books. But she is confident that he has the reading skills he needs to succeed.

“Based on where technology is going and the world is going,” she said, “he’s going to be able to leverage it.”

Hunter’s mother’s comment makes me think of Ken Kay’s concern about whether or not we are teaching young people not only to find information, but to synthesize it and, yes, leverage it. Are we helping students use information to their own personal benefit? To advance their own agendas? 

As an English teacher, I will never give up on books as teaching tools and will expect my students to engage in literature’s one-way, “linear-ness” and possibly even to enjoy the experience. This year they will read Antigone, Things Fall Apart, Animal Farm, All Quiet on the Western Front and more. The authors of these works have important ideas that can only be found by plunging into them and dealing with the non-digital universe that exists when one mind speaks and one mind (can merely?) listen. But I’m also going to find or create online experiences that allow kids to interact with Orwell’s ideas, for example, and to hear multiple perspectives (rather than just the teacher’s). I’m reaching the conclusion that if we don’t work to better integrate literature into the Web 2.0 experience, books might gain a reputation of being so 20th century that — whatever form they take, print or electronic — they won’t matter anymore.

Information is powerful, but wisdom culled from literature provides the context and narrative richness with which to make meaningful decisions. 

(CC Photo credit: A.K. Photography )

Well, that may be going too far, but he’s certainly someone whose premise I hope and pray is right! According to his excellent book A Whole New Mind, the U.S. economy is transitioning from the Age of Information to what he calls the Conceptual Age, an era that will be kind to creators and empathizers. It’s an age that will reward imagination, joyfulness, social dexterity and humor. Cultural creatives comprise one-quarter of U.S. adults; they are right-brain dominant and are good at:

• seeing the big picture
• synthesizing information
• feeling empathy and sympathy by taking the viewpoint of the person speaking
• embracing an ethic of caring

My people! 

The Information Age rewarded reasonably priced and functional products; it required people strong in logic, calculation and sequential thinking. But now that the “left brains have made us rich,” says Pink, these qualities and people are no longer enough. With so many cheap products flooding the marketplace thanks to overseas labor, consumers have an abundance of choices (for example, cell phones) and are starting to crave items that are more aesthetically, emotionally or spiritually pleasing (as in the iPhone). And jobs that depend on routine skills are disappearing overseas, as well.

What cannot be outsourced or mechanized are those six very human, creative qualities above. And these are what we should incorporate into our teaching. As an English teacher these aptitudes make me very happy! The study of literature can easily incorporate the six areas. We can ask students to tell what makes a story emotionally engaging, what makes a poem beautiful, what gives a whimsical quality to that scene in a play: this is design. What about empathy? How better to understand character interplay, conflicts and motivations than to ask students to empathize with the characters, to map out their relationships and explain why they care (or don’t care) for each other. How about updating the characters of “Antigone” with their own Facebook or MySpace pages? What music would Creon listen to today? What would his mood be? What famous quotation would Haemon highlight? What gods would make his top friends? I will definitely be using my Ning page for this activity.

In fact, now that I think about it, the six aptitudes defined by Pink are probably what led me to major in English in the first place. Finding meaning in literature is one of my favorite things in the world, and applying that meaning to my own life IS my favorite thing in the world. 

How refreshing this is after eight years of drilling down into stories and poems and non-fiction with all those left-brain dominant standards, such as this one:

 ”3.2 – Evaluate the structural elements of the plot (e.g., subplots, parallel episodes, climax), the plot’s development, and the way in which conflicts are (or are not) addressed and resolved.”

I believe in the standards, believe they are necessary so that there is an overall scope and sequence to our students’ progression through the grades. I love organization and logical progress. So I will not be tossing the standards by the wayside. Rather, what I will try to do is balance them with creative, meaning-making opportunities. It’s not enough to evaluate structural elements since apparently we could outsource such tasks to our student friends in India or China!

Our students should also be asked to take those elements and create something new, unique or playful. For instance, with the 8th grade standard above, they could identify the parallel episodes and then — I’m totally making this up right now — try to discover “perpendicular episodes” (i.e. the parts of the plot that are most disparate, jarring or contrasting to each other) or they could take an episode in the plot that has no parallel and insert one of their own making, then evaluate how it adds or detracts from the meaning of the piece.

The possibilities are rich, or, as Pink says, ”meaning is the new money!” 

Here’s one example. Pretty much the most important questions facing any student the summer before they move away to college are… what dorm will I get, and who will my roommate be. Other nagging questions might be, who will my friends be, what are the other students like, will I fit in, what will my professors be like, etc… It’s all very anxiety producing, as we could sympathize if it were us leaving home and family to live alone with a stranger for the next year. But with Facebook, many of these questions have been answered two months before my daughter even packs her bags. 

Last week at her orientation, it was made very clear that the college is not going to give out roommate information and dorm assignments until some time in August. The kids would just need to be patient. So how does my daughter currently know what dorm, floor, and room she’ll be in? How does she know who her next-door neighbor is and who a half dozen of her floor-mates are?

