Podcast - Seeing is Believing

This week’s podcast class wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I think that maybe I had spent too much time playing around on iTunes U and had been expecting something more podcast like, and not something so much like being able to hear inside a classroom, and yet not see that classroom. The interesting thing was this format allowed me the chance to learn what the classroom dynamic is like for those that can’t see and hear what is happening in the classroom at the same time. We have hearing and vision impaired students in classes all of the time, and I had never thought about what a classroom would feel like for them, especially a technologically heavy classroom, before this experience. I have been so spoiled in my education so far, not only can I see and hear I also have the internet at my fingertips and can instantly access any information I want to answer questions that arise during the class period but suddenly I couldn’t see anything that was happening.

With the first podcast, the one about magic circles, I truly felt outside their magic circle. There were moments they were looking at things on a computer and then talking about them, I tried looking for the same sites but was unable to find the exact ones or pages, and this limited my ability to understand the in-class discussion. It isn’t that I wasn’t able to understand the overarching idea of the class, just that I felt as if I were missing details that would have really added to what I would have been learning. I am really glad that I had the chance to experience distance learning in this way, it has made more really aware of what other types of learning look like. I truly never would have given thought to what it is like to be in a class and not be able to take in all the information being given if I hadn’t been forced into a situation in which I had too, I am grateful that this learning experience came before I started to teach.

A Fictional class on Fiction

I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy any of the class work more than I enjoyed putting together my visual essay, and I hadn’t thought that any of them would challenge me as much, but I was wrong. While the essay forced me to examine how I learned, it also forced me to learn to use technology that I have had at my fingertips for about a year and had never even opened before this class; the assignment sequence challenged me to start thinking about how I would teach a class. I have known for sometime that what I want to do is teach English at the college level, and I have had some ideas of things I want to do in my classrooms, but I had never really given much thought to how I would implement my ideas into a classroom. This project really forced me to look at what it is that I want to teach, and how I would be able to use the ideas, knowledge, and skills the students would come to me with in order to do so.

I was really excited about the assignment and created three different fictional classes before finally settling on working with a creative writing fiction class. I ended up making the choice to use fiction because after many attempts at creating the syllabi for the three classes I quickly found that the fiction class most enabled me to work with the parts of writing that I hope to teach the students I will one day have, idea generation and the power of language. In the end what I realized is that building on the knowledge the students have when they come to me would be one of the many ways to help them create their writing and to create the vocabulary with which to talk about their writing, and part of the knowledge and skill set they will bring to my class is their ability to use and understand technology, and this element of technology and what it tells us about our world is something I should find ways to bring into the course work.

I miss my Lite-Brit

Last week’s discussion of computer games and the technology of such games led to two really interesting ideas; that computer games help make people more comfortable with technology and that our childhoods are being remediated and sold back to us.

As far as computer games making technology more comfortable for many users, I would have to say that I agree with this assertion. There is something to be said for the level of comfort we develop unknowingly as we play. Play has been a form of education since the emergence of higher life on Earth. We have used play to teach in schools, at home, and at work for years and yet we have for whatever reason created an understanding of computer games that not just ignores their potential to teach but that also suggest that they are harmful, unless they are produced for the intentions of education. We have managed to look so deeply at the potentially scary parts of these newer forms of play, that we have all but lost sight of how they help us. Learning to move a character in a game, or to interact with another player, or how to perform an ordered series of keystrokes or actions to perform a given task. Not only do we learn from each of these tasks, we become more comfortable with manipulating computers and playing with our technology.

I would also say that these games are just one more way our childhoods are being remediated and sold back to us. We grow up with a cartoon and the toys with it, then when we have kids we find that same cartoon again. Now there is a game, a movie, more toys and a new show. We also have new more technologically advance versions of the toys we grew up with. Toys we will buy our children because of our personal nostalgia. In many was thus is genius, we got our parents to buy this stuff for us, now we are buying it for our kids, it is like two for the price of one marketing.

Life after oppression

Here is the after picture of our group trip to the tunnel of oppression. Jackie did an amazing job explaining what the tunnel is and summing up her experience there. She even posted a pic of our group of 658ers before we all went into the tunnel. Sadly the man that we asked to take the after pic was lass than functionally literate and couldn't manage her phone so the after pic had to be taken with my phone, and here it is.

A Week of Remediation and lots of Links

Teacher Hite and his follow instructors led us all on a journey through the xtranormal website that ultimately led to a number of great creations (seen here, here, and here) and illustrated the academic uses of such sites (ones not meant at all to be academic but secretly are) and the implications of using them. The example that Hite gave that first grabbed me and helped me see this as something more than just fun was how he used this site in his class to have his students realized a visual rendition of Julius Creaser. In my Brit Lit class we closely looked at how the stage an costuming of King Lear can so dramatically change the audience view of King Lear’s level of sanity and the overall understanding of the play. We did this without the aid of xtranormal or having seen multiple examples, we just envisioned different possibilities and talked about how they might impact the meaning. Had I had (or known about) xtranormal this assignment would have taken on a whole new level of understanding and a higher level of critical thinking.

I was also stuck by just how quickly I remediated the technology the site uses in my own projects. I am working with a friend to develop a program for children’s books that will allow the text of a book to be read electronically and have individual words read as they are pointed to, but in a way that enables the physical paper text of the book to more closely correspond with the audio text of the book so that what the child hears and sees are happening at the same time. As soon as I saw this site, I forwarded it to the person I am working with so the he could see technology similar to what we want in the works, and we can find the good parts and the bad parts of this and have something better to base our work on. As soon as I saw the site, my first thought was wow, they already did so much of this work, now we just have to make it better.

Using white space

“The logic of immediacy dictates that the medium itself should disappear…yet these same old and new media often refuse to leave us alone” (6). I thought this was interesting when combined with the ideas of virtual reality they put forth that states that the goal would be for all the equipment to vanish and for the person to really feel as if they are in the new setting, without the technology. The implication of these two lines together is that virtual reality is not possible because we are so fascinated with our technology that we are unable to look at just what the technology is creating; but that we have to look at it through the lens of the technology, or as being part of that technology. (ie, we look at the plot of video games as the plot of video games, not just as a story line)

When I thought about this in terms of text (books, poetry and such), which is often used as a form of escapism (or virtual reality if you will, it is often said that when reading a really good book you should forget that you are reading) it is interesting because with some text, the actual text and its placement on the page is part of what gives us the meaning of what the text is trying to say so there is no way according to these combined ideas for these text to function at their possible intended level because it is this utilization of the technology that allows for the full meaning to be made which brings attention back to the technology and away from the text itself again.

I made a movie :)

You can watch it here....