Media Resopnse 3

I saw this film as part of a collection of international award winning films for kids from ages 4 to 8. What's Wrong With This Picture by Jeffrey Travis is listed as an American comedy. Travis' website says that the film has been in over 30 festivals and won "multiple" awards.

This is the blurb from the DVD insert on the films:

Millions of children each day are left alone with crayons and paper—the vast majority of whom gleefully animate without loss or injury. There are those precious few, however, who must bear the weight of wax-gone-bad. Three-year-old Aidan may have followed all the rules, but in a moment of carelessness, his own creation will go horribly wrong.

• Heart of Gold International Film Festival
• Tribeca Film Festival
• SXSW Film Festival
• Seattle International Film Festival

This two minutes of home video and stickman animation is award winning because people must be identifying with it. I think I'm at a disadvantage because I don't have any children (although the intended audience to children between 4 and 8), but for what it's worth, I did think the PADD organization idea was clever.

There are three separate moods in this film. The beginning feels like a public service announcement for something horrible, but it's over the top nature makes it an apparent joke. We are set up and prepared for the pay off.

The music changes drastically to a happy upbeat tune during the animation. It's fun and cute. I was happy to see the "stickman" get something to eat and drink.

The films gets interesting for me when Aidan returns and is very upset. I could use this film as an example of the ethical treatment of actors. Was Aidan aware that he was even in a film? The camera doesn't move when he is on camera, making it appear as though it's a hidden camera.

Aidan may just be a convincing actor, but even if it was real for him, it is unethical? In the credit, Aidan's last name is Travis, so it would be fair to assume the director is family, perhaps his father. It's also hard to consider taking juice away from a child torture, but is it exploitative to take his reaction and turn it into a short film?

Media Resopnse 1

I've recently rediscovered this film because of the Sunday school lessons so far this year.

Oddly enough, when viewing this film in the past I didn't spend much time framing the film to me. This reminded me of our discussion on overt direction and critical framing.

What I have in my head as a clear theme and what the students understand from a visual example may not be the same.

This isn't their fault, there are countless themes and elements to pull from single images. By setting up the clip, we can direct the students to the see what we were intending them to find.

Reading Response 3

I cannot get it out of my head: motivation. The description from the articles of using Zora, or other civic engagement simulations, and blogging (in great detailed examples) all caused me to cringe (and never be quite satisfied) about the motivation that youth have in gaining a civic attitude, civic skills, etc. MTV puts it in these terms: “it does seem that the majority of young people are convinced that supporting a social cause is something they should do. However, there is a strong disparity between interest and involvement, an ‘activation gap,’ and there is significant room for growth” (98).

It is this disparity that has me personally concerned. The creation of such fun, interesting, and civic experience software like Zora is very interesting (even for an entire article that says, “look what I created and what it can do” – now, mind you, I believe you have to do that sometimes so I’m not “put out for it”) and “seeing” the interaction between youth of varied ages is really cool (I am all about discussion) but how do you get them to care to do it in the first place (what’s the motivation?) and then, as both authors stressed, how do you get them to do it in a forum that is real, outside the online environment?

Truthfully, I do not have an answer, nor am I necessarily satisfied with either methodology. Ber says that “Zora’s design and infrastructure provides a bridge between…civic education, focused on helping children become better citizens by teaching them civic attitudes and skills…and…approaches focused on internal motivation to support the development of morally responsible individuals…” (149). I’m not convinced. I do, however, like what Ber had to say on the subject: “Listening to what young people care about is the necessary first step in enlisting their enthusiasm” (104). Based on our in-class discussions, I would say that is a big, fat “duh.”

This is where Rheingold has greater interest to me; he’s talking about how to use what youth already like and care about and helping them learn (this would definitely be a part of literacy) how to actually make their voice heard through skills that work the media technologies they like using. He focuses on blogging primarily and branches out into “citizen journalism” which is really quite cool to discuss. I’m not a formal teacher, but the ideas have a great deal of merit. But, I believe we need to not only put together these tools that Ber and Rheingold have (because it facilitates growth and learning) but we absolutely need to discuss how to motivate our youth to engage with these methods. This, to me, is imperative if we are going to even begin approaching what The New London Group is trying to suggest with regard to designing social futures where our youth are prepared to be workplace adults and have skills necessary to be great there. It is bridging the gap that must happen between wanting to be involved and actually being involved - and finding the motivation within youth to do it. Heck, I don't think enough adults are involved (myself included)!

reading response 3

I'm taking undergraduate Technology and Engineering Education (TEE) classes concurrently with our MA pedagogy class. The main difference is scope. My TEE classes (so far) focus solely on the classroom (motivating students, disclosure documents, lesson plans, etc.) and the emphasis seems to be on making it seem...not easy, but doable. There is a lot of confidence building. Whenever a fear or anxiety is brought up, the phrase "Don't worry, you'll be fine" is tossed out at some point after addressing that concern.

Our class is not incredibly different from my TEE classes. I'm still learning what I can do in a classroom, but now the ramifications flow in and out of the classroom.

For example, my TEE classes suggest a direct line of confidence. If you do this, then this will happen or if that doesn't work then try this and remember this. My goal is to establish my own language and teach it to the students I may have in my classroom.

Our text says this of its own pedagogy:

Neither immersion in Situated Practice within communities of learners, nor Overt Instruction...necessarily gives rise to this sort of critical understanding or cultural understanding. In fact, both immersion and many sorts of Overt Instruction are notorious as socialising agents that can render learners quite uncritical and unconscious of the cultural locatedness of meanings and practices.

The four components of pedagogy we propose here do not constitute a linear heirarchy, nor do they represent stage. Rather, they are components that are related in complex ways. Elements of each may occur simutaneously, while at different times one or the other will predominate, all of them are reatedly revisited at different levels (New London Group, 32).

This is a product of learning the Cha Cha and the Paso Doble at the same time.

One particular sentiment that I gained from our readings that I want to incorporate into my young pedagogy is that there isn't one standard. Students "are simultaneously members of multiple lifeworlds, so their identities have multiple layers that are in complex relation to each other" (NLG, 17)

Our readings are pushing me to understand that I have a responsibility to integrate learning compatible with their work, citizenship, and lifeworlds in the present and near future. The earlier I can incorporate such integral facets of learning into my language, the more concrete it can become.

As a side note, the final section of the article A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies titled "The Internation Multiliteracies Projects" is perhaps the greatest summation I have ever read. I wish I had read it before reading the article. I hope this doesn't sound sarcastic because it is awesome.

The One Where I Stop Complaining

This week's reading was delightfully practical for me, and either the reading is getting easier or my brain has finally switched on (though as I read through this posts, its disjointed nature makes me think that it hasn't switched on entirely...), because at the end of this reading I'm left feeling hopeful for education's future and new media's potential to improve our culture rather than feeling upset.

As I read, I tried to think about what this all means for me. Though I found the two articles really interesting, and I LOVE the podcasting assignment flow in the Rheingold article (really, I just loved the Rheingold article) enough that I'm trying to think of how an altered version of it might look in my classroom, I initially thought, "Well, this is really cool for a social studies teacher, but what does it mean for a media teacher like me?" Then I remembered a quote that Amy uses (for which I should probably get the full reference...) to get our Hands on a Camera teachers thinking about how Hands on a Camera affects the lives of our students:

By civic engagement we mean exercising personal agency in a public domain; and we assume that becoming civically engaged is a developmental process characterized by growing facility with ideas, situations, skills and awareness." (New Student Politics Curriculum Guide, emphasis added)

As the Rheingold article mentions, being civically engaged doesn't only mean something political; so, in helping students to think more critically about media, and to produce media of their own, I am preparing them to exercise their own personal agency in the very public domain that I'll just call the media-sphere. And that's something.

