Tomorrow is the big day. Our news site launches for the first time with real content: articles, video, photos, polls, Twitter, Facebook, commenting, article ratings, etc… Yesterday I worked from 7:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. and today has been the same. It’s been a race to the finish with stories coming in at the last second and photos frantically being shot, edited and uploaded. The kids operate in the “nearly now” and it’s nearly killing me. My prefrontal cortex is screaming: why can’t you guys do things ahead of time, meet deadlines, plan for the unexpected? Their prefrontal cortexes, which are not completely wired, are asking where the cake is and who’s on Facebook right now.

The kids want to put the site up online at midnight, which currently is 1 hour and 15 minutes away. So this evening we have been working on it from our respective houses, trying to edit stories and fix little flaws from the back end of the site (the non-public end), and now the entire thing has crashed. Turns out the hosting company is doing some server changes RIGHT NOW. Luckily, I got a prompt response to the email and the owner says it will be back up soon, but still… what are the odds of this happening right now? We are one hour from our stated launch time (stated on our Facebook page, at least), we are 12 hours from the entire school watching it after morning announcements and we have… nothing.

Just one more thing about technology that I need to get over: the inability to actually control anything! You can plan and plan and build and build, but you can’t seem to count on the technology to work all the time.

I’m trying to roll with it…

…with joomla’s strange behavior that I can’t seem to get a handle on (why does inserting a “read more” tab into a story wreck the frames of the entire section page? why can’t photos be resized in the image editor?)

…with the hack job that was done to the hosting company last Friday, rendering the site useless for a day. Is that something that will happen again? Should I move our site?

…with the way my Google Docs system of editing turned into a disaster (hint: have the kids upload stories to one place and let the editors come there; sharing stories in Google via emails just confuses everyone because nobody really knows “where” the stories are at any one time)

…with the way Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer all display the website differently and how that makes no sense to me and I can’t control it or make the site look good on all three at the same time

… and now with the site I’ve been working on for seven solid months being just hours away from its reveal and the server (from Canada!) going down for the first time in my experience. Should I move the site? Of course, today I just upgraded our account to get more bandwidth and storage space. Naturally.

I never thought I’d say this, but I think printing a paper — even by hand — might just be easier and more sane.

Starting with the basic Gmail service has led to an exploration of the Google suite of tools, of which I currently use Google Reader (to keep track of dozens of blogs and websites), Google Docs (to store, edit and share documents, build surveys and post pdfs to the web), Google Sites (to run a wiki site for my Journalism class). In the near future, I plan to test out Google Moderator in a class assignment.

My comfort with Google led to experimenting with Ning, the free social network site that allows you to create and maintain a closed-gated community. I have created four nings and trained lots of teachers on how to make and use them. EtherPad is next on my list to try.

The nings led me to blogging, including this blog on Edublog.com. And all of my experience with these programs finally led me, with a push from a colleague, to joomla! when it came time to start my online news site for school. And that is where my high feelings of technology competence came crashing to the floor.

Joomla! is an open-source content management system (CMS) that is very sophisticated and built by computer programmers around the world sort of as a service to the world. Most do it for free; some try to sell extensions and templates for profit. Most likely these programmers think that mere mortals such as high school teachers comfortable with Google and Facebook can use such exotic offerings like their joomla! with few problems. Sort of like, in theory, they should be able to come into my 6th period classroom of 36 10th grade world lit students and lead an orderly discussion on the themes in Oedipus Rex. Right.

I’ve met my match in Joomla! I’ve been using it since last April and I told my colleagues at the ASNE institute this summer that the first 20 hours Joomla! kicked my butt, the next 60 hours we were in a tense standoff and the last 20 hours I kicked it’s butt. That was all true, and it still would be true if I were the only user of the site I’ve set up. Now that there are 28 other users, I’m running into issues. For example, today somehow some of the text on the site has mysteriously turned to italics. I have no idea how or why. Not all the text, just some. There’s no logic to it, and I can’t seem to undo it because I don’t know how it got that way.

Other problems: I took the site offline last week so we could prepare it for the opening day, which is now four days away. The kids all had user ids and passwords and I assumed this would let them log in and submit their stories, but apparently not. After several frantic emails (on a Sunday! and trust me I was at my computer all day), I figured out I had to upgrade their status from editor (on the front end) to manager (on the back end) so they could submit their work. Shortly after doing this, the italics appeared. Sigh.

Creative Commons image courtesy of clairity

I am so incredibly grateful to be living in the 21st century! I’m an information junkie through and through, and with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks it seems like I can find anything I want to find. This makes me as happy as the day I learned, at four years old, that I could check out as many books from the library as I could carry. (Really, I remember the librarian saying that to me and I remember the stack I shuffled out to the car, the corners of the picture books poking the insides of my elbows, the way the books smelled when I got them back to my room). It was unbelievable and glorious, and now as an adult living in the age of high-speed internet, MacBooks, free content and open source software, it’s even better. 

Of the experiments I incorporated into my teaching in the last year — the nings, the wikis, the google forms, joomla and edublog, apture, animoto, zamzar, zoho, teachertube, etc… — 90 percent of them were triggered from tidbits on a blog (the school, a technology-centered high school, already had a wiki). I have learned so much this past year and it has energized by life and my teaching by opening up possibilities for creative experimentation and play that did not exist when I used the old 20th century tools of teaching: the overhead, the whiteboard, the VCR. 

I am still amazed at the generosity of bloggers. You can see the list of blogs I read on the right of this page; I check them daily (okay, several times a day, by logging into my Google Reader to see what’s new). It seems impossibly kind that bloggers will take the time to provide advice — and links! — on tools, to share notes from conferences, to relay concerns about the state of their minds/hearts/jobs/education/the world… all at no cost to me. Do they know they are impacting a classroom in Ventura, California? No. Do they understand that 170 sophomores spent a year building a Ning community because of them? No. Do they get it that a teacher who thought so many times about bailing on the profession has been reenergized? I hope so!

[Photo Credit: "Information Superhighway" by nickwheeleroz]

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 )