LRA Pesidential Address for 2013, Richard Beach, President

Understanding and Creating Digital Texts Through Social Practices

Richard Beach, LRA Presidential Address

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LRA Distinguished Scholar presentation

Keith Rayner, University of California, San Diego

Eye Movements in Reading: Implications for Teaching Reading

Thursday 2:00

Bishops Art Rm 7

Summary

❖ Texts as actions/spaces

❖ Digital texts: affordances

❖ Social practices mediated by uses of digital texts

❖ Research questions

❖ Research methods for studying social practices

Handout: Links and references

❖ http://tinyurl.com/pgnbp2u

QR: Handout

Texts as Actions/Spaces

Performance emphasizes that literacy practices are not about giving meaning to a preconstructed and preexisting text. Such practices are the text. The Internet has introduced new forms of textuality and brought out our capacity to read and write in performative ways. (Canagarajah, 2013)

Continuum: Text meaning

• Static Dynamic

• Fixed Open

• Monologic Dialogic

Monologic texts: 19th Century India

Affordances: Digital texts

❖ Multimodality❖ Revision/copy-paste/

remix❖ Interactivity

Multimodality: print or digital

Revision/copy-paste/remix

Interactivity/“spreadability”

Texts: Jenkins: Spreadability

❖ Attention economy

❖ “Stickiness”: attention in centralized places (broadcast media)

❖ “Spreadability”: dispersing content through formal/informal networks

❖ “If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.”

Affordances in activity mediated by digital texts

❖ Affordances not “in” digital texts

❖ Affordances created by teachers

❖ Activity leads to texts

Affordances: Social practices

❖ Contextualizing and recontextualizing

❖ Interacting with others

❖ Making intertextual/intercontextual links

❖ Collaborating with others

❖ Adopting a critical engagement stance

❖ Constructing identities

Contextualizing/recontextualizing

❖ Prior knowledge and experience

❖ Beliefs and attitudes

❖ Purposes and goals

❖ Reframing (Goffman,1974, Andrews, 2011)

❖ Re-mediating (Gutiérrez, 2012)

Contextualizingwords

Steps in recontextualizing (Blommaert, 2005)

❖

Decontextualizing: removed from context

❖ Recontextualizing: place in new context

❖ Entextualizing: analyze as new text

Recontextualizing: evolving, recursive process over time

Text

Van Leeuwen (2008): Recontextualizing accounts of the first day of school

Interview with child:

first day of school

Write up analysis

of interview data

Report or news article on first day of school

Rap Genius: Annotations

Kurt Coban’s suicide letter

Interactive Fiction

❖ Little Red Riding Hood app from Nosy Crow Press

70% of top-selling apps: Preschool/elementary level

“Text-dependent questions”

“The Standards strongly suggest that a majority of questions posed to children be based on the text under consideration…, not rely on students’ different knowledge backgrounds.” Authors of the Common Core Standards in ELA/Literacy

“Text-dependent questions”: Meaning lies in the four corners of the text (Coleman: directive to publishers)

Text Meaning

Common Core: “Text Complexity”

No one seems to have addressed the question of what students do to demonstrate their understanding of a text…a prima facie analysis suggests that task has to matter: Asking middle school students to identify the topic of a chapter out of a high school life science text is likely easier than asking them to critique E.B. White’s use of symbolism in Charlotte’s Web (Pearson & Hiebert, 2013).

Recontextualizing/re-mediation of curriculum:

Leander (2009)❖ “resistance” to using digital

literacies

❖ “replacement” of old literacies with new

❖ “return” to older print literacies

❖ “re-mediation”use digital literacies to transform uses of print literacies

Recontextualizing reading (Leu et al., 2009)

❖ Reading as writers to produce multimodal texts

❖ Reading within social contexts to achieve uptake

❖ Reading to produce texts as actions and spaces

Social practice: Interactivity

Pew: Increase in Texting

Pew: Device use in class

Interactivity: Subtext: book discussions

Interactivity: Google+ Hangout

LRA Research Repository: LRA website

LRA Research to Practice Show: disciplinary literacies (November),

graphic novels (December)

Survey: Print vs. e-book Yearbook (n = 388/ 28%)

Survey: Costs considerations

Cross-cultural interactivity: Space2cre8

Pew: Teachers: Students having an audience

Civic Engagement: Audience

Out the Window Project in Los Angeles Youth create videos for 7 millions bus

riders Pose questions related to civic issues

Interactivity: Social networking

❖ Social presence: Sense of comfort/engagement

❖ Sense of potential audience uptake

❖ Sense of agency/change: something at stake

Online Role-play research (Beach & Doerr-Stevens,

2011)

❖ formulated arguments: should access to certain websites be blocked?