In the Multiliteracies book, I thought that the chapter was a nice synthesis (introduction?) of the various concepts that we've been discussing. I think that the distinction between language and Design is wonderful, primarily because it indicates that reading is always an active process. I also appreciated that the authors considered the various designs that we need to have an understanding of in order to negotiate our mulitmodal mediated world.

So here are some things that I take from the reading that can potentially improve my practice:

1. I need to be more intentional about adding overt instruction and critical framing into my lectures with my students. I do a lot of situated practice (my classes are hands-on, low end production kind of classes), and I think that students have a bit of a chance to transform knowledge, but I'm not always great at being overt about why these assignments are relevant for the future teachers, or at putting them in a larger context of media literacy education.
   
2. "It is...important to stress that listening as well as speaking, and reading as well as writing, are productive activities" (MUL 22). This is why we include media literacy lessons along with production lessons are important--we are always creators, even if we're not creating products from scratch.
3. The practice of making a documentary can be even more civically engaging than we are currently making it. We might want to consider giving the students a little more instruction as to the purpose of their documentaries (if Hands on a Camera could become a semester and a half program like I REALLY want it to, maybe we could do a more structured documentary followed by a more open-ended assignment...).
   
4. Focusing on Non-fiction production seems to fit more into the post Fordist economic model, where one student is in charge of many different roles (as opposed to the highly specialist-driven areas of fiction production. I know how to dress sets really well, but don't ask me to schedule your film or direct actors...).
   

So...that's that. I liked this week's reading a lot because the authors offered potential answers to their own questions. Maybe I'm just lazy and I don't want to have to work through tough processes in order to find answers, but it was refreshing to have someone say, "Here's the issue...and here's what we can do about it!" If/when I write something like this, I want to have some possible answers in hand. Not all the answers, but at least some.

Since I will also be presenting this week, I'm going to follow in Timbre's footsteps and just discuss the Multiliteracies article here. So Gee is a member of the New London Group, yes? I was pleased to see the return of his Student's Bill of Rights in this week's reading, particularly as they expanded on what each of those ideas meant and I found my understanding of each principle being strengthened. That said, I will admit that while I'm beginning to get a handle on the how of literacy pedagogy, I find myself still very confused about the discussion of the what of literacy pedagogy.

If my understanding of what they presented as the Designs of Meaning is correct, they see Available Designs as the information that is already present, Designing as the process of using that information in the learning process and then the Redesigned as the transformed information. Is it just me or does that not sound like the how only in different language? Available Designs are the Critical Framing and Overt Instruction of the available knowledge/systems, Situated Practice is the Designing stage and Transforming knowledge is the last stage. Am I just oversimplifying here or missing something obvious? I suppose part of the explanation may be that they are saying look here is what multiliteracy pedagogy should look like and then this is how that looks in practice, but it all just seems needlessly complicated to me. I know Amy said we should be looking at not just the content of these articles but also how they are written and I'm stating that I found these the separation of the what and the how with different language to describe the same concepts kind of confusing.

Another aspect of the article that I found somewhat confusing was the introduction which talked about society's increasing privatization and the idea that "...market directed theories and practices , even though they sound humane, will never authentically include a vision of success and for all students." Only to go on and talk about how school's can redesign pedagogy to incorporate multiplicity and diversity and greater success for all students. It's not that I don't agree with their vision of what school's should do, I just don't understand how they got from their first conclusion into the rest of the article. Maybe I'm getting tied up in the practicalities when they're just talking about the theoretical and what should be and not what is, but I don't understand how we go from society has been steadily moving in this direction that favors students with access to schools can change the pedagogy of how we think of literacy so that every student has both access and engagement. I don't mean to be overly negative here because I know that just criticizing the system does nothing and that I'm hopefully playing a (small) part in actually making this vision of multimodal students a reality but it through me for a loop when they seemed to be going down the critical path only to suddenly jump in what to me feels like the opposite direction.

Sorry, I feel like I'm kind of all over the place with the article this week but hopefully you can make some sense of my rambling and I'm going to stop now.

Media Resopnse 2

5 minutes into the video posted below is a dinner scene from 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. The focus of the scene is on the young blonde woman (Otilia). She is at her boyfriend's house for his mother's birthday. She is late to the party because she is helping her friend have an abortion, which is illegal in Romania. No one at the party knows what she was doing before coming to the party.

Just in case you don't speak Romanian, the conversation is rather frivolous. They ask her about her studies, they make some disparaging comments about the working class, the best way to make potatoes, young people are rude these day, etc.

This is a very rich scene with a lot of meaning in the context of the entire film, so if you haven't seen this film, then perhaps that isn't coming through, but that's actually okay for this post.

Do you remember playing this game when you were a bit shorter?



I think this game conditioned me to like the unique and have a desire to find that which isn't like the other. This seems like what teachers are doing daily. Finding that which is unknown to students and helping them see it, so that it changes the way everything is viewed. I love it when someone can change my mind.

This scene from 4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile will now always be a part of any editing lesson I teach. This is unique and different, but not wrong. It is very effective. The work that a particular student does may be different, but if the correct themes are there and effective: well done.

Reading Response 3--Informality Anyone?

So, because my media post was forever long, because I am teaching in class on Thursday, and because even I am tired of listening to me go on and on, I have made a commitment to myself that this week’s post will be of the less verbose variety. Because of this commitment, I am going to respond to one of the readings and leave the rest for my lesson.

I think that things may be finally coming together in my mind. Like my father’s explanation of how to use Word 2007, Amy’s overt instruction/explanation of the connection between Gee’s “structure” and Kress’s “purpose” helped things to click for me. The New London Group’s “Pedagogy of Multiliteracies” provided the final connection that has helped me to make sense of it all, for which I am grateful. (Now here’s hoping that MY version of “sense” is the same as others’.) As I’ve been “putting it all together” this week, I had a few more random thoughts regarding this specific reading, and I want to focus on one of these here.

This particular, and quite random thought deals with the discussion of changing working lives. We have talked about the need for us, as educators, to cultivate “profile people” and the fact that our students are multimodal learners. In the New London Group’s article, they talk about the fact that a new work life (which is what is happening with the focus on profile people, multimodalities, etc.) is the result of new social relationships at work. Technology has helped to alter the workplace and the attitudes of workers, who now work in teams. They say that “effective teamwork depends…on informal, oral, and interpersonal discourse. This informality also translates into hybrid and interpersonally sensitive informal written forms, such as electronic mail” (12).

As I read this, I noticed the use of variations on the word “informal,” and I began thinking of my own work life. Has my realm of work, the classroom, become a more informal place due to revolutionary changes in technology? As I thought about it, I came to the conclusion that, yes, there is a level of informality that exists in the public high school that I am pretty sure did not exist when I attended high school. (Allow me to qualify at this point: this is from my own personal experience and observation—nothing else.) The introduction of email, text messaging, and social networks have, again—in my opinion, broken down many of the “boundaries” that were once a part of the teacher/student relationship. Students who would, even still, NEVER dream of looking the teacher’s home phone number up and then picking up the phone to call and ask a question, have absolutely no problem trying to get cell phone numbers and then texting questions (or even less formal things) to teachers. Email has made it possible to get information to a teacher at any time of the day or night; making appointments for face to face interaction is rendered unnecessary in the minds of many because of this technology. And then there’s Facebook and MySpace. People have been fired because of the “informal nature” of the content of their social networking pages when students have been involved. After thinking about it, I think that technology is one of the main elements at the core of changing relationships between teachers and students. I’d never really thought of it that way before—maybe it’s just me though?

