I was just rereading Will Richardson assertion that it's about Networks, Not Tools:

Today, it was all about networks, not tools. All about connections, not publishing. All about working together to get smarter, not learning alone. All about how RSS connects us to ideas, how blogs connect us to people, how Twitter connects us to, um, the Twitterverse, and on and on and on. ...

Networks and connections are important in learning. But as Richardson goes "on and on and on," he says little about what he actually learned from skyping over to Utrecht during his presentation. Instead, he gives us words like "cool", "passion", and "glow", but no indication of what learning, if any, took place. We can now "buzz" around in streams of information overflow, but it's not clear how that makes us "smarter." There seems to be an emotional conflating (1) of fact aggregating with learning and (2) of stream of consciousness socializing with mastering a body of knowledge to the extent that you can use it in novel situations. Twitter, like any other tool, can be useful, but it is just as likely to lead to frittering our time away. As I wrote earlier about twitter,

Twitter can keep us from achieving, as noted in [Kathy Sierra's] article How to be an Expert, Philip Ross's The Expert Mind, and my post Forget IQ. Just Work Hard! Twittering one's time away may be momentarily pleasurable, but real pleasure, real achievement, and real learning--whether it's learning a language, learning to write, or learning in general--come from real, focused, and challenging endeavors.

American Educator has a 19-page article titled Teaching English Language Learners: What the Research Does and Does Not Say (pdf) by Claude Goldenberg, Professor of Education at Stanford University. The article looks at the findings of two reviews of the research, one by the National Literacy Panel and the other by the Center for Education, Diversity, and Excellence. Here's an excerpt from the conclusion:

Although there are numerous areas in which there is insufficient research to guide policy and practice, we can lay claim to some things that matter for the education of ELLs. Chief among these is that 1) teaching children to read in their primary language promotes reading achievement in English; 2) in many important respects, what works for learners in general also works for ELLs; and 3) teachers must make instructional modifications when ELLs are taught in English, primarily because of the students’ language limitations.

Practically, what do these findings and conclusions mean? In spite of the many gaps in what we know, the following is the sort of instructional framework to which our current state of knowledge points:

• If feasible, children should be taught reading in their primary language. Primary language reading instruction a) develops first language skills, b) promotes reading in English, and c) can be carried out as children are also learning to read, and learning other academic content, in English.
• As needed, students should be helped to transfer what they know in their first language to learning tasks presented in English; teachers should not assume that transfer is automatic.
• Teaching in the first and second languages can be approached similarly. However, adjustments or modifications will be necessary, probably for several years and at least for some students, until they reach sufficient familiarity with academic English to permit them to be successful in mainstream instruction; more complex learning might require more instructional adjustments.
• ELLs need intensive oral English language development (ELD), especially vocabulary and academic English instruction. However, as the sidebar on critical unanswered questions explains (see p. 12), we have much to learn about what type of ELD instruction is most beneficial. Effective ELD provides both explicit teaching of features of English (such as syntax, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and norms of social usage) and ample, meaningful opportunities to use English—but we do not know whether there is an optimal balance between the two (much less what it might be).
• ELLs also need academic content instruction, just as all students do; although ELD is crucial, it must be in addition to—not instead of—instruction designed to promote content knowledge.

Paul Kei Matsuda has recently set up Symposium for Second Language Writing Interactive. Here's some information from the site:

The purpose of SSLW Interactive is to provide a centralized resource portal for second language writing teachers and researchers from around the world. Currently, SSLW interactive provides the following features:

Blogs. Any registered user can create blog entries to share their experience and perspectives on various issues related to second language writing.

Groups. The site hosts group space for various related groups, including: TESOL Second Language Writing Interest Sections (SLWIS); CCCC Committee on Second Language Writing; CCCC Special Interest Group on Second Language Writing; Symposium on Second Language Writing; and Journal of Second Language Writing, among others.

Forums. Forums provide a space for the discussion of various topics related to second language writing in the traditional, hierarchical list format.

E-lists. A list of email lists related to second language writing. Recent contents are available from this site. Links to subscription information and list archives are also available. If you are aware of any other email lists, please post the description. (Anyone can add an edit the descriptions--you don't have to be the list owner to contribute!)

Conferences. A list of conferences, workshops and other meetings related to second language writing. If you are planning an event that may be relevant to second language writing teachers and researchers, please feel free to add an event.

Journals. A directory of journals that publish articles on second language writing. Please contribute by posting information about your favorite journal. (Anyone can add and edit the descriptions--you don't have to be the editor or the publisher to contribute!)

