Digital IEP

I'll be the first to admit that during my student teaching I made no complex use use of technologies. In fact, I struggled just to get an entire class on the internet at the same time, using simple resources on prescribed websites such as the PBS history pages.

One typical "digital" assignment from last January was the following:

• 26 pieces of paper were distributed to the students, each bearing the name of an interesting person from 1880-1920. Some of the less complex ones were handed out to students who had a hard time doing research in the past (e.g.: Wright Brothers instead of William Jennings Bryant).
• The students were given free run of the internet (which essentially meant Wikipedia for most of them), and filled out information on pre-made sheets that were divided in categories such as "what are three interesting things this person did?", and "if this person came back from the dead and had only one thing to say, what would it be?".
• They then had to present their person to the class orally, while all the other students took notes on their person on yet another, simpler set of sheets for a participation grade.
• Three of the 26 people were picked at random as part of the unit final.

Here are some issues with the lesson:

• The lesson treated the internet as a giant encyclopedia.
• The lesson was entirely in the past.
• The lesson emphasized the studied persons' quirkier, less significant aspects.

Here is a possible second half of the lesson, which would involve the students more closely:

"A government for the people - but what do the people want?"

Let us take a look at a broad issue that reflects the social concerns of the turn of the century: state-sponsored health care. First, find the party named on the piece of paper you received in class, and go to the link listed to the right of it:

• Communist Party of America: People's World
  
• Republican Party: Debunking Democrats
  
• Socialist Action: Socialist Action News
  
• Green Party of the United States: Green Party Watch
  
• Democratic Party: The Huffington Post
  
• Boston Tea Party: BTP Blogs
• United States Marijuana Party: USMJP Political Forum
• Social Equality Party: World Socialist Website
  
• Socialist EqualityParty: socialequality.com
  
• Southern Party of Georgia: News Briefs
  
• Libertarian Party: The Party of Principle
  
• Working Families Party: NYWF - Vote Your Values
  
• Workers World Party: International Action Center
  
• Constitution Party: constitutionparty.com

Then find an article, post, or forum thread about health care, and enter the debate. You are expected to contribute at least twice in a constructive way. Other websites may be used with teacher authorization.

When this is done, write what you think your turn-of-the-century person may have said about the public health care debate, and why. You are allowed to begin a thread, or to follow threads started by classmates if there is no pre-existing thread. Then, compare/contrast that position to yours and to that of the party you were assigned to study.

Digital story

I first made a digital storytelling rubric that would allow me to have some perspective on the story.

My first idea was to deepen my understanding of colors in the Tlingit language by going into a cave on the outside of Kruzof Island, Near Engano Point, that is called Neixinté X’aak in Tlingit. The minerals found in the back of the cave are used to define a green color, and no one was able to tell me where I could see a sample of it. Furthermore, Neixinté X’aak is associated to an interesting story about two bold young men who go out there to gather rocks (to make pigment), and get caught by bad weather. The story is fairly long, but in the end they get back to Sitka just fine with their load of mineral and without any obvious transformation. That story seemed an interesting counterpoint to the story I tailored to illustrate the story map concept, and I kayaked out to Kruzof for three days but was unable to get to the outside of it because of a high pressure front moving in at that time.

The trip to Kruzof did not turn out totally in vain after all, because the entire area around the volcano was enshrouded in fog while I was over there. I then remembered that I had an unfinished design that related to the classic and sometimes over-analyzed story of Fog Woman, and thought I'd tell the story. I finished the design over the following couple of weeks, and here is the result:

Thank you.

Article Assessment 2

This is a review of the article Teens and technology -- a good match?, by John Matuszak.

Overview

This feature article briefly summarizes a report by the Kaiser Family institute, called Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18- Year-Olds. It then presents some interviews conducted at the local middle and high schools.

• Technology exposure (everything from radios to online gaming communities and texting) in 8- to 18-year-old Americans has risen by more than one hour a day from five years ago, to over 7.5 hours a day.
• Most technology use is unsupervised, although some school districts enforce policies designed to curtail use, and prevent cheating and cyber-bullying.
• However, technology is also fostered in the schools, so that education can remain in step with the times and take advantage of those same technological revolutions that may be working against them in their recreational applications.
• Parents should be involved with their children in the cybersphere as well as in "unplugged" contexts.

