Always On by Naomi Baron

Computer-Mediated Communication and Writing on Prezi

Frame 1

The first chapter begins with an anecdote about a boy frightened as a large mechanical object thundered down the road, kicking up dust. The boy dove away from the road and cut himself on the barbed wire that lined either side of the road. The object, an automobile.

The point of the anecdote was to illustrate how technologies become domesticated, a term coined by Roger Silverstone and Leslie Haddon, to mean the process by which a new device becomes a normal part of everyday life. I keep coming back to the idea in M. T. Anderson’s Feed, where the internet and such technologies have become so domesticated that they are implanted in people, who can then access the internet from inside their heads. This significantly changes the way people communicate, interact with other people.

This is one of the guiding questions of Always On—“How language evolves with changes in the way we interact with other people as communication technologies become increasingly domesticated.”

Frame 2

Does the proliferation of the written word as a means of communication lessen the public view of what good writing is? Baron suggests that some of the effects of technology are obvious. It’s easier to talk to people who are farther away – when I was in second grade, my best friend moved away and I never talked to her again. In 7th grade, my best friend moved away and I never talked to her again. The two best friends I made toward the end of my middle school career now live in Indianapolis and Seattle/Texas, and because of technology, I’m able to talk (so to speak) fairly regularly. Baron also talks about how anyone can become an author/publisher, creating blogs, web pages, fanfiction, etc., sharing whatever they write with varying sizes of audiences.

Baron’s position is that “the sheer amount of text that literate Americans produce is diminishing craftsmanship” (location 240). In conversations I’ve had / witness in my PLN via Twitter about students and writing online, teachers are saying that the texting and online writing that students do in their spare time is helping them guide better writers because the teachers can bridge the gap between the writing they’re doing at home and the writing they’re doing in school.

Frame 3

Controlling the Volume

Most of the time, when my mother calls me, I let it ring. When I get a text message from my brother, who you saw in the first frame, it makes a different noise than all of my other text messages. I can choose whether or not my AIM (which includes not only AOL instant messenger, but also Google Chat and Facebook Chat) buddies see when I’m idle and not at my computer.

Baron calls this controlling the volume of our social interactions. We increase our access to other people by changing ringtones or creating specific alerts to notify us when people are available to talk.

We pretend we’re not at our computers or ignore phone calls in order to avoid talking to people.

The data she gathered on controlling the volume centers around the multi-tasking abilities of undergraduate college students at American University in the fall of 2004 and spring of 2005. It was a pilot study, and the participants were on the buddy lists of Baron's students. In the first study, 98% of the 158 participants engaged in multitasking. Focus groups found that one of the main reasons students multitask is due to time constraints. It allows them have conversations with people while writing papers, playing games, etc. Also that IMing isn't a stand alone activity. Sometimes multitasking is due to boredom-waiting for people to respond.

Are Instant Messages Speech?

In 1997 Baron looked at the literature about email, message boards and computer conferencing and decided that the communications are mixed modal--having aspects of both writing and speech.

David Crystal wrote a book called Language and the Internet, and in his understanding of the literature he found that online interactions is more like written language with spoken tendencies.

Baron did a pilot study with undergrads and recent grads at American University in 2003. Found the same as Crystal did, that while IMing has many elements of speech, it is, in fact, writing. She talks about how the writing is different--because there is no red penned-English teacher looking over their shoulder, and because they are multitasking, the academic typing goes out the window.

Away Messages and Facebook

Blogs, YouTube & Wikipedia

In brief, blogs, Wikipedia and YouTube give something to students that I think many are lacking in the sterile school environment: a sense of audience. When they put their videos or their writings on the internet, even via Facebook and such, they expect people to read it. They often ask me how many views my video blog is getting (even though they’re the first people to see it). This sense of audience builds on historical uses of the first amendment, that is, like the Federalist Papers, letters to the editor, and talk radio shows like Dr. Laura.

What I think they learn, incidentally, is how to establish a purpose and an audience, even if they don’t have a wide readership.

Frame 4

Is the internet destroying language?

Baron looks at offline writing—newspapers, essays and advertisements, whether or not electronic mediated communication follows a specific set of rules that users can violate, and then she suggests ways that the internet may be changing the way we write and speak.

