Category Archives: Technology

Teacher Facebook Groups & Civic Lessons: Learning from “The Truth About L.A.’s Promise”

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[As should be obvious, the images and quoted text in this post were not made by me.]*

As schools are being cleaned, painted, prepared for the new year and as many of my friends collect unemployment and search for teaching jobs in charters and small non-LAUSD schools, I want to spend some time on this blog describing some of the individual challenges I’m seeing my school community face. I plan to dedicate several posts over the summer looking at what budget cuts and educational reform look like through the lens of my school. Starting right now.

The problem, of course, is that there isn’t even a pretense of objectivity in what I’m trying to do here. Pertaining specifically to the words and images here, I’m trying my best to simply offer you, the reader, a snapshot of what is happening. What I want to show now is how teachers are voicing, organizing, and enacting civic action within a public & open digital sphere.

“The Truth About L.A.’s Promise” Facebook group has only been up for about a day. I don’t know what kind of response the members can anticipate. As a bit of background, L.A.’s Promise is the “Network Partner” for Manual Arts; the company manages and oversees the organizational and academic operation of the school in conjunction with LAUSD. As I’ve written about before, the climate at the school over the past year has been less than harmonious. [If it sounds like I’m downplaying any conflict or tension, you would be absolutely correct; the focus here is on the Facebook group.]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Though I will weigh in at some point down the road, I want to simply show one way the current circumstances of public education are engaging teachers in responsive ways. The fact that many of the people, my friends & colleagues, who are voicing opinions in this digital space are no longer working at Manual Arts is not lost on me. Being liberated from this work environment allows for dissenting voice. However, for the teachers like myself that are still working at the school next year, I am interested in how this open Facebook group will protect and share support for teachers still teaching at Manual Arts and those that will not be teaching there in September.

 

 

 

Ultimately (and from the “safe” view of researcher), I am fascinated by the ways these teachers advocate and continue to “teach” within this space; former students speak up and participate in this group and the lessons of activism are seen by students – through what kind of interpretive lens is not up for me to decide.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Similarly, taking the traditionally text-heavy interface of groups, the participants of this open group are weaving images into a clearly digestible campaign.

 

Again, I have yet to see a response to this group. It’s membership and organization is still nascent. I am intrigued about the way Facebook’s process of recruitment – a current member simply “adds” me – signals to outsiders how I am to be read. Though I did not choose to join this group, I am automatically affiliated with them (and, conversely, I haven’t yet chosen to “leave” the group either).

 

 

 

Pragmatically, L.A.’s Promise could quickly scan the membership of this group, see that I am included, and see me as an individual that opposes them without engaging me in dialogue one way or another. I am essentially placed in an oppositional position simply through sharing digital space at the behest of a friend. Intrigued, I’m encouraging (but not “adding”) you to follow along.

 

 

 

*If you were to think that I was worried about retaliation or being seen as libelous, you would be correct.

[UPDATE: 7/29/11 12:21 a.m] This was posted by a member on the Facebook group:

Hey Everyone. Looks like I got REPORTED by someone on Facebook. Problem is I removed myself from “Admin” status when I started this group because I believed that it should be open to all.

I guess that’s how this group will be engaged for progressive dialogue.

Multiliteracies: Thinking “Beyond New London” (at DMLcentral)

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My latest post at DMLcentral is about the future of literacy research. I am interested in collaborating with other stakeholders around the question of how are literacies shifting currently. Though the text is cross-posted below, please consider commenting over at DMLcentral to continue this conversation.

 

Multiliteracies is an area of interest for me and my classroom, and I am hoping to use this post for dialogue and collective theory-building. But first, I want to talk briefly about being a book geek. As an English teacher, I am passionate about literature. During my first two years in the classroom I overextended myself by maintaining an evening and weekend job assistant managing a popular independent bookstore in Los Angeles.

Passion, Teaching, and Literacy

The pay was paltry and secondary to the opportunity I had at first dibs for advanced readers’ copies of works by my favorite novelists – not to mention engagement with local literati, and the opportunity to discover personal favorites through customer recommendations, fellow employees, and random books falling on my head while shelving the particularly tall bookcases.

I’ve written elsewhere why this kind of passion is a key component to successfully engaging students. Passion is contagious; it was my bookstore co-worker, Nancy, enthusiastically talking about the growing complexities of J.K. Rowling’s work that eventually compelled me to bother breaking the spine and entering the world of Hogwarts.

All of this is to say that I’ve become interested, now as an educator and researcher, into the changing and fluid world of literacy development.