Overall, after reading for this week, I think that the face of education in changing in all kinds of ways that I have never thought of before. It’s interesting to look at it with a different set of lenses.

Today was our first day at Sundance and I was pleased that both of the documentaries we saw were going to be great discussion material later on in the classroom.

First up we saw A Small Act.

A SMALL ACT documentary trailer from Patti Lee on Vimeo.

I really liked the movie and thought it did a great job of showing how generational poverty and lack of education contributes to the other problems in developing parts of the world. I think it will be a great jumping off point for classroom discussion about privilege and access to resources. After the movie the director talked about how she became familiar with the story because she spent some time in Kenya in college and became good friends with one of the women involved in starting the scholarship fund. Last week the Hands on a Camera students talked to the kids about finding a good story and about looking around at the people in the various communities they are part of to find a story to tell and I thought this was such a great example of that idea.

The second documentary we saw was Space Tourists.

Again, the movie itself had a lot of content that could be interesting for classroom discussions about history--particularly the role of the space race on the cold war-- as well discussions about technologies environmental impacts and the cost/benefit analysis of pursuing space travel on a large scale, but I think the most interesting stuff came from the director's q&a. He talked about a part of the film that shows scavengers who go out and collect the rocket boosters and salvage them for scrap metals and the difficulty they had in obtaining permission from the Russian government to film these scavengers. He said the government wanted them to film a staged scavenging with government employees in the roles, he was disgusted by the idea and talked about how it would have ruined the film. I thought this was very interesting information because it highlights how much we as the audience rely on the director to be truthful. If the film says documentary then we expect to see actual events not staged re-enactments, but why is that? I hope this incident will lead to an interesting discussion about the need for critical thinking when viewing media and help facilitate student's understanding of how texts are impacted by who creates them and for what purposes they are created.

This I Believe (About Media)

I'm still getting used to our posting schedule.

This week I've done mostly reading of the copy-editing variety, and even though it's sort of lame, one of the articles that I read caused me to really think about my theory and practice of what media can and does do for me in my life.

The article in question (which will be available in the February issue of the Journal of Media Literacy Education, which I think I have to plug at least once a semester) discusses the beliefs of English teachers about what English does for their students. The whole concept is very interesting to me--the notion that our ideas about education (and thereby, our actual practice) can arise from a system of beliefs rather than rational experience initially seemed like a stretch, but the more I read, I can definitely see the author's point (it also helped that I didn't have to see a lot of grammatical/citation errors). The author talked about how teachers believed that literature cultivated higher level thinking skills and cultural literacy that their students would need later in life. They believed that forming a relationship with a book--an actual book, not an electronic document--could change a student's life. They believed that studying the "universal human truths" manifested in the canon (even agreeing on a canon requires some belief about what is 'good' literature) would allow their students to grow. These beliefs simultaneously made the teachers passionate about their subject matter, but also made them resistant to the idea of examining other sorts of texts, which is a problem for media literacy.

Believe it or not, that's just the introduction. Reading this article made me question my own beliefs about what media can do for me, what it can do for students, and it made me question my own practice in relation to those beliefs.

I believe that media can help us form connections with those closest to us by giving us a common experience.

I believe that media can help us form connections with those far away from us; we engage with differing viewpoints, and see the world through eyes that are not our own.

I believe that media can help us learn things about ourselves.

I believe that media can be intellectually stimulating and spiritually enlightening.

I believe that the ability for media to be all these things for us--a connecting point, an object of study, a lens through which to see the world--rests firmly and solely with the viewer/reader/listener. Though I do believe that some media are inherently more valuable than others, it is always the responsibility of the reader to make something of the media.

So, that's what I believe about media. Now what do I actually do with media? At this point, I would say that about 70% of my media consumption is just that--consumption. To some degree it's an activity that I enjoy with my husband, so that's something, but when I'm sitting around watching Chuck and reading my textbook during commercial breaks, I'm not thinking about the way that Chuck might help me connect more with others. I don't believe it helps me understand spy culture (although if that's what spy life is really like, I feel sympathy for spies), and I don't know that I'm really being intellectually stimulated. The same goes for most of NBC Thursday (though Community really makes me love people. Seriously.). In some ways, I'm no better than those English teachers who forbade "TV Talk" because they found it intellectually inferior, though I don't think the source is necessarily inferior; I am.

I'm a little better with films, and a lot better with anything I listen to on the radio (bear in mind that I only listen to NPR, or KSL radio if it's late at night and I need something that will make me furious enough to stay awake because KUER has switched to 'Nighttime Jazz'). This is probably because I've made myself become a disciplined film viewer through four years of film school, and I turned to NPR because I was sick of listening to the same 12 songs over and over and wanted something more intellectually stimulating as I drive. In doing this, do I really showcase that I value some media more than others? Is that okay? (I think the answers to those questions are, "yes," and, "yes, as long as I don't try to force others to feel the same way.").

It's interesting to think about our own beliefs about media, and to examine our actual practices in accordance with our beliefs. I think this would be a good activity to do with students in an introductory lesson in a media literacy unit: what do you believe about media? How do you typically use media? What different purposes do you assign to different media forms?

And while we're talking about beliefs, I played around on Wordle and made a word cloud of my testimony. I like the way it looks, and it proves to me that sometimes design toys like this can be at least somewhat spiritually enlarging.

Media Response 2: Single 6 Year Old Ladies

My oldest daughter (and please forgive me that I am again using my girls as part of my posting) had her big “friends” party this weekend. This meant that there was nine four, five, and six year olds wearing tutus, bracelets and necklaces, fingernail polish and face paint (it was a “Fancy Nancy” party). My daughter chose the music for the event. Among these song choices was “Single Ladies,” currently a favorite in my household.

The girls were sitting around drawing pictures, stamping images of Disney princesses and fairies, and putting stickers onto paper. They were eating salt water taffy and drinking lemonade out of tea cups. The room was bustling with commotion, talk, and giggles. Then a funny thing happened. Beyonce Knowles’ “Single Ladies” comes up on the little boom box in the corner of the room. All of a sudden, a girl yells out, “I love this movie” (meaning “Alvin and the Chipmunks 2: The Squeakquel”) and there is a sudden booming of high pitched voices belting at the tops of their lungs, “Now put your hands up!” in one chorus.

If this was not interesting in itself (since several very young girls singing a song about jealousy and moving on from an old/bad relationship is quite interesting) what happened next was even more interesting to me. There was a social structure to the singing based almost solely upon who knew the lyrics best. Their interaction with the media of song triggered a social hierarchy that came out of their confidence, and that confidence was from their degree of engagement with the media. There were two girls that knew the lyrics perfectly; with some of the dancing as far as they knew it (it seemed that it was contorted by their recollections of the Chipettes’ dance from the movie). Later, it was Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.” from her latest album that earned the same response.

