When I was younger I shared a room (and bed) with my brother Jaime, I always had a flashlight and book nearby. I’d read until I was done and then go down to the bathroom before falling asleep. If my parents were still up, I’d get yelled at for being up. I remember being dragged to the store and sitting in the book aisle reading while Mum shopped. (They use to sell books at a store called HILLS which is like Target today).

Earlier today Claire and I went through all of her books and got a large box for Bookman’s. Bookman’s is cool because they accept lots of books for a pretty good price We took two full boxes and my buddy Audrea was working. We dropped them off up front and headed to find the “Chapter books” (they’r e novels for under 6th graders). Claire has about 30 Magic Treehouse books so I wanted to fill in the gaps from when I bought them on Ebay. We also wanted to see what else they had.

She got eight Magic Treehouse books, a few fairy books, and the first Judy Moody book. She’d seen Judy Moody and the Not So Bummer in June with her Auntie M, my sister (Meghan) and her only aunt. After she picked the ones she wanted, it was my turn to look around. Claire climbed into the cart with Judy and started reading. I had to pull it from her hand to pay and then she read it all the way to REI. In REI she was reading and walking into things.I sat her down near where I planned to shoot; I told her to scream bloody order if anyone touched her. She sat in the corner on the floor while I shopped nearby and it reminded me of when I would do the same at Hills.

Later that evening after she had dinner and watched some tv, I tossed her and her book into bed about 7pm. I told her to make sure she didn’t come out since I was planning to watch American Horror Story and that was the last thing I wanted her to walk into. Around 9:45pm I heard her bedroom door click, and she came out as I hit pause. She sleepily climbed into my lap and told me that she just finished her book. I carried her back into her room where she showed me Judy Moody book #1. She talked to me about it for a few minutes and showed me her 105 page chapter book. I put it on her shelf, sat another new book near her bed, and turned off the light. Like father, like daughter.

Originally published at nooccar.com

Claire came over to my couch to say good night today as I was clicking on a link I saw from some Twitter feed. Suddenly the We Give Books website pops up with the book Goodnight, iPad, which is a tech parody of Goodnight, Moon. This original book is a staple in our house (Claire and I BOTH have it memorized); I own Goodnight, Bush and Claire has Goodnight, Goon (the scary version), so when Goodnight, iPad showed up, we both just stopped. The full color ebook was in my browser and she started reading it out loud to her mother and me. I “turned” the pages & we three enjoyed the entire book. I then clicked the button to send a book to a child in Asia. I logged in (for free) and made an account so Claire and I can enjoy more books online in the future, plus we’re going to rest it on her iTouch tomorrow so she can watch herself anytime.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk

Here at the Conference on College Composition and Communication I’ve been talking to various publishing companies and the publishers are beginning to rethink their text book and learning management system models. I’ve used different text books for both high school and college over the last decade and come to realize a few things. Some of which I envision has come from my discussion with others, but the first thing we need to do is stop thinking in terms of pages and chapters. Books… (erg, I don’t think we can even call it that anymore. What do we call it? Modules? Ok, modules for now…) modules now need to be not only more organic but also more parsable. For example, I’ve never used an entire researcher/textbook/guide for any class I have taught. The current researcher I use, The Wadsworth Guide to Research by Miller-Cochran and Rodrigo, includes sections on APA or CSE but I don’t teach those styles (now I realize if the student owns the entire researcher and eventually takes a social science course, then that chapter on APA is really important to them). I am required to “use” a reader in my AP courses albeit do you think we use the entire thing? Straight through? No.

For years there’s been discussion of an la carte model for television so why not for modules, too. The argument is always money. We sell what they do need with what they do not need.

I’ve talked to two different publisher’s sales people in the last 24 hours about tagging. Why can’t we move to an electronic model where the instructor chooses which modules they will use in their classes? The whole (paper) book version will be an optional purchase for the student while the electronic modules will be available via laptop, ereader, etc… Rather than simply a taxonomical index, the student will use a tagging system (folksonomy) that includes a predictive text and suggestions to other sections or modules. (This could include suggesting modules the students probably really need, rather than where the end up.)

