Hypertexts in the Rearview Mirror

A couple of weeks we sat down as a teaching team and reflected on the Year 11 Hypertext unit as we moderated the work produced by students. Moderation meetings are one of those things that scares a lot of teachers - they're long, they can be controversial as marks are debated, and they can be confronting as your students' work is on the table and the inevitable fear of "Did I teach it right?" crosses your mind.

Despite all of that our moderation processes are an invaluable part of our processes in my Academy. It's where we get the opportunity to look at the whole cohort of work and reflect on our original objectives for the unit, as well as share our failures and our success stories.

Essentially it gives us a chance to connect beyond our classrooms and timetabled lines.

As a group we were impressed with the quality of the narratives crafted by our Year 11 students - their confidence in experimenting with story-telling techniques and the maturity of so many of their writing styles often left us speechless. There are two which have lingered with me after reading them and I still want to pull one character away from the risk she's about to take and another I feel heartbroken for as the student took us on a journey into the mind of an alzhemier's sufferer.

But writing a good narrative wasn't all this unit had been about. It was also about the students carefully selecting where to place hyperlinks within the narrative in order to invite their audience to learn more about the narrative through different perspectives or additional information (expansions) before returning to the main narrative. This was the hardest part of the task because it was much more subtle in its management than most of the students thought it would be.

At first we had a lot of students link words like "rain" to and image of rain with an expansion such as "it was raining hard that night." As we got deeper into the unit and students became more confident with the potential of the hyperlinks they started to play more and they began to take advantage of them to position their audience towards characters and events. One that stands out is how one student used the main narrative to tell one side of the story, but then explored the reactions of other characters affected by the main event.

So, in terms of writing and 'mastery' of a new genre the students (and the staff - most of who had never heard of a hypertext before this year) did well.

It's a given that people are going to roll their eyes when I talk about this unit (probably not my lovely PLN members who are big nerds like me :P). I get a lot of comments like, "How would you do it with limited computer access?", "Blackboard is too painful to work for a project like this.", "Wouldn't the kids just copy each others?", "What if someone leaves a nasty comment for another student?", "Our staff don't have the skills to teach this."

And yes, these were all challenges. But, you know what? We overcame them and it was an awesome feeling to have so many 'A' grades compared to 'D'.

How did we manage the issues?

1. Were aware of what the (major) potential problems were going to be - nothing took us by surprise as an issue during this unit and as issues came up we rolled with them and worked as a teaching team to solve them.
2. We gave each student their own wiki, set so that only they could edit it - even if another student did copy someone else's narrative we'd be able to look at time stamps and in conjunction with normal proceedures for plagarism we'd be able to able to deal with it (we did have one case of plagarism, but not from another student).
3. Comments - before we "went live" with the wikis students were shown exactly how we could track everything in the Blackboard and reminded about appropriate and inappropriate behaviours (and that the College's Code of Conduct extended to this space as well) and that any breach of these expectations would see students face serious consequences. (We didn't have any inappropriate comments left - a couple of narratives with...interesting...content, these were locked from viewing and, again, normal proceedures followed).
4. Blackboard not handling it - this one I did stress about...big time. We're only allocated 20MB per Blackboard at the initial set up, we're able to request an extension of this if there is a need. Before we even began the unit I requested a significant increase given the unit and the sheer number of participants (175 students approximately and five teachers), closer to the due date of the hypertexts I requested a further increase ("just in case") and again it was allowed. So, Blackboard handled it just fine and I have to say a big shoutout for the support of the project I got from the eLearning team who oked my requests.
5. Limited computer access - up until two weeks before the due date we had incredibly limited computer access in our classrooms. We're a new school and had just had our next phase of buildings opened, we also had a massive intake of students at the beginning of the year, and while the new rooms got settled and the new students were absorbed into our cohort EVERYTHING was stretched (even now there's no such thing as a "free room"). On top of that the distribution of computer access was undergoing massive restructure to lessen the damage to our laptop trolleys and to take advantage of the federal government's funding to increase student:computer ratios in secondary schools. It was stressful and it did require a great deal of patience and team work, and we were starting to get creative.
   A lot of students were happy to work on their wikis at home and that did ease a little of the pressure...still, imagine our delight when the restructure happened sooner than predicted and the tech fairy left us all ten brand new laptops in each of our rooms (we're spoilt and so lucky).
6. Teacher's comfort levels...this was fun...not. Of the six teacher team we had everything from highly confident to open refusal to begin with. In the end with support, coaching and a fair bit of hand holding we got everyone over the line...just.
7. We did have 1-2 students who couldn't even figure out how to log into the Blackboard and who somehow missed their teachers' attention during the drafting process. Out of 175 1-2 aint' bad in my eyes.