Multiliteracies and Thinking about Literacy beyond 2011

As a 21st century teacher, the work of the New London Group – their conceptualization ofmultiliteracies – is not only a breath of fresh air, but it also liberates my approach to English Language Arts instruction when I guide the learning needs of my ninth graders.

Briefly, the major principles of a multiliteracies framework relate to how technology is fundamentally changing the ways people are communicating: It is  bringing people into closer proximity to one another, and the forms of communication in which people engage are multimodal, meaning that they incorporate word, image, video and sound.

And so it was at this year’s American Education Research Association conference last April that I eagerly joined a crowded room to see many members of the New London Group speak in a session titled “Beyond New London: Literacy, Learning and the Design of Social Futures.” And while I was excited about the potential of this session, I left feeling that the researchers, for the most part, didn’t talk about what is happening in literacy development, nor did they update the concept of multiliteracies or point toward reasonable responses to this work.

My interest is, where is literacy heading? What are the implications for the students in my classroom and the literacy achievement gap in general?

Literacies are multitudinous and text is a fluid concept that moves beyond the printed page. This much educators and researchers are generally accepting in this day and age (thank you, New London).

However, in 1996, when “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures” was published, social networks were not a norm, Google did not yet exist (nor did YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.), and mobile media devices were owned and used by an exclusive and small sector of young people. In short, the work does not account for the significant ways young people are interactive and learning today.

I want to outline a few ideas about how I see literacy expanding today. These are initial thoughts and I hope we can engage in collective development around what you may think as well. There are three developments in literacy that are under-recognized in classrooms, in policy, and in empirical learning theory research:

1. Search, Query, and Interpretation

2. Conscious identity development

3. Online/Offline Hybridity and Spatial Interaction

Search, Query, and Interpretation

To effectively navigate, produce, and communicate within the participatory structures both online and offline, students today need to understand the ways that search functions. Black hat & white hat search optimization, for instance is an innately complicated idea that directly impacts what students see and interact with through online spaces. Likewise, the tenets of something like Google’s search algorithm dictate what students are allowed to “find.” In this instance, seemingly ubiquitous engines like Google and Bing act as gatekeepers for counternarratives that are published online but suppressed by a page’s ranking. Douglas Rushkoff’s warning, Program or be Programmed, paves the away for thinking about how students need to be equipped to not only understand why they are seeing the products online when they search academically and recreationally, but also to think about how students can develop search tools for themselves – these computational and programming literacies are going to be the second language acquisition tools students will need to master.

Conscious identity development

Related to interpreting and understanding search-like tools, it is necessary for young people to recognize the way students read and view texts online reifies specific hegemonic ways of being. As a quick example, if students search for images online of their community or a profession they aspire to work within, the images they see dictate an aggregate normative understanding; the narratives online of urban youth perpetuate stereotypes and students should be able to read these narratives critically. Likewise, when students develop and shape online personas inMMORPGs, social networks, and online discourse, they are consciously involved in personal (and sometimes collective) identity development. These literacy practices directly impact the images, words, videos, and other myriad media products that a larger and larger public sees and interprets vis-a-vis youth identity.

Online/Offline Hybridism and Spatial Interaction

Finally, and perhaps what most teachers are seeing within their classrooms, students are utilizing online tools to mediate predominantly offline relationships. When students are texting in my classroom or posting updates to their Facebook pages, they are doing so mainly to maintain a closeness to peers and friends are usually interacting with on a daily basis. Students mediate their day-to-day physical world decisions through online tools. This hybrid media interaction is a space that is becoming more and more persistent in classrooms. Asking a group of my 9th graders if they text or are on Facebook as frequently during lunch or after school, the students rolled their eyes incredulously: of course not – they are busy socializing with the friends they’ve been texting and communicating with when they were supposed to be silent reading in my classroom.

Collaborating Around a new Framework

Without the New London research and much that has since followed, this conversation would not be anchored within meaningful discourse. I am hoping for this to be the start of an ongoing formation of post-New London Theory building. I am interested in the space where this work can be done.

Fifteen years ago, when the authors of “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies” met at the New London site, they purposely published their article in the Harvard Education Review without their names attached. Though the identity of the authors of the piece was not a conspiratorial secret, the gesture is significant. I am hoping those individuals interested in participating in shaping a renewed framework of multiliteracies can comment below and we can discuss an open space for this conversation to continue. Ultimately, I’d hope for a group of us to share this work’s developments in a future post & perhaps wherever else this work can directly impact classroom practices and research.