Party in the U.S.A. (I apologize but Miley has asked that the embedding feature be removed from YouTube)

This brought to mind the idea that we have discussed in class about our students’ engagement with media and the levels of experience that cause a kind of social hierarchy among them. I had never seen it quite in the above microcosm before, but I can see how, in school, it is not unlike in “Horton Hears a Who” when the daughter proclaims that everyone in her class has a cell phone therefore she needs one too. If you don’t have a cell phone, an iPhone, an iPod, a Blackberry, or whatever other gizmo is most popular, you are automatically less viable in the social sphere. Also, there is the degree to which you Facebook, or post YouTube videos, or blog that can also play a part in your level of social viability. I think that this is great material for discussion in a classroom setting, talking about media engagement as a new kind of discrimination of societal levels or in understanding the structures we build for ourselves based on our media consumption. More particularly, it would be interesting to discuss what things have the most social currency and which make you socially poor (like the geeks who learn the Klingon language may have huge investment in media but the wrong media).

Cry, Media

As it is going to be a very large part of my life very soon, the subject and methodology of my action research project has kind of integrated itself in my subconscious; it is always in the back of my mind, and I can imagine it probably is in everyone else’s too. As a result of this, I’ve been paying more, and closer, attention to how media has shaped and continues to shape my world view. In addition, I’ve been more conscientious of how I use it in order to help my students to understand and be able to visualize the unfamiliar areas of the world that we will be studying.

These days, most of my media interaction, outside of requirements for our classes, has focused on building schema for my students’ study of the novel Cry, the Beloved Country. Now, even though the novel was written almost as a warning to South Africans before apartheid was officially institutionalized, I feel that to fully appreciate the power of the novel, my students need to gain a basic grasp of South African history during the apartheid era and after its abolition. In addition, because my students have absolutely NO concept of Africa at all, let alone South Africa (they often think that when I say “South Africa” I mean “the southern half of the continent that is Africa”) I like to allow for visual and audio experiences while also allowing them to discover bits about the history on their own as well.

So, here are three of the “pieces of media” that I have viewed and/or used that have connected directly to my classroom in the past month.

This first one is the trailer from the 1987 film Cry, Freedom, which was based on the true story of Steve Biko and his interactions with a white South African reporter, Donald Woods. As Woods, himself, wrote the book, this seems to be a pretty accurate representation of one particular instance of apartheid at work, and it is one that my students seem to get into. I like it because it focuses on someone other than Nelson Mandela, it demonstrates the fact that not all white people were evil (which is VERY important in relationship to understanding the novel), and the setting allows the students something to visualize when it comes time to picture the landscape while reading.


This clip is from Paul Simon Graceland: The Africa Concert, a concert featuring musicians from South Africa held in Zimbabwe in 1987 in order to raise awareness. This one I use in conjunction with a discussion of what role music plays in a culture and how we can learn a little about the “other” through an examination of their music. I tried to find a clip of the entire group singing South Africa’s now national anthem, “Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika,” but alas, Youtube did not have one. I like this one, though, because I love Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The other thing that’s cool about the recording of this concert is that it’s interspersed with images from life around Zimbabwe, and while I recognize that it’s not South Africa, the geographical location is much closer than what my students are typically familiar with.


This final trailer is from the newly released film Invictus. I haven’t shown any part of it to students because it’s not yet on DVD, but for me, personally, seeing the film was a reminder of why I have been fascinated with South Africa since my 10th grade English teacher made us read Cry, the Beloved Country. In this particular case, I was amazed at the ability of media to reawaken the passion that had dimmed a bit over time. I loved the film.


Now, as a final note, most especially for Amberly’s sake, I’ve never been to South Africa, though it’s always been a dream. I have no direct personal experience with this place, beyond research and interacting with people who are from there and who have lived there. Given that, I am aware that there is so much I don’t know. However, I try my best to not perpetuate stereotypes to my students and to demonstrate my interest and passion to them through the use of this (as well as other) media. (Sorry this is so stinking long!!)

reading response 2, Jeff Hill

I have been reading Jenkins' "Convergence Culture" for another class. "Convergence Culture" is focused on the flow of content across multiple media platforms and the relationship between the commercially produced and grassroots produced media. I mention it because one element that Jenkins stresses in his book comes through in the reading for this week. Jenkins lays the foundation of his work with the idea that what is happening now and what will happen with media is inevitable. The current media will become more a part of our life and the new media, both creations of new forms of media and new innovations of the current media, will soon invade our existence. There is no stopping it.

Media Education is understanding the power of the media and using it to the benefit of furthering education. Livingstone addresses this by referring to teaching internet literacy as empowering the students and enabling them to do what they can do best. I like the debunking of the term "tech-savvy teen" across the board. It may have some relevance in familiarity or even in comfort of use, being familiar with something doesn' t ensure competence nor does it even suggest that the technology is being used either correctly or to its potential. That's something I need to remind myself of. Just because a student can work quickly with an operating system and understand the language of a program, doesn't mean he or she is media literate in a full sense of the phrase.

And I'm not trying to be down on the student in any way. Kress's article focuses on the many ways of communication or perhaps more accurately, the inefficiencies in one mode of language. We are teaching a new language. Students may have the lingo down pat, but the formal is typically lacking. There are so many ways of reading and understanding that we must focus education while being open to the many interpretations (i.e. the drawing of an elephant), especially when all may be correct.

During particularly good discussions in class, Brother Parkin will often interrupt and say something to the effect of "Do you realize that we could all be in an accounting class right now?" I am in an education class that often discusses motivation and trying to keep student interested, which seems difficult in many regards, but I am encouraged by our reading assignments because the attention is given to focusing the learning instead of trying to create an atmosphere in which media literacy is appealing. The appeal is there because society is surrounded by media and its constant changes.

Rant Anyone?

So, as a preface to my commentary here, I’d just like to say that I am looking forward to the presentations on Thursday, because in all honesty, this week’s reading was challenging for me. I’m not too sure why, but I have had a difficult time getting to a point where I feel as though I truly comprehend the discussion taking place across these three readings, especially with regards to Kress’s “Multimodality” article. As for the bits that I did fully grasp, I feel as though a “ditto” to Erika’s post would probably encompass the better part of my thoughts this week.

However, there are a few things that came out of the Seiter article, in particular, that I want to address from my perspective as a teacher. After reading her work, and despite her overt (and self-acknowledged) negativity, I still want to say to her, “Thank you! At last someone has said it!”

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love technology, and I think that its use can truly revolutionize the educational process, when instituted in a manner that facilitates students’ overall learning and growth. However, I am with Seiter when she says that oftentimes technology is viewed as this “silver bullet” which will somehow manage to kill all educational woes. As she so forcefully states, IT DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY. And I honestly believe that if it did work that way, there would be no need for a program such as ours. I feel that learning about media literacy education is a means for educating educators about how to effectively teach media so that it can be a positive force within the educational realm. As it stand now, though, with so many holding the views so forcefully challenged by Seiter’s article, it can even, at times, cause more harm than good.

