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....

V-Day Loves!!!

My Visual Essay

I wanted to post my visual essay here, so that you could see what I was talking about, but I have yet to find a way to do that so you will just have to look at this one... :)

Here are my reflections after having made mine:

I can build (and have done so) a computer from bottom up. I selected each piece of hardware that went into it, choosing sound and video cards based of their processing abilities and clarity and a case based on its aesthetic appeal. Yet, when working on this essay, I had scanner issues that were only overcome by employing a friend to help. I also used iMovie for the first time and was able to navigate my way through this program and didn’t feel limited by its features or my lack of experience with it until I tried to upload my finished product. The file was too big for youtube, but there is a feature built into iMovie so that with a meager two clicks it is on youtube and ready to go. However, there isn’t a built in fall back for files that are too big, there seems to be no way to brake the film into smaller chucks to be viewed in parts, as is the youtube way.

This left me in the old place of being at the third level of literacy, where I was question the technology I had, looking for ways to use technology I had in ways it wasn’t meant to be used but would accomplish what I was trying to do, and creating technology all while not even being functional literate given my scanner issues.

Essay issues :( and my Worst/Best for 2/7

So I have spent the weekend working on this visual essay, and all is not going well in the land of Gin. This first iMovie I made somehow got lost, I am sure it was user error, but these things happen. I am not to worried about the lost, as the new one is far better than the the older one. So I guess that is a perk of my exploration into new Mac features.

I have also been struggling with the question of what to write and what visuals to use. Not having been the most literate kid in the bunch until quite recently and not living anywhere near my family leaves me with limited visuals. I did however find a bunch of great pics and such that I wanted to uses, after having settled on a story line. Which only led me to one more issue, I don't have a scanner and didn't have a way to use the stuff I had rummaged up.

Nicole, dear sweet Nicole offered me the use of her scanner, and I spent Sat. night at her place scanning away. The first attempt was scanning them to my Mac, which didn't work at all, and I still have no idea why. The second was scanning them to her laptop and then transferring them via a USB drive to my Mac. Nicole scanned the first few images, and then I took over. After my pile of 90 or so items had been scanned, Nicole tried to transfer them only to find that everything that I had scanned didn't get saved. So after all that wasted time, Nicole quite nicely did the rest of the scanning for me and at midnight I headed home with a laptop full of baby pics.

My best friend came over later in the evening, and this morning as I worked on my essay, he quite eagerly told me everything I was doing wrong. Geeerrr, I love that boy, but I had finaly felt like it was going well. At least I know I have someone to give me feedback once it is done.

Worst - This little cold I have been trying to fight all day, it is wearing me out and yet I can't sleep for more than an hour or two at a time, makes reading hard....poor Selber he feels so unloved.

Best - All the cuddle/hangout time with the best friend this weekend.

Trying to add a video

Just trying to add a video before Wed so I know that I can. We saw this in English 530, thought some of you might find it funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDv2ssf8iyA

I may have been too hard on Selfe...

It was Jennifer’s (her blog) comment that the length of the history provided may have been an intentional way of illustrating how much work had gone into getting all these classrooms this technology and how much money had been spent, and how in the end, the classroom conditions were basically the same, that made me start rethinking the Selfe essay.  “Wiring the schools had not saved them. The problems with America’s public schools – disparate funding, social promotion, bloated class size, crumbling infrastructure, lack of standers – have nothing to do with technology. Consequently, no amount of technology will lead to the educational revolution prophesied by President Clintion and others” (Selfe 146).   The more I thought about it, the more this writing strategy seemed to work.  There were 145 pages of explanation of what was done to reach this educational revolution, and because we weren’t paying attention to the real problems (and the real solutions our schools needed) none of it panned out to anything.  We had spent all the time, effort, and money, and because we focused it in the wrong places and ways, our schools had seen no real benefit.   The issue wasn’t that these students didn’t have access to the internet; it is that through our own lack of funding and involvement they had a real lack of access to education.   

