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.