Educational philosophy video

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



Many thanks to everyone who helped.

Article review: Orchestrating the Media Collage

Article Title: Orchestrating the Media Collage

Author: Jason Ohler

I. Essential questions:

• Why is media literacy important?

• How can teachers be effective in teaching media literacy?

II. Summary:

- Literacy has become a simple concept, but whenever it is hyphenated it re-acquires its original mystical chasm that could be summed up as the “scribe vs. illiterate peon” relationship.

- In fact, there is no need to fear the hyphenated literacies – especially the technological ones, as their transition from the educated elite to the masses is astonishingly smooth, affordable, and rapid.

- Understanding media is the key to controlling one’s interactions with the economic and political spheres.

- Authoring media turns students into stakeholders, actors, and producers. It demystifies other peoples’ media.

- Teachers should be proactive and forward-looking when exposing their students to the read/write web.

- Assignments that involve the use, creation, and analysis of media should be as focused and rigorous as any “core” assignments.

III. Some key ideas:

 Cross-platform applications that require flexibility and technical skill are now commonplace.

 New media-producing technologies are not subject to the normal risk/benefit and supply chain constraints. Therefore, they can spread virally in an ultra-democratic way.


 Teachers need not be afraid of including new media in their curricula.

 The teaching of media literacy should be geared toward the understanding of important ideas, just as the teaching of traditional literacy always has been.

 Literacy is fine, but fluency is effective.

IV. My twist on it:

My students play Halo3. They post videos on the web. They maintain Facebook pages. However, their media literacy is rudimentary at best.

It is necessary for people to learn the fundamentals of government before they can be effective citizens.

It is necessary for people to learn the fundamentals of economics so they can make rational choices when consuming and producing.

Just as importantly, it is necessary for people to learn the fundamentals of media before they can truly understand or broadcast information.

Thus a lack of media fluency is just as profound an “educational gap” as any other. On the other hand, media fluency is just as teachable as any other kind of fluency, whether it be political, economic, mathematical, musical, or linguistic.

I agree with the importance of demystifying new media. In my understanding, the dramatically lower cost of first access to new media technologies trumps many of the old arguments for not jumping on board with unproven technologies.

I have heard lots of horror stories about technologies that were adopted by school districts, only to result in piles of incompatible, outdated, overpriced, irrelevant gadgets that gather dust in storerooms between a mimeograph and a stack of electric typewriters. However, the following is new:

• Cross-platform applications and open-source software help prevent incompatibility.

• Downloadable patches and updates help extend the lifespan of technologies.

• A shift of emphasis from hardware to software has diminished the cost of technologies. Distribution costs are only a fraction of what they once were.

• Technologies are becoming more and more alike, which helps increase the relevancy of training students on any particular platform.

Energy conservation project 2.0!

I re-did my energy conservation project. You can watch the PowerPoint presentation if you have a Slideshare account and a propensity for self-induced pain:

Energy Conservation

View more presentations from Paul Norwood.

I found Slideshare to be rather frustrating. You can also go see it on Google Docs. It's not as pretty, but more effective.

Or you can go to YouTube and view the presentation video.



It's always funny watching myself on video because I don't hear my accent or realize that I scratch my nose unless it is recorded and played back to me. Overall, my performance didn't seem too bad.

I kept pointing at the screen, because it is always more natural to teach with props than with words and pictures. I should try to have something to handle and demonstrate whenever I have to deliver a lecture.

Clearly, I felt frustrated by the limited available time, and I was speaking to people in the MAT program. Also, I felt more awkward talking to my camera without being able to know if it was even recording. it is much more natural to talk directly to human beings who can provide feedback through questions and nonverbal communication.

Also, I was stuck in one place, which I tend to avoid in the real classroom, so I felt rather awkward.

Almost none of the ninth grade English students in my class today knew the meaning of the word "monastery," so I'd have to define a lot of words and concepts if I were presenting the data to them.

I also learned just how drastically the school district's internet use restrictions can hamper these kinds of assignments.

Technology-wise, I expanded a little bit, but not as much as I could have. YouTube and SlideShare are new to me, and now I know how to play with the format features of my camera.

Research Plan

What can I do to better my habits?

After I estimated my impact on the environment, I realized that most of it comes from airplane flights. I am not flying anywhere this winter except for the Army, so I could simply calculate my lessened footprint from not flying to Latin America as I would normally do, but that is too simple. I bicycle everywhere, I recycle, I compost, I rarely eat out, and I keep my thermostat at 48 degrees F. A more pervasive aspect of my life is my use of batteries.