Programs. A directory of doctoral programs where students can specialize in second language writing. Please post information about programs you are familiar with. (Anyone can add and edit the descriptions--you don't have to be a faculty member or program director to contribute!)

CFPs. A list of call for papers/proposals related to second language writing.

SSLW. Information about the Symposium on Second Language Writing, an annual international gathering of second language writing specialists.

The site is in its infancy now, but it has the potential to become the central interactive clearlnghouse for all things related to second lnaguage writing. That potential, of course, is waiting for your contribution.

Teach for America (TFA) teachers are making a difference (via OL Daily). According to this six-year longitudinal study of high school students in North Carolina,

The findings show that TFA teachers are more effective, as measured by student exam performance, than traditional teachers. Moreover, they suggest that the TFA effect, at least in the grades and subjects investigated, exceeds the impact of additional years of experience, implying that TFA teachers are more effective than experienced secondary school teachers. The positive TFA results are robust across subject areas, but are particularly strong for math and science classes.

This is troubling: Five-week institute trained teachers do better than those with a degree in teaching, which usually includes two years of education courses. (And 34% of the non-TFA teachers had graduate degrees compared to less than 2% for TFA teachers.) How can that be? The report notes that TFA teachers are recruited from highly selective universities but placed

in the lowest-performing schools in the country ... [and] in the most demanding classrooms in these already challenging schools.

Yet, their students do better. Interestingly, TFA teachers also score higher than traditionally trained teachers on the PRAXIS exam. Is their success due to being more motivated? Do experienced teachers suffer demotivation over the years? Or is it because TFA teachers are stronger academically? I imagine it would be at least a combination of those factors, and perhaps others I'm not aware of.

What's troubling is that it is difficult to imagine the same scenario in another discipline. Take, for instance, engineering. Would you expect that a group of new college graduates would be better engineers than a group who had been in the field a while? Even if the newbies were from highly selective schools and the oldies weren't? Lots of questions but no solutions here.

A new study reports on the success of career school programs (Erik Eckholm, NY Times).

Now, a long-term and rigorous evaluation of nine career academies across the country, to be released in Washington on Friday, has found that eight years after graduation, participants had significantly higher employment and earnings than similar students in a control group.

Researchers believe that those who initially expressed interest in the academies may have shared similar motivation to succeed, whether or not they were chosen for the special program.

But this also suggests that something about the academy experience, apart from educational achievement, promoted greater success in the job market. One likely factor is the exposure the academies provide to a range of adults in real workplaces, said J. D. Hoye, who directed a “school-to-work” initiative for the Clinton administration and now heads the National Academy Foundation, which advises career academies on curriculums and other topics.

“The students see what work is like, and they build a network of caring adults at school and in the workplace,” Ms. Hoye said.

Students seem to benefit from being part of a special, small group, said Mark Bartholio, the academy director. Many do not pursue finance careers but instead go into teaching, social services or criminal justice, he said, but one graduate said the accounting skills he learned in the academy had enabled him to help start a small business.

This reminds me of Deborah Meiers (In Schools We Trust), who wrote:

Standardization and bureaucratization fuel the very distrust they are aimed to cure. (p. 2)

Students need to be around teachers they can trust and teachers who ask questions as learners, too. (p. 14)

And it reminds me of Deci & Ryan's self-determination theory in which motivation is affected by autonomy, competence, and social relations.

We often talk about making learning meaningful with a view towards connecting school learning to students' interests and activities, but meaningfulness can be stimulated by positive social relations and dampened by negative ones.

Most of the tag cloud generators tend to keep all of the words horizontal, but Wordle (via Collin vs. Blog) has them both horizontal and vertical, giving it a rather neat appearance.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

I generated the tag clouds below from two of my papers.

It's to be expected that the words overlap quite a bit. One difference is the emphasis on "knowledge" under Learning Networks, which indicates the difference in the emphasis on individuals in Building Blocks and networks in Learning Networks, so that in the former, students construct learning, while in the latter, knowledge becomes a resource in the network.

The size of these tag clouds are fixed when linking to them, and if you increase the size, the words become blurred. So, to get a larger image, you need to take a screen capture of the tag cloud at Wordle and use that image instead as below:

I'm wondering how this might be useful for students. Perhaps it would let them see what their focus was, which words they used the most, and whether they needed to change the focus or the words.

Participation Inequality

Most people are lurkers. Jakob Nielsen, writing on participation inequality, states:

• 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don't contribute).
• 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
• 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don't have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they're commenting on occurs.

