A Guide to Documenting Learning
Page 23
Hyperlinked writing is a complex genre that all readers and writers need to realize is part of the now literacies. If someone cannot see how hyperlinked writing can be considered a genre, it is important to think outside the traditional box of when paper-pen and typewriter writing was the norm. While learners need to be introduced to and sharpen their skills in writing established genres, including argument, persuasion, informational, and narrative, the hyperlinked writing genre adds a new critical-thinking depth and dimension to writing and reading any established genre in a digital form. Basic literacy, as mentioned in Chapter 2, is the ability to read and write many text types. In today’s world, the amount of text read digitally via smartphones, tablets, and eReaders outweighs what is read in analog form (e.g., paper books, newspapers, magazines), especially when not in school.
The thought processes and actions involved in quality hyperlinked writing to ensure quality digital reading experiences are a natural fit for blog writing, as well as other content-creation writing (e.g., website page, wiki page), which students and educators are involved in creating with increasing frequency.
Higher-level thinking takes place when writers are strategically reflecting on potential web-based sources to meaningfully connect to their selected hyperlinked words and phrases in their digital text. It is important to note that this contemporary writing genre does not come naturally for most learners, and will not happen consistently as a ubiquitous behavior after just a lesson or two, or a few hyperlinked writing attempts.
During a pre-writing time, a hyperlinking writer needs to consider what and how to convey his or her intended message using higher hyperlinked taxonomy levels. The writer needs to consider what to link and when best to link it to convey the desired connection, curation, illustration, or information source. Here are examples of potential hypertext and hyperlinks:
Person’s name > URL of hub (e.g., website, blog, Twitter, Facebook profile)
Brand name > URL of company’s website
Term > URL of definition
Quote > URL of original source
Word or phrase > URL of content context/background
Word or phrase > URL of someone else’s perspective
Conversation > URL of Twitter hashtag
Example > URL of explanation, demonstration, or action
Theory > URL of recognized practice
Theme / topic / concept > URL of previous writing by self, a collaboration, or another
The writer also needs to consider how to strategically use the to-be-hyperlinked text to create purposeful connections for readers, such as
Being responsible for previewing prospective URL links for quality and relevance before linking
Using descriptive text with meaningful keywords or key phrases in preparation to link
Keeping the amount of underlined words or phrases to a minimum; do not create links where the linked text is a full sentence or an entire paragraph
Krochmal (2010) uses a helpful analogy regarding the purpose of a strategically hyperlinked word or phrase in the context of the included content, “Link[ed] text must telegraph the destination. ‘Click here’ is completely meaningless.” In other words, let readers know descriptively what content to expect before they click on the link.
Lastly, there are logistical skills needed to support a writer’s hyperlinked writing fluency:
Selecting a link in a browser
Copying a link in a browser
Creating a link on your digital page, either with HTML code or WYSIWYG editor
Pasting the URL into the link code
Opening up a new tab in your browser to switch easily back and forth between digital writing page and pages to be linked
Given all that is involved in the learning curve for becoming a fluent hyperlinking writer, using documenting OF and FOR learning opportunities provides an excellent avenue for creating and unpacking the visible evidence of a digital writer’s learning growth over time concerning his or her hyperlinked writing capabilities.
Hunt (2008) reminds educators and learners alike, “Digital texts have the potential to make a big, juicy mess of a linear experience. Or to turn a so-so piece of writing into a masterful collection of references, linktributions, and pointers to other good stuff.”
QR Code 9.12 Scan this QR code to read the blog post Hyperlinked Writing in the Classroom—From Theory to Practice.
http://langwitches.me/hyperlinkedwriting
Levine (2006) defines a linktribution as, “An attribution via a web link or offering a ‘linktribute.’” This term and its definition leads to a final point about hyperlinked writing or any contemporary reading or writing genres: new forms require new terms and phrases to communicate meaning and understanding about the genre’s characteristics and elements.
For additional insights concerning how to teach and meaningfully practice hyperlinked writing in a classroom or professional learning environment, scan QR Code 9.12 to begin exploring, which included activities to begin the process of building literacy and fluency with students and/or colleagues.
Summing Up
Incorporating audio and video documentation adds an engagement factor that hooks most learners. Platforms and tools for the documentation phases and learningflow routine steps will continue to expand due to innovative people and the demands and hopes of users.
It is important to be willing to be a risk-taker as a primary or secondary learner to try out new platforms tools. Do not be afraid to test, evaluate, re-evaluate, and switch platforms and tools in conjunction with experiencing a variety of documenting opportunities.
A blogging platform can be the glue that holds all of your documentation needs together. It allows for a wide range of documentation media and artifacts, as well as having built-in tools to insert and embed media and links, and connect to your past, present, and future documentation content. A blogging platform can also become a hub that inherently supports the share and amplify steps in the documenting learningflow routine.