Doing Things Correctly on Google Plus: Social Networks, Youth Practices and What Educators Need to Know about Appropriation

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Part of my current ongoing goal of this blog is to provide a continuing understanding of social networks and their role in the shifting nature of the new culture of learning. While I’ve only played with it for two weeks at this point, I can say that Google Plus (Google+) is a significant step forward in terms of how to manage, engage, and mediate learning personally and when interacting with youth, pre-service & in-service teachers (the current contexts in which I teach).

Although there are useful guides elsewhere about how Google+ is different & useful for educators, I think the possibilities of the new pool of information lies not in a single component than in the convergence of the myriad features to provide a customized learning experience for a group of co-inquirers.

As I’ve dabbled at posting and “being” on Google+, I am conscious of the ways I post, comment, and share. I do it deliberately. Cautiously. Worried that I’m not “doing it right.” Using a Chrome extension, I tried to share with a circle of friends a link to something I found funny. I made a note that I was “In tears” (implying because of how funny it was). Of course, the way I ended up submitting this link ended up actually omitting the shared content. My social network instead received the wrong message that I was likely upset and “In tears.”

And while such blundering examples are innate as we better understand the tools we are equipping ourselves with, I am more interested in this moment of self reflection and metacognition that occurs as I (and I’m sure most of you) wonder if you’re using Google+ “correctly.” I wonder about this because this feeling is one that is mediated by the immediate culture we surround ourselves with in these virtual networks (and on-line/off-line friendships). “Correct” use of this network is only as what is dictated by the practices I see reinforced by the people I follow and share in circles.

As an example, I want to turn to Facebook briefly. The migration of my students from MySpace to Facebook has been significant and swift. Within a year, MySpace is bereft of its biggest demographic as Facebook accounts become the ubiquitous cache of legitimate online student identity. As I watched a generally new demographic utilize a social network that was initially populated by people around my own age, I was intrigued by the differences in use. I often see a student post a status update that would be followed by dozens of comments. Looking at these, students were utilizing the commenting space on Facebook to engage in conversation. Often only one or two participants would rapidly fire comments back and forth to have publicized chat logs (some extremely personal in nature). I remember distinctly thinking “that’s not how you use this component or tool.” For me, such conversation we to be conducted in a chat window (isn’t that why it’s available on Facebook?), through a private message, or – ideally – in “real” life. I didn’t understand that I was naturally ascribing my own rules of use on a cultural practice that was not my own.

danah boyd writes about “Networked Privacy” and this is a useful realm to better understand other ways students are using Facebook differently (and just as “correctly”) as many of my own peers.

Part of why my use of MySpace in the past was successful is because I asked and watched how youth were using the site. I incorporated elements of what they did, closed off the reaches of my social network so it was not as invasive as they may have felt, and ultimately found a medium between youth cultural use of MySpace and academic use of the site for my group of learners.

As we steadily proceed up a naturally developed learning curve around Google+ it is a useful time to remember that educational use of these social networks is going to have to largely be negotiated with our youth constituents. We will all have different online registers in how we are utilizing this new tool. We will all be utilizing it differently and “correctly.” In order for this use to be effective in the context of sociocultural learning, we will have to collaborate around how to engage with Google+ (or Facebook or MySpace or Friendster etc.). To simply appropriate these tools and monopolize them in constrained ways will ultimately fail. I’m looking forward to sharing and learning about the different and “correct” ways we will be learning with a site like Google+ in the future.

Your Summer Syllabus: Three Recent Examples of Participatory Media that Teachers Should Know About (Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy Ahead)

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My browser is overcrowded with tabs of information I want to share here. Instead of focusing on a single example, I want to briefly reflect on three different aspects of the shifting nature of culture in participatory media: community, copyright, and civic engagement. By looking at all three of these, educators can get a quick & robust snapshot of what is on the horizon for pedagogical implications vis-à-vis all of this “new media stuff.”  The examples below speak to three different ways that media and culture are changing the ways young people are learning, interacting, and acting upon the world. For teachers, all three of these bring up significant ways that pedagogy needs to shift. (I’ve called this, previously, Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy.)

