A few things occured to me whilst reading this week's literature. The first was how great the Youth Voices project seems to be; I'd never heard of it before, but now I'm planning on using it in my own classroom, especially since I'll be teaching solely writing. The project also brings to the forefront the question of audience, which has been touched on before. Not only will students hopefully be more motivated to produce great work, knowing that someone other than myself will be reading it (not that they don't try their best for me, of course! ;) ), but I like the fact that Youth Voices seems to be a massive project, which means that there is far more chance for students' writing to be seen and commented upon. One of my big fears is for the student who writes a post, only to receive no comments at all, whilst another student may have ten comments. How demoralizing that must be! Opening writing up to a potentially limitless audience is a great way to generate interest, and really make a writer feel special, and motivated to want to write more. I feel that such global feedback will really move the classroom away from an instructionist ideology, too, where the comments of the teacher are the most important, to a more constructivist model.
I also permitted myself a wry smile at a certain line in the story of the all-girl's private school poetry project: 'In groups of three or four (depending on the size of the class and the number of cameras)' (emphasis mine). This only serves to heighten the pre-discussed divisive nature of technology between those schools with money and those without; by Schwartz's logic, a class of thirty students would need at least three cameras, and that's if the students shared them around!
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Ben,
ReplyDeleteI completely agree that students writing should be made available to other students through something like Youth Voices. I think it gives the students confidence and allows others to think critically and edit and offer suggestions about writing. Also I have always had a problem with people giving me feedback on my own writing because I never really had to share it with anyone in school. I was scared of what they might think or say. If we can get our students to share their work it will increase their confidence. I mentioned something similar in my discussion questions to the effect of schools having the money for the technology. Is it fair that tis technology is available to some and not to others?