July 2009 through August 2009
• detailed analysis of data collected march 2009 through June 2009.
• write background, rationale, literature review

September 2009 through December 2009
• further classroom experiments with collaboration tools (Google Apps), instant messaging, wikis, wikiEducator and web-conferenceing.
• student analysis of web 2.0 conversations

December 2009 through March 2009
• detailed analysis of data collected from September 2008 through February 2009.
• write methods, results, and assessments, implications & recommendations.
• thesis complete

Purpose

The purpose of my action research plan is to improve the quality of discussion among middle school students. I want to see if I create opportunities for my students to engage in reflective discourse on conversations captured or recorded by emerging web 2.0 technologies, in what ways, if any, will those opportunities help them develop the capacity for meaningful conversation or critical discourse?

Situation

Middle school students wander off-topic easily and take a long time to move beyond superficial matters in any sort of dialogue.

Cycle 1

Research Question 1

If I create opportunities for my students to engage in reflective discourse on conversations captured or recorded by Instant Messaging, in what ways, if any, will those opportunities help them develop an awareness of their influence on the flow of a conversation.

This cycle will be conducted with a group of 14 grade 8 students who will discuss a specific question about a text they are reading in the normal course of their studies in a 15-minute online session using Google Chat. The students will then be asked to read a transcript of the discussion and to analyze it for a.) student participation and b.) on- and off-topic comments.

I expect to some initial resistance to the exercise. These students have participated in online discussions before and have found them frustrating because their conversations have been undisciplined, to paraphrase a couple students. However, they have never been asked to review what they said online. I expect that when I ask them to do this, they will begin to see that they have some influence over the quality of the online experience. Evidence one way or the other will come in the form of a short writing assignment in which I will ask the students to reflect on how their contributions, whatever they were, shaped the conversation.

The exercise will be repeated with a new question on a new text. If the first round was successful in making students more aware of the effect of their contributions, we should see an improvement in ratio of on- to off-topic comments.

Research Question 2

If I create opportunities for my students to engage in reflective discourse on conversations captured or recorded in a blog or wiki, in what ways, if any, will those opportunities help them develop an awareness of their influence on the content of a conversation?

This cycle will be conducted with the same group of students. This time they will be asked to contribute comments to a blog or wiki set up to explore a more complex question relating a text they are reading in the normal course of their studies. The blogging or wiki editing will take place over a week.
Blog or wiki dialogues take place asynchronously. Studies suggest that this sort of communication, as opposed to the synchronous dialogue in an online chat, increases a person’s ability to process information (Hratinksy) and that should give the students richer data for analysis. They’ll be asked to examine the comments for three types of contributions: a.) task-related, such as assignment dates, b.) content-related and c.) social-support related, such kudos for well-written comments or words of encouragement. The students will also again be asked to evaluate their own contributions.

The exercise will be repeated with a new question on a new text. If the first round was successful in making students more aware of their influence on the quality of conversation, we should see an increase in the proportion of content-related comments.

Research Question 3

If I create opportunities for my students to engage in reflective discourse on conversations captured or recorded in a blog or wiki, in what ways, if any, will those opportunities help them develop an awareness of their influence on the quality of a conversation?

This repeats the experiment in Research Question 2, but instead of analyzing blog or wiki comments from types of contributions, we will make an analysis of the quality of a conversation by looking through content-related comments for evidence of higher level thinking. This will be measured by counting verbs and question stems associated with the various levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.

Cycle 2

Research Question 4

Can the lessons learned working with grade 8 students be transferred to other grades in the school? What, if any, accommodations must be made for developmental differences in students of different ages?

In this cycle, research questions one, two and three will be repeated with grades 6, 7 and 9 students at Island Pacific School.
However, should a different question of direction of study arise from Cycle One, it will be pursued instead or as well.

I will be conducting my research at Island Pacific School (IPS), an independent, co-educational, non denominational middle school on Bowen Island, B.C. In the 2008-2009 school year, 50 students were enrolled in grades six through nine. About 80% of these students live on Bowen Island; the balance commute from the mainland. While in the past these percentages have varied considerably—the percentage of students from the mainland has been as low as 0% and as high as 40%—we expect the numbers to remain relatively stable at 15% to 25% over the next five years. Almost all the students come from white, middle class families although for each of the past three years we have also had at least two Korean ESL students attending as home-stay students.

I have been working there since 2001 and am currently the assistant head of school. I also teach English and philosophy to all four grades.

As a small, independent school, IPS enjoys a great deal of flexibility in developing and delivering curriculum. Classes are small and range from eight to 15 students. The instructional staff of six full- and part-time teachers is organized in a flat structure that encourages collaboration and affords a great deal of autonomy for individual teachers. The school also enjoys the close support and direct involvement from many of the student’s parents.