 

How to Have the Number One Book on Amazon Without Actually Finishing It

When it comes to YA literature, John Green’s works are not only a personal favorite, but also a consistent hit with my students. During the final days of June, John Green went live on YouTube to his legion of fans and (over the course of nearly two hours) announced the title of his new book, answered questions being sent in real time, and read a chapter from the unreleased work. He also announced he was going to sign every copy of the first edition of the book. As a result, The Fault in Our Stars shot to number one on Amazon and Barnes and Noble websites & Green’s work was profiled in the Wall Street Journal, and media sites are pointing to the phenomenon of the sudden sales. What’s important to notice here is specifically how this happened. Green didn’t go online overnight and simply announce the book title (as mainstream media like WSJ signals). Instead, this has been a sustained relationship with readers that has developed trust and identity. John announced that the title came from someone within his online community. Fans have created tons of covers for the book. John’s hosting an online book club that’s reading the Great Gatsby. He has a series of video exchanges with his brother. He interacts with readers through twitter constantly. If anything, part of the fun of being a “fan” of John Green is being able to interact & engage with other readers, the author, and other artifacts in varying degrees of intensity. Spending some time meandering across his official site, his tumblr, his various twitter accounts, and fan pages is a great way for educators to think about ways to collaborate and share the learning experience with young people.

The Good, the Bad, and the Bloop of Fair Use & Copyright

Do you like Kind of Blue? How many times have you heard a soloist riff on those opening bars of “So What”? And while the music is constantly pointed to as a vanguard album in the history of jazz, a recent reinterpretation of the music finds itself a useful case study in when art appropriation exceeds “Fair Use.” I’m regularly talking about the importance of discussing fair use, copyright, and Creative Commons with young people; I’m convinced that this is a space that  students need to explicitly understand as we shift toward a cultural shift from merely consumption to production. This case study, “Kind of Screwed,” is a fantastic introduction into the challenges that are being faced across artistic mediums. Related to this, I regularly either include Free Culture or the film RIP: A Remix Manifesto in courses I teach to teachers about media and technology- both of these are great resources for further investigation on this topic.

 

The Fall of Eve – Commercial Interests & Citizen Dissent

Think of Eve Online as the geekier, way (way) more complex version of World of Warcraft. With political and corporate intrigue at the center of a game that takes place on ships and in fleets of aircrafts, Eve isn’t as widely played in the U.S. as other MMORPGs. However, that hasn’t stopped EVE’s distributor, CCP, from cashing in on game updates & expansions. In doing so, the company’s revealed a strategy that is more interested in a bottom line profit than in continued support of a long term player community. The result? Nearly 5,000 subscribed players walking away from the game and community. Digging through forum postings and news articles, a clear tension between creator and user emerges. And while teachers aren’t likely to utilize EVE Online in daily instruction (though the class that does has got to be an interesting one, no?), the way that these players are signaling dissent within the game, through canceled subscription and through collective organizing demonstrate how civic engagement is reshaped through participatory media. There are past examples of this kind of work described by researchers, particularly in America’s Army and the Sims, for those who want to look at other work in this area.

 

Summing Up

While all of the examples above have related precedents, they point to the fuzzy edges of socio-cultural interaction that most educators aren’t thinking about. They are all from within the past two weeks and are related to the kinds of practices our students are engaged in every day. When are we, as educators, going to formally sketch out a redefinition of pedagogy that addresses the paradigm shift that affects our classrooms?

 

 

Transitions: Manual Arts, The Department of Education, and Stepping into the Productivity of the Summer

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Thursday was the final day of the school year at Manual Arts. It was the end of a very long year with significant changes. As the students left the school, they walked away from a campus that has been under constant operation for nearly a decade. This will be the first summer since I’ve worked at Manual Arts that the school is not in session (aside from a paltry summer school offering). What will the school’s return to a traditional calendar look like next year? Will student, teacher, and parent concerns about security at the overcrowded campus be addressed? Will we adequately meet the needs of students in classes that are averaged at 40 students per teacher? Will the incredible (absolutely incredible) graffiti murals at our school be painted over? (Strong signs point to yes.)

Thursday was also my final day as an official employee of the U.S. Department of Education. And though my role as a 2010-2011 Teaching Ambassador Fellow has come to an end, I am excited about the network of individuals I have been able to talk with and from whom I hope to continue to draw expertise on future projects.

This summer, I am focusing on coding, analyzing, and writing up preliminary findings for my dissertation. I am also teaching a few classes in and around L.A. and will be consulting for a few education-related projects. I hope to share information about these in future posts.

I am also pleased to be working with the Schools for Community Action design team. We are developing four amazing (amazing!) small schools to serve the South Central Los Angeles community. The work before us is exciting, difficult, and (occasionally) overwhelming. You are welcome to join us. At the least, please consider following us on Twitter.

