Reading Response 6 – Pluralism

I was totally unprepared for this chapter – I did not expect this forum of discussion based on the title, “The Changing Role of Schools.” This chapter was not only interesting to me because it was somewhat cynical in its perspectives – it appeared to me to have a kind of biting wit to it – but because Alisha, my wife, is currently in a multicultural education course at UVU and she absolutely hates it – because it is not pluralism. Of course, she did not know this term previous to my reading the chapter, but we have had discussions on the subject-matter and, as I read, I had to read to her the following passage:

The first is a veneer of tokenism in which it appears diversity is honoured – a spaghetti and polka multiculturalism – but in which nothing really changes in terms of patterns of educational outcomes.

For me, I could not help but think of her because she frequently talks about how all multiculturalism in the classroom is (according to her professor and much of her learning) exactly this idea of “spaghetti and polka multiculturalism” as it pertains to saying, “Hey look, we’ve got some Hispanics in our class…let’s talk about the ‘Day of the Dead’…” This hearkens back to the previously written idea that:

Education as a superficial kind of multiculturalism means that, at a surface level, the system recognizes, even honours, the variability of lifeworlds, but deep down, you’ve still got to make yourself over in the image of those lifeworlds closest to the culture of institutionalized learning and ‘mainstream’ power.

So, what are the implications of this thought? Pluralism, in my perspective, says that every student should be working in a kind of “self-directed study” with a learning plan specific to their lifeworld because we cannot be truly pluralist unless we actually change the form of our educational system to meet the individual, not the other way around. Again, we’re back to the “portfolio person.” Now, I could be misinterpreting this.

The final question of the text talks about “productive relationality” – essentially connecting with, entering in, and learning from (in a productive manner) other lifeworlds not our own. I got interested. They pointed to articles within the text (which is nice) that would inform us regarding the “how” of pluralism – and then I noticed that they all seem to do with learning a different language or collaboration. So, in essence, we have to do some kind of expatriate activity that gets us involved in the language of and collaboration with other lifeworlds…and all this within our schools? I love the idea of pluralism but its implementation kind of exceeds my abilities to perceive – perhaps it is too ideal even for me?

Reading Response 5 - Marc Prensky

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/learning/literacy/do-books-have-a-future.html?play

While I was reviewing the interviews online, this gentleman totally threw me for a loop when he, essentially, said that the written word was all but dead. “You don’t have to read them to take in what’s in a book…The stuff that’s worth reading, that really matters, is very small…There are very few books that you have to have read…Video is the new text.” Initially, I had an emotional response of, “What the heck?!” This is why I’m going to write based around him. I feel compelled to. “Books are not as good as the internet for contemporary learning.” Whoa! “We accelerate; we do that shorter and more intensely…”

Okay, so he’s ALL about intense experience in short spans. “Almost every book I read I wish were shorter…There’s so much that you don’t want in the stuff you read…” He’s okay, however, if you WANT to learn in a larger format, but “you have to discover that for yourself.” He doesn’t believe that we should be forced to learn any more than we need to learn from any book. If we want more, we can get more, otherwise why? Also, there is the idea that guided learning is the first thing, desire is the second. We have things that teachers need us/want us to learn – that can be pinpointed – (not unlike Darl leading us through “Birth of a Nation”) and if we want to visit the full text, we can. Is this necessarily intelligent thinking? I know that Mark Bauerlein doesn’t necessarily believe so, but then, he’s not necessarily part of the pro-digital media realm either. The two camps are very interesting. For the most part, watching these leading experts in the digital media, media literacy fields almost seems to dictate the need to be in one of the two factions: enthusiast or cynic. Henry Jenkins is fascinating because, if you go to his site, he seeks to be hip: “The first thing you are going to discover about me, oh reader of this blog, is that I am prolific as hell. The second is that I am also long-winded as all get out. As someone famous once said, ‘I would have written it shorter, but I didn't have enough time’” (http://henryjenkins.org/aboutme.html). This is his attempt to be part of the crowd that he is advocating by speaking a similar language. James Paul Gee doesn’t put up this kind of pretense, but is nonetheless not unlike Jenkins.

After Mr. Prensky caught my attention, I had to go and look him up online.

http://www.marcprensky.com/experience/default.asp

Okay, Mr. Prensky is a triple Master’s degree: MA in Theatre, MAT in Teaching (from Yale) and a MBA from Harvard. This is not a man who is necessarily illiterate or unintelligent. He also has taught in public education, performed in music and theatre, helped plan television programming and consulted in film investments, been involved in technology research, e-learning programs, and most recently is developing training games for corporations. He has a wide breadth of experience, knowledge, and interests – which would make him necessarily multimodal because of his multiple disciplines – so why would he be advocating that we read less, and engage with smaller bits that are “more important”? Granted, my upbringing is in reading books and I believe in reading thoroughly – cover-to-cover. For some of what he says, this makes sense, but what is Mr. Prensky leaving behind? What is happening if we are being possibly overabundant advocates of the new media that we neglect some of our past heritage of learning? He feels that getting a book is getting information that is 3 years old when we can have an author’s thoughts from 3 days ago quicker through the internet – is that necessarily better?

Media Response 4 - Opening Pandora

I personally discovered (I say personally because I have known about this website for a long time because many at work use it) Pandora this last Friday. For those of you who do not know what Pandora is, this is what they say about themselves: Click Here. In my words, Pandora is a website that allows you to “create” your own radio stations based on your tastes in music (having a great deal of input into the radio station even after it is “created”) and then saving them to an account so you can always reference those stations again. I was hooked; since Friday I already have 13 personal radio stations with varying styles depending upon what I know my usual moods are.