What about Batteries?

Where are they manufactured? What do they contain? How wasteful are they as energy vectors (how much input versus output)? What produces that energy in their manufacturing areas? What is their transport impact? I will replace them with rechargeable batteries, and deduct the impact of rechargeable batteries from that of disposable batteries. I will then calculate the number of units / months of use, that will be required for me to get to where the use of either has the same footprint, the number of units / months of use, that are required to make a really positive difference. Of course, I just got my charger and batteries in the mail, and right now I am deep in the red.

Looking for hard facts without much luck

I looked for information about this on Google, and the pickings seemed to be rather slim. To begin with, I eliminated anything that ended in .com, and wound up with a host of well-meaning but little informed, and almost never rigorous, websites. A commonly cited study was in fact commissioned by Uniross – a company that manufactures (you guessed it!) rechargeable batteries. According to them, switching to rechargeable batteries in Europe would divide the ecological impact of batteries on the environment by 28. I would assume that the numbers would be even better outside Europe, because outside Europe, cheap and very ineffective “Chinese” batteries are the norm. Here in Sitka, thanks to hydroelectric energy, supply chain inefficiencies, and somewhat low temperatures, the number would probably also be better. Of course, I hate to trust the manufacturer... Then there is the popular website Redefining Progress, which rates switching to rechargeable batteries on the same impact level as six degrees F of difference in air conditioning temperature. Clearly, there’s a disconnect here. One promising avenue is a European website, but most of what it does is advocate for recycling (recyclable NiMH batteries are recyclable as well).

Anthrotech

It's interesting to think of the school as a living organism - a beetle perhaps, with its clunky bricks-and-mortar exoskeleton. It's always easy to justify a bond measure to rebuild the school, because everybody knows how hard it is to learn in a leaky, unsecured building. Just the same, everyone knows that the school can't run without its living, breathing elements - namely, the students and teachers, and most people realize that the whole beast promptly becomes arthritic without a small regiment of janitors, administrators and bus drivers.

Now where does technology fit into this? How would I convince the city to allocate precious tax dollars to some software?

The interface between people and ideas is increasingly a digital one. Computers would be the dumbest idea ever devised, if knowledge really were a one-person endeavor. The reason we need them is so that Joe student and Jane teacher can access the world's knowledge database both as consumers and producers of content. Any school that realizes this can acquire a significant edge over any paper-based school, simply because it is connected.

While doing this Anthrotech assignment, I learned that at least at Sitka High, technology is mostly used by a small minority of teachers. I also learned that the opportunities for teachers to place content online are currently greater than the opportunities for students to place content online, even though the opposite seems to be occurring.

Arty kohl reeve you #2

Sorry about having strayed so far from the specifications on the previous article review; I couldn't get the syllabus CD to cooperate for awhile, and just went ahead with the assignment without having realized that the format was so stringent. :(

Overview

In the article, we encounter Marc Prensky again, and several other traditional academic types, but there are also a few references to the new producers and consumers of content that are, after all, the focus of the article. After a brief introduction to the dramatic rise of what is sometimes called “user-generated content,” the article introduces the idea of the “read / write web,” and quickly veers off into a discussion of news sources on the internet, once again bringing up the beleaguered New York Times. This is probably most interesting from the point of view of the primary sources debate in Social studies. Howard Dean is also mentioned in the article, as he was still trendy at the time.

There is a brief synopsis of common web-based tools that would be useful in the classroom, but it was kept succinct as they can come and go surprisingly fast. An unexpectedly long part of the article is dedicated to safety on the internet. There are good tips on starting to use blogs in the classroom.

Reference points

1. 81% of students have an e-mail account.
2. The Write Weblog – look for the students’ blogs linked in the box on the left, called “JHH Sudents.”
3. Teachers should themselves blog to model for students, as is usually done with journaling, for example.
4. The first time a blog writer receives a comment for her work, the activity becomes more significant.
5. Wikis can be created to make evolving, password-protected “e-textbooks.”
6. “RSS” stands for “Rich Site Summary,” another wording for a newsfeed.

Reflection

I liked the idea of Rushkoff, mentioned in this reading, that the new “society of authorship” means that “we will be writing the human story, in real time, together, a vision that asks each of us to participate.” One thing this does not address is the inverse relationship of readership to this explosion of content. As Thomas Friedman predicts in his popular book “The World is Flat,” there has long been more content on the internet than anyone can ever read, and there will someday come a point where each one of us uploads more content than we consume. This would mean the largely automatic uploading of terabytes of largely useless information, and it would turn most digital content into colder, more isolated units.

