Although she does ring the “digital natives” alarm as one contributing factor (meh), she also admits that:

…it’s time to acknowledge that the lure of visual media isn’t the only thing pushing our kids away from the page and toward the screen. We’ve shied away from discussing a most unfortunate culprit in the saga of diminishing teen reading: the high-school English classroom. As much as I hate to admit it, all too often it’s English teachers like me — as able and well-intentioned as we may be — who close down teen interest in reading.

The apathy runs both ways, though, and this bit struck pretty close to home for me:

When students have to produce an essay on a book they care nothing for, it becomes a nightmare for both the student (think “all-nighter”) and the teacher, who’ll spend precious weekend hours reading papers devoid of content. The upshot of this empty drill: teens increasingly resistant to great books.

So what’s happening in our secondary English classrooms?  Certainly, we want students reading material that they find engaging, but most schools, I imagine, also want to push the well-roundedness that a liberal arts education professes to provide, so it can’t be all “Miley Cyrus and Brittany [sic] Spears biographies”, as one particularly hyperbolic commenter wrote at another source.

After reading Dr. Schnog’s article, these are the essential questions I took away:

1. What can we do to encourage, rather than discourage, student interest in reading?
2. How can we “teach the classics” without “transform[ing] them into dessicated lab specimens fit for dissection”? (the words of a parent quoted in Schnog’s article)
3. How important is the literary analysis essay to teaching secondary English? (OK, maybe not an essential question, but one I’ve been wrestling with for a few years now, and this is just as good a time as any to bring it up)

This one’s approaching TL;DR territory already; I’ll continue in a day or two.  Just wanted to clear my mental clipboard and float this out there… I have some thoughts of my own, but I’d appreciate yours as well, particularly on any other key takeaways from the article.

In the meantime, Dr. Schnog held a WaPo-sponsored Q&A session the day after the article was published; here’s the transcript.

So why might I jump ship?

Identi.ca is the new microblogging kid on the block, and at first glance, it not only seems similar to Twitter, Pownce, Plurk, etc., it actually seems like it has less to offer.  No replies buttons or tabs, no search bar, just a steady stream of messages and the ability to ’subscribe’ to one another.

What entices me about Identi.ca is the fact that it’s open source.  While Twitter has been having trouble staying on its feet lately (it has been better of late, to be fair), I wonder how long it would take for Identi.ca users with some technical knowledge to diagnose and attack the underlying problems.  Seems like a good thing to have “more hands on deck.”  There’s more to be said about it, but Mike Bogle covered it in pretty good detail in his post and follow-up comment here.  With add-ons and other contributions from the Identi.ca community, I’m seeing the potential for Identi.ca to play Firefox to Twitter’s IE – highly customizable and community-based.

I also like Identi.ca’s commitment to the OpenMicroBlogging protocol.  Essentially, conversations could take place across services, so there’d be no need for a Twitter account, Plurk account, etc.  One protocol to rule them all, so to speak.  There is already a plethora of services for cross-posting to multiple services, but nothing to aggregate responses and facilitate discussion.

To me, the discussions and exchanges of ideas that take place on Twitter are by far its most important factor, and why I won’t be deleting my Twitter account anytime soon.  Identi.ca may evolve into something great, and I’ll definitely stick with it, unlike a lot of other microblogging services.  Without the people who make up my network, however, it won’t be of nearly as much value as Twitter, broken down and everything.  Ultimately, it’s the people, not the tools, that give the network its value.

In the meantime, I encourage folks to try out Identi.ca and see if it suits you.  I’m @damian613 on both Identi.ca and Twitter; feel free to subscribe, follow, or just read.

What was the “worst job” you ever had that ironically helped prepare you to one day become an educator?

I’ve been extremely fortunate in that I’ve never had any terrible jobs, but for the sake of the meme, I’ll say dorm security at The College of New Jersey during my undergrad years:

• Shifts lasting til 2am enabled me to work long into the night, like I had to during my first few years of teaching
• It was my first taste of working as an authority figure (to use the term loosely), which helped when I was 23 and faced with a class of 18-year-olds
• Conflict resolution (and avoidance!) skills came into play, especially when dealing with drunk freshmen. Similar scenarios have played out in my presence at school (presumably, minus the alcohol), and I learned to always keep the coolest head of the group.