As documenters share their digital work in online spaces, the skills involved in hyperlinked writing become a necessity to create meaningful, organized, and curated connections to the learning artifacts and the learning process itself.
Going Beyond
To amplify your reading beyond this book’s pages, we have created discussion questions and prompts for this chapter, which are located at www.documenting4learning.com. To extend your thinking, reactions, and responses, you can connect with other readers by leaving comments on individual chapter’s discussion posts on our documenting4learning blog.
We also invite you to contribute and share your artifacts in other social media spaces to connect with and learn from other readers around the world using the #documenting4learning hashtag on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram; or by mentioning @documenting4learning on Facebook and Instagram, and @doc4learning on Twitter.
10 Documenting With Unpacking in Mind
The unexamined life is not worth living.
—Socrates
Unpacking, reflecting on, and analyzing captured artifacts are important facets of the post-documentation phase. As learners become fluent in the unpacking process, the cognition and metacognition involved positively influence choices about meaningful artifacts to be captured in the pre- and during-documentation phases.
Unpacking Documentation Artifacts
The context for unpacking was first mentioned in Chapter 6 related to how the post-documentation phase’s nine steps aid in transforming evidence of learning into meaningful artifacts. While there are myriad media that can be unpacked, this chapter focuses on six media platforms or tools commonly used in educational settings.
Unpacking Blog Posts
In Chapter 3, there was the example of a teacher extending her professional learning by contacting Mike Fisher and having him skype with a mixed fourth- and fifth-grade classroom. This documenting opportunity involved primary and secondary learners in the documentation process.
T
he teacher was Silvia, the 21st century literacy coach at the school at the time, who worked closely with Stephanie Teitelbaum, the students’ Language Arts teacher. The two of them were working collaboratively on embedding documenting FOR and AS learning opportunities into Stephanie’s classroom. Silvia and Stephanie connected with Mike and learned that he had written children’s poems over the years. They saw this as a perfect opportunity for Stephanie’s students to interact authentically with a poet.
The Skype call between Mike and Stephanie’s students organically lead to him working on a project with her students wherein they illustrated a collection of poems Mike had written. The students embarked on an illustration-creation process that was iterative based on feedback from the poet and their classroom peers.
QR Code 10.1 Scan this QR code to see the Blogging Rubric (first page).
http://langwitches.me/bloggingrubric
The students had been blogging throughout the year and continued to do so while they worked on their poetry illustration project. Based on the information gathered during their time skyping with Mike, they wrote a blog post expressing the key points of the project, as well as some facts about Mike. As in the past, when they drafted and eventually published their posts, they used a familiar blogging rubric for measuring their ongoing quality writing growth (scan QR Code 10.1 to access the rubric).
Silvia unpacked the blog post with the learning focuses and goals in mind, which Stephanie had discussed with her students prior to writing their posts. A portion of an unpacked artifact can be seen in Image 10.1. As primary learners, the students saw evidence of their writing being evaluated through the annotexted posts, which aided them in their ability to determine and defend their rubric scores. Stephanie, as a secondary learner, gained insights from Silvia in how documentation can aid in evaluating student work and the learning focuses and goals, including a digital writing genre (blog posts).
Image 10.1
Silvia was both a primary and secondary learner. As a primary learner, she captured evidence of her own work concerning assessment practices in a modern classroom with now literacies applications, which she reflected on as an action researcher via her blog. As a secondary learner, she helped unpack evidence of Stephanie’s teaching and her students’ learning applications in their blog post writing samples.
As Silvia also shared her annotexted images and blog post reflection with Stephanie, they made additional observations: the annotexted artifacts helped Stephanie’s students make connections among the project’s focuses and their ongoing skill-building concerning grammar application, writing with an audience in mind, and digital writing skills (e.g., hyperlink writing, blogging as a conversation platform using first-person narrative).
In the unpacked Image 10.2, Silvia’s annotations highlighted several learning applications for a particular student who provided evidence that he is being reflective and mentioned a posed question using proper dialogue punctuation, his enthusiastic voice, and attempting to engage the audience.
Image 10.2
When unpacking blog posts, it is important to determine what details pertaining to the learning focuses or goals are going to be articulated as evidence in what has been captured. Possible considerations may include:
What do I want to convey as evidence of understanding, relationships, and connections to current learning, past, or cross-discipline learning?
What do I want to convey concerning the evidence of previous learning being applied in an authentic way?
What do I want to convey that is evidence of growth over time?
What do I want to convey concerning a specific image or other media form related to one or more of the now literacies that is present in the artifact?
