Macbeth Unfriends Duncan

Looking forward to presenting at the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention 2010 in Orlando this November. My presentation is part of a panel session to share my Macbethbook project, a parody social network students build in a wiki that is a mashup of Shakespeare's Scottish play and Facebook.

Shakespeare’s theme of versions of reality (appearance versus reality) comes to the fore as students consider versions of self that a social network user puts online. They imagine what "versions" of characters are known among the dramatis personae of "Macbeth."

Using a wiki as the platform for this collaborative project, provides verisimilitude to the look and function of an actual site. In role, students post online journal entries, photos, videos, links, and email among characters from the play that demonstrate their understanding of characters, relationships, action, dialogue, and language. As they examine the thematic implications of appearance v. reality, they realize how social networking fosters varied representations of self in virtual and real lives today.

As recently as December 2009, researchers have noted that 93% of American teens use the Internet and of that number 73% use social networking (Lee Rainie, “Networked Learners,” Pew Internet & American Life Report, 2 Dec. 2009. Web.)

In creating a mock social network for the characters of "Macbeth," students analyze how social networks function: who sees what, what may be shared, hidden, revealed, invented, honest or hypocritical. Traditional literacy skills serve new literacies of working with digital media is a requirement as students construct a social network from the ground up, composing writing, taking photos, making videos, and uploading these to the site, and then linking to “friends” for viewing.

Session participants will be given the opportunity to imagine the social network of "Macbeth" from character points-of-view to add interaction and illustrate the students' learning process of this inquiry-based approach.

Out of a complex intersection of classic literature and contemporary technology come practical lessons of living literate lives. One lesson is the imperative that students come to understand the social relationships and multiplicities of persona in Shakespeare’s play. Next comes the lesson of how we tend to segment our “selves” among our social relationships, yet ultimately must reconcile these selves in one whole human being. Third, there is a recognition that social networks function at once virtually and in reality. And finally, students’ discover that their versions of themselves on offer to others—virtually or in reality—need to be critically selected with agency and be consistent with how they identify themselves—each as a one whole human being.

"Macbeth" is tragedy of a man and woman becoming monsters caused in part by a each separating his or her “self” until he or she became less than human. Thus, this project underscores how teachers and students may live literate and whole lives together, particularly when it comes to representing ourselves in social media.

If you are headed for NCTE 2010 in Orlando this November, look for Session I.25 at 1:15 p.m. on Saturday, November 20.

Are You Driving the New Model?

The National Council of Teachers of English has an updated Framework for 21st Century Curriculum and Assessment that is a clarion call to English educators to embrace and develop skills in digital technology and media. Adroitly the NCTE points out that language changes as the way we communicate changes, and indeed to be a literate person in the coming century requires a new and plastic skill set.

Blurring? Yes. Whereas in medieval times one was literate who could read and write, tomorrow (if not today) one is literate who can read, evaluate, communicate, create messages, develop meaning, and build relationships in myriad, complex, and ever-changing technologically based means.

The NCTE's framework point to such literacy skills as that will allow a 21st Century readers and writers to :

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

The charge for English teachers comes in dozens of questions under each of the above elements. Such questions as:

• Do students use technology as a tool for communication, research, and creation of new works
  
• Do students work in groups to create new sources that can’t be created or solved by individuals?


• Do students solve real problems and share results with real audiences?


• Do students create new ideas using knowledge gained?


• Do students evaluate multimedia sources for the effects of visuals, sounds, hyperlinks, and other features on the text’s meaning or emotional impact?


• Do students practice the safe and legal use of technology?

I say these amount to a charge for English teachers, because the lessons that these questions point are still emerging and yet becoming germane to language arts study. What percentage of our curriculum and assessment is answering these questions in the affirmative? Surely, we always have held such lofty goals at times and perhaps those "creative" or "dramatic" or "soulful" among us have from time to time veered off the straight and narrow essay assignment track("why don't you submit that poem to a magazine" and "cite your sources" and "how about creating a collage on theme").

Today is a new day, and tomorrow newer still. Technology as a way to read, create, publish, and communicate is tuning-up the English classroom into an all-terrain vehicle--sans brakes! As teachers we must learn much that's new if are students are to learn from us. The NCTE's framework serves as a good table of contents for this new-fangled buggy's user's manual.

Giddyup!

Image credit: ahisgett. "All Terrain Buggies." 22 Aug. 2007 Flickr. 2 Dec. 2008 <http://www.flickr.com/photos/hisgett/1203532051/>. Courtesy of the photographer under Creative Commons License: BY.

Blogging: More Than a Nifty Strategy?

Last month's National Council of Teachers of English Convention in New York City boasted a session on blogging, podcasting, or wikis, just about every hour. I attended several hoping to cull a few new tips or tricks, or even better, hear some discussion on how and why teachers were using blogs and other Web 2.0 applications. Ultimately, I wanted to know what others are finding their students are learning from this sort of practice.

From research done at our school, we know that writing proficiency improves from students' blogging. And we have some hunches about why. We figure modeling and the writer's confidence and compositional structuring that develops from models have much to do with the improvement of writers over time. But what else?

The sessions on Web 2.0 were lacking in reflective pedagogy. I don't expect to hear all the answers. (Do we ever have them?) But I'd like to hear some questions and inquiry. What I heard instead were cutesy, superficial "and then we have the students' post them (projects, writings, pictures, recordings) to the Web without any consideration as to why or what happens differently when we do this.

I'm not an alarmist--rather I think we are missing an important (teachable and teaching) moment that is actually replete in positive implications for our practice. Maybe that's what concerns me most. What I was hearing was blogs and wikis being regarded as just another "thing you could do," and I think they are more than that. My experience is that teaching/learning, i.e. meaning-making and sharing of meaning in the classroom is significantly changed by the power of collaborative, public posting of ideas and products of learning on the Web.

More research is needed. More discussion is needed. More reflection is needed. For a presentation at U of PR, Cayey I wrote a one-page sheet of some questions with which to start.