❖ adopted roles and created fictional bios

❖ challenged each other’s arguments

Social-networking: Ning

Mapping: Roles and relationships

Creating Persona: Emo Girl

• I think the internet usage policies are ridiculous. The policies are almost impossible to find. I spent half an hour trying to find them and I'm a young, computer savvy person

“Strict Father” persona: Charles Hammerstein

• The issue with sites like YouTube is that it is a helpful site when used correctly, but the ratio of students who would use it to the students who would abuse it would greatly favor the later of the two. R-rated sites are not ok because they usually contain information and content that may be considered offensive. The internet policies are very clear, if your grandmother would not appreciate it, then you probably shouldn't be doing those kind of things at school.

Value of collective activity

I'm realizing that a few students working together to create change on a subject they feel passionate about can actually make a difference, whether it be in the school or community.

Question: How do students establish a

sense of social presence and agency

through online interactions?

Connectivity: Intertextuality

❖ Navigation of hyperlinks ❖ Connecting the dots ❖ Transfer of meaning across

contexts (Intercontextuality, Bloome, et al., 2005)

Wiki annotations to a Munro story (Dobson, 2009)

Connectivity: Distant Reading

❖ Value of distant reading, Franco Moretti: Stanford Literacy Lab

❖ Digital/database analytics❖ Patterns: Numerical

representations

Readers’ connections

Reviewers’ connections on Amazon: Infinite Jest

Voyant: www.voyeurtools.org Analysis of Moby Dick

Use of data to inform interpretation

whale

Ahab

Mapping student’s intertextual connections

❖ Current texts previous texts

❖ Links based on genre conventions, topics, themes, author, etc.

❖ Database for assisting students in making selections

Question: How does use of digital texts mediate

students’ ability to make connections?

Collaboration

❖ Modeling of alternative response strategies

❖ Building on individual responses to create composite responses

❖ Applying alternative perspectives to generate broader interpretations

Acquiring strategies from each other: Think Pair Share (Corio, Castek, & Guzniczak, 2011)

Findings: Shifts in Abby and Starfish’s Individual and Collaborative Stances

Aesthetic Summarizer

Thoughtful Gather

Purposeful Summarizer

Reflective Analyzer

Methods: Participants

Three classes of 7th graders (n=68).

School Demographics 67% Latino, 17% African American, 8% Asian, 3% white

73% free and reduced lunch 62% English Language Learners

Methods: Data Collection Unit on wind energy produced by wind turbines

Hands-on activities making wind turbines and measure output of energy

pro article arguing that wind power has a number of positive benefits

2 articles arguing that wind power is not cost effective and has negative effects

Affordances of Diigo: Collaborative Annotation

Results: Diigo Annotations

❖ 34% questioning,

❖ 22% integrating/connecting,

❖ 13% evaluating,

❖ 10% determining important ideas,

❖ 9% inferring,

❖ 8% reacting to other’s comments,

❖ 4% monitoring

Alternative perspectives derived from annotations

I am perplexed in choosing if wind energy is a good source or bad source. While wind energy is a good source because it’s renewable and needs nothing more but construction, it can also cause irritation and attention of some people. Wind turbines are loud, noisy, and risky. Even though, it doesn’t cause any greenhouse gases in the air, wind turbines are harmful to wildlife and space. More birds die by getting hit by wind turbines which is very dangerous to our wildlife.

Equivocation: Alternative perspectives

I am perplexed in choosing if wind energy is a good source or bad source. While wind energy is a good source because it’s renewable and needs nothing more but construction, it can also cause irritation and attention of some people. Wind turbines are loud, noisy, and risky. Even though, it doesn’t cause any greenhouse gases in the air, wind turbines are harmful to wildlife and space. More birds die by getting hit by wind turbines which is very dangerous to our wildlife.

