Dancing Madly Backwards Writing on writing and teach July 27, 2024 Repost Stories at Work (I was lucky enough to sit in on the Seven Valleys Writing Project's first Open Institute, a six-day intense hands-on technology seminar -- my experience from that first day stays with me and made me think about stories in a new way, which I share below). The Open Institute was devoted to making : teaching strategies, practical knowledge, connections with other teachers, radical claims about technology, ways to teach writing. What struck me was the deep way the participants, all teachers, were thinking. At one point we were discussing whether speech transcribed was writing — that is, what’s unique about writing, what’s special about it. What does it do that speech (or video) doesn’t do? Lots: it makes the writer’s understanding proceed word by word, creating an extraordinary sensitivity to the meanings of words (or just driving the writer crazy with the complexity and ...