Reflection

The report itself is most fascinating to me, because the school district employees being interviewed restated ideas that were debated many times over in the Sitka School District.

The least expected results in the report were:

• Of all studied forms of media consumption, reading was the only one to which young Whites dedicated more time than young Blacks or Hispanics.
  
• The incidence of internet and computer access did not vary as much between races and classes as I would have predicted (16 percentage points is the widest single-factor spread, out of 24 measures)

Black youth's use of all studied media is significantly higher than that of White youth's, but the statistical significance of that data shifts when one considers that the discrepancy is due almost entirely to a higher exposure to television and music. What we are examining here is the more interactive brand of technology, and this is where the "equality" is most glaring.

Free marketers such as Thomas Friedman and the Economist will usually use this data to predict that the democratization of the means of intellectual production has erased the old left-wing criticism that:

“The prevailing social order perverts or annihilates the creative capacity of the immense majority of people and reduce the possibility of creation – an age-old response to human anguish and the certainty of death – to its professional exercise by a handful of specialists.” Eduardo Galeano 1976

However, left-wing thinkers will raise the undeniable facts that there is a tremendous quality gap in the nature of the technology that young people are exposed to, and that it is top-down economics, not free markets, that get kids copying Wikipedia and PBS primary sources rather than IMing their flirts.

This irreversible technological revolution comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. On the whole, those technologies are very beneficial, but we still have the responsibility as educators, parents, citizens, and consumers of media, to ensure that they are reaching everyone in the most beneficial way possible (which includes having fun, of course).

Three Internet Resources

As part of this blog, I had made a list of internet resources as early as last September, so this assignment seemed a bit redundant. In order to make this assignment more effective, I decided to start a new category of links, about teaching and learning French.

The three best ones, in my opinion, are:

• Radio France Internationale: This might be the best site because it is free, integrates very relevant, written and spoken material. Its strongest point is spoken material, and when downloaded via a podcasting tool is eminently portable. The cultural dimension is very in-depth and sensitive, with many pieces every week featuring French speakers from Africa, Canada, the Carribean, and Tahiti.
• BBC's "French Talk," and "BBC Afrique": "French Talk" is good for beginning speakers, and has a fair amount of material. "BBC Afrique" is the new version of the BBC in French. It is good for intermediate readers and listeners.
• freerice.com: While this website isn't very academic, it has the distinct advantages of being fun, free, addictive, and having a faint social relevance. However, it offers no cultural dimensions to the language.

Social web

• What to do?
  

This assignment was at once easy and difficult. At this time, we create almost as much content as we consume. The resulting webscape is one where the act of creating information might be less important than that of organizing it.

How does one organize information in a way that facilitates learning and teaching?

First of all, the information has to be in a place where it can be readily found.

• First web society: Wikipedia
  

Because it is the second place almost all high school students go to (after Google, which wouldn't let me mess with its algorithm), I picked Wikipedia as a social web I would join as part of this course.

As an example page, I altered the page for the starfish Mediaster aequalis. In order to do this, I uploaded a photograph of the species onto Wikimedia Commons, and added a few lines of information on the species. In order to help make the web more accountable, and to help turn Wikipedia into a tool for the high school student, I linked the photograph to its place on Google Maps via the Geohack tool, and inserted two references. While the page is still a long ways away from incredibly well-researched, detailed, and funded pages on the same species such as that of E-Fauna BC, those pages are almost invisible on Google's search engine. I only know of them through my oceanography professor.

• Second web society: Tlingit language and Culture Discussion Group
  

Another social media I joined is at the opposite end of the scale and specialization spectrum. It is an e-mail list organized by Roby Koolyeikh Littlefield, and I have been subscribing to it since September of 2009. Here is a message I contributed just today, hours before writing this post. It is called The color gray:

This is in reference to a discussion of a particular color in Tlingit, that evoques the young seabird known as "lawúx."

As is plainly seen in the Sealaska poster, the color of a young seagull is not gray

However, young ground-nesting and cliff-nesting chicks of the Alcid family are usually dark gray. Most closely matched to the color is a storm-petrel's chick. Coincidentally, in 1982 there were about 500,000 storm-petrels nesting in burrows on St Lazaria, as opposed to about 100 seagulls and 20,000 alcids - reference here (JSTOR access needed).