I just keep thinking back to her discussion of High Tech High, and I just get so irritated. As a public school teacher, I am constantly being told that “I’m not doing enough” or that “I need to be doing better.” Well, as a teacher who easily works 50-60 hours in a typical week, I really am doing all that I can, to the best of my abilities. My resources are often limited, and yet my students still score relatively well on standardized tests. And as Seiter points out in her article, students in traditional schools often score better when tested for actual content knowledge. I get really tired of being constantly compared to other schools and teachers, especially when, as Seiter states, schools like High Tech High can afford public relations reps and billions of dollars worth of PR and equipment to make themselves look good. Honestly, how is a normal teacher supposed to compete with that? (I can feel myself slipping into my “lack of regulation for charter schools” tirade right about now, so I’m going to move on…)

And as a final note, because I’m into my 500th word, I also really appreciated her assertion in the beginning that “computers cannot teacher-proof the classroom.” Do I feel as though computers and all that they bring with them have a place within the educational system? OF COURSE I do. However, I do not think that they should be an excuse for shoving 45-50 students in one class. If there is anything that has been emphasized over the three readings that I did fully understand, it’s that technology, like any other text, must learn to “read.” You need teachers to teach that.

Reading Response 2: All About My Girls

What is happening with my two little girls, in my perspective, is the embodiment of the discussions in each of our articles this week. I have a six year old (well, on Thursday) who loves the Wii and enjoys PBS kids on the computer. I have a three year old who can sit on the computer and play on Nick Jr. for hours, or switch between Nick Jr. and Starfall for an equal amount of time. My oldest, Lilly, cannot yet read. At least, she knows her letters (relatively well – R and K pose problems for her) and can sometimes sound out words (when she is willing to try). My youngest, Coralie, knows her letters really well – partially from working with her parents and partially from learning on Starfall – but is only beginning to work with sounds of letters. But, when Kress talks about multimodality, and expresses that the visual itself has an inherent “literacy” that semiotics tends to forget or leave as secondary, I know what he’s talking about.

My children don’t come to me and ask me to navigate web pages. When they were both two years old I sat down with them on their websites of choice and taught them to move the mouse and click it. I can still recall Coralie’s gasp of surprise when I showed her that when she moved the mouse, the arrow moved on the screen, and when I left-clicked on the green arrow in the bottom right-hand that says, “Play” the screen changed – she was instantly hooked. That’s literally all it took. And, all she has is the visual cues to “read” and understand. Lilly is the same way. When she’s playing a Wii game that has some words and she wants to know what the characters are saying, she will ask me, but otherwise, she has it down pretty well when something is intimating “OK” or “Yes” or “Continue” simply because she has mastered the visual messages on the screen without knowing what the written words actually say (she has, however, learned from playing video games what “yes” and “no” and “OK” look like and can identify them outside of the on-screen messages). To me, this is what Kress is trying desperately to help the literacy world understand: pictures have just as much valid language as spoken or written language. For all intents and purposes, my girls can "read" their media.

Now, I do not know if I’m doing everything as well as I should. I try and participate (as much as time allows) with my girls in their digital/media/internet experiences but I do hope that some of what Alisha and I do today will be as beneficial to their future growth as Seiter talks about with pianos and media: you have to start young. I know that I learned a great deal about things I need to do in the future from Livingstone’s essay. I will not continue and bore you with more discussion of my daughters (I’m getting a little long for the general post) but I do want to say that the idea of converging audio/visual, digital, information literacy is something I am tremendously interested in understanding how to do. Also, I would add that I love Seiter’s decidedly “pessimistic essay,” and it was engaging to read – not because of her semi-cynicism but because she really clicked with me (because she realistically posed the challenges while maintaining what I felt was a degree of hope) and, in the end, I love the following statement:

I am pessimistic about long-term effects on public education of the vast concentration of wealth at the top that has accompanied the digital revolution, the unprecedented concentration of media ownership, and the shift of power from the public realm to that of private corporations (49).

Unexpectedly Uninformed

When Amy and Amberly and I were on the radio (since it probably won't happen to me again, I've got to get all the mileage I can out of it...), the host asked me if I ever felt like the Hands on a Camera students already knew everything that we were teaching them in regards to media. Obviously my first answer would be, "No," since if I really felt that way we wouldn't really engage in the project at all. I think that the answer I actually gave was that I felt like a lot of the things that we taught the kids were things that were fairly intuitive to them, but that didn't mean that they didn't need guidance to be made aware of the fact that they actually knew it.

I feel like this is the case with youth and new media: there are things they know, things they understand, but that doesn't mean that they don't need good pedagogical strategies to help them learn, and it seems like this where we hit a wall. We talked about it last week, and the reading this week (of which I've actually done only about half of at this point. Too many things to read, not enough time!) also confronts the issue head on: how do we change our communities of practice (since not learning happens in classrooms) to reflect the seismic changes in society brought about by the influx of new media and new media technology? The things I've read so far don't really give very many answers to these questions (which is fine, though frustrating at times), inviting practitioners to take this knowledge and do with it what they will.

In "Multimodality", Kress aptly discusses how we are inherently multimodal beings, and our educational system has done us very few favors by placing ultimate primacy on the written word. I believe that the issues brought up in this chapter (which I can't even believe was written 10 years ago, because it seems so relevant) are particularly relevant when trying to decide how to change our classrooms: students need pedagogical strategies that reflect our multiple modalities, because we increasingly communicate in multimodal ways. We need to stop seeing areas like visual art and music as separate, specialty interests in school and start recognizing that these are areas of literacy just as important as print literacy.

The need for solid and relevant pedagogical (I'm pretty sure I've already used that word at least 3 times...sorry) strategies was made quite clear in the Seiter article, whose unabashedly pessimistic tone made it clear that introducing technology into the classroom is not the end-all fix-all solution that some people (even myself, on occasion!) seem to think it is. Her article makes apparent what most of us know but try to ignore: in our knowledge economy, rich kids always have a leg up on working class kids. Fixing schools is a step in the right direction, but even if every school had equal access to technology, the vastly different home lives of students from different socioeconomic classes will still be a barrier to true equality. I love her closing statement: "Technological utopianism is past: we need to be clear and precise about the goals and the feasibility of technology learning, in the context of a realistic assessment of the labor market and widening class divides, struggles for fair employment in both technology industries and other job sectors, and the pressing need to empower students as citizens who can participate actively in a democracy."

Though Seiter is pessimistic, this doesn't mean that there aren't any solutions. I think the solution begins in recognizing what strategies we already have in place that are worth hanging on to. It also involves recognizing the new skills that all students need, and allowing them the time they need to practice them (though this will not result in completely fluency for all students, it's a start). It means finding the ways that we can encourage multimodal literacy practices to prepare students to find ways to communicate effectively.

So, this week's reading had a lot of big ideas and challenging material for me and I look forward to talking some of them out this week in class. In the meantime, I felt particularly inspired by the Seiter and Heverly articles. Both of these articles had sections that felt like they were speaking directly to me and addressing my experiences in the classroom.

Seiter's pessimistic look at the use of technology as a cure all hit very close to home for me and in reading her descriptions of the two students at High Tech High I couldn't help but feel that I was reading a description of some of my own students. As you all know my classroom is designed to be a cooperative learning environment in which learning is project based and in which student's are given access to a laptop that they get to take home and use to further facilitate their education. On good days I feel like we are engaged in granting students situational practice and opportunities on bad days I worry that we are failing students in the basic skills and that we are not providing them with any great technological skills in exchange. I know that I have students who use their laptops almost exclusively for gaming and although some of those students also make use of the other creative software programs on their laptops, I've noticed that these also tend to be the students who fall behind in the actual schoolwork portion of our class. Of course I recognize that my program is slightly different in that there is a high possibility that students who are in my class would not be going to school at all or participating at much lower levels if they weren't in my class but I still worry that in our efforts to expand technology to our students we may actually be causing more harm than good.

