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.