I am excited to share a bunch of other work in the coming weeks:

  • I am beginning to play around with Google Plus (thank you all mighty Twitter for coming through with a speedy invite!) and can’t wait to talk about how I see it playing a transformative role in schools.
  • There have been some exciting conversations brewing related to the NBPTS Take One program within my school.
  • I will eventually take issue with Jaime Oliver (while still enjoying the occasional burger at Patra’s).
  • I’m taking down the “Teacher of the Year” program.
  • I’ve got a serious problem with capitalism and creating “lifelong readers”
  • And finally, I have a series of ongoing thoughts about what I have learned from Sadie, my basset hound companion that passed away earlier this week (I am still, slowly, coming to terms with the quietness of the house now that she’s gone, but will be sharing the lessons she’s taught – in her slow, stubborn way – as the time feels right).

I can’t wait to get to all of this! And if you are interested in engaging in an American Crawl conversation and want to collaborate here, this is your official invitation to reach out and make this happen. School’s out! Time for learning!

 

Praising the Voice

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So I’m kinda into The Voice. A week in a hotel + Hulu = completely caught up and officially rooting for Beverly.

I was hooked by the blindfolded recruitment phase. In some ways it reminds me of the process of entering the realm of academia: reviewing writing and intellectual ephemera, top-of-the-field professors recruit graduate students to join their teams (these teams will eventually duke it out in academic journals and conferences around geeky topics). And just like the two ladies on Team Blake, sometimes grad students have to sing backup for their advisors.

In any case, I appreciate the strong representation of LGBT contestants not being tokenized as merely gay. For a superficial talent show, the Voice is doing a great job of presenting its contestants as humanly multifaceted. We’ll see what happens when contestants are voted only by a mainstream public next week.

And though it’s not necessarily tied solely to The Voice, this show is the apotheosis of participatory media’s integration into mainstream broadcasting. The show’s logo is shown as a hashtag throughout the show, the hosts mention when artists are “trending” on Twitter, which performers topped the iTunes charts, and coaches & contestants alike answer questions submitted via social network sites. The integration is not secondary to the show and is a sign of where television is moving.

 

 

Busted Axle on the Digital Oregon Trail

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It was day four of a week long intense standards writing session. As Sandy and I reviewed documents to look at how we were presenting technology in the standards, Barb came in cradling her laptop like a fallen comrade. It had fallen and a crack in the display rendered the computer all but useless.

The screen, however, hemorrhaged spectacular blips of light. When another committee member pressed the screen with a forefinger, the screen spewed color like a fountain of brilliance. As much as I felt bad about the loss of work for the group and of personal equipment for Barb, I was transfixed.

A husband in another timezone was called by one committee member. An LCD was pulled out to reroute the computer’s display. My own productivity came to a halt.

As the majority of us stood around prodding and suggesting and generally not able to do a whole lot about the situation, I was reminded of the calamities that befell the travelers in the Apple II rendition of the Oregon Trail of my youth. Is this the Oregon Trail of the Digital Era? Had our axle broken? Had we failed to successfully ford the river? Improperly squandered our resources?

Thinking About Video Games, Narrative, and Freedom

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[This post is shared, intended for, and written as a resource at the Digital Is site for the National Writing Project. If – for some silly reason – you haven’t been over there, please take a look.]

Reading the article, “Press X for Beer Bottle: On L.A. Noir,” by Tom Bissell I was left with several significant thoughts and questions about the role of video games on learning, media, and how we teach storytelling and writing.

Though quite lengthy, I encourage you to read through this resource – though the comments below can be read as a stand alone reflection on video games at large, the review is a useful case-study of how narrative shifts in storytelling affect player freedom and understanding of choice.
What’s at the heartof this inquiry is a tension that exists between video games and story. Specifically, can a video game act as a useful means to convey narrative? As an English teacher and as a writer, I question whether my intentions as a writer – to recount a specific narrative, to persuade and effectively defend a thesis – can be adequately represented in a video game. And even if these ideas are in a game, will it ultimately be a fun one?

A popular game series  many of my students (and youth around the world play) is the Grand Theft Auto saga. In these, players may undertake specific missions driving around cities to meet various objectives sand move up the ranks in a city’s organized crime underbelly. At the same time, however, most of my students usually play the game with a more broad understanding of the game’s purpose: cause as much chaos as possible. Driving over pedestrians, getting into glorified shoot outs with law enforcement, creating spectacular crashes, explosions, and city-wide damage, most of my students appreciate the game platform as a space for exploration and play. It is a giant sandbox filled with digitalized violence. Your ethical concerns aside, I question how the developers (writers) of these games feel about this approach. Clearly, there is a loose narrative that students are supposed to adhere to. Clearly, most of them do not.

