Content is the least important part of education. What is far more important is what takes place between and among the students. The activities of the community of learners. What they actually DO with the content and with each other.

Great content IS important, but only if there is also a functioning and active community working together to learn, create and share. Otherwise, all that takes place is content dissemination. And that’s not education, open or otherwise.

How did Norman come to the conclusion that content is "the least important"? Perhaps by reacting to those classrooms in which students sit as passive receptacles, never using the content being disseminated. Obviously, that is "not education." Still, let's consider the converse: students DOing whatever without content. Would that be education?

Both content and DOing are important, and both need each other. DOing, however, does not always takes place collaboratively. I may read a book or, better yet, go to a conference in which I sit in the audience, listen, and take back some tidbit of content that I apply to my own work. My DOing, in this case, is not one of "working together" (although social constructionists would say that my DOing is the result of many previous instances of social interaction.) In this case, the dissemination of content was more important than what didn't take place between me, the other members of the audience, and the presenter. And perhaps we might not call it education, but it was learning.

Learning does take place in communities, too. But simply sharing and working together doesn't guarantee that learning will take place. Think of the many committee meetings that most complain about as a waste of time. The nature of sharing and working together is crucial, too.

Arguing whether content or DOing is more important is a fruitless endeavor. Depending on the purpose, the time, the place, and the individual/people, one or the other might take precedence—but both are essential.

Writing in a Digital Age
looked at writing in digital environments with respect to building online classroom community, professional development, and teacher leadership via a combination of presentation, small-group discussion, and whole-group discussion on successes, failures, and open-ended questions, some of which were:

• What are the implications for the design of your site’s professional development programs with technology?
• What are the implications for developing technology leaders at your site?
• How are professional development experiences affected by technology?
• How can I engage diverse students who may or may not want to be in my classroom?
• How can I help all students become better critical thinkers, researchers, and writers?

The Web as a Tool for Continuity
was a session of sharing, discussing, and troubleshooting problems of continuity of Teacher Consultants at writing project sites and ways in which technology can support continuity. Three questions that were discussed were:

• How can you ensure that this work will stay integral to the site, and not be a distraction or a flash in the pan?
• Who might be the key leaders of an Internet-enhanced continuity project at your site?
• What capacity challenges or opportunities might such an initiative contain?

One of the failures of many sites has been trying to use blogs to provide continuity of leadership and professional development. They tend to wither as teachers leave the Summer Institutes to return to the classroom.

The Bay Area Writing Project took another tack and started an e-Zine, Digital Paper, which combines stories, pictures, and podcasts. It has had some success.

The strategy of the Alaska State Writing Consortium was to have an online Open Institute. In it, teachers examined their own work and built a framework for change via activities, such as:

• audio-conferences
• web-based posting of documents and data
• online discussion
• live chats
• daily journals
• discussions of readings

One interesting feature of this Institute was having an ethnographer who looked at the online communications and gave feedback back to the group on what s/he was seeing, noting concerns, noting areas of idea conflict, and so on. And at the end of the Institute, a lengthy report was written on what happened in the class.

As I look back over my notes, the key aspects of building communities seem to be

• start with a group of 3 or 4 committed people who can share different responsibilities
• start small projects that don't overwhelm you or participants
• make it relevant to participants' immediate needs and goals
• give participants' time to "play" with the technology
• develop personal relationships with participants

These principles are not new, but it's easy to get carried away with visions of grandeur only to be let down when others don't see as you do. And these two sessions were excellent in terms of being practical, showing us their own applications of and twists on these principles, and of leading us into discussing and thinking about the implications of the presenters' own successes and failures for our own sites' future endeavors.

Presenters:
Writing in a Digital Age
Felicia George, New York City Writing Project
Sarah Hunt-Barron, Upstate Writing Project
Rebecca Kaminski, Upstate Writing Project
Seth Mitchell, University of Maine Writing Project
Jason Shiroff, Denver Writing Project
Laura Stokes, Inverness Research Associates

The Web as a Tool for Continuity
Sonnet Farrell, Alaska State Writing Consortium
Tom McKenna, Alaska State Writing Consortium
Evan Nichols, Bay Area Writing Project
Sondra Porter, Alaska State Writing Consortium
Carol Tateishi, Bay Area Writing Project

In great contrast to only a few years ago, most of my students write several hours a day. I’m not talking about technically perfect papers, focused on grammar and the rules of structure. These students are tirelessly blogging, texting and responding to their peers in lengthy e-mail. And rather than dismiss this kind of writing as lacking in academic merit, I’ve started thinking about how schools can embrace, in academic ways, the emerging forms of writing students have already claimed as their own. ...