As fun as it is to be able to set up your own radio stations (that have minimal audio commercial interruptions, though there are always ads posted and the ability to buy the songs you have listened to), what is fascinating is the theoretical background behind the website’s creation: “The Music Genome Project.” 8 years of music analysis “uncovered” over 400 distinct “musical characteristics” (a very obvious structuralism perspective). Pandora relies upon trained music analysts (rather than software) to create these differentiations in taxonomy and connecting that musicological information to songs and artists.

Pedagogically, this raises for me some interesting ideas regarding literacies. One thing is this is audio literacy, and audio literacy that is looking at the codes involved in different genres of music from (as far as I can tell) a purely auditory experience. Another thing is we can use this as a microcosmic way of studying multimodal literacy: audio, visual, informational, and digital. Therefore, a discussion of how “The Music Genome Project” was possibly orchestrated and what standards were developed to “measure” music would be enlightening for a young group thinking about their own personal tastes of music and how they would describe their auditory experiences. Also, the microcosm of this one website and its marriage of modes could be broken down on so many levels: What does the site’s very existence say about us as individuals? What are the assumptions that are made regarding us as consumers? What part does the information about artists and songs play in our understanding of the media presented?

Reading Response 4

I admit this is more a post in preparation for my lesson than anything else.

I have talked at work about creating a “video game culture” as a strategy for developing skills and advocating a specific kind of work atmosphere built on competition and teamwork. We sat down one day, as a management team, and played several popular video games that specific groups were familiar with (addicted to) and then broke them down to find their core (very semiotic, I might add – and it has to be said that I am a bit of an eccentric but utilitarian manager). Below (perhaps for your personal interest, if you have any) is what they came up with that would be necessary to produce a “video game culture”:

• Total Everything
• Running Total of All Stats
• Ranks
• Overall
• Per Game
• Gamer Name/Avatar
• Choose Level/Style
• Experience Points
• Individual/Team Stats – always available
• Character Choice
• Perks to Earn
• Multiple Objectives in 1 Game
• In-Depth Stats – End of Game Report
• Set Weapons/Techniques
• Tracking of Use
• Time Count
• Different Game Types
• Training
• Boosts
• Replay (all or last event)
• Team/Individual Challenge
• Audio Recognition

Now, these are “aspects” of ‘competitive play’ games (first person shooters or racing games) but what they address are the necessary components of what make a game both addictive and engaging for my management team. This, to me, is not unlike Squire’s article where he tries to decipher the nature of open-ended video games and then tries to link it to educational purposes. For this blog, I’m interested in putting out there some things that he says which are of interest or concern to me:

“We need rigorous research into what players do with games (particularly those that don’t claim explicit status as educational), and a better understanding of the thinking that is involved in playing them” (167). This is not unlike what my management team and I are trying to do: figure out what makes the best games work and then tie it into a framework that meets the needs of our particular learning context.

He later asks the question that I believe is the crux of the article: “How to create spaces that ultimately exist for people to do interesting things?” After which, he says, “Good games are vehicles for player expression” and then wraps up the thought with a very poignant thought: “A potential paradox arises as educators seek to reconcile game players’ multiple ways of and reasons for being engaged in games, with the divergent learning outcomes that are likely to occur as a result” (178). In other words, how do we get learners to like doing it, be innovative in the process, and learn exactly what they need from the experience in order to fulfill core curriculum (or get results)?

Gaming, to me, is a strategy that can do a lot but it will take even more than that to design it appropriate for successful learning and skills acquisition that makes student and the state happy.

Media Response 3 - Super Why!

Super Why! Why? Well, because the subject is alphabet and reading. Granted, this site is not one that our secondary education students or college age students would ever find themselves going to, but this site also has a great deal to offer in its structure, as does the television show which it is drawing from.

http://pbskids.org/superwhy/

I spent the morning last weekend watching this show and then following the show onto the website. The show is an interesting forum for learning. Amongst all the “educational” television that the FCC has mandated television stations show for their children’s television, this one is particularly of interest to me. I watched other things like Curious George, Clifford the Big Red Dog, and Sid the Science Kid (wow he’s spastic), but I was impressed by one thing in particular in Super Why!

Here is the premise: Wyatt (aka Super Why) is a “regular” kid who can go into Storybook Village and meets with his friends (the Super Readers), characters generally drawn from fairytales: Princess Pea (aka Princess Presto), Little Red Riding Hood (aka Wonder Red), and Pig (aka Alpha Pig; I assume he’s one of the Three Little Pigs). They all have different “literacy” powers: to read, to spell, words and the alphabet. Pretty cheesy to us adults, but I have now watched toddlers eat it up.

What happens in every episode is a minor altercation in Storybook Village: someone won’t share, someone hurt someone else’s feelings, or a character won’t listen to another character when they rudely knock down their building blocks. The Super Readers “transform” after they “state their problem” – they have a question to answer. To answer the question, they go into a book to find the answer to that question. After a series of events that specifically engages skills such as knowing your alphabet or rhyming words, the most impressive part of the show occurs: they change the story they are in to develop a new story in an effort to change the outcome of the previous problem outside of the story.

Of note, this television show follows those four aspects of pedagogy we have earlier described in class. My favorite part is that transforming knowledge at the end. Doing the same thing in our classroom, as discussed in class, is a very difficult and time consuming thing, but I would recommend watching this show to see how it plays out in its simplicity – and maybe use in our classroom won’t seem as daunting.

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)!

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).

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).

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.

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.