I should make it clear that I think this is okay. The freedom to resist narrative and to resist societal conventions (to specifically push against them) is exactly what makes these games so engaging for young people…and probably cause the kinds of fear mongering about violence and video games that are monthly headlines in grocery-store magazine displays.

However, the developers of the Grand Theft Auto series have recently released a new game. L.A. Noire (as detailed in the article). In it, opportunities for chaos still can be found. However, this game has a very specific narrative vision. It adheres to traditional storytelling narrative arches. There are things like denouement in its final moments. But with this narrative comes a much more limited scope of choice. The player, though posed with options and-at times a broad area to play and explore-ultimately must take specific paths, choices, and steps in order to proceed. In fact, the game doesn’t really provide much choice at all.

As creating games becomes easier and cheaper, it will become the kind of literacy practice that – I imagine – will be second nature in ELA classrooms in the near future. If this holds true, what kinds of lessons do we develop about teaching choice, agency, and power within video game design?

Similarly, in addition to looking at images of race and class and literary elements in video games, how do we get students to write and think critically about agency and power when they play these games? In essence, by playing a game, a player is essentially committed to a programmed contract that forces them to adhere to the rules, laws, and conventions of social behavior that are designed into the game’s architecture.

This may seem like a superficial discussion, but I caution us, as educators, to think specifically about what video games inculcate in students about power, authority and the way they understand & synthesize information. By garroting a game’s scope, its designer is afforded the freedom to closely “tell” a narrative. However, it will take more innovative game design for a video game to allow open ended exploration that can “show” a narrative based on player free will. This tension between choice and narrative is one that needs to be conveyed in our lesson plans and in our classrooms. How we design our classrooms, establish class rules, and set agendas are no different than digital walls and required button mashing in the stereotypical first person shooter our students play daily.

 

My Union Sucks at Twitter (#DeasyFTW)

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I’ve been disappointed with my union lately.

That’s a difficult thing for me to say in the current teacher and union-bashing climate. However, while I support unionized teaching labor, I don’t feel like my union (both at the my specific school site and the district at large) has made decisions that are in the best interest of “rank-and-file” teachers. And yes, a union is as strong as its members, so I accept the criticism that comes with speaking ill of one’s own organization.

I say this all as a prelude to point to a useful contrast between my union’s online presence and that of the management it negotiates and works with (or against, depending on the day of the week).

 

Exhibit A:

 

And Exhibit B:

Really, UTLA? 2009? Back-patting our own demonstration through a series of tweets? Really? That’s our best use of social media? Meanwhile, Deasy not only communicates an issue clearly, he does so in a way that calls for support and empathy from teachers and the public alike. Regardless of where you may stand on the actual issue at hand, Deasy leverages social media to more effectively inform and sway a population.

 

Exhibit C:

Unless someone else in UTLA is following other users, UTLA is missing the boat big time with the people they are “following” – this is a huge opportunity to engage, interact, and personalize the union for thousands of its members, instead of merely deferring and following mothership accounts.

Exhibit D:

Really? A broken link for the (once again) 2009 twitter handle?

Discussing this with colleagues at lunch today, I mainly expressed frustration that this is so backwards in our district. I’ve come to see Twitter (through the many news headlines in the last few years) as a tool for working class activism. It is a free, easy, and proven way to mobilize many (many) people. It’s hard to speak hyperbolically about the potential of Twitter; it has literally broken the news about global revolutions.

And yet, instead of UTLA “getting it,” the superintendent beats us to the punch.

And while this can be rectified, this is a useful turning point for thinking about the lessons we teach in our classrooms. If we want to work toward a libratory education, understanding the potential of a tool like Twitter and how to implement effective use needs to become a necessary aspect of education. Clearly, @utla2009 is a useful demonstration of ineffective participatory literacy practices.

Lastly, I realize that some would see it as prudent for me to volunteer to take over the UTLA Twitter handle, but that’s not my M.O. here. Frankly, someone is being paid to stay out of the classroom to help aid with communication and outreach for the union. I imagine they are overexerted and already working well beyond their limits. However, fax blasts are painfully slow when the vast majority of a constituent is Smartphone enabled. I’d imagine it is time to update how our union operates and communicates.