Thanks for tagging me, Christian. I hereby tag some folks whose blogs I most sincerely wish I had more time on which to comment:

1. Jose Vilson
2. Ken Rodoff
3. Kyle Lichtenwald
4. Diane Cordell
5. Jeff Wasserman

Remember a few months ago I developed a wiki for one of the departments at my school? I updated the “Article of the Month” section over the weekend and sent the department an email yesterday to let them know (as well as call for contributors – total number (beside me) in the last 4 months: 0).

One of the teachers sent a nice email to tell me that the wiki was a very worthwhile project, but that she doesn’t even have time to look at it, let alone contribute information to it. Look, I know everyone’s got their own stuff going on, especially in the home stretch of the school year, but damn. At first it didn’t bother me, but like a grain of sand in my sock, it grew slightly more irritating the more I thought about it.

My first thought (vented in a Tweet earlier today): I teach a full courseload, continually develop new projects for my students, parent a 3-year-old and a newborn, do a grad school internship, attend graduate classes, and I found time to WRITE the damn thing – you can’t even look at it?

My second thought: You don’t have time to visit a website, but you have time to write me an email telling me you don’t have time to visit a website?

Is this what it’s like being a technology coordinator?

Here, then, is the full text of the email I sent to my school’s Special Education department this afternoon:

For my grad school internship, I created a wiki website for the HC Special Services department: http://www.hcss-wiki.org. On it, you will find information on a variety of topics including behavior support, New Jersey classifications, and various online resources for special ed teachers. It’s just missing one thing: your input.

The reason this site is a wiki instead of a regular website is because I wanted the teachers of the department to have an ongoing say in its development. There is a very simple 3-step tutorial on how to add content to any part of the site linked off the main page, so I encourage you to visit the site and add your thoughts and experiences to any part of the site. There is a section specifically for general hints and tips (perhaps from the more experienced teachers to the newer ones?), but of course you can add to or modify any existing information.

The value of wikis is in group collaboration. I hope you will find time to make a contribution and help this tool grow. I am available to you if you have any questions.

I hope the tone and content of the email were sufficient to get people poking around and maybe even contributing, but there’s a part of me that’s pessimistic about how frequently it will be used – and that’s not a reflection on the faculty. I think there’s a missing component here that I am unable to offer, at least not within the confines of the contracted school day: training. I feel like I’m offering these folks a potentially very cool, very powerful utility, but withholding the instruction manual.

And if you don’t know why that’s a bad thing, just ask William Katt.

Baby willing, I’ll be co-presenting a short (traditional-style, sorry) workshop on wikis at the New Jersey Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development headquarters in Monroe Twp., NJ on February 12. It will be a 40-minute section of a longer (9am-1pm) workshop entitled Infusing Technology into the Curriculum to Enhance Learning, which will also cover the curricular use of blogs, Skype, Moodle, and social networking. The presenters are teachers from different disciplines (English, Social Studies, Spanish, and Phys. Ed.) who all use these tools in their classrooms. There will also be an introductory piece from our Supervisor of Instructional Tech (I think that’s your title, Don; please correct me if I’m wrong).

It’s not my first conference presentation, but it is my first one involving this technology in which I’ve immersed myself for the past year or so. I’m quite excited about it, and will be putting all the preso notes up at (what else?) the official presentation wiki. The major points I’m considering so far are:

• Wikis as bare-bones content management systems
• Cost (free and ad-free for K12 educators via Wikispaces)
• User-friendliness
• Functionality & security
• Opportunity for students to publish to a global audience & contribute a meaningful product for public consumption
• Examples of student-generated wiki products

I’ll probably also start with Lee LeFever’s Wikis in Plain English, just for good measure. So what am I missing? If you had 35 administrative ears to bend, what about wikis would you want to convey?