Social networking.

She joined a group on Facebook consisting of freshmen who will attend her college in the fall. One of the students noticed that when you check the parking pass assignments on the university’s online information network, you can find your dorm and room number — even if you have no intention of bringing a car to college, ever. The information is there for all students. Within minutes, the kids clicked their way over to the parking info. and started piecing together their assignments. Over the last couple of days they have announced them to the Facebook group and are becoming acquainted with the people they will be spending the next year of their lives with, and possibly the next four years! The dots are connecting very quickly as more and more students announce their rooms. I’m not sure the university knows about the back door they left open, but the kids found it, and they’re collaborating.

My daughter has not met her roommate yet but thinks the girls on “her” floor are a fun bunch. She’s seen their prom pics, their graduation photos, read their blogs and seen members of their families. All of this, two months before school starts. Two weeks before any of them were supposed to know anything.

Ken Kay, president of Partnership for 21st Century Skills, says this in this video:

“So the coin of the realm is not memorizing the facts that they’re going to need to know for the rest of their lives. The coin of the realm will be, do you know how to find information, do you know how to validate it, do you know how to synthesize it, do you know how to leverage it, do you know how to communicate it, do you know how to collaborate with it, do you know how to problem-solve with it? That’s the new 21st century set of literacies, and it looks a lot different than the model most of us were raised under.” 

I would say they do, they are and they will! 

Over the past few months I’ve been browsing blogs, clicking on links and gathering information about how I want to incorporate technology into my teaching this year. It’s been a fascinating survey, and I particularly enjoy the enthusiasm and sincerity with which my teaching colleagues “out there” and the technology experts write about the newest developments.

At times I thought my head would explode from the overload, but I kept coming back for more because I began to see the vague outlines of some ideas building (rather like a tag cloud… big 18-point yes to Ning, but a tenuous 9-point maybe to Animoto, etc…). I learned how to create a del.icio.us page and just kept posting websites on it to go back to. It felt like a particularly great buffet, and I enjoyed overloading my plate. 

Once school got out in mid-June and I’d moved my stuff over to my new classroom at the high school, I came home and made a to-do list. The technology tasks included:

1. Create a website that will be the permanent home to the course overview, rules, contact information for parents and “about me” profile. Thanks to iWeb on my MacBook, this was very easy and fun.
2. Build my part of the school wiki, which will be where I post weekly homework and where students post essays, video and where I will link to resources. The school started the wiki last February and most of my incoming 10th graders will be familiar with it. Building my part of it was more difficult than the web page, and does not feel intuitive. I’m going to be a team player and get on board with the wiki; I think from a student vantage it would be useful for them to go to one place rather than 6-7 teacher websites.
3. Create a Ning social network for my students. This will be the place to informally discuss ideas, watch videos, brainstorm, socialize outside of class and get creative. The Ning was easier to learn than the wiki, and I’m pretty happy with it so far. I have two videos on it and many ideas that I want to try with students.
4. Build a blog. This is it, and I’m happy with it so far, but have found the functions of edublogs.org to be the most difficult to learn. I think it’s just me.

There were many other non-tech items on the list, including reading Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind and Donna Foote’s Relentless Pursuit. One of the items came before everything else, and that was to pause long enough from my research to attempt to write out my philosophy. I felt the need to focus on the bottom line for my work, the big picture stuff, before building an infrastructure or deciding what to experiment with. This bottom line would guide me and help me to say yes to some aspects of Web 2.0 and no thanks to others. The purpose I came up with looks like a circle, with four tasks each pointing to the next. Students will:

• Develop enthusiasm for literature
• Read important works and understand why they’re important
• Write clearly and will style
• Communicate effectively through logic, argument and emotion

Who are you, reading this, anyhow? I try to picture you — are you sitting cross-legged in your yoga clothes on summer vacation like I am? Are you the only one awake still in your silent house, computer screen glowing and a cat on your lap? Are you on a train? It seems odd, this projection of self, nothing like my newspaper days when I believed, I don’t know, that the audience was somehow more common, Everyman-like, knowable. But you, you might be an expert in blogs, technology, schools, teaching or this Web 2.0 experiment. You might have been blogging for years.  It seems odd to write to/for you. But I guess teaching middle school has prepared me for odd undertakings, and I’ve learned to run with it. 

And I’m moving up to high school this year, to a school that has an excellent reputation for academics and that was created to make using technology a priority. The word technology is in the school’s name even, which goes to show that they were serious eight years ago when they founded it. I have wanted to teach at this school from the beginning, but I wanted to send my two children there even more and they did not want mom around, so I put the idea on the shelf. Last month my daughter graduated and the coast became clear. I’ve been hired — the only new hire for next year (gulp!) — as a 10th grade English teacher… six periods of English, emphasis on world literature. Now the fun begins.