The next most important notion in terms of tags is self-tagging, or the ability for the student user to be able to add their own tags. I’ve seen this in Google where they let users play “games” by tagging images, which they then include for all users. By making that a game, it encourages people to add to the collective intelligence of the product. Now, if we can do this through publishers with the self-tagging system and then also include those tags back in the main server (student and faculty users can them moderate the tags for nefarious additions, much like Wikipedia does) then the publishers module databases become more robust without anymore money spent by the publishers.

Some publishers will tell you that they like the idea of self-tagging but only through a collection of module elements in a “personal student notebook space”. But doesn’t this defeat the purpose? The users can (and will), much like Wikipedia, manage the folksonomy themselves. My colleague calls this new module based system “project” rather than “book”. We first need to remove the idea of starting with the book and then parsing it out. We need to think away from the formalized, traditional book. We need to think of the module system of a system, but we also need to continue the discussions we’ve started with the publishing reps to help them envision this new learning paradigm.

At the beginning of the school year I took the section on mobile devices in my classroom and made a significant change. Originally it began with the change from “Cell phones, mp3 players, and other electronic devices are not allowed in the classroom to removing the word “not”. I told them to take out these devices on day one and had these looks of worried shock that I would be confiscating these things (and with full disclosure, until last year, I did just that). Once they were all out, I told the kids to use them. They look around the room confused. I then explained how we would use iTouches, mobile phones, smart phones (e.g. BlackBerries), etc… in the classroom daily.

This began rockily as they didn’t think to use them for research, but we began using phrases like “Use your technology to…” or by modeling on my own mobile phone use. I would say safer several weeks the students began replying to problems that emerge in classes in new ways, and I suddenly realized these questions were coming from further online research by the students at their desks. I’d be discussing something and wouldn’t be able to answer a question, but then suddenly one of their peers would raise his or her hand and explain to the peer what they hoped to know. By doing so, he or she is now teaching others (which has a 90% retention of information rate).

I continued this exciting usage in class through out the fall semester. At the beginning of the spring semester I asked the students to procure a copy of Twelfth Night and mentioned the full text could be found online, and then I told them when the text was due. The next week when books were due, several people were sitting at their desks with just BlackBerries, iTouches or iPhones. I was disappointed that they did not bring their materials to class and began to call role and ask for their plays. When I hit the first students without a paper book in front of them and asked where his play was, he held up his mobile device: “right here, Mr. Adams”. He flashed his screen at me, and I quickly went over to his desk and there was Twelfth Night open on an ereader app on his device. Oooops. My fault.

This kids took what I’d been teaching them and flipped it to a need from their own, but I didn’t realize it because I hadn’t thought that way yet. As I went around they all had their play, and I would say more than 30% of them did not have any paper copy at all. Two students had laptops, one had a netbook, and the others had mobile devices. And not every device was expensive. Some people had basic phones where they could save “notes”. Here they had note #1 which was Act I. Note #2 was Act II. And so forth. (My question still revolves around annotating these files!)

Last week my students were finishing up this Twelfth Night unit and building a poster (yes, yes, paper and markers). Many students had out their mobile devices and frankly there were probably a few people responding to questions of when work will be over or when the peer groups for Mr. X’s class will be meeting. Looking over one girl’s shoulder, she was looking up the use of the literary device “place” in the play so she could use that on her poster.

While this activity was occurring, I was observed by a district evaluator. In part, the comments on the informal write up were “why are so many students texting during your class when they should be learning”?

cc licensed flickr photo shared by The Pylon

I felt the need to explain my pedagogical processes (especially since these evaluations are worth $6k+), so I wrote a response that I sent over to district. Hours later I was called to my administrator’s office. She had the email I’d sent to district in front of her and wanted to know what I was doing in my classes.

I explained about the pedagogical approach to mobile technologies in my classes, how the students synthesize the materials, teach each other supplementary information learned online, and present that information to the class and students. I discussed how there will always been people who abuse the situation and when it’s reflected in grades, that discussion is between me and the student separate from the classroom. She seemed relatively interested but hesitant; I then mentioned briefly that it was in my management planned approved last July. She relaxed a bit, turned, picked up my plan, and asked me to locate that section. I showed her the paragraph disclaimer that delineated my classroom objectives for mobile pedagogy. She smiled widely and, I think, was relieved it was there.

