Commenting Skills: How to not be a jerk

One of the 21st Century skills I'm trying to teach my students is how to comment. I was reminded of this today at MEC 2011, when the keynote speaker, (Karen Cator, head of the US Office of Educational Technology) mentioned in an aside how much she wished there was a curriculum for teaching kids how to comment. Given the scandalous tone of many letters to the editor and comments on various websites in situations like the Egypt protests and SB 1070 here in Arizona, I knew that it is critical that students learn how to communicate their opinion without being (for lack of a better word), jerky.

One of the things that is most interesting in the brain development of 8th graders is that they are more and more capable of abstract thought, but not developed enough to do so consistently. Hence, one has to have just the right question to get everyone to want to actually think. It has to be something that is relevant (not  generic, like say cafeteria food) and be something about which everyone has, or can develop an in-depth opinion. The topic I happened to stumble upon was having the students take photos of the neighborhood surrounding their schools and then write a paragraph or two about their opinion of the neighborhood, and the impact they think it has. Then, I took one piece of exemplary writing (which happened to somewhat criticize the neighborhood) and had the other students practice their commenting skills, after we discussed what a good comment looked like.

The criteria we listed for a valid comment were:

• It can't be one word or even one sentence (at least not an 8th grade sentence: "That's cool.") This helps the author know you actually care about what they said, and what they specifically think.
• Explain what you agree with or think they did well. No matter how frustrated you are with someone, you will have a much more productive conversation if you can start on common ground.
• Ask a question of the author instead of insulting or calling names. This encourages the author to think about what they said, instead of being defensive and not listening to you. 
• Add information to the topic, by giving a related experience you've had, or the reason for your own opinion on the topic. 
• Re-read your comment before posting. Ask yourself: Would I say this to the author's face? If so, would I be yelling when I said it? If you answered no to the first question or yes to the second, you need to take another crack at the comment. 

In education, you win some, you lose some, so I was thrilled when this lesson went over surprisingly well. Like I said, since many of the students were a bit upset with the author (who they didn't know), the criteria were a bit of a challenge, and I did end up deleting some inappropriate (read: jerky) comments, but by and large, the kids did a really quality job. We also had to have a discussion about the difference between being racist and stereotyping people, because everyone wanted to jump straight to calling the author racist, but that's another story. Check out some of the comments on this blog post, and see what you think. 

And for proof that this is a valid skill that students want to know, I had an 8th grader come back to my class later in the day with a 7th grade class (his teacher had gone home sick), and he looks around at all the 7th graders working individually on their iMovies, and says, "Wow, this is boring. We were actually having fun in here this morning." 

Online vs. Paper Writing

Over the holidays, I had a lovely conversation with a friend about her next job and how educational technology relates to it. A few things you need to know about her to preface this discussion: 1) She's going into her 3rd volunteer job in Africa, adding up to about the last 8 years of her life. 2) The job she's beginning this year is heading an English department at a girls high school that is opening in February in Rwanda. 3) She's an amazing writer and just finished a master's degree in creative writing. 4) She's in the editing stages of writing her first novel.

With these things in mind, we had a discussion about whether or not (or when) it would be appropriate to have her forthcoming students do online writing in any form. Her first assumption (being a very pen and paper type), was that it would be better to spend quite a bit of time getting the students used to doing general writing on paper before heading them into theoretically uncharted territory of writing online.

My response, (after she told me that they'd be on a wired campus) was that they should absolutely give online writing a shot. I do think students need to practice writing thoughts out on paper as this form of writing hasn't been completely outdated yet, especially in Africa. However, I think that it's critical for students all over the world to learn how to write online for many reasons.

I believe this is an imperative part of writing instruction in this day and age because it gives students incredibly real audiences. Through this, they can learn about writing in a form that is useful and/or interesting to an audience that does not know you and does not have to read your writing. Too often, classroom writing takes on topics that do not engage an outside audience at all, and are merely exercises in the conventions of writing, not the content of writing. (Ex: No one cares about how your basketball practice went outside your family, unless you can find a way to make it useful to others.)