Worst/Best Jan 25th

Worst - Not sure that I had one, maybe having to leave a great dinner with great friends early...but I left for good reasons so it is hard to call that a bad thing

Best - My DSL working at long last and enjoying my DSL with the best friend

Maya, Selfe, and I

Chapter Six “The Role of Parents” was the chapter that seemed to fall the farthest from what was the presumed goal of being enlightening. The chapter opens strong, “You can sit with your child and prompt him to show you something…you’re getting close to the kid and gaining insight into ways of learning…is fosters the relationship between you and the kid (Everson qtd in Selfe 98).” On the following two pages Selfe continues on to give experts of computer magazines suggesting the parents can coach, support and act as positive role models for their kids, but it is with this introduction of the computer magazines that Selfe seems to loose track of the role and the power of a parent.  Selfe reduces this role to being a binary system of either the good, providing parent or the bad, non-providing parent.  Selfe claims that this is what the advertisements of the time did, which is no different than what any other advertisement does when selling products meant for kids, but then does it herself by reducing the parents role to that of the agents to the cause, meaning that the parent only seem to have played a role in this situation by providing the needed funding.  In reality the parents role went (and goes) far beyond funding, as was suggested at the opening of the chapter and then somehow moved past far to quickly. 

 For another look at this Chapter see Josh's blog here, he also talks about the idea that this good/bad parent marketing is not new or exclusive to this industry. 

Wait! Don't look, I don't know you!

It seems the follow classmate Jaclyn and I have be thinking about the same issues of ownership and how they impact our daily lives, see her blog here. 

And now for my post....

I am not sure if it is that my life begins to reflect what I am doing in class, or my in class life reflects what I do outside of school, but more and more these two world seem to converge upon one another.  Maybe it is just the my education has made more more aware of life around me.

Over Christmas my Father found my facebook page and naturally we became friends.  Up until his request I have been unaware that he had a page, and that most of my siblings had a page as well.  In the last few weeks it has been a landslide of family on facebook, which for the most part I am enjoying.

One notable exception to the enjoyment has been the addition of my oldest sister, B, to my friends list.  Not because I don’t want her as a “friend” or because she has run amok with applications and such, but because of the issues of ownership (over myspace/facebook pics) we were talking about in class last week.  

The first thing she did upon becoming my friend was to use facebook to take an inventory of my life, friends and morality (or so it seemed) and then email me all of her qualms with my existence.  Her main issue seemed to be that I have pictures of children that are not “mine” in a photo album titled “People I Love.”

Three of the kids in question are her stepdaughter, son, and daughter and the rest of them are my god-children or family. All of the other parents involved have seen this part of my page and are comfortable with it, and all of these other parents (including B) have pictures of my daughter somewhere in there lives if not on facebook/myspace. 

B, however, took issue with them being on my page, saying that I took “her” pictures off of “her” myspace and them put them on my page, and asked me to either remove them or change the settings of my page so that nobody else could see them, citing that he and her husband are really protective and don’t want just anyone to be able to see their kids and that these pictures are hers and I didn’t ask about using them.

She seems to really feel as if she owns these pictures and can therefore tell me what to do with them, but I question the validity of this statement.  Most of the pictures in question were taken over Thanksgiving, when all of my family and upwards of twenty cameras were around.  All photos were later collaborated and every member of my family has a disk with all 500+ photos and I am not sure that anyone of us can be sure who took what pictures.  (Outside of the safe guess that you didn’t take the ones you are in, and Aunt R took all the one that look as If they are looking down on the room, because she is the only person that was spotted standing on a table.) But all the same, B thinks these pics are hers, either because she has the same ones posted else where, or because they may have been taken with her camera, or, more likely, because her kids are in them.  Well my kid is in them as well and I am not excreting claim of them, they are pics, nothing more.  But if her kids are in them, as is my kid, and my brother’s kids, and my other brother’s kids and so on, who owns the pic?  Do we vote, one vote per kid?  Or is ownership determined by who “took” the pic?