She said she was eager to hear what I find but even being called in and even getting the evaluation in the first place, really shows how far we need to go and change the philosophies of schools’ administrations.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by jk5854

Recently I was speaking with a colleague at Arizona State University who was eager to buy her first Kindle. I asked why she’d not considered an iTouch. She just shrugged, and I shared some researched I’d done last summer. Simply put you could buy a Kindle and read books, and that’s cool, but if you buy an iTouch you can use the same Kindle software plus do much much more.

The Kindle’s form factor is thing and larger than the iTouch, and all it does is allow you to read, download text, and and annotate. Plus it is damn expensive and for the price, foughetaboutit! Not too mention it’s easier to break because of the fragility of the factor. For me, I enjoy several different sorts of applications for my iTouch. I use educational mobile apps, games, travel apps internet utility apps, obviously my eReaders, games and some other random things.

My daughter, Claire, spending an evening out with dad at an event, playing games on my iTouch.

I’ve installed Evernote, which my friend Alan discusses at length HERE, as well as Shmoop LINK which is a mobile study guide system for history and English. Many of the games I have installed are for my daughter, but her favorite is Word Magic which allows her to learn to spell by giving her an image and a word with letters missing. She fills it in and wins virtual medals and ribbons. She can play this for hours. My travel apps were a huge deal last summer when I toured Europe, and these include Skype (which you can use easily with a miced ear piece), translators for the languages of the countries I visited, Google Maps, language dictionaries, and currency converters. Some of the coolest internet utilities I have include, obviously, Google Apps, Google Voice (before it’s ben embargoed by who knows whom), Tweetdeck, Yelp, Twitterific, Facebook, Remember the Milk, and Tumblr. My eReaders include Sony eReader Pro, which is absolute favorite because I can bookmark a page by “dog-earing” it, Stanza, which has a powerful file converter application for the computer side, and, of course, Kindle, which I actually find myself using infrequently.

I am a self-proclaimed bibliophile and was apprehensive to begin reading books electronically, but you know what? After reading a chapter, I was hooked. I could take as many books with me anywhere in the world, read in the dark (think LCD screen), and I completely forgot it wasn’t paper in front of me. No issue. I have now read about a dozen books in three months on my iTouch and haven’t look back.

Did I mention free wireless anywhere there’s a signal in the world? It’s like a mini-computer in my pocket!

After I finished talking to my colleague about that, her response was “Looks like I have a lot more research to do before settling for a Kindle.”

I’ve been teaching Into the Wild, the journey of Christopher McCandless, since early in 2005 so when Changing Hands Bookstore announced that they were bringing Jon Krakauer to town I was stoked. Into the Wild seems to touch more of my students than any other required novel. Last month Krakauer released his next nonfiction novel- the story of Pat Tillman. Before Bush made him the propaganda poster boy for his wars, mostly only people in Arizona knew Tillman as the NFL safety who walked away from a $3.6 million dollar contract to join the Army.

While I know less about Tillman and don’t have developed comments of my own without researching more and reading the Krakauer book about him, Where Men Win Glory, I do know McCandless. My AP classes just finished Into the Wild and as wanted to know if McCandless was elfish or selfless. We had wild debates about this topic in class, but we never came to any sort of conclusion. Toward the end of one of these hour long debates, I suddenly thought of Tillman. At first I hated Tillman because of what he represented by the government, but as I think more and more about it, I hesitate to pass judgment.

When we arrived at Dobson HS tonight, I discovered close seats near the podium and was excited to be about 20′ from where Krakauer would speak. After a short wait, the Changing Hands person came up to introduce Krakauer who was right behind her. We had our touch with fame as he walked within 10′ of us. I shot several pictures as he began discussing Tillman. He began a slideshow of he made of photos and videos from Afghanistan when he was researching Tillman and he read the excerpt where Tillman was killed.