Overall the unit was a success. What will I do differently next year? Honestly, I'm not sure, maybe spend more time talking about skills such as image sizing to save space (we touched on it, but really due to variations in teacher confidence the focus was on the wiki skills) and leaving productive comments (we had a lot of "this is great!" without any offers to extend the conversation). Actually, I'd love to have students do more of the 'teaching'.

I mentioned in today's earlier post that this unit has impacted on other subjects. As teachers gained confidence with wikis they started to see how they could be used in other subjects and we saw wikis become common in Geography, Humanities, English Communication, Year 10 English and Ancient History. Some of these are just starting to play with the potential while others are way out in front.

I think that covers that reflection in sufficient depth to bore you all to tears.

Sorry...

Wikified English - Update

Pic: Fountain Pen, by phil_h
@ http://www.flickr.com/photos/14318462@N00/48771723/

Wow, the efforts of the last few weeks have been mammoth. Especially when it comes to the Wikified English project with students crafting their own hypertexts within personal wikis.

At first it seemed a simple enough task - find four stimulus items, write a narrative which used them in creative/symbolic ways and then embed hyperlinks to show the intertextuality and 'layers' of your story. I've watched as students and staff slowly realise that this task is far more indepth than this. Students are having to really think about their choices as writers - which words do I hyperlink? What do I use as my expansion piece? How does this stimulus item add to my narrative and not just show something from it? I've had a number of students try to do this task the same way they did the narrative piece in Year 10 - write the story and then find the stimulus item that 'fit'. Some have written entire narratives and then gone looking for stimulus items, only to realise that doing it that way is actually really difficult - nothing 'fits' the way they need to.

This deceptively simple task is really seeing them go through the process of crafting a narrative piece. I've had quite a few students learn the lesson and start over. At first I was worried about that, would they have time, was I asking too much - but I've accepted that they've benefited hugely from the lesson. The quality of the narratives I've read so far in drafting (and at this stage I'm only looking at the main narrative - next week they're crafting their hyperlink expansions) is fantastic - I get tingles reading their work!

Some students seem shyer about starting to construct their wikis and we suspect that it's because of the sense of "publishing" to an audience (their peers). Like I always witnessed in Drama, give them an audience and the pressure does pretty amazing things - suddenly students who had a fairly laid back approach is concerned with making sure it looks 'just right'.

Collective collaboration is happening too, and we haven't even had to tell them how (surprising...not). Students from across the cohort are looking at other groups' work and leaving comments. Some of them surprisingly detailed and incredibly constructive. What amazes me, (as always) inspires and gives me hope is that we haven't had to "tell them" to do it. For them it's been a natural extension.

But, it's not just the students I'm seeing step up on this one. The teaching team on this have really leaped forward during the last few weeks - they've:

• upskilled from not knowing what a wiki was to being able to create and edit wikis within our LMS
• figured out how to enroll and mange students within that LMS - including from scratch (no easy task if you're familar with it)

And that's just the skills stuff...their knowledge, awareness and understanding of the potential of these sorts of tasks is growing - and I love watching it, better yet - I love watching them apply the idea to their other classrooms.

Whilst it has been both challenging and draining to try and upskill nearly 200 students and seven staff, it's been so incredibly worth it (I may change my tune if in the next week it all suddenly goes pear shape...) and I must admit I'm looking forward to trying to find the next tool to introduce to my staff.

Wikis, Wikis, Everywhere

Three weeks ago I introduced the five other teachers teaching the hypertext unit to wikis. I got mixed reactions and I still am, but the fact of the matter is that the use of wikis and blogs in my room last year is snowballing - honestly, it's getting out of control and I couldn't be happier about it.

