Boost Blog

I’ve been talking with colleagues about models for digital resources for learners. We have a curriculum with new priorities for learning; we have technologies challenging traditional publishing formats; and we have students who’ve adopted some of those technologies for themselves. These developments should mean big changes for educational publishing.

A few ideas then. Resources for students need to:

1. engage young people’s cultural and social practices
2. provide opportunities for transformative learning (a shift from filling students’ heads with facts to strengthening their key competencies)
3. build teachers’ capability around the seven ‘actions that promote student learning’ (pp34-35 NZC).

Publishers producing resources need to:

1. commission, write, design and curate across the range of media and in multimodal forms (avoiding treating web as an extra add-on to the publishing process)
2. plan for and predict likely interaction (how will young people want to interact? debate amongst themselves? engage with us?)
3. contribute an editorial or curatorial role that influences and creates community (set framing questions? bring people together?).

What do you think?

Learning is always a social experience for learners and their teachers, whether the artifacts involved are chalk, books, ICT and/or other minds. However, in an era when key competencies are at the heart of our curriculum, I think we can look to ICT to support transformative learning in ways that print simply can’t. Digital resources and software (especially, but not exclusively, social software) make available new opportunities for students to do things with their knowledge. Content is a means to this end (doing things with knowledge), not an end in itself.

An example … what learning could we make available if the fabulous Journal of Young People’s Writing were a blog? Instead of publishing completed student work in a fixed format, we could publish student work with great potential – with a great opening, a great ending or great dialogue. Invite writer David Hill to critique and explore. Invite other students to comment and illustrate. Invite graphic artist Ali Teo to respond to the illustrators. Draw comparisons and contrasts with work by other writers. Turn the existing model inside out by exposing the workings that are past and hidden by the time classrooms receive the print version.

There’s a role for the publisher: curating students’ work, modelling cognitive and social processes, influencing teachers’ pedagogical practice (including their own classroom blogging practices), responding to the interests and strengths that students bring to the project …

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