IPS was founded in 1995 by Dr. Ted Spear and offers a revitalized liberal education to young adolescents. Part of that education has included courses for all students in practical reasoning and elementary philosophy. A year of experimenting at Island Pacific School with emerging web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, microblogs, wikis, podcasts, collaboration suites and instant messaging, indicates that it may be possible to use these technologies to augment this more or less traditional teaching to develop “the language of critique and possibility.” (Smith) These web 2.0 technologies allow students and teachers easily to capture or record conversations, even those spread out over time and great distances--something they could not do before, not practically anyway. This, in turn, allows students and teachers new opportunities to engage in reflective discourse about the content of their study, but also—more importantly—about the conversations themselves.

Literature Review

Current literature on using web 2.0 in K12 classrooms, including formal publications and informal discussions on blogs and Twitter, divides into several strands:

How To’s. Emerging web 2.0 technologies have generated tremendous excitement in K12 education. Most of the informal discussions are about ways to use various technologies for day-to-day classroom activities. These typically take the form of samples of student work accompanied by a teacher’s explanation of how the works were created. They focus on the mechanics of assembling a piece of web content, a video or podcast, for example. There is little or no discussion of why the particular format—video, wiki, podcast etc.—was chosen or what outcomes the teacher measured. In many cases, it appears the format was chosen simply in order to teach students a technique. There are countless wikis, blogs and Twitter conversations on this subject, but the Flat Classroom Project wiki and David Warlick’s 2¢ Worth are typical.

Skill Development. The literature here suggests that the new web 2.0 calls for new literacies—skills in searching, evaluating and exploiting web-based resources that a.) are necessary for success in school and, more importantly b.) necessary to be an informed citizen and active participant in a modern democracy. The work of the Metiri Group and the American National Council of Teachers of English are examples.

The Effects of Web 2.0 on the Way Students Learn. These discussions examine the phenomenon of socially constructed knowledge and the ways it challenges the traditional (Western) model of education. Seely Brown speaks on this.

The Effects of Web 2.0 on the Structure of Schools. These discussions examine a movement, sometimes called Opening Up Education (OUE), working to develop open educational resources (OER). Proponents argue that access to educational resources ought to be freely available to all. They work to develop sophisticated, authoritative content—equivalent to a university chemistry text, for example—and deliver it through the web. Most of the work here is done for higher education, but it has applications and implications for K12. There is a parallel discussion here of the way students might access these resources through their so-called personal learning networks (PLNs). In a traditional school, educational resources are concentrated in the school building and teachers effectively control access to them. In the web 2.0 model, resources are dispersed and students have direct access to them though the web. In this model the role of the teacher changes from gatekeeper to curator. The students’ families also become more involved in education as the web is not bound by the brick-and-mortar or even the timetable of schools. Seely Brown also addresses this issue as do many blogs. The Journal, EdTechLive and EDUCAUSE are examples.

Sociology. This is the body of literature on the nature of conversation itself. It examines how humans communicate and convey meaning. Habermas, Gadamer, Wardhaugh and Wooffitt are examples.

This literature suggests that (Western) education is undergoing significant change. Much of the literature I’ve reviewed, however, takes a passive stance: the change is happening to us and we need to adapt to it. To a certain extent, this is true. It’s absolutely necessary to teach K12 students about, privacy, community, the public sphere, and finding and verifying knowledge in their online contexts. To a certain extent, this passivity is unavoidable; the technologies are so new and continue to evolve so quickly that it’s hard to know yet just what exactly can be done with them. But I want to know if teachers can be more active and harness web 2.0 to enhance the teaching of a specific pre-determined goal.

Bohm, D. (1997) On dialogue edited by Lee Nichol, London: Routledge.

Burbules, N. (1993) Dialogue in Teaching. Theory and practice, New York: Teachers College Press.

Christopher, Mary M., Julie A. Thomas, Mary K. Tallent-Runnels. (2004) Raising the Bar: Encouraging High Level Thinking in Online Discussion Forums.  Roeper Review, Spring 2004, Vol. 26 Issue 3, p. 166-171.

Curtis, David D. & Michael J. Lawson. (2001) Exploring Collaborative Online Learning. JALN Volume 5, Issue 1 - February 2001.

Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Harmondsworth: Penguin. 153 pages.

P. Freire and I. Shor (1987) A Pedagogy for Liberation. Dialogues on transforming education, London: Macmillan.

Gadamer, H-G. (1979) Truth and Method, London: Sheed and Ward.

Guzdial, Mark & Karen Carroll. (2002) Explaining the Lack of Dialogue in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. Georgia Institute of Technology.

Habermas, J. (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action Volume 1, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Hara, Noriko, Curtis J. Bonk, & Charoula Angeli. (1998) Content Analysis of Online Discussion in an Applied
Educational Psychology. Instructional Science, 28:2, pp. 115-152, 2000

Haroutinian-Gordon, S. (1991) Turning the Soul. Teaching through conversation in the high school, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Malone, M. J. (1997) Worlds of Talk. The presentation of self in everyday conversation, Cambridge: Polity.

Mercer, N. (1995) The Guided Construction of Knowledge. Talk among teachers and learners, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Tannen, D. (1989) Talking Voices. Repetition, dialogue and imagery in conversational discourse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Vella, J. (1994) Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach. The power of dialogue in educating adults, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Wardhaugh, R. (1985) How Conversation Works, Oxford: Blackwell.

