The Polliwog Journal

You know how sometimes you just grab onto something, like a little analogy and it sort of fits? Well, the other day I was explaining the Living Histories project to my ninth graders and reminding them that they needed a minimum of 10 hyperlinks throughout their project. I told them that I did not want them to think of their hyperlinks as an afterthought, like sprinkles on the cupcake, but rather as an organic part of the cupcake. So, I asked, where do the sprinkles have to go? “In the batter,” one student said. “You make funfetti cupcakes,” said another.

Exactly!

I love how thinking connects to thinking if you’re open to it. So today as I was reading Bud Hunt’s article for the September 2007 English Journal, Linkin’ (B)Logs: A New Literacy of Hyperlinks, I thought again of my cupcake idea.

Bud writes that the true power of blogging (as a verb) in the classroom is the connections it allows students to make through hyperlinks. As a CyberEnglish teacher, the very first assignment I wrote for my students seven years ago was a hypertext lesson. Based, in part, on the work of Nancy Patterson, I saw that one of the astounding aspects of Web writing was the ability to make links. When I teach hypertext, I tell students that links do several things:

• connect to similar ideas
• expand on a topic or idea
• define or clarify an idea
• take audiences to original sources

Beyond those attempts at explanation, I see that hypertext allows writers to extend their thinking, to take it “off” the page in a way, to draw their audiences to what’s meaningful through a click of a mouse.

Bud lists several types of links in his article:

• Connecting to locations
  • Websites that illustrate concepts and help explain information
• Connections to ideas
  • Linking to original sources or “linktribution”
• Connecting to self
  • Linking back to things you have previously published (as I have in this post) to reflect and reconsider
• Connecting for attention (links to blogs, wikis or something the intended audience might be keeping an eye on)
  • Links using an RSS feed to “feed” posts of specific interest

Bud is right about all of that, but it was something else he said that made even more sense to me. He said

“thinking about how the technology connects the pedagogy is important. We can’t learn how to write connectively, to get into blogging, without first learning how to make those connections. Hyperlinks take you from page to page and bring you back again. Linking is how you crystallize those connections. . . .”

“Once i began to use [hyperlinks], I began to think about hyperlinks and more importantly, connections, in all aspects of writing.”

Sometimes people who don’t understand CyberEnglish criticize what we do. They cannot see the value of integrating Web technology because to them all we’re doing is typing. The problem is that until you use the technology yourself, like blogging, or creating a website, until you write hypertext and make for yourself these powerful connections in thinking, you cannot understand how the technology changes your thinking.

When we talk about 21st century literacies, we’re not really talking about some new program or a new curriculum. We are talking about how new technologies change how people think and learn. This is a fundamental shift in education.

I love what I do. I am a CyberEnglish teacher. I teach reading, writing, and NEW thinking. How will I know if I have succeeded? One way I will know is when my students begin to think in links, or when their cupcakes are funfetti, when their sprinkles go in the batter and not simply on the top.