I would also venture to say that now they are owned by facebook and myspace as myself and many of other members of my family (including B) have posted them on both sites, and my removing them or changing my settings has little to no impact on who might see them. And if I subscribe to the idea of removing them from public space (which I can’t remove them from the WWW in any real way) do I then have to take them off my walls and not hang pics of these wonderful kids in my home because from time to time strangers enter my home to do things life repair pipes and change the carpet? How far do I have to go to make sure nobody outside of friends and family can see these kids?  And does she then get so sort of approval system over my friends list, who is and who is not ok to be added and have the privilege to see her kids? 

Also, does this woman never take her kids outside if she is so worried about “other people looking at [her] kids”? 

 

Blogging as classwork

So I have recently come to the conclusion that I am not a good blogger.  Ironically I was super excited about having my own blog after learning it was one of the class requirements.  I thought that it was going to be yet one more creative outlet for me.  As it is right now, I find the format of the blog to be more restrictive than freeing, but that might just be because I haven't played around with the formatting yet.  It might also be a product of my having never had a blog before and not being used to posting one on a regular basis and now needed to do so.  I am hoping over the next few weeks I will grow to love blogging, and that I will be able to find a way to make this one prettier.  

In the mean time, I will let her pretty up the page for me...

Worst/Best Jan 18th

Worst - Jan 18th being the day Verizon said my internet would work, only to have it roll around and Verizon to tell me my internet will work on Jan 25th.  Looks like 7 days at a time, they are getting me to pay for nothing 

Best - Holding hands with my daughter and spending the raining day with her and Miss N passing the time with games and books.

Worst/Best for Jan 15th

Worst- The kid being at her Dad's house. I am sure she is having fun, but I miss her.

Best- My morning with the best friend before I had to head off to school.

Worst/Best for Jan. 14th

Worst - Tie - Waiting all day for the UPS guy, only to have him show up as soon as I got in the shower and started washing my hair and Going to pick up L last night for poetry only to have him text and say he wasn't home yet as I pulled in his driveway, then laving only to have him text that he was on his way and would be there in 5 mins, so I waited only to be told he wasn't going to make it causing me to be late for poetry :(

Best - The slam poetry event in Pomona...Good poetry and good friends, what could be better?

Faigley and the Revolution

“Some have made quite remarkable use of this new literacy. Even though Generation X often gets bashed for its political apathy, many students have used their digital literacy to engage social and political issues.”

 

            I chose these two lines to be the two that I wanted to respond to because they are the base of my thoughts on the mood of Faigley’s address.  I agree that the general mood of this piece was sadness.  Faigley seems incredibly sad about the state of the literacy not just in our classrooms but in our society.  In class, coming to the agreement that Faigley was saddened by the state of literacy (especially that of multimedia literacy) but I had a slightly different feeling about why he was sad about it.  Most of our class seemed to think that he was sadden by what we were gaining access to with the invention of the world wide web, and it easy to understand why it is that this could be the case.  The question that came up in class is really valid, what is it we are really getting access to?  I however, think it was something different that was making Faigley sad.  I think he was sad because if what we are using this amazing tool for.  He points out how powerful the world wide web can be in engaging people in civic issues and political arenas, but all too often we chose to use the web for escapism and entertainment over education and activism. 

My first blog....

This blog should have hit the web yesterday, but unfortunately my home internet issues won’t be resolved until Monday so I am left at the mercy of the ever growing AT&T wifi hot spots for now.   That being said I am super excited about having my own blog, at least for now, we will have to wait and see how long that excitement last.  I will be keeping this blog in accordance to the requirements of my English 658 class as well as to in some small way document the happenings of this year because 2010, the year of my MA program, will be amazing. 

So an explanation of the only element the will be consistent from post to post.  I have long realized that it is impossible and undesirable to share every moment of everyday with even the people that you love the most in this life, but it important to know their basic moments of joy and defeat on a daily bases as well as to keep lines of communication and understanding open.  It is one the foundation of this belief that I started my “worst/best” thing.  At the end of everyday I ask my daughter what the worst part of her day was and what the best part was, because while I wasn’t there for all of her day, this will give me not only a pretty good understanding of her day, but also what makes her happy, sad, excited, angry…and so on.  So here I will document the worst and best parts of my day at the end of everyday (I hope).