These percentages vary somewhat according to type of site (see Quantitative Analysis of User-Generated Content on the Web by Ochoa and Duval via Robert Hughes). Nielsen notes,

Blogs have even worse participation inequality than is evident in the 90-9-1 rule that characterizes most online communities. With blogs, the rule is more like 95-5-0.1.

Participation inequality is a fact of life. Suw Carman adds that in and of itself, is not a problem.

Still, it is possible to decrease the number of lurkers a little by making it easier for them to participate. Conversely, of course, the percentage of lurkers is likely to increase as the difficulty to contribute increases. In the case of trackbacks, as posting on one's own website requires more time than simply rushing off an "I agree" comment, the number of trackbacks will be smaller as they are more difficult than commenting. Looking at EFL Geek's statistics (before his new redesign), we see that he had written 1007 posts, received 1924 comments, 50 trackbacks, and 184 members. These statistics support the previous post's speculation that trackbacks took too much energy for people to use as compared to commenting.

Comments are Uninteresting

On enabling comments, Nielsen writes,

I would say to only allow comments if you have the time to moderate them. Otherwise, your site will suffer information pollution and waste readers' time because of the dominance of uninteresting comments.

I don't imagine that this site would ever have so many comments as to require much time to moderate them, but as, he notes, most comments are just "uninteresting." However, that assertion also has qualifiers. In analyzing the collaborative nature of the Web, he compares chat and discussion forums, writing that although most discussion forum posting are "uninteresting,"

the longer postings [in discussion forums] typically lead people to include some arguments and not just pure name-calling [compared to chat rooms]

This is in line with my earlier posts concerning commenting. In Monologic and Empty Comments vs. Parallel Conversations, I looked at comments on the sites of two well-known bloggers:

When I counted, out of the 58 comments on Brogan's post, perhaps 20% of them said something that added "content." Out of the 141 on Arrington's (not including trackback, which have a higher percentage of "content"), it seemed to be a little more than 20%. (I stopped counting quickly as my eyes glazed over.) Now, a few of the 20% were very good. Still, most comments were simply thanks, pats on the back, or repetition of something already said, without reference to others in the "conversation."

Learning from comments like these, which are fairly normal, is about as easy as learning in a room full of speakers, each with a megaphone shouting out their own opinion.

Generating Quality Comments

The exceptions to these types of comments tend to be found on blogs like that of the Becker-Posner Blog. The more serious the tone, the more knowledgeable the article, the more specific the focus of the blog the more specific, knowledgeable, and serious the responses will be. As mentioned two years ago in Rethinking Comments and Trackbacks, comments differed quite a bit, depending on the blog:

Over at weblogg-ed, I looked at the first 30 comments. The overwhelming majority of comments were in agreement with Will's position, sometimes adding a twist on it, but mostly agreeing.

At Creating Passionate Users, we see a different picture on one post, "Intuition", which had 15 comments when I looked at it. Three comments added nothing, but the majority added some point that was slightly new or gave a different perspective.

At "Half an Hour," Stephen Downes writes about "Adults and MySpace". It's a long article: 1758 words. It has two comments, one with 78 words that doesn't add much, and another with 280 words that adds new insight into the issue of adults on MySpace.

So, quality comments are possible, depending on the quality of the post. One other factor in getting quality comments is your responses to commenters. Referring to business, Nielsen writes,

Promote quality contributors. If you display all contributions equally, then people who post only when they have something important to say will be drowned out by the torrent of material from the hyperactive 1%. Instead, give extra prominence to good contributions and to contributions from people who've proven their value

Applying that to education blogs, respond in kind to comments that add some new insight into the topic at hand, and ignore those that add nothing.

Learning through Comments

For our students, Mary Hillis has a suggestion:

After the first week of the Book and Literature Circle Blog, I found that students wrote short comments, and there was no flow between contributions in the comment area. During the second week (this week), I specifically asked students to think about how they could connect their comments to previous ones and build up a conversation.

Thinking about participating in academic discussions, and synthesizing sources in academic writing assignments, I think that by challenging students to make connections between their comments and their classmates' comments, they are learning a valuable communication skill that they may be able to apply to other types of assignments.

This approach fits in well with Graff and Birkenstein's book They Say / I say, which

shows how academic argument is a dialogue in which an individual acknowledges what others are saying and at the same time makes a space for what s/he is saying.

