Vance's first video production: A teaser for the Writingmatrix K-12 Online Conference presentation

The Writingmatrix group Vance Stevens, Nelba Quintana, Doris Molero, Saša Sirk, and Rita Zeinstejer will present “Motivating Student Writers by Fostering Collaboration through Tagging and Aggregating” at the K-12 Online Conference http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=100. According to http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=83 this year’s conference is scheduled to be held over two weeks, October 15-19 and October 22-26 of 2007, and will include a preconference keynote during the week of October 8. This year’s conference theme is “Playing with Boundaries.” Along the lines of our presentation, content related to the conference can be aggregated at http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/k12online07.



The presenters play with boundaries through the simple expedient of having student bloggers in different countries tag their blog posts with the unique tag term writingmatrix. Searching on that tag in Technorati, the student bloggers in four locations in three different countries have managed to locate one another's posts, leave comments for one another, and have subsequently interacted in other ways as well. The presenters explain how they started the project and how it has branched into other online and even face to face activities involving the students in the participant countries. The presentation is made not only through the voices of the presenters, but with the students themselves lending their voices through their blogs and videos.