Heverly's article about the dangers of digital media in particular the persistent nature of digital media is also resonating strongly for me this week because again I know that we are providing students with the tools to create media artifacts without giving them a proper understanding of the potential dangers or long term consequences of creating and sharing these digital texts. Last week I was going over a computer that a student had turned in and I found a huge collection of pictures of the student drinking, smoking, etc. The student is no longer enrolled at our school so I just deleted the content but I couldn't help but think about the fact that this student saw no problem with taking such pictures with his school issued laptop, that's problematic to say the least. Heverly talks about students not necessarily understanding the consequences when they get involved with the creation of these types of digital media and I think that's true to some extent but I also think there is some element of uncaring that may be somewhat incomprehensible to those of us who came of age in the analog era. I frequently get the impression that my kids have an attitude that bad things may get posted online and that it's just something that everyone does and goes through and that it's not a big deal. In contrast I found that an old friend had converted some old video footage to digital and posted it to Facebook and was completely mortified at the idea that people would be watching my sixteen year old self saying ridiculous things about the boy I had a crush on. I don't really have any conclusions but I do feel like I need to have another conversation with my students about what content is appropriate to have on their school computers though.

Blame it on the pop

I was already pretty sure I was going to write about this song for my first media response entry and then I did this week's reading on multimodalities and it seemed like a perfect fit. I've been a big fan of mash up music for a while now, there's something really appealing to me about an artist who can take bits and pieces of other songs and fit them together to create something totally new. For the last few years DJ Earworm has done these mashups of the top 25 songs of the year according to Billboard magazine. This year's is definitely my favorite one. I downloaded the track back in December and it's been on my running playlist ever since but it wasn't until I sat down to write this blog that I looked up the video for the song and I was amazed at how much easier it was for me to pick out the samples from the various songs when I could connect them to the visual images. Now that I've watched the video a couple of times I can pick out the the little bits just listening but it amazes me to think of all the little snippets I had previously missed even though I've listened to the song dozens of times before this. I'm not sure if that's what Kress meant by multimodalities but it definitely seemed to illustrate the idea to me.

I'm not sure how I would use something like this in my classroom, but I do think it would be an interesting way to introduce the concept of intertextuality. It might also be interesting way to talk about plagiarism and crediting your sources. I would be interested in hearing if my students felt something like this was more comparable to copying a quote word for word in a paper or paraphrasing something to make it their own. I think I would lean towards the latter explanation myself but I think it could spark some interesting discussion.

Media Response 1: “Remember…Remember…Remember…”

My oldest daughter (6 years old) has been desperately requesting the 2009 “Fame” (PG) remake of the 1980 “Fame” (R) and I finally gave in on Saturday evening (I include the ratings because that could be an interesting look at filmmaking rational). We sat in my small living room and all watched as teenagers auditioned and went through graduation at the New York Performing Arts high school. The story arc is mostly the form represented with each year of high school, only pointing out moments of time that apparently shape the characters’ futures or vignettes defining that specific year for the individual student. All this happens with the background of singing, dancing, and music production of apparently talented teenagers. To be honest, this is a hard example to discuss because of its nature, but I’ll take a stab at it (since it was the only media I was able to consume this weekend).

Because of the multiple students being watched in the ensemble, it is a surface film, skimming over lives and never getting deep into any one character. Instead, it is a basic (if not stereotypical) exploration of the lives of a-typical teens. The surface theme may be worth looking at and perhaps the stereotypical approach to the characters is, in fact, meant to be a representative slicing of “common” teens’ true aspirations battling against the world’s expectations. For instance, one young lady has been practicing for years to be a concert pianist with the urging of her father. She is given opportunities to do something different than what her father considers “conservatory” work and she is forced to give up the opportunities; that is, until she finds a way to explore a new realm of experience as a hip-hop singer. The context of the character’s experience may or may not be something that teens can relate to because (as the stereotype dictates) “our parents will have expectations for us that we don’t necessarily have for ourselves.” This could be used in teaching as a way to explore media’s representation of the students’ own experience: Do they feel it accurately expresses their own relationship with parents? Do they feel that it could have, or should have been explored differently to be more accurate to their experience (if not accurate already)? Etc.

This exploration of identity representation may be of use in understanding the media’s portrayal of “how” their identities should be formed, of what experiences are truly “meaningful” in being a teenager, and this can easily branch into a discussion of the reality/fantasy regarding romantic relationships. There are two specifically romantic relationships present; one is based in the idea of friendship (which is one that endures its own trials) and a more superficial relationship because the boy is attracted to the girl, but the girl’s priorities are focused on him as being “not boring” and only a pastime from which she grows beyond as other life opportunities present themselves. Both relationships present very little depth, but each is worthy of some degree of exploration in a teaching setting, looking at their own expectations in romantic relationships and if the media is (again) an accurate representation of their own identity development.

Ultimately, I believe that the most interesting class discussion can be about the young man (and there is an entire voice over of his teacher's commentary with him) who essentially "fails" because the teacher point-blank tells him she will not write him a letter of recommendation because he simply is not nor will he ever be good enough to be a professional dancer. The idea is: What is failure and how should we react to it? I believe that subject alone can have great merit for school and out-of-school life.

I Own Both the Care Bears Movies.

This week I was looking for material to use in one of my classes, and I spent some time looking at Post Secret. For those of you who don't know, it's a website where people anonymously mail in homemade post cards with secrets on them, and then the person they're mailed to puts them up on a blog to read. I was looking at them to possible use to demonstrate my six word memoir assignment, but since hardly any of them are only six words it didn't really work out, but the concept is still engaging to me.

The notions of public and private interact here in really interesting ways. I feel like this flux of new media technology, along with a desire to be "known", have made people more interested than ever in having their private lives made public (but only in ways that we control). I already mentioned this in class on Thursday--there is a part of me that wants to be known, to be read by a lot of people (although if I really wanted that I would change my writing style slightly so as to not be so clearly for people who know me, and if I REALLY wanted it I would try to advertise and get the word out, and I'm really not willing to do that). What makes me want this? Does the desire to be known have anything to do with the various new communicative tools that we have at our disposal, or is it simply more pronounced because anyone can post anything online? Why do we (and maybe "we" as a cohort don't, but "we" as a society definitely do...) want our personal lives public in the first place? This constitutes an anonymous but deeply personal leap into the world, and at what point is interaction with it inappropriate? Am I a voyeur for looking at these secrets, even though they're freely offered? Am I nosy if I respond to them in comments (which I don't, but other people occasionally do)? What happens if I recognize a secret mailed in by someone I know (which will probably never happen...)?

The other thing I notice while looking at Post Secret is the way that we as a culture are becoming more and more adept at telling stories in very few words. I don't think it's because of Twitter, but I definitely think that the goal to say something in 140 characters or less, combined with prolific texting, has definitely influenced the way that we communicate, particularly online. At a time when films are getting longer and longer (though I think that no matter how great the film, we're maxed out at three hours, and I think it will continue to be so), our personal stories are getting shorter and shorter, as if whole aspects of our personalities can be condensed to sound-bytes. I don't know how I feel about this.

I feel like I've sort of covered how I would use this in a classroom, but just to be explicit, here are some things I could potentially use Post Secret for:
1. A discussion of the ways that image and word work together to create a story (this is what I was originally looking at the images for).
2. A discussion of the personal/private space discussion in relation to online interactions.
3. A discussion of short form storytelling.