At present these wiki based projects are happening in my department:

• The hyper-english unit, where students are publishing hypertext short stories to show the intertextuality of their piece.
• Year 12 Geography are publishing multipage wikis for their research task on Climate Change in particular global regions.
• English Communication students are now creating wikis as personal representations.
• Year 10 English classes are publishing their reconstructions to a wiki as prep for their Year 11 task.

There's also talk of perhaps integrating wikis into subjects such as Modern and Ancient History (YES PLEASE!).

There's two problems we're encountering at present:

1. At the moment I'm upskilling staff and students on the wikis in our LMS - and until they're confident I'm it. I need to figure out a way to clone myself.
2. The school is suffering a distinct shortage of computers at present. This is a temporary issue, unfortunately it is happening NOW as subjects across the school come on board with the integration of ICTs. I just hope we get through without the teachers going "it's too hard" and just going back to the "easy" way.

The reality when integrating ICTs into your classroom in meaningful ways is that at first there will be teething problems - something will crash, something will have a wrong setting, the kids will forget their passwords (the teachers will "forget" their passwords), there won't be enough computers. If we're dedicated to finding a way to integrate technology in a more meaningful way than using our laptops to play YouTube clips, or music, or powerpoint presentations we're going to need to accept that we're not "teachers" - we're LEARNERS. And that is going to mean some late nights trying to figure out how to do something the first time (promise you, the more you do it though, the quicker you'll be able to do it. I've cut my wiki creation time from 5 min each to a minute flat, it's a matter of knowing the tools), it is going to mean having backup plans and it is going to mean some moments of frustration (my computers have had their well being threatened more than once while walking my digitial journey with me).

The extra effort is so worth it when it works - when you get those first few blog entries, or you find that the kids have figured out how to do something without you showing them (or that you thought impossible), when their eyes light up because they're getting to work with technology from their world in their classrooms.

As a learner I'm overwhelmed at the moment. I'm well and truly outside my comfort zone and feeling more than a little out of my depth. My learning curve at the moment is huge and everytime I get to a peak there's another, larger, lesson to learn. I'm not disliking it, but it's tiring - even without the wiki pressures!

Tomorrow I'm working my way through four classes to intro the basics of the wikis - the teachers don't know it yet, but they'll be expected to work in a group with their students while I do it - they're not going to be comfortable with that, but collaboration is the key to the great shift I'm trying to foster.

Wikified English - Pt 3, Over Complicated?

As I finished the last Wikified English post it struck me that maybe I've been making this unit seem like a far bigger task than it needs to be. Afterall, isn't it as simple as this:

1. Find your sources of inspiration
2. Write your narrative (type it up as a word document)
3. Copy and paste your narrative into a page of the wiki
4. Upload any necessary material to the wiki (videos, images, etc)
5. Go through your story and add hyperlinks as appropriate to the relating texts - either held on other wiki pages or external websites (remember some may not be available at school).

So why did it take me two decent sized blog entries to deal with a project that can be summarised in five easy steps? If it boils down to those five steps how is it anymore complicated than the traditional task of writing a narrative based on some stimulus items?

It's the "extra" stuff I want to see happen in this unit that makes me wonder, what's really important? Shouldn't we be focused on what the syllabus states and not the extra?

As teachers we're responsible for students being exposed to the content specified by our curriculum bodies as essential and for assessing in accordance with the guidelines - however, I see our job as more than that. We are also responsible for helping young adults develop the skills they will need to interact responsibly and appropriately in the wider world and that takes more than being able to write a narrative.

This unit offers us the chance to talk to our students about things like copyright and Creative Commons, about safe internet behaviour, skills like uploading files, modifying the size of files, embedding, hyperlinking (what it is, how it's done, the possibilities it offers). These things are as equally important for them (and our staff) to be exposed to - in addition to the curriculum Englishy stuff of narrative structures and critical awareness of texts. In my opinion these are all equally important "lessons" in this unit, and despite my opening question I can't in good faith say I've over complicated things.

Mind you, interesting that someone confident (mostly) with the technology and concepts we'll be working with would have that moment of "Too much?" Definitely a timely reminder for me as to what the less confident staff will think about the idea.