There is a sense of “finished” in the area of writing that is produced. It happens faster than it did before. In the IMing study, the participants suggested that they often multitask when sending IMs because of time constraints. Because there’s something else they need to get done. Thus, the written word is being sent out there faster, and sometimes before people get a chance to decide if what they’re sending is really what they intended to say.

It’s even gotten to the point, and this happened after this book was written, that Google introduced a lab (a feature still in testing) that allows users to “unsend” a message. It’s timed, and really means that there’s a delay before the message is sent, but it exemplifies what Baron is saying here about being finished with our writing so quickly without taking the time to go back and look at it.

Baron also suggests that because of the direction we’re going with the written word everywhere, writing is going to move toward being a tool to record informal speech. We may move toward non-standardized spellings like Middle English. And language will not be held as heavily to identify social status.

As for other effects, Baron suggests that it may push us toward more compounding of words, partially because we take words when we type URLs and smush them all together.

And then, there’s Google auto correct, and spell check.

Because the technologies we’re using are still relatively new, researchers aren’t entirely sure what the long-term effects are going to be. And there still aren’t set conventional rules that can be held to or broken in terms of the internet.

Struggles

This is not the paper I wrote. It may have been the paper I intended to write, but I'm not entirely certain. What I know is that what I did write made me ashamed to be called a grad student. A writer.

Right now I feel like Paolo at the knee of Luis, learning how to write. It is with shaky, unsure hands that I attempt to put together my thoughts, my understandings, what I have learned. I am Paolo, writing the five words I know in the mud with a whip, then with a red face, erasing them, embarrassed.

I wonder how much of my struggle with putting the words on the paper has to do with shift in identity. The more I read, the more unsure I become about myself as an educator. I want to say that I agree with the social constructivist approach, that learning can/should be scaffolded, as we build our new knowledge by connecting it to something we already know, but at the same time, I want to step back and allow my students to discover. To take control of their learning and learn not only what is being taught on the surface, but the hidden curriculum (because teachers have it too, though some are more aware than others) as well.

I struggle to find the balance between supporting my students' learning with direct instruction, allowing them to support each other, and requiring independent practice. Te way we read it seems like one theorist says "This is the way is should be," and another says "No, this is the way it should be," and I forget that a balance is necessary and I don't have to agree with all of what a theorist purports.

Glassman (2001) explains that "Dewey places interest at the center of the educational process [because] interest is not something that can be created within the educational context, but must come from the interaction between the person and the situation" (p. 10). From this account, it seems like Dewey is in favor of problem-based learning, combatting issues of student motivation with interest. Additionally, if inquiry is built through the educational system, then the act of stopping at the next problem disappears and humans are no longer comfortable with a simple, pleasant lot.

But interest is another thing I struggle with. Because of phantom policies in place in schools, those policies that determine what students will learn. Why read Romeo & Juliet? Why read The Odyssey? How do we get past that these texts so culturally entrenched in our society that everyone must read them? (Franzak, 2008). Who decides what texts should hold value, what the purpose of reading is, and what we should teach in language arts classes? All of that said, what, even is the purpose of a language arts class? Sumara (2002) suggests that from reading literature and from learning close reading skills he learned how to pay attention to small details outside of the text, too.

We talk a lot about the need for culturally relevant texts--texts that our students can identify with. I can't remember whether I made this point in class or not, but that's easier to do in places like southwestern New Mexico, where the majority of the population is Latino. In bigger cities, in places where it is more culturally diverse, it's difficult to choose texts that cater to the myriad languages and cultures that a school's students represent. Understand, however, that I am not posing an argument for the canon. I do think that the texts we choose shouldn't be bleached, which is my issue with the common core suggested texts for language arts. Many of the texts are in the public domain, and represent a time and place that is not accessible to many students.

National Reading Panel, SSR findings, & more

National Reading Panel, SSR findings, & more: ""

(Via .)

I want to come back to this later. I'm currently looking at The Reading Zone (Atwell, 2007) and Smart Answers to Tough Questions (Garan, 2007). I'm interested to see if any of the findings about silent reading can have implications for the study I might conduct in the fall.

