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.
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2 comments:
Sometimes you make me feel really old Erika, because while I didn't even really use it at the time, I totally had a friendster account. Now I feel like an anthropological relic of an earlier time. Of course it's also evidence of just how quickly this technology has shifted and changed. I think we're already seeing a shift again with the growth in popularity of twitter.
I agree with you on wishing for more concrete examples of how these new teaching/learning styles should play out in the classroom. Also, it might be the somewhat awful essay tests I've been grading tonight but sometimes I get frustrated in thinking that while it's all well and good to teach some content in these new learning techniques other areas don't seem to lend themselves to these methods and that it doesn't matter how inventive the pedagogy when students have no interest in the material-- but then again maybe if the material were being taught in ways that more closely mimicked students other media interactions they would become more interested in the content?
It's really hard to say. Whenever I learn about new and inventive teaching styles that supposedly go across the curriculum, I always think, "What does this look like in a math classroom?" I kind of remember hating situated practice in the math classroom (one in trigonometry, our teacher made us take out land survey equipment and use trigonometry to figure out how tall/far away certain geographical features were...) because even tough it seemed authentic to the field (I've seen those survey crews), it didn't feel authentic for me.
So maybe it's not enough to engage in practices actually used in the discipline, but maybe we also have to find ways to make it authentic to the students' lives as you suggest.
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