As Mary noted in her other post on comments,

commenting is a skill that students need some guidance on

So, along the lines of making connections and synthesizing, I would help the students consider how to remix their comments and those of others (and of course giving credit appropriately) with the goal of coming up with new insights into the issue at hand. Perhaps, in this way, good comments can be generated, and learning might take place.

About two weeks ago, Claire Thompson, upon finding that I didn't allow comments initially was "aghast" and wrote,

On my blog comments were my riason d’etre. What was wrong with this guy? If only I could give him a piece of my mind…"

I'm glad that I wasn't close at hand then. :)

She then went on to a brief but thoughtful consideration of the pros and cons of having comments. One point she made that I hadn't given much thought to before was that many readers are not likely to follow trackbacks. Comments have a time advantage by having the entire conversation in one place.

I'm not sure why readers don't follow trackbacks, but I believe that many want to skim something quickly, and if it attracts them enough, they will slow down to think about it. Going after trackbacks simply doesn't have a sufficient level of catalytic attraction to get them to click. That applies to me, too, because often all trackbacks do is quote part of a post from which I can't determine if it's worth my time to click on it. Trackbacks need to have a few words that indicate the value/substance of the reply sufficiently so that I want to see what they have to say. As Christine Martell, one of the commenters on Claire's post, stated,

I don’t check out trackbacks on others posts unless the blogger points them out in a subsequent post. I’m even clicking on less and less links in a post unless the blogger gives me a sense of why I should. I’ve just gone down too many paths of check out this post only to find out it doesn’t add a lot of value for me.

Similarly, the large majority of readers do not want to expend the time and energy in writing a lenghty and thoughtful comment. In the two years since I initially gave my rationale for no comments, not one reader has taken me up on my invitation to send me by email a thoughtful and measured response to anything I've written for posting on my blog. (Before that time, two individuals did post lengthy responses on my blog, one, a colleague whose response I invited.)

Now I do think that some blogs are meant for comments. Technical ones are a good example, in which a large number of people can bring together isolated pieces of information, giving readers a much better grasp of possibilities for resolving some problem. And some blogs seem to encourage good comments, such as the Becker-Posner Blog.

But many blogs (I would say most), for whatever the reason, have too many comments that add nothing but feelings. As Claire noted, this post

by Will Richardson has garnered 68 blog reactions and 166 comments to date. What could someone possibly add to the conversation at comment 166? I don’t know, but they must feel pretty stongly to add their 2 cents worth.

For these reasons, I don't think comments are best for students because they often take the path of least resistance due to time pressures, such as work, family, and so on. The goal for blogs used in classes has to be learning, but the instantaneous nature of comments inhibit reflection. Then, again, as Mary Hillis wrote,

commenting is a skill that students need some guidance on.

From this perspective, with guidance, perhaps commenting can be a learning endeavor. Before assuming that comments or no comments are better, we should be able to answer questions like these:

• Is commenting as effective for learning as writing a post on one's own blog and trackbacking to the initial post.
• Does posting on one's own blog reduce the tendency of confirmation bias that is found in comments?
• Does the social nature of commenting (compared to trackbacks) motivate students more to continue their learning via blogs after the class ends?

Each of these questions would make for a good study, and at the least require some thought before assuming that comments are important for learning.

Although I lean against commenting, I do not see it as black and white. There's no research along these lines that I am aware of that can give definitive answers according to type of blog, context, and so on. But for those of us who are educators, I would say that we need to be careful about being sidetracked by the social contagion of commenting and instead keep the goal of learning in the foreground of our blogging and of our students' blogging.

Related posts can be found at Why I don't have comments.

Collaborative learning can aid the ESL learner tremendously, which was discussed at length in a recent study by Johnson & Wales University. Luckily, the advent of the Internet has fostered global communiqué between both ESL students and teachers. There are scores of growing online communities that offer support to new students, many of which provide much-needed multilingual support. Below are five such communities, all of which serve as useful resources for both students and teachers.

1. The ESL Café — This comprehensive site is friendly to ESL newcomers and provides countless online learning materials. Here, students and teachers can communicate on forums and gain access to ESL-related job leads.
2. John's ESL — This site is divided into two communities: one for students and one for teachers. Both areas are interactive and informative, offering guidance to those within the ESL world.
3. English Club — Serving as an online "clubhouse" for ESL learners, this vast community provides welcome lessons and an inviting forum for teachers and students to communicate.
4. English, Baby! — One of the largest online ESL communities, this site offers free English lessons, as well as live chats and English language forums. Here, fellow ESL learners can meet and help one another.
5. English Forums — People from all over the world visit the forums on this site to meet others who are transitioning to an English-speaking culture. It can be comforting to speak with other people from your native country who are just learning English.