Plus, Stephen Krashen is cited on the website.

On the margins in a high-performing high school: Policy and the Struggling Reader

Franzak, J. (May 2008). On the margins in a high-performing high school: Policy and the struggling reader. Research in the Teaching of English, 42(4). pp. 466-505.

In this article, Franzak sets about to answer the following questions: "What constitutes 'policy' in secondary school reading and literature study" and "In the context of how it is constituted, how does reading/literature policy shape the experience of struggling readers in a traditional high school English class?" (Franzak, 2008, p. 467). She finds there is a disconnect between state/district created policy and its implementation in the classroom, describing implied policy and phantom policies that existed within the district. The focus of analysis is the student participants' understanding of why they read specific literature in language arts class--namely Romeo & Juliet and The Odyssey.

In the discussion of the research, Franzak suggests that the integration of teaching literature and teaching reading needs to be added to teacher education programs as well as educational policy.

Rdg 608 board notes

 

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"Five Things I've Gained from Reading Literature"

This was the NCTE Inbox blog post by Traci Gardner that I thought of while I was reading through Sumara's Chapter 2 "Learning how to create insight".

The post was a response to a report written by Carol Jago (who I believe is the current president of NCTE), which I have attached. Instead of being told the reason to read literaature, the idea is that by answering five questions, people can come to see the importance of reading literature on their own. The five questions are as follows:

1. What piece of literature has stayed with you, even though you haven't read it recently?

2. What character or story has influenced something you've done?

3. What character or piece of literature seemed to relate to a recent news story or personal experience?

4. What character has made you wonder why he or she did/said something?

5. Name something from a work of literature (such as a character, setting, or quotation) that you find beautiful or vivid.

At the very least, it's something to think about.

 

The original blog post can be found here: http://dft.ba/-fivethings
Carol Jago's report can be found here [PDF]

Sumara, Dennis. (2002). Why reading literature in school still matters: Imagination, interpretation, insight. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoicates.

Four "A"s Text Protocol

adapted from Judith Gray, Seattle, WA 2005

One of my professors introduced this method of attacking text a few weeks ago. It has helped me tremendously in terms of how I approach and interact with the selections I'm asked to read. I feel like it also prepares me to better contribute to discussions. That, by itself, is huge because I'm usually one to be timid in class, especially when I'm intimidated by my classmates. In the case of what we were given (the handout says that we can add out own As), we looked at

**Author's assumptions,
**Where I agree with the author,
**What I want to argue with, and
**The parts of the text I aspire to.

My hope is, and my reason for writing this here, that I'll remember this strategy and continue to apply it to my reading.

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Always On

Baron, N. S. (2008). Always on: Language in an online and mobile world [Kindle DX Reader version]. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com

"In Always On, Naomi S. Baron reveals that online and mobile technologies--including instant messaging, cell phones, multitasking, Facebook, blogs, and wikis--are profoundly influencing how we read and write, speak and listen, but not in the ways we might suppose. Baron draws on a decade of research to provide an eye-opening look at language in an online and mobile world. She reveals for instance that email, IM, and text messaging have had surprisingly little impact on student writing. Electronic media has magnified the laid-back "whatever" attitude toward formal writing that young people everywhere have embraced, but it is not a cause of it. A more troubling trend, according to Baron, is the myriad ways in which we block incoming IMs, camouflage ourselves on Facebook, and use ring tones or caller ID to screen incoming calls on our mobile phones. Our ability to decide who to talk to, she argues, is likely to be among the most lasting influences that information technology has upon the ways we communicate with one another. Moreover, as more and more people are "always on" one technology or another--whether communicating, working, or just surfing the web or playing games--we have to ask what kind of people we are becoming, as individuals and as family members or friends, if the relationships we form must increasingly compete for our attention with digital media." --from Amazon.com

Reading this text did bring a sense of awareness to the way I interact and the way my students interact with people (or even choose not to interact with people) using technology. It often isn't enough to be engaged in one activity. With the proliferation of mobile technology, it is increasingly more "necessary" to be engaged in more than one activity at a time. But what does this multitasking to do to the quality of the activity we are engaged in, whether it be writing a paper or talking with a friend or parent on the phone?