Afterward he opened for questions and most were about Tillman. One or two people wandered into a discussion of Under the Banner of Heaven or Into the Wild, so I figured my question wouldn’t be too far off. He called on me pretty quickly. I explained to him that I’ve taught Into the Wild for the last five years and he actually thanked me. I then told him I couldn’t understand how Tillman could not give up everything without some idea that he’s be glorified for what he was doing. Krakauer agreed and discussed with me how Tillman’s journals argued back and forth the very point about walking away from his wife and family for his country.

Next I asked him my second part. Was McCandless selfish and how do the journeys of these men parallel. Krakauer told my questions was great and really tough to answer. He talked briefly about Tillman, and he said my kids should continue the discussion about McCandless in class: “You students should keep talking about that. I’d love to sit in on that conversation.” Wow. Wouldn’t we like that? He did move on before talking any more about McCandless and after a few more questions, the hosts had to cut off questioning so he could sign.

I was in the B group so I wanted a short 10 minutes before getting in line. Several people I ended up knowing were there and said my question was profound, and what did I think the answer was. Or what did I think Krakauer thought it was. It was my turn to find out.

The line moved quickly and I got up towards the end to get my books signed. I reminded him who I was, and then I said, “Well, is McCandless selfish?” Krakauer looked up at me and answered. “Yes, he was selfish and rightfully so.” He went on to discuss with me the familial problems McCandless faced and we discussed my teaching his novel. I thanked him as he asked about my British version of Into the Wild that I had him signed, and then we parted ways with a hand shake. For me, this was like meeting a rock star.

(c)2009 Devon Christoper Adams

Tonight I was subbing at MCC for a colleague and conveniently immediately beforehand, Chris Crutcher, author of several young adult novels, was speaking here in the library to kick off banned book week.

He opened with a story about two penguins attempting to nurture a rock that was egg sized. The zoologists realized that it didn’t matter to the penguins so they took an abandoned egg and gave it to two male penguins to nurture. That egg succeeded and hatched, and those two male penguins raised that chick. To them it didn’t matter if there were two men or no females, etc… It was two penguins raising a baby. He segued into how this story was not about homosexuals and had nothing to do with that, and now, in today’s culture, book banning has gone to the extreme. Then he moved into a discussion about book banning.

It the 1950s and 1960s some books were banned, but then it continued to get out of hand. Conservatives argue that “If kids read stuff that they shouldn’t read yet IN THEIR TERMS, then they’re going to be bad.” Who’s to say what the terms should be? Crutcher grew up in the 1960s and after he graduated, he went to Spokane to work as a therapist.

When he wrote Chinese Handcuffs and toured about the book a young woman came up to him and asked “how did you know about my life?” The girl’s English teacher gave her the book and he had the two of them talk. Crutcher said it doesn’t matter that some people were offended by the book, but in this case, this girl was able to get the help she needed.

As a licensed therapist for over two decades, as a teacher, and as a novelist with over ten books, he understands how to skim the truths off the stories he hears; as a therapist, he knows he cannot tell their real stories, but over and over again these truths emerge from writing. “They are pockets where the author just elbows up against people’s beliefs.” Something about books get people going.

Now Crutcher is talking about Deadline, which is the book by him that I own, and about the young man who is living on borrowed time. In this book he makes education and school important; he also makes this about life and living it to the most. Crutcher read chapter 1 of Deadline about Ben Wolf discovering he is terminally ill and choosing to tell no one about it. He made the book mysteriously engaging and those in the room who’ve not read this before sat enrapt.

Crutcher thought it would be easy to write Deadline after the first chapter. He wanted to write a novel about life not about death and how a person who has a short period of time left can make his mark on the world. These “nuggets” or challenges that are thrown at Ben are how he reacts to these situations through that year. Crutcher uses people he knows and in dealing with families, he has come across sex offenders in his work, and he wanted Ben Wolf to meet and engage with this sort of person, so we can see how mankind relates to other people, including people like this who are the bottom of the barrel in prisons, people who are destroyed by the people around them and regret their own illnesses more than anyone. And Ben Wolf meets this sort of person, and by bringing up hard issues and dealing with them in his novels, of course, Chris Crutcher’s books have been banned.

Without addressing the hard issues, without pulling them out into the open, without discussing them, then these issues will continue to fester. Instead of standing up for books we DO like, we need to stand up for the books DON’T like.