Benefits of annotations

Focused, targeted reading

Inquiry-based responses

Collaborative argumentation

Acquiring alternative perspectives

Teacher: Value of collaboration

This is natural way to build community through content so you don’t have to plan something extra, you’re creating dialogue…it provides an opportunity for more kids to be participating especially if you have a large class, it’s impossible for every kid to be heard, but in a setting like this every kid has a platform to be heard in terms of equity.

2013: 6th grade: Mindmeister, Diigo, and VoiceThread

❖ Difference between weather versus climate

❖ Multimodal affordances

❖ Collaboration

Affordances: Organization/Multimodalit

yIt organizes your thinking. When you put in bubbles you could tell the difference and you can put it on each side that you think it is. It’s better than writing because you can think of more ideas when you’re using that and you can put images when you’re explaining.

Affordances: Collaboration

You can communicate with other people like if you have a question or a comment on other people’s sticky note or if they have a question you can clarify.Sometimes the people who you know they don’t know the answer but if you post it online a lot of people will be online then they will probably answer for you.

Teacher: Multimodality

The multimodal aspect of this helps kids gel their understanding and further their understanding of whatever their particular part of the carbon cycle was in a way that was not as rich had we been doing a whole class discussion or another reading on the carbon cycle or all watching a video.

VoiceThread: Multiple audiencesshare responses to images

Analysis: VoiceThread Annotations

77%: inferences about

relationships between

phenomena

23%: description of

phenomena in the images

Question: How does use of digital texts mediate

productive collaboration?

Critical Engagement

❖ Emotions driving use of digital texts (Lewis & Causey)

❖ Frustrations: coping with competing systems (Engestrom, 2001)

Creating Persona: Emo Girl

• I think the internet usage policies are ridiculous. The policies are almost impossible to find. I spent half an hour trying to find them and I'm a young, computer savvy person

Judith Rosario, President, Youth Against War and Racism Club (Online

role-play)I fight for what I believe in and will take stands against issues, even if the rest of the student body is too afraid to. . . . I don’t take anything lying down…I came to see how a person could come to feel so strongly about privacy in the academic setting. At the beginning, I saw the blocking of websites an educational benefit that would only help students, not hurt them. I thought that blocking websites that are crude or vulgar should simply guard students against features that they would not want or need to access at school, but then I looked further into it. The school blocks sites such as YouTube that can actually be used by teachers as an educational asset.

Google autosearch: “shouldn’t,” “cannot,” etc.

Question: How do certain emotions evoked by

digital texts precipitate critical engagement?

Identity construction: Online impression

management❖ Concern with how others perceive

one’s online identity

❖ Need to be perceived in a positive manner

❖ Need to be continually connected and responsive

Research methods: Analysis of social practices❖ Activity as the primary unit of

analysis

❖ Inquiry-based, open-ended framing of activity

❖ Use of social practices to collaboratively construct knowledge

Mediated discourse analysis (Jones & Norris,

2005) ❖ “Nexus of practice”: Same set of

actions/practices as shared, aggregate meaning

❖ Shared understanding of how digital text/tool use mediates use practices

Research methods: Analysis of social practices❖ Conflation of assessment versus

description of use of social practices (Ellis, 2013)

❖ Ability to make connections (analysis of CCSS “text sets” connections)

❖ Computer scoring of Smarter Balance/PARCC writing assessments

Conflation: Digital “people analytics”: Class Dojo app

Class Dojo: “Positive behaviors”

Class Dojo: “negative behaviors”

Feedback for Cameron

Knack: Games for assessing dispositions/practices for hiring

Balloon Brigade app

Longitudinal research: Self-reflection on social

practices

❖ Long-term changes in social practices

❖ Digital repositories/e-portfolios: track changes in social practices

Digital texts as descriptive data

❖ Digital annotations

❖ Digital mapping

❖ Wikis

❖ Blog posts

❖ Games

Digital inequality: Class differences

Significant differences in middle school students’ online reading comprehension ability according to the economic status of their school district (Henry, 2007)

Significant effects of SES on college students Internet use for information seeking (Hargittai, 2010)

Research agenda

❖ Acquiring social practices: Economic and social success in a knowledge economy

❖ How use of tools fosters use of social practices

Dreaming the future 50 years ago

❖ Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation. John F. Kennedy