As part of this change, technology has radically extended the spaces for academic debate. In real ways, blogging and other forms of virtual debate actually foster the very types of intellectual exchange, analysis and argumentative writing that universities value.

Along these lines, Can MySpace make better writers talks about how technology is changing writing and how it can motivate students in their writing.

Amy Gahran, in Straight to the Point: The Miniskirt Theory of Writing (via Downes), asserts,

If you want to make a point in writing, make sure you nail the “so what” in your first 62 words.

Of course, as she admits, reader tastes vary and cites Dave Taylor as saying "more educated, intelligent readers prefer longer, more thoughtful and eloquent content." There's no question that the first words are important in "hooking" one's audience into continuing to read. But hopefully, one's posts will not become mere sound bites.

How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It (via Downes) is an excellent online book written by Wikipedians Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates. It includes an appendix for teachers.

Blogging Pedagogy has a recent post on integrating multimedia into newspaper readings Deconstructing and Reconstructing Media and Messages:

For those of you looking to invite students to interact with different media, you might consider adopting and adapting the lesson plans conveniently provided as part of the Humanities Institute’s Living Newspaper Project. In this case, the four kinds of media are printed news reports, play script, oral reading, and theater performance.

What you can't win in court: "After you’ve been called racist by some students, can you sue to get your reputation back?" That's what Richard Peltz, who teaches law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, did. He began a lawsuit against students who had accused him of being racist because those accusations had led to him being "barred" from teaching certain courses. One of the accusations concerned his having students "focus more on their writing."

While defending his intent, Peltz pledged in his new memo to never again offer the writing tips “lest I again be maligned for trying to improve student writing.”

The article shows that it is not difficult to undermine the university as a place of learning and discussing ideas.

William Major, an associate professor of English at the University of Hartford, takes Another view of bias:

There’s a great deal of discussion in academe about a perceived bias amongst the professoriate, though Horowitz is looking in the wrong place. If he and his acolytes want bias, I have no doubt that there is plenty to go around. But playing favorites has the potential to do real harm to the student, ourselves, and to an ethic of professionalism. There is the spirit of fair play, unwritten and rarely acknowledged, through which we show our students and colleagues and, most importantly, ourselves who we are and what we are about. I suppose it’s called character.

Mark Richardson, an assistant professor of writing and linguistics at Georgia Southern University, takes aim at the myths surrouding learning to write in Writing is not just a basic skills:

From that vantage point, first-year composition is only indirectly preparatory to writing in other disciplines: What a student will learn is somewhat applicable to writing a history or psychology paper, but significant gaps in preparation will remain. Psychology professors who want students to write effective papers, even at the introductory level, can't count on first-year composition to have done all the preparatory work.

And here are a few more links on writing:
John Updike reflects on the challenges and satisfactions of the aging writer.
Zhura releases world's first online, collaborative editor for comic book writers
On college: Essay writing critical to getting accepted

This document is a code of best practices that helps educators using media literacy concepts and techniques to interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use. Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment under some circumstances—especially when the cultural or social benefits of the use are predominant. It is a general right that applies even in situations where the law provides no specific authorization for the use in question—as it does for certain narrowly defined classroom activities.

This guide identifies five principles that represent the media literacy education community’s current consensus about acceptable practices for the fair use of copyrighted materials, wherever and however it occurs: in K—12 education, in higher education, in nonprofit organizations that offer programs for children and youth, and in adult education.

Related links from the NCTE Inbox:
Fair use and copyright for educators (Traci Gardner)

Elementary Teachers
Research building blocks for elementary classrooms

Middle Level Teachers Campaigning for Fair Use: Public Service Announcements on Copyright Awareness
Inquiry on the Internet: Evaluating Web Pages for a Class Collection
Exploring Plagiarism, Copyright, and Paraphrasing
Copyright Law: From Digital Reprints to Downloads