Wikified English - Pt 2, HOW?

In my last post I wrote about the hypertext, "unconventional narrative" unit where students will publish short stories within a wiki with hyperlinks to show the intertextuality of their work with other texts. That post looked at WHY I am passionate (and more than a little excited) about this unit, in case you missed it you can read about it at - Wikified English - Pt 1, WHY?

Working past the WHY on this bright idea (please make sure you read that with a degree of self-deprecation...I have a feeling this project is going to become consuming) I'm moving into the HOW phase and I've been researching and collating resources for the unit the last few days and mulling over how to approach the task - with students and staff. Part of this is identifying what skills they're going to need I'm expecting a degree of resistance from students and staff and I'm trying to remember baby steps while I collate and plan.

Whenever I start work on a unit like this (totally new and included emergent - are wikis really emergent these days? - technology) I spend a fair bit of times brainstorming what skills and knowledge will we need to know in order to succeed? Usually I do this on paper, and it ends up fairly messy. Because I'm on holidays and I've had some time I had a play with Webspiration, the online version of Inspiration, a great mind mapping tool I've used with students in the past. This is how the first draft has turned out:

As I say, it's only a draft and there's probably a gazillion small things I haven't thought of, things I consider "basic" and need to consider.

So...HOW do I get my staff and students to the point where they have the necessary information? We get into the nitty gritty of the sequencing...if the above is kind of like my ingredients list, what's the method to use?

In the past I've started thing small - just my classroom, just one other teacher...this time it's eight classes of about 25 and the eight staff. I suppose I'm lucky in that I am one of the teachers and there's probably about 20-30 really competent students with our MLS from my classes last year that I'll be able to draw on for some help. There is also a couple of very keen staff who, while they don't yet have the skills want to learn. Given the situation my usual method isn't going to work.

Since the teachers need to understand what they're managing (notice a change in my usage here - for the majority they're going to be spending a lot of this unit learning, not "teaching"...oi, this is going to be a massive unit...is it too late to back out?) I'm starting with them on the student free days - doing some quick activities, providing a collection of resources, and workshops and support throughout the unit.

Then we work together on helping the students...this really will be a situation where we all need to collaborate to make sure this works...Staff and students are going to find it hard to approach this task in a 'traditional' way...or am I unduly complicating things?

That's a thought to ponder in tomorrow's post I think.

Wikified English - Pt 1, WHY?

My first big project this year is our very first "wikified" Short Story unit. Traditionally this unit sees students devise an original short story inspired by a variety of collected stimulus items, these can be poems, news articles, other short stories, images, etc. The focus during the unit is exploring the way texts and authors weave together to make meaning. This term students will be doing essentially the same task, except that the stories will be published in wikis with links to the stimulus items.

When we first came up with the idea I hadn't made the connections about WHY I thought it was such a great idea. Talking in the car on the way home I finally figured it out - the hypertextuality of the internet is often a real life example and respresentation of the intertexuality of texts. Websites, wikis, blogs - they are all made richer through the inclusion of hyperlinks to relevant resources, different points of views, and sources of inspiration. Hypertext is connecting texts and making meaning in, perhaps not new ways, but significant and important ways. One of my favourite resources for showing this is Michael Wesch's, "The Machine is Us/ing Us".

Some of the great things I've found so far:

A great SlideShow over on Slideshare entitled "Digital Fiction", by Angela Thomas (2007) which looks at some of the "emerging" literary formats popping up on the web:

Digital Fiction

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: fiction digital)

Then I found an entire novel that was a collaborative wiki - A Million Penguins. Not the most complicated hypertext out there, but it's nice to have an example to show people this type of text is not a figment of my imagination. As I dug around I found that there's more hypertexts out there than I thought - Hypertext Fiction Sites, Eastgate, and Hyperizons are just a few sites with nice collections of resrouces and examples.

It was through these resources and my lightbulb moment that I was able to figure out WHY I think we _need_ to get this unit to work - our students are dealing with interwoven, multimodal texts everyday, and they need to understand how these texts are constructed and connected so they can navigate them confidently and with awareness...but more on that in a later post.