• Picture of a storm-petrel chick:

http://www.pixdatabase.com/bigphoto/2058/

• Pictures of three species of young tunnel-nesting alcids that are common on Saint Lazaria Island:

http://www.cooperbiological.com/images/937395-sty.jpg

http://www.avianweb.com/images/birds/auks/CassinsAukletchick.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Rhino_auklet_chick.jpg

• Chick of the dominant cliff-nesting bird on Saint Lazaria (for those harvesters unafraid of heights):

http://alaska.usgs.gov/science/biology/seabirds_foragefish/seabirds/images/Comu_chick_tiny_edited.jpg

• Picture of a glaucous-winged gull chick:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3119/2741098522_1c8def6cac.jpg

• Conclusions
  

From this social media participation, I started to re-think the way information should be placed on the internet. For example, I may be uploading source material in the context of the Sitka Sound Science Center, or sitkanature.org - but how can those pages be made to be less redundant and more easily accessed? "Offline" dialogue for day-to-day ponderings and a more hierarchical structure for durable information may be two important dimensions of the answer.

Article assessment

“Thinking About Story and Applying Story Maps”

by Jason Ohler

Overview: the story-making process

→ The idea

“So far, this is basically flat and forgettable.” (p. 90)

The idea is the basic inspiration. While the idea always seems appealing and rational at first, it is seldom ready to be effectively told. For example, I could decide to tell the story of a longliner who gets a lot of fish on his first skate, just to have his groundline snap, and he spends eight hours looking for the other end buoy in ever-worsening weather.

Great idea! Let’s make it into a story board!

But can it really work?

→ → The story core

“[T]he story core […] must pass muster before students begin committing their work to the digital domain. Once the media production is rolling, it’s difficult to significantly change directions.” (p. 76)

The story core includes a challenge that creates the tension and forward momentum, a character transformation that facilitates the challenge, and a resolution of the challenge, that leads to story closure. It addresses Campbell’s quest story.

What would the story core be in my longliner example?

· The central challenge is to find the gear, haul it in, and return home.

· The character transformation is missing at this point. Perhaps, as the GPS fails, the skipper will tap into long-forgotten skills that one of his crewmen learned from a crazy old Norwegian handliner. Then again, perhaps he will learn to abandon the gear, after an injury and some damage to the vessel.

· Now there are several possible resolutions. The resolution could be a successful trip, or a bittersweet return (in the fashion of The Old Man and the Sea), or even a disaster.

For the purposes of illustrating the process, I will decide that after eight hours of searching, the wheelhouse has a busted window and the GPS system got wet. The boat is now on radar and returning home in steep following seas, but it comes across the end buoy. They start hauling gear but the deckhand catches a wave when the boat goes broadside. He breaks his ribs. The skipper runs out to help but gets washed off. The deckhand cuts the line, brings the boat in by himself, and passes out when he reaches a rescue vessel.

→ → → The story map

“[A] story map evolves naturally from a story core.” (p. 79)

That flow of story emotions often graphs out as a gradual approach to a first peak in tension, then a saddle-like ridge (“the middle”), leading to a second (hopefully higher) peak in tension, that finally slopes back down because of the hero’s transformation.

In the longlining story, the story map evolves roughly as follows:

· The call to adventure occurs when the deckhand (probably the narrator) jois the crew.

· The problem and escalating tension arise from the skipper’s unwillingness to heed the elements.

· The tension reaches a first paroxysm when the line snaps.

· The deckhand panics as things grow worse and worse.

· He finds the buoy, and his transformation start to occur (now he is starting to be a rough crewmember as well).

· The second paroxysm in tension occurs with the two accidents.

· The deckhand is now transformed. He cuts the line, calls for help, and takes the helm.

→ → → → The story board

“Storyboards show the flow of story motion, while story maps show the flow of story emotion.” (p. 78)

The story board, finally, provides the setting, character maps, and other mechanical aspects that give the story its specificity. After all, since most stories are retellings of the same half dozen elemental stories, if it weren’t for the details no one would ever need to write.

→ → → → → Reflection

The longlining story that I made up almost as an aftertought as an illustration for the purposes of this assignment ended up becoming rather interesting, if still a little cliché. That in itself is probably the best assessment of the method. Of course, I am an easy convert, as I came to this with some background knowledge in myth telling in general and Joseph Campbell’s ideas in particular.

Educational philosophy video

This is the two-minute, video version of my educational philosophy:



Many thanks to everyone who helped.