And in case you didn't figure it out, my secret (that I'm okay with you knowing) is in the title. It's not a good one, it's just what I could think of at 6:30 in the morning.

Media Response 1

After reading the articles for this past week, especially the one on social networking, I decided to spend some quality time with my Facebook account. Really and truly, I probably log on twice a week for an average of about 5 minutes each, so spending a significant mount of time on the network is pretty abnormal for me, and it was an interesting experience.

First of all, as I logged on, it brought up the News Feed home page, where I noticed right off that my sister had changed her status and her profile photo. The little picture that shows up on the page showed her with our youngest brother, Brayden, in a photo taken over the break—a photo which I was initially in as well. Offended that she’d cut out her older siblings (me and our other brother, Landon) I immediately clicked on the picture without paying attention to anything else. It was when her profile showed up, complete with the entire photo of the four of us together, that I noticed what her status update said: Lexy Newby it's nice to have siblings, they're almost always on your side and by your side even when they're not physically there. Now, without being overly sentimental or sappy, I was touched, because I know she was talking, at least partly, about me. The thing that I think is most interesting, though, is that 1-I had known that she was having a hard day and I had talked to her repeatedly on the phone that day, but 2-it took looking at Facebook, a public forum, by CHANCE to find out that she appreciated it. It doesn’t change the fact that it made me feel good, though.

The second thing that I did was to start looking at pictures of members from my mission…I know that the article we read last week said that there isn’t one solid global networking site, but Facebook has made its way to France, at least a little. It was quite interesting to flip through images of activities at the church; pictures really do say a thousand words, and you can learn a lot about even more than the person whose profile you’re currently examining. For example, I learned that a couple of the members who were there while I was serving got married. The Valence branch is now a ward, but it seems that they’re still in the same rented space, even though there was a ward-building planned when I was there 6.5 years ago. I wonder what happened there. And, it seems that a couple of people who were recent converts when I was there so long ago are still attending activities at least. That’s comforting.

So, what are the implications for teaching? I really have no idea. Last semester we did look at the Pride and Prejudice and Hamlet Facebook pages…for me that wound be an interesting activity, to have students use their “Facebook discourse” to summarize novels. I think, too, that there are lessons that need to be taught regarding how students present themselves on these types of sites. As I was looking through things, I thought about how Amy felt like she had to alter her profile a bit when her niece added her as a friend. I’ve heard of (and they mentioned in the same article) that prospective employers and admissions committees have sometimes made decisions based on these profiles. There’s a life lesson that needs to be taught somewhere along the way.

I was extremely interested in Gee's idea of portfolio people, specifically the idea that to be successful in today's job market it is more important to have a variety of diverse experiences than to be very knowledgeable in a narrow field. I found myself identifying with this outlook, particularly as I look back on my own work experiences, where there have been some common elements but where my overall experiences have been much more diverse.

In looking for links between this week's articles, I found myself considering the two MIT articles within the framework of the pedagogies of the Gee piece. Particularly the portion of the Gee article that laid out his Bill of Rights for all children: The right to lots of situated practice, the right to overt instruction, the right to critical framing, and the right to be allowed to produce and transform knowledge not just consume it.

I was interested in the way the Boyd article fit within the right to lots of situated practice. She talked about the difference between the way teens who have internet access at home and those who can only access it in public locations like school or a library participate on myspace. The teens with limited mainly public access still used the site but there experience was much more narrow than those with home access who could spend more time working on their profiles and using the other features of the site to a greater extent. This seemed to be a real world example of situated practice and how it is limited or denied to those from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. It also seemed to be an example of how those with access have more chances to produce and transform knowledge, while those with less access are again forced into the more marginalized role of consumers. I also felt that Boyd's discussion of the the creation of a copy/paste culture was a fantastic example of Gee's explanation of the difference between learning and knowledge building. It is unimportant if a teen understands html code as long as he/she knows how to find someone else who does they will still be able to create an awesome profile page.

In the Goldman and Booker article I found myself looking at the case studies as examples of situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and the opportunity to create and transform knowledge. The film project in particular served as a beautiful example of how all four of those learning objectives could be implemented in a single classroom experience. I also thought the film project was an excellent example of a community of practice and found myself thinking about Gee's statement that in a community of practice they bond through a common endeavor and not affective ties because it seemed clear from the descriptions of the project that the teens had indeed bonded more of their shared participation in the project first and then through the project they developed affective ties.

Response 1

I now can place a reason to why I never, ever play on Facebook: I have absolutely no desire to make my life public. I’m a very private person with a very private life. The idea of having to manage a public identity is just too much for me, therefore I avoid it. I don’t even have the desire to post my “status” there. This is just a side note, really, but it puts me in that category described thus: “we need to figure out how to educate teens to navigate social structures that are quite unfamiliar to us because they will be faced with these publics as adults, even if we try to limit their access now” (Boyd 138). Truly, I am “quite unfamiliar” with these publics because of my own personal idiosyncrasies. I’m not a limiting kind of parent, but as a parent, I especially want to be the guide Boyd references, and will lean much about my wife for the immersion into the language of social networks.

I am still immersing myself into the language of pedagogies and school politics, which were so heavily alluded to in the two MacArthur articles, but much of Gee’s article was fresh air to me because it is uses a contextualization that I have been immersed in for years now. For instance, there is a book called, “The Purple Cow,” which talks about the development of niche novelty being of greater force than the creation of "better" commodities in the marketplace; you want to set yourself apart. Gee says, “What makes a product distinctive is its novelty … – customized – to serve the identity, lifestyle, or interests of a particular type of ‘customer’ …” (46). This was especially interesting in light of learning about MySpace and the fact that its novelty in relationship to musicians and music is what set it apart for teenagers. Knowing that many are abandoning MySpace for Facebook makes me wonder what it is in the novelty of Facebook that has customized it to serve our identities/lifestyles as a general society that attracts us to it.

Further, “What businesses market now are not products…but knowledge” (46) is extremely true based on what I have experienced. What I have learned about competitive advantage is, in fact, that knowledge capacity is the only true competitive advantage and that knowledge capacity is determined by multiplying your ability to discover with your ability to diffuse. Looking at networks and networking and at what happens with the SAB students, this idea especially holds true. Because of the social media, the SAB members are able to maximize their knowledge capacity about bylaws and such through a “community of learners” discovery of them and the inherent diffusion of that information across its membership. Their knowledge capability because of their informal use of these social media allows them to gain both identity and power in their situation. As hierarchical structures in the workplace become flatter, workgroups are able to spread their knowledge faster with the right kinds of technology. In our day and age, however, that technology is rarely easily accessible because either the lack of funding to put into place the media necessary or, more commonly, the old school thinking is still very much in management despite the creative use of resources that could be with some imagination and education.

Jeff Hill

I found a consistent progression in each article. They each started with the idea of language as both a barrier preventing acceptance and an equalizer because once the language was understood, the participants felt a sense of autonomy. This is important for the classroom because you don’t want students to feel as though they are only being acted upon, but that they are an integral member of the community and they in turn will be invested in the class or project. These articles are about how language (Discourse) creates a community.

I really like the vibe Gee generated when he examines language. He isn’t harshly making commentary, but is encouraging as he guides the reader though concepts and new ways of understanding a Discourse we may have thought we already knew.

“All language is meaningful only in and through the contexts in which it is used. All language is meaningful only on the basis of shared experiences and shared information (63).”