The unpacked examples (see Images 10.1 and 10.2) involved students creating singular or collaborative blog posts. Silvia did not unpack every student’s blog posts. Her goal was to make using blog posts as a formative assessment and reflection visible for Stephanie, as well as her Langwitches blog readers
As mentioned in Chapter 8, there is a variety of annotexting apps available to create superimposed text, highlights, frames, and directional arrows on an artifact. Skitch was used or the images above. Annotexting images can also be accomplished using PowerPoint or Keynote by importing the desired image into a slide frame and using the text box, shapes, and arrow features to create the annotext information. When the annotexting is complete, export the single slide as a .jpeg or .png.
Unpacking Twitter Feeds
Given a Twitter feed is an ongoing stream of tweeted messages, to follow a specific stream based on a conversation, an idea, value, or group, a hashtag is used to locate the crowdsourced posts.
The first example of unpacking a Twitter feed will be from a professional learning perspective with Janet as a primary learner. She wanted to experience what is involved in hosting a Twitter chat, as she had been participating in educational chats for quite some time, but felt she did not truly grasp what it was like task-wise to host a chat.
She learned as much as she could about the process and protocols prior to hosting. She created the #CDeduchat hashtag with the goal of connecting with educators around the theme of curriculum creation and decision making. She began hosting the #CDeduchat Twitter chat time at its pre-announced time, and created a conversation archive for asynchronous viewers and contributors after each chat time has ended.
After hosting her #CDeduchat for a few months, she wanted to capture evidence of her hosting capabilities at that time and get feedback from colleagues who were seasoned moderators. She took screen-capture images from the #CDeduchat stream and created a collage in a PowerPoint slide. Janet then used arrows and text boxes to annotext her images to convey her reflective observations. When she was done, she exported the slide as a .jpg file. Next, she shared her learning-thinking artifact via email with her colleagues who helped her gain insights into moderating chats. When she emailed her artifact (see Image 10.3), she included several questions she had based on applying what she learned and now realized having moderated and hosted a series of Twitter chats.
QR Code 10.2 Scan this QR code to read three students’ reflection posts based on their skype-with-Mike experience.
http://langwitches.me/digigogy
Image 10.3
Assuming students have their own Twitter accounts or a classroom Twitter account, they can reflect on and analyze their own Twitter streams based on a learning focus or goal. Students or their teachers can unpack their posts to create reflective annotations or use a screencasting program or app to capture their reflective thoughts orally.
The second example for an unpacked Twitter feed features reflections made by Stephanie as a secondary learner with Silvia supporting her learning. They decided to unpack several tweets generated by her students while interviewing Mike during their meet-a-poet Skype session. Knowing the students had reached a comfort level with the various collaborative roles involved in conducting a Skype interview, they chose to capture evidence of the goals of authentic applications of quality expressive and receptive commenting and exemplary digital citizenship.
During the Skype call, Silvia and Mike were following the Twitter feed. Mike was using their tweets to aid in the conversation he was having with the Interviewers. Four students (two from Grade 4 and two from Grade 5) had been designated the Twitterers for the Skype call. Their job was to document and disseminate tweets that captured key points and interesting facts shared by Mike using their respective grade level’s Twitter handle, which is the captured documentation that Stephanie unpacked (see Images 10.4 and 10.5).
Unpacking the classroom Twitter feeds proved insightful for both Silvia and Stephanie. Stephanie mentioned that she felt good about the instructional practices she had been providing based on the textual evidence in the two streams. She also mentioned that she noticed the fourth-graders’ comments demonstrated little or no evidence of deep thought, since their tweets were mainly at a remember-and-recall level. Silvia and Step
hanie agreed this concern could be addressed through practice lessons.
Image 10.4
Image 10.5
Stephanie shared that she would like to use these artifacts as a beginning benchmark and periodically capture and annotext their Twitter feepower of using this social platform to aid learningds to monitor their growth.
Twitter posts (tweets) involve applying unique skills and strategies that are beneficial to help convey one’s intended message, which can take some time to apply effectively. For example:
Concise articulation and summarizing of information or thoughts, given 280 characters or less limitation
Accurate use of Twitter lingo and abbreviations (e.g., @username, #hashtag, Ss—students, Ts—teachers, TY—thank you, YW—you’re welcome)
Appropriate use of Twitter protocols (e.g., placement of third-party’s @username mentioned in original post when responding to original Twitterer’s comment)
Ability to insert URLs or embed photos or videos
Authentic application of digital citizenship and network literacies
Awareness of potential influence on a larger audience by strategically amplifying
Building one’s professional learning network purposefully, as well as interacting with specific members of one’s network
These unique capabilities can be focused on during the unpacking process, especially to measure improvement over time.
When unpacking Twitter feeds, it is important to remember that tweets rarely stand on their own. It is not easy to create a narrative context when reading only one tweet because it might be connected to a thread of tweets by the same person or group of people. Based on a specific hashtag being used, replies shared, links embedded, images attached, and/or tweets sent before or after specific tweets, a narrative emerges that expresses an idea or collective thoughts and resources concerning a topic or theme.