Also, in online writing, particularly through blogging and other kinds of technology that allow commenting by readers, students learn about giving and receiving useful comments and criticism. While it does leave them open to ridiculous comments, it teaches them that those types of comments do occur, and how best to respond to them. If we leave students to discover this kind of reading and writing on their own, we take the chance that they will become those ridiculous people who make the internet feel like the crazy, wild, wild, west.

Without these kinds of opportunities to write for real people who care what students have to say and give and receive comments and criticism for others, students will be missing out on instruction in something that WILL [eventually] be part of their online lives, no matter where they live.

Meaningful Blog Comments

Having spent the last several weeks teaching my 7th grade classes how to write a blog post and upload a legal, relevant image, I decided that this past week was the time when we'd embark on commenting. Given that these students are intimately familiar with MySpace, it was a bit surprising how much they did NOT know about online commenting (on blogs or otherwise).

Since I only see my students for 45 minutes, 9 times a quarter, I was not able to use projects or discovery type learning to teach a fantastic lesson on this topic, as I know many others are able to do. (Here are sources one & two I used to form the basis of what I taught, and another I just noticed today.) Instead, I ended up just telling them the most salient points.

These were the sections all students were to include on every comment they left:

• First, write something positive or a compliment. Just as teachers can always find at least something positive to say about a student's writing, we should all be able to find something positive to say about a blog post.
• Second, give a suggestion or ask a question about what they wrote. This tells the author that you are interested in what they have to say on a given topic.
• Third, add information to what they said. This might be a related experience or information that they might not know about their topic. This way, the author's knowledge is deepened by your comment.
• Sample comment: That's cool that you like bracelets. They're colorful and very creative. Do you make them yourself? Colors of bracelets have meanings too!

I also explained these qualifications about commenting, hoping to eliminate hostile, inappropriate exchanges:

• Comments are NOT private communication between you and the post author. Anyone in the world can read them, LITERALLY, including parents, friends, principals, teachers, people in China, etc. (I emphasized this a lot to 13 year olds!)
• People form opinions of you based on what you write. You want to make sure that people know you are an intelligent human being by using proper grammar, spelling, and that you double-check for silly mistakes before you submit comments. This also means no text language! You don't want someone thinking that you think the word "you" has 1 letter! Also, 17 exclamation points are unnecessary. One or two get the point across just as well.
• You are free to disagree with blog posts, but you must do it respectfully. This means not saying "Your crazy, that idea sucks!" but intelligently stating your opinion WITH REASONS, without being rude, insulting, or hurtful. Stating an opinion without reasons makes people dismiss your comments immediately.

Throughout the week, I moderated the comments to delete the one-sentence comments (as I had told them I'd do), inappropriate things, and to generally keep tabs on the conversations. Had I discovered this comment earlier in the week, it would have been my perfect example of how NOT to comment: (I would link to it, but I deleted it!)

"WOW!!!! U SEEM REAL COOL TO HANGOUT WIT WEL I LIK HTE WAY U CHUZZ OUT SHOEZ ND CARZZZZZZ.. U SEEM AWSUMMMMM DUDE ND BY THE WAY I AM A GURLLLL........"

This post, however, has some much higher-quality comments on it. While there is still a lack of punctuation or improper grammar in some of the comments, I think it turned into a decent little group of thoughts. I would spend more time ensuring proper conventions in writing, but with 26 different classes a week, I just don't have time. If I catch them before they've posted it, I'll have them fix it. Otherwise, as long as its an intelligent comment that adds to the conversation, I'm willing to let some of those things go, momentarily. But it will be addressed every time we blog, as a reminder.

I think these guidelines should make for a good baseline for all online commenting in my classrooms throughout the year.