Chris Crutcher ended with the paraphrases comment here, and then he opened it for Q&A.

Common Craft Twitter Video. Watch this for a great Twitter overview.

Hi, My name is Devon and I have a problem… No seriously though, I’ve been on Twitter for almost two years now, and yes, when I explain it to others, they look at me like I need a padded room and some Cialis. In part, Twitter began as a simple micro blog that answers “What are you doing right now?” but as simple as that sounds, it’s not anymore.

My timeline (that’s Twitter timeline for you noobs) has been popping off about the new Time article on Twitter: “How Twitter will change the way we live” from June 5, 2009, and as someone who is obsessed as most and about to begin to work on a workshop on Twitter, I have some responses.

As a Composition instructor, I find it interesting to be forced to maintain a response as brief as 140 characters. For high school students whose mentality is that instructors are interested in length (remember when we were in high school and padded pages with 12.5 font and/or 1.1″ margins? I do.), Twitter forces the practice on fighting verbosity in today’s composition. Moreover, Twitter also forces the author to be keenly aware of his or her audience.

Socially, yes, we can simply answer Twitter’s ubiquitous question that we’ve asked each other for decades anyway (how many of you have met up with someone or called and first asked “how’s it going?” before getting down to business?), but there are so many powerful ways to move beyond that “ambience awareness” of one’s day. How often have you been able to see photos (posted on TwitPicNeil Gaiman rolling around in the snow with his husky? Or read about Dave Navarro and his concert going experiences in Jane’s Addiction? Maybe you want to know what Lance Armstrong did today, or what Shaq’s been up to (figuratively).

Neil Gaiman enjoying time outside his home with his dog.

In April 2009, Oprah sent her first tweet from her show, and I ironically was wearing my Eat. Sleep. Tweet. shirt. People looked at me like I’d jumped on some bandwagon and I spent my day tweeting about my Twitter experiences over 18 months. Her publicity coupled with Ashton Kutcher’s race with CNN.com caused an interesting situation to occur for me in the Twittersphere. Before April, I had probably two current high school students want to follow me on Twitter. Both were “cool kids” who I “trusted” with my Tweets, but after that Oprah show, more and more current students began to want to follow me. This really freaked me out because at that time my Twitter audience was not my high school students. (In contrast I made my Facebook profile FOR my students to follow me.) I haven’t really come to a conclusion on the whole student following me on Twitter situation, some I allow and some I don’t, and I ever blocked all updates for a few weeks until things simmered down, but as more and more people jump into Twitter, the more diffused the whole “teacher freak who Twitters with his students” thing becomes.

Posted as part of a Twitter presentation by Chad Richards.

With that said, let’s discuss some of the positives education wise that have emerged from this tool. As I mentioned above, there are “experts” in any field who you can find on Twitter every day. You can follow them (and occasionally they even follow you back!), and sometimes communication emerges that would not necessarily from an email inquiry. In my field, I consider people like Intellagirl and Michael Wesch experts (albeit both are specialized within my field), and I follow both and have actually spent time with both in real life, too. Without Twitter that relationship (virtually) would not have occurred.

People tend to gravitate around certain topics of interest. Mine are “social media” and “instructional technology”. I also teach high school English and tweet about teaching Freshman Comp. I sometimes pick up followers just because of my work, or, other times, I join a new NING and people start following me on Twitter because they stumble over my profile there. A (virtual friend) and colleague Liz B Davis, who I’ve never actually met, aggregated a list of “Educators on Twitter” and as of today (June 6, 2009) there are 765 members. No, I don’t follow them all and they do not all follow me, but the contact data I have at my fingertips is powerful in it’s own right. Another person who I know better but I still consider him an “expert” to be mentioned here (although he is too humble to believe this) is Alan Levine from the New Media Consortium. Here’s a post of his on Twitter, and below is the life cycle of a Twitter addict that he adapted from Kathy Sierra. Very fun stuff.

Alan Levine's twitter life cycle.