It’s because of what we share in the classroom that makes education possible. The meaning will come out of the whole, not the singular assignment, student, project, etc. The teacher continually contextualizes the classroom.

Gee continues, “it is important here to see the word ‘contextualised’ as naming an active process: the process of a person ‘contextualising’, that is, of a person making and doing a context, not just passively registering one. What does it mean to say we humans actively ‘contextualise’ language? ‘Context’ is not just ‘out there’. We do not just ‘reflect’ context when we speak or write. Rather, we always actively create ‘context’. We make the world around us mean certain things (64).”

In Boyd’s analysis of MySpace, she describes the process of creating a profile: “By looking at others’ profiles, teens get a sense of what types of presentations are socially appropriate; others’ profiles provide critical cues about what to present on their own profile. While profiles are constructed through a series of generic forms, there is plenty of room for them to manipulate the profiles to express themselves (127).”

The participant first learns the language, then engages with the community by presenting his or her page. It is only after a learning curve that he or she can fully invest her or himself in the community. The teacher creates those models for the students. Social networking sites are incredibly popular and this is a good example of something educators can learn from them.

There was a similar situation with Goldman’s case study with the student representatives at the local school board. It was technology that helped them first learn the language of the school board and then develop their own voices. It took some time, but they became influential within the context of the school board.

The students’ language and identity are expressed in the context of the classroom or community you are teaching. Allow them to form that identity.

Dialogue, Discourse, and Connection

I'm going to be honest, finding the connection between these articles was a little difficult for me. That said, each article had at least one concept that I really felt I latched onto:

Gee: "People as portfolios"(mentioned first on page 43, but several times after that)
Boyd: People "write themselves into being"on social networking sites (129).
Goldman et al: "Technologies, as communicative vehicles, serve as platforms for dialogue, discourse, and connection." (203)

Gee's article was at times fascinating to me and at times boring (can I say that a reading assignment was boring?). I loved the discussion of New Capitalism and how it requires a different kind of worker, and I REALLY loved it when he talked about ways that those reforms actually influence classroom practices. I don't doubt that the discussion of language etc. was relevant, it was just a little over my head. What I pulled from his article is this: our economy has drastically changed what it requires of (most) of its workers, demanding not that we become experts at a task and perform it well, but rather that we become "expert at becoming experts" (48) in a model that allows for adaptation and flexibility.

Things constantly change in our knowledge-based economy, so that it feels like it's more important to learn how to be a learner than it is to learn any specific skill. This notion of adaptability and flexibility seems to apply particularly to my field of study; I have chosen a field (and I guess since we're all here, we all chose it!) that is constantly in flux. The article on Social-Networking (speaking of which, did anybody else pity the researcher(s) who must have needed to spend hours lurking on teen's profiles on MySpace? There's nothing quite like online ethnography to make you feel like a creepy stalker...) inadvertently demonstrated this: any discussion of social networking needs to include Friendster, but who even uses Friendster anymore? The only reason I even know about it is from reading articles and watching Saturday Night Live. To understand current practices in social networking (which I really don't...), you don't only need to know Friendster, you need to know MySpace, Facebook, Flikr, and probably sites like Ning (my students laugh at me every time I mention Ning...) and LinkedIn. Many of these are completely different than when this article was written. Gee's notion of constantly adapting our knowledge base and skill set certainly applies in this discipline.

I did wish that there was more discussion of how these new developments actually affect our classroom practice. I loved the discussion of reciprocal and jigsaw teaching, and what I think I actually wanted to read was more of a discussion about specific pedagogical strategies to engage these new identities. How does the notion of youth "writing themselves into being" in spaces like MySpace change the way we act in the classroom? It is inarguable that these developments change the way that youth relate to one another and their teachers, but how does that affect the classroom? The media mentioned in the Goldman article, though interesting, seemed less important to youth social development than the social and cultural technology they described (which has little to do with media as I tend to think about it).

This is way past 300 words, so I'll end with this: I wish my personal portfolio included some sweet guitar-playing skills.

Reading Response 1- I AM...

...a daughter, a sister, a friend, a significant other (I’m not sure if we’re calling it girlfriend these days…), a graduate student, an English teacher, a bibliophile, a traveler, a John Mayer fan (sorry Amy)…the list goes on. As I read through the readings for the week, especially thinking of them in regards to the topic of identity, I kept coming back to this question: Who am I? And closely related to that is another question that kept popping up: How do others perceive me in various realms? It’s amazing what new media has done and continues to do in illuminating the complexity of these questions.

Considering the fact that “New People in New Worlds” was written by the same guy, it’s not a surprise that, in my head at least, the article dovetailed a bit with our discussion regarding Gee’s “Reading as a Situated Language” and our brief discussion of it. As I read, I kept making connections back to the idea of discourse, especially when thinking of examining people as portfolios and the conclusions made regarding language in and out of school. I thought that it was extremely interesting how by examining Sandra and Emily, Gee is able to demonstrate how indicative language is of who is and who isn’t a “capitalist portfolio person in the making.” Their identities are so connected to their language, and their “lifeworlds” are made so evident through their very words, that to say that language isn’t contextualized is, in my humble and highly educated opinion, a bit stupid. I really do agree with him when he says that “All language is meaningful only in and through the contexts in which it is used” (63). When I read that “we always actively create ‘context,’” I thought about the fact that, in the creation of meaning, I firmly believe that perception is reality. And, before I even read Gee’s example of sexual harassment, I thought of one that I use with my students when we talk about perception, which can, in my opinion, be transferred to the issue of contextualizing and creating meaning from language.

What I say to students is this:
“Imagine you receive a huge bouquet of flowers (boys and girls alike). They are gorgeous, and whether or not you like flowers, you can truly appreciate that they are beautiful and that they were very expensive. Now imagine that you look at the card, and they are from this adorable boy/girl that you’ve been interested in for forever and who you’ve been out with a few times. How do you feel about receiving the flowers?” After receiving the typical positive responses, I have them think about the very same bouquet, only this time when they open the card, the flowers are from the creepy boy/girl who has been following them around school, waiting outside their house, calling in the middle of the night and hanging up, etc. Now how do they feel about the flowers? Creeped-out is right.

The meaning of the gesture is found within its context rather than within the gesture itself, in much the same way that the meaning of language is found within its context as much as it is within the actual combination of letters written/spoken. As I understand Gee, it seems he’s saying that much of the problem of much of today’s underprivileged youth is found in their inability to comprehend the context of language, which marginalizes them from the “portfolio person” who is more likely to be successful in life. I can appreciate this, and I can even agree with it. In fact, as I read a quote from a 16-yer-old-girl named Nadine in the article “Why Youth Love Social Network Sites,” it was obvious language affects the classification and identification of youth. She says, “As a kid, you used your birthday party guest list as leverage on the playground…Ten, as you grew up and got your own phone, it was all about someone being on your speed dial. Well today it’s the MySpace Top 8. It’s the new dangling carrot for gaining superficial acceptance. Taking someone off your Top 8 is your new passive aggressive power play when someone pisses you off.” Wow. Isn’t it interesting how simple it is to make assumptions about this girl, based on the construction of and our contextualization of that one statement? I think so. And I think that if we were to look at her actual MySpace page, we could very easily find a completely different person there.

So, I guess my question now is: If I can create a complete identity for this girl from simple statement, how are people identifying me, especially once they've looked at my Facebook profile?