I imagine that any student blog would have to be regularly and positively commented in order to keep up the effort.

What most intrigues me is the idea of Wiki-textbooks. That may well be the future cresting over the horizon. After all, it can’t be that much harder to make than a lesson plan with accompanying documents, and it’s bound to be more useful. I would LOVE IT if my sick and traveling students had the opportunity to view all the class material online in an organized, somewhat appealing way.

So Wikis could be my next project. I already admire the work done by Matt Goff on the Sitka Life website with Wikis, and it’s getting to the point where I just need to make the leap and get started on this.

A bunch of words, or a bunch of html?

This post is my response to the article: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.

My pre-digital response to this assignment is called A bunch of words. Check it out on Google doc if you're up for traditional read, or if you're my professor and you need to give me a grade for this.




Oops... This student opened my antideluvian, .doc file, and he just doesn't get it...



What's a digital way to do this? The National Teaching and Learning Forum has a great article called "teaching naked," but then again, it's just a bunch of words too...

I could have freerice.com competition, with the students drilling on vocabulary for ten minutes every few days, little prizes for every thousand grains earned on the site, and a class party when a milestone is reached by the class as a whole.

I just saw a method for testing, using an mp3 recorder, and having students take turns going out in the hallway to talk into it as the class is being taught. The effectiveness of the process is pretty incredible.

How about getting the students to post something weekly on the National Gallery of Writing?

Technologically savvy methods are, of course, infinitely diverse and ever-changing. Alas, in order to get a more complete, methodical undrerstanding of my response, you'll have to step back into my unappealling pre-digital content. Students will also need to be able to "crack the code" of long, dreary texts if they want to achieve any kind of versatility. The idea that one kind of understanding is fundamentally different from the other, anyways, is quite possibly bunk.

Halfway to 2015, why do I get a local newspaper delivered?

“School train” made very little sense to me at first. Its “stated intent” would rate rather low (“stated and restated intent” in a media clip would stand-in for an essay’s introduction and conclusion), but those parts may account for only about 30% of the content grade – 15% of the overall grade if style and convention are weighed equally with content. Boldness both in content and idea rate rather high in this case, but boldness doesn’t count for very much either. Unexpectedly for such a disconcerning piece of media, “School Train” may get most of its grade from the successful use of conventions (i.e.: technological tricks in the right places), and a demonstrated understanding of the material.

I would probably rate “Fox becomes a better person” higher, because its content and style are both nearly flawless. While the production isn’t quite as smooth, it makes the best possible use of the original video’s quality. Also, the use of the scooter, traditional introduction, digitally done introduction, drawing, and music, are bold and successful. While it may have been tempting to “improve” on the original material with, for example, some music in the background, I would uphold the author’s decision to maintain a respectful, ouside position.

The “2015” clip was first made in 2004, so we are supposedly halfway to the metastasized mediascape. Googlezon doesn’t exist, and even if it did, there just isn’t a whole lot of noise from the New York Times. The paid online subscription service debate is a timely one indeed, but things seem to be moving toward an uneasy state of balance. Even “The Economist” is putting more and more content online for free, and the NYT’s “NYT select” program was purely and simply a short-lived flop. Paid archived material does make sense, though. For a while, even the Anchorage Daily news was charging for fairly recent material.

Beyond the details, “2015” makes an interesting point: the digital information soup is so democratic and subversive in nature, that naturally elitist institutions such as newsprint and – yes – schools are going to see themselves swept into the tide when their pedestals are eroded through by bored, opiniated geeks in dirty sweatpants. Podcasting is great, but it has the same initial appeal and unexpected problem as the video phone: “cool – in five years everyone will use it all the time.” And “who wants to dedicate themselves 100% to someone when they really want to be multi-tasking in a privacy gray area?”

So just as the video phone flopped and text-messaging became an unexpected hit, it’s probable that podcasts will keep being in that awkward area between “I care enough to really pay attention to this,” and “this is kinda funny, and I may peek at it from time to time.” Of course, there are great applications; I myself subscribe to two podcasts.

“Sabrina Journey” is a good example of digital content gone right. After all, it is visually rather flat and unappealing, but I must say that the text itself is unusually focused and coherent, especially in contrast to most of the writing that high school freshmen have been generously plying me with. In the classroom, I would use it in contrast to a largely scriptless, very visually intensive video.