Zeldin, T. (1998) Conversation: How Talk Can Change Your Life, London: Harvill Press.

My experience in the Graduate Liberal Studies (GLS) program at Simon Fraser University (that's me in the beard) reinforced a personal conviction that liberal studies are essential studies. While the sciences explain how we might do things, the humanities explain why we ought to do them at all. Liberal studies, as their name implies liberate us from ignorance and liberate us for the pursuit of human excellence. For the past seven years I have been teaching literature, history and philosophy at Island Pacific School, a 50-student co-educational independent middle school on Bowen Island. During my coursework in GLS, I began looking for ways to enrich my own teaching, especially in philosophy where the existing curriculum focussed on developing rudimentary skills in practical reasoning and surveys of Western philosophy.

Along the way, I published a paper in the International Journal of the Humanities and presented at the International Symposium on New Directions in the Humanities at Columbia University in 2007. In A Shout in the Dark: A Call to Reanimate Metaphysical Discussions in Grade Schools, I suggested that grade schools--public and private, alike--need to reinvigorate the discussion of epistemology in general and of metaphysics in particular in the classroom. The aim is not to promote a particular philosophy, indeed that would be inadmissible in a pluralistic society, but to begin to develop in young people the capacity to make meaningful conversation. As in my experience they are currently woefully ill-equipped to do so, they are cut off from a rich tradition of inquiry into the human experience:

Conversation and dialogue are not simply the means that informal educators use, but are also  what educators should seek to cultivate in local life. They may be approached as relationships to enter rather than simply as methods...Cultivating conversation lies at the centre of what informal educators do. It is not simply the form that their work takes, but also part of their purpose. Through conversation, testing out prejudices (prejudgments), searching out meaning, we become more critical. Language, discourse 'exists not for the sake of expression alone but for the sake of the community it makes possible among those who become parties to it'. We become better able to name our feelings and thoughts, and place ourselves in the world. We can develop a language of critique and possibility which allows us to act.

(Smith, M. K. (2001) 'Dialogue and conversation', the encyclopaedia of informal education).

I will admit that I am generally sceptical about the usefulness of these technologies. In my own classrooms I am reluctant to adopt any new technology unless it allow me to do something I couldn't otherwise do. As Alan Kay says, "Most ideas you can do pretty darn well with a stick in the sand."  But emerging web technologies do allow my students and I easily to capture or record conversations, even those spread out over time and great distances--something we couldn't do before, not practically anyway. And in an IM transcript or the collection of edits and comments behind a wiki page, we have a ready record of both the content of the conversation and the way the conversation itself developed. I wonder that if by teaching the students to analyze these records, they will better see both the form and purpose of conversation.

If this is the case, and I'll make a defense of the idea later, then schools should work to develop meaningful conversation, or dialogue or critical discourse, not as a secondary idea, but as a principal goal.

The GLS experience has shifted my thinking on the development of critical discourse in middle school students. I had initially approached the problem by attempting to enrich the content of my curriculum, bleieving better material would yield better discussion. In part that’s true: it’s hard to make a dull book interesting. However, much of the content of philosophy is simply beyond the understanding of my students who range in age from 11- to 15 years. It occurred to me that the success (and my enjoyment) of the GLS program came from the way it developed the capacity to engage in critical discourse as much as (if not more than) the way it delivered quality content. I learned more about the human experience when I stood back took the various courses I took as voices in a larger dialogue. I wondered that even if my students could not grasp content I might be able to recreate this spirit of dialogue.

Web 2.0, or the Read-Write-Web, may offer teachers new tools for developing an increased capacity for critical discourse in their students. While much of the literature written about Web 2.0 addresses the destabilizing force of the new technologies and the way they challenge current assumptions about the structure of schools and methods of teaching, I believe there is a counterbalancing force inherent in Web 2.0 that has yet to be exploited in K12 schools. The Read-Write Web technologies let consumers of content also be creators of content; yet, even as users create that content, the same technologies automatically capture the processes by which those creators worked. A wiki page, for example, records every edit ever made to a page giving us a kind of dialogue—between several authors if the page is a collaborative project or within the mind of a single author—we can review. Thus students and teachers have access not only to content, as we would have in a book, but also to a potentially rich set of meta-data: the give and go between writers or points of view, the crafting of words and so on.

My thesis takes conversation as the primary mode of learning and asks whether teachers can use emerging web technologies such as blogs, micro-blogs, wikis, IM, SMS and smart phones in middle school to improve the ability of their students to engage in critical discourse. This blog is a record of my research and my work with these technologies in my own classes at Island Pacific School where I teach English and philosophy.

I hope this blog will also be a conversation with the readers. I have built it on the open source CommentPress Wordpress theme developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book. The theme allows readers to comment, annotate, gloss and debate paragraph by paragraph: just click on any of the sections in the table of contents at left to open a page with a dynamic comments section in the margin of the text.

If you like to get in touch, please email me at brad.ovenellcarter@gmail.com .