What I would define as a collective intelligence that emerges from these “Twitter trees of experts” is what the Time article called “accumulation of authority”. No matter what we call it, our expert groups moved from the saloons of Dorothy Parker, to the list serves, and now to Twitter groups. Want information on anything at all? Ask on Twitter. Sometimes you get several responses within minutes. It’s like the silly old movies when someone asks for a pen or pencil and everyone in the scene shoves one at the simultaneously.

We are not all experts on all topics, but we have experiences and we have ways of collecting information. Sometimes that information includes links. Maybe we see something we want to share, so we post a link. Perhaps someone we follow on Twitter made a profound statement on the world of politics, a new musical, or a must read book. We “reTweet” these, which is a direct attribution and verbatim quote to the original poster (sometimes 2-3 people deep). Other times we don’t want to tell everyone what we have to say, so we send a Direct Message (d twitterid msg). (Sometimes people need to do this more often!) I’d like to point out what Steve Johnson already said about this in the Time article through his metaphor of the toaster oven and microwave. Neither Biz Stone nor Evan Williams, the founders of Twitter, (did you know they are friends with Will Wheaton?) came up with retweets, direct messages, or @ replies? As Johson said in the article, Ev & Biz gave the community the toaster and we made it into a microwave.

I’d like to talk at the idea of the @ sign for a moment here. In my tech circles, the @ID becomes users identity more and more. People don’t know who Sarah Robbins is as much as they know @intellagirl. Cropping up across the USA and into the UK are “Tweetups” where people gather corporeally outside of their meeting on Twitter. No longer do people introduce themselves as, for example, “hi, I am Heather Herr.” But now, when I met her, it clicked faster when she corrected herself, “On Twitter I am @msherr.” THAT person I KNEW! Her real name meant nothing, as for me, some people have no idea who Devon Adams is, but they have seen @nooccar on Twitter. A colleague, Shelley Rodrigo, (@rrodrigo for those of you playing at home), and I have signed entire presentations as devoncadams@gmail and shelleyrodrigo@gmail.com, rather than writing our names more traditionally. Guess what goes on our presentation IDS? You guessed it, just our @IDs. Companies like Tweetup Badges, will even make your group badges for when meeting in public and in person.

We all know the power of Google searches that has continued to gain momentum over the last decade, but have you searched Twitter? Johnson points out that the value of searching within your extended networks may “start to rival Google’s approach to the search”. Now, we will see if Twitter search can ever truly do that, and I am of the opinion that Google will eat Twitter before that happens, but two strong search examples Johnson points out is his article are worth mentioning. “If you’re looking for information on Benjamin Franklin, an essay shared by one of your favorite historians might well be more valuable than the top result on Google; if you’re looking for advice on sibling rivalry, an article recommended by a friend of a friend might well be the best place to start.”

The power of Twitter is that it’s real time. It’s the here and now. I heard about David Carradine’s and Heath Ledger’s death on Twitter within minutes of them being found. I remember when the plane went down in the Hudson River, TwitPic’s were posted of the ferry going to rescue people within minutes (can you even imagine what it would have been like if we had Twitter on April 20, 1999 or September 11, 2001?) According to Johnson, in May 2009 an “anticommunist uprising in Moldova was organized via Twitter. Twitter has become so widely used among political activists in China that the government recently blocked access to it, in an attempt to censor discussion of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.” Also, Twitter is used by CDC like organizations to track flu and health epidemics in urban cities.

As end users, some of us build the better mouse trap by making Twitter more power. We find extraordinary uses for Twitter and many times those uses are by our ME Generation. The innovative ways in which user play and work with Twitter will continually change. The value of the tool mutates, and it’s less about this tool BEING TWITTER than about the key elements of the platform–follower structure (including the @ symbol which has bled out of Twitter into other social media sites), link-sharing and real-time searching. It is like Marc Prensky said at the National Council for Teachers of English keynote in November 2008 in San Antonio, it’s less the noun that matters than the verb. What are the concepts where, rather than the content. Beyond Twitter for the fun of tweeting and calling our followers and friends tweeple or, more courageously, twits, what is the true purpose? Yes, some times it’s cool to see who is doing what, other times you spend more time tweeting than checking your gmail. Even other times, you run across fun tools like “Historic tweets,” which essentially sends out fake tweets from famous situations.