The sites above provide a comfortable environment for those who are new to the ESL society. With free online communities and online ESL lessons, the Internet offers many wonderful opportunities to those who are new to the language.

By-line:

This post was contributed by Heather Johnson, who is an industry critic on the subject of university reviews. She invites your feedback at heatherjohnson2323 at gmail dot com.

Abstract is better than concrete for transfer, according to the New York Times reporting of recent research in mathematics:

In the experiment, the college students learned a simple but unfamiliar mathematical system, essentially a set of rules. Some learned the system through purely abstract symbols, and others learned it through concrete examples like combining liquids in measuring cups and tennis balls in a container.

Then the students were tested on a different situation — what they were told was a children’s game — that used the same math. “We told students you can use the knowledge you just acquired to figure out these rules of the game,” Dr. Kaminski said.

The students who learned the math abstractly did well with figuring out the rules of the game. Those who had learned through examples using measuring cups or tennis balls performed little better than might be expected if they were simply guessing. Students who were presented the abstract symbols after the concrete examples did better than those who learned only through cups or balls, but not as well as those who learned only the abstract symbols.

The problem with the real-world examples, Dr. Kaminski said, was that they obscured the underlying math, and students were not able to transfer their knowledge to new problems.

“They tend to remember the superficial, the two trains passing in the night,” Dr. Kaminski said. “It’s really a problem of our attention getting pulled to superficial information.”

The explanation of examples clouding up the concepts reminds me somewhat of the research on reading about seductive details diminishing recall of information. (There are many articles on this phenomenon, but see, for example, Processing and recall of seductive details in scientific text.)

Transfer is also a major problem in writing: Students often don't transfer what they know about writing in one situation to new situations. Somehow, the situations are compartmentalized so that the concepts don't transfer, which remains me of the research on students learning physics. David Hammer's research showed that students could compartmentalize and keep their every day notions about motion from the physics concepts they were learning.

So, although this was a small study (and one that needs to be replicated), it does fit in with what we know of transfer, that learning that is bound to a particular context doesn't transfer well--which explains why students who have learned the five-paragraph essay structure in high school continue to use it in college even when an assignment requires them not to.

What would be the abstract set of rules for writing? I've looked at that before, except I called them "building blocks." But although I can see the need for knowing the building blocks abstractly, I think mastering them abstractly is achieved through much practice of remixing these building blocks across contexts. (See Learning by Remixing and also this review/synopsis of Spiro's Cognitive Flexibility Theory.)

The problem remains determining what those building blocks are. Although they likely differ across genre (just as math concepts differ from geometry to algebra to calculus and so on), they must also have elements in common. At a basic level, there's always writer, audience, text, and purpose. For persuasion, it may come down to the formula in Graff and Birkenstein's book "They Say / I Say", in which writers join into a conversation with others and position themselves with respect to those others. It's a small book with three parts and ten chapters:

Part 1. "They say"

ONE: "They say" (Starting with What Others Are Saying)

TWO: "Her Point Is" (The Art of Summarizing)

THREE: "As He Himself Puts It" (The Art of Quoting)

Part 2. "I Say"

FOUR: "Yes / No / Okay, But" (Three Ways to Respond)

FIVE: "And Yet" (Distinguishing What You Say from What They Say)

SIX: "Skeptics May Object" (Planting a Naysayer in Your Text)

SEVEN: "So What? Who Cares?" (Saying Why It Matters)

Part 3: Tying It All Together

EIGHT: "As a Result" (Connecting the Parts)

NINE: "Ain't So / Is Not" (Academic Writing Doesn't Mean Setting Aside Your Own Voice)

TEN: "In Other Words" (The Art of Metacommentary)

As you can see, despite having only two building blocks--"they say" and "I say"--students are led into a variety of ways of analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating what "they say," along with generating their own understanding and position among others in a conversation. And treating persuasive writing like a conversation has many connections to students' lives: They argue about their sports, clothes, cars, majors, professors, and so on.

I imagine that different sets of building blocks are possible, just as different sets of rules can be found in different fields of math. The key seems to be helping students practice using one coherent set of building blocks (i.e., abstract principles) across contexts.

Related posts:
The Five-Paragraph Essay and Building Blocks of Writing
The Five-Paragraph Essay (continued)
Learning by Remixing