Lincoln asks followers for speechwriting help

But other times, this matters. We, as users, are the, as MIT prof Eric von Hippel puts it, “end-user innovation” where we, as consumers, modify these social networking tools for our own needs. Twitter and the like mutate and change as we find ways to engage the tool to make meaning in our own lives, through our own needs, and within our education

Last year my friend Kerri Mathew contacted me regarding finding a way to hook up a science fiction writer, PJ Haarsma, with students eager to read his book, play his online game, and connect in new ways with young adult sci-fi. Having just come off a year project with Kerri working with wikis and fanfiction, I immediately saw wetpaint.com as an outlet for the kids, and we we’re all a little excited about the author himself being part of the project. To get the kids excited about the book series, Jim Blasingame, professor at ASU and ALAN/NCTE guru, schedule PJ Haarsma to hit two local Arizona high schools including Basha. The kids seemed a little starstruck, but they quickly realized that PJ is a man just like they could be and he has a vision that could be anyone of theirs.

In the late fall semester of 2008 we encouraged the students to move towards an online official lexicon of PJ’s first two Softwire books and his online video game. I was able to procure an advanced copy of the third book at NCTE in November and used it to bribe the students into working faster and more efficiently. By Christmas they had a large chunk of text in the wiki, edited and put together. Two students stood out beyond the others as the shining stars for this project.

Jim’s goal was to present the wiki as a “premier” by the end of the spring semester at ASU. That was tonight. Tonight Jim invited Kerri Mathew, me, PJ, several of my students, Book Babe, media, professors and others to join him in discussing a summer project PJ and his good friend Nathan Fillion of Firefly/Serenity fame are producing, briefly introducing book #4 of The Softwire Series, and then a conglomerate of social media meets literature project of PJ’s.

I spoke at length in this showcase about the wiki, collective intelligence, social media in traditional pedagogical settings, and what the kids accomplished. Two of the students discussed some as well about their role in everything and how they put it all together. PJ explained what he wanted us to still accomplish, and then Jim presented me with consent forms from the publishers who want to publish the lexicon text in the back of the third book’s paperback form. The student and I are very excited about this, and I’ve discussed briefly with Jim how he can showcase some of this at AETA this fall at ASU and my plans to begin to write up and publish my side of this experience.

After a photo shoot and interviews with press and the media manage at ASU’s decision theatre, I headed home. Now the wiki isn’t public yet, but we will be discussing that move shortly between me, PJ and Jim. As for now, I am waiting to get my hands on the manuscript for book #4 this summer.

In Novemember at NCTE I headed into a session where PJ Haarsma, the author of The Softwire series, was presenting on Science Fiction and Gaming in the High School Classroom. I was hoping to have PJ sign his up and coming book The Softwire: Wormhole Pirates on Orbis 3. When I walked in, Jim Blasingame, ASU professor and presentation chair, welcomed me, shook my hand, and told me that he wanted me to join the panel. I was surprised, but eager. I joined PJ, Jim, Pete, and a teacher named Kristina on a panel to discuss how to use video games to get kids excited about reading science fiction.

PJ discussed what he and Jim calls the simulated literary experience (SLE), and that reminded me of how we now see more and more trailers for books, instead of just movies. PJ uses video games to hook readers, and he and Dr. Goggin suggest that we need to redefine “literacy”. Literacy is now whatever we want it to be as creator and consumer. We cannot define literacy as just the ability to read and write; literacy in the 21st century included images, audio and video, too (for example see Gee 2003).

The concept of multimodal composition isn’t a new one, but a colleague and I have been developing courses at Mesa Community College that move beyond the traditional formal papers and more into the 21st century multimodal realms.

In what quickly became my portion of the panel presentation, I discussed the use of wikis to generate collective intelligence lexicons based on Haarsma’s The Softwire Series; of (when) the students generate the lexicon, PJ hopes to publish it in the rear of the paperback in March 2009. I just need to better motivate the students to become excited about this entire endeavor. I am also excited that on another level, this may lead to other presentation and publications for us. The power of technology used to increase youth literacies is exciting.

A couple weeks after that presentation, my name popped up on the grid here. I didn’t know the video from the presentation was online. Here it is.