Saturday, April 10, 2010
Sunday, April 4, 2010
A symphony of “wows” and “yuks”
reflections on futurelab.org.uk’s article, “The Future’s bright, the future is…”
Sometimes I include the random PowerPoint slide of a rabbit in a football costume or of Darth Vader teaching grammar to young students. It’s fun stuff: I see how long I can carry on the ruse as if the slide is actually part of the real lesson, and make wild connections and long, drawn out, and detailed anecdotes that give credence to the notion that, “Oh yeah, after the Star Wars series Darth often appeared in elementary schools to teach the past participle to ten year olds,” or, “Yes, definitely the first mammal besides homo sapiens to get drafted into the NFL was a rabbit—of course, they are both fast and can change direction on a dime with those sturdy hind legs—and rumor has it that this rabbit was a distant, if not direct, descendant of the hare that was the inspiration for Warner Brother’s Bugs Bunny.”
I am not really very funny, and the kids know it. I am only funny because I am not funny, and I generally apologize on the first day of class in September for all of the unfunny hyjinks I will drag my students through over the course of the school year. I don’t even use flashing lights or music (very often) to get a reaction out of my students—I just insist that my story/PowerPoint slide/random video is in fact true and entirely related to the task at hand—and yet they still remember such jokes at the end of the year (or the end of their high school careers) much more readily than they remember the symbolic significance of the Mississippi River in Huckleberry Finn (much to my chagrin). Action research for my master’s degree thesis involved investigating the correlation between the use of humor in the classroom and levels of student engagement. It turns out there is one, and the trick is to try and infuse that humor with images and ideas that are also relevant to the lesson/idea/task at hand so as to ensure better and longer-term understanding for students.
But I’m just one person and, again, not very funny—nor am I bestowed with expensive tools and expertise in the areas of persuasion. Nonetheless, students believe my most ridiculous claims when coupled with a mere (ridiculous, at that) picture. And this concerns me.
If a noticeable number of my students are gullible enough to (time and again) fall for Mr. Fuller’s in-class song and dance, just imagine what they might be susceptible to believe online—when actual marketers with actual agendas and actual tools and actual expertise place a well-aimed and actual advertisement in front of them on the internet. “No problem,” you say, “young people can tell what is a commercial and what is ‘real.’” Yes, perhaps. Most of the time. But how about when those same “marketers”—or “designers of content,” as seems a more apt description of today’s online authors—deliver information within a context that is seamlessly integrated with other, seemingly important and legitimate content? What then?
At its most basic levels, the ability to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent, sincerely wise and merely flashy—whether in an online environment or a very real physical environment, say, at the grocery market (are online environments “real” or not?)—is the ability to distinguish between reality and unreality, between truth and hoax. I sometime wonder in what ways P.T. Barnum might have leveraged the internet. Certainly, he would have been master orchestrator of wows and yuks.
What kind of symphony do we want our future-adult students to play in? What kind of symphony will they play in? Who will be the conductor, and who will be willing to call out the conductor when his directions are, well, just wrong?
“However, people’s dependence on multimedia, rather than on traditional text-based sources of information, could make them particularly susceptible to what scientist, writer, broadcaster and member of the House of Lords Professor Susan Greenfield calls “the ‘yuk’ and ‘wow’ factors”. The more exciting the presentation, the more likely they are to be impressed by it. So, for an obvious example, young people using the net to get the truth may decide between creationism or evolution not on the quality of the arguments but on the cleverness of the web designers’ pyrotechnics. But healthy amounts of adolescent skepticism (“whatever”) kick in at about the same time as acne. So, if we are able to equip young people with the skills to evaluate different sources in the context of a media-rich world, pupils will know how important it is to take everything they find online - however wicked the graphics - with a huge pinch of salt.”
Sometimes I include the random PowerPoint slide of a rabbit in a football costume or of Darth Vader teaching grammar to young students. It’s fun stuff: I see how long I can carry on the ruse as if the slide is actually part of the real lesson, and make wild connections and long, drawn out, and detailed anecdotes that give credence to the notion that, “Oh yeah, after the Star Wars series Darth often appeared in elementary schools to teach the past participle to ten year olds,” or, “Yes, definitely the first mammal besides homo sapiens to get drafted into the NFL was a rabbit—of course, they are both fast and can change direction on a dime with those sturdy hind legs—and rumor has it that this rabbit was a distant, if not direct, descendant of the hare that was the inspiration for Warner Brother’s Bugs Bunny.”
I am not really very funny, and the kids know it. I am only funny because I am not funny, and I generally apologize on the first day of class in September for all of the unfunny hyjinks I will drag my students through over the course of the school year. I don’t even use flashing lights or music (very often) to get a reaction out of my students—I just insist that my story/PowerPoint slide/random video is in fact true and entirely related to the task at hand—and yet they still remember such jokes at the end of the year (or the end of their high school careers) much more readily than they remember the symbolic significance of the Mississippi River in Huckleberry Finn (much to my chagrin). Action research for my master’s degree thesis involved investigating the correlation between the use of humor in the classroom and levels of student engagement. It turns out there is one, and the trick is to try and infuse that humor with images and ideas that are also relevant to the lesson/idea/task at hand so as to ensure better and longer-term understanding for students.
But I’m just one person and, again, not very funny—nor am I bestowed with expensive tools and expertise in the areas of persuasion. Nonetheless, students believe my most ridiculous claims when coupled with a mere (ridiculous, at that) picture. And this concerns me.
If a noticeable number of my students are gullible enough to (time and again) fall for Mr. Fuller’s in-class song and dance, just imagine what they might be susceptible to believe online—when actual marketers with actual agendas and actual tools and actual expertise place a well-aimed and actual advertisement in front of them on the internet. “No problem,” you say, “young people can tell what is a commercial and what is ‘real.’” Yes, perhaps. Most of the time. But how about when those same “marketers”—or “designers of content,” as seems a more apt description of today’s online authors—deliver information within a context that is seamlessly integrated with other, seemingly important and legitimate content? What then?
At its most basic levels, the ability to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent, sincerely wise and merely flashy—whether in an online environment or a very real physical environment, say, at the grocery market (are online environments “real” or not?)—is the ability to distinguish between reality and unreality, between truth and hoax. I sometime wonder in what ways P.T. Barnum might have leveraged the internet. Certainly, he would have been master orchestrator of wows and yuks.
What kind of symphony do we want our future-adult students to play in? What kind of symphony will they play in? Who will be the conductor, and who will be willing to call out the conductor when his directions are, well, just wrong?
I try to keep me out of it, but I’m both smack in the center and just a link in a chain
reflections on futurelab.org.uk’s article, “The Future’s bright, the future is…”
I try not to write in the first person, and I think this is because as a teacher of English whose Advanced Placement curriculum is heavy on analysis, the old rule of thumb in conventional academic discourse is that first-person “I” is not used; rather, an objective, persuasive narrator maintains a person-less hold on the text that admits to no “I,” to no sense of infallible human error, but only is concerned with the ideas and analysis embedded in the text itself, as if those ideas simply and incredibly exist—no need for the feeble reassurance of a human author.
Obviously, I have already broken my own rule. But you knew that way up at the beginning of the previous paragraph.
But sometimes when we struggle to make sense of something (OK: “Sometimes when I struggle to make sense of something”), I need to say it simply like it is: “I think that….” This phrasing suggests more honestly where I am truly at in a given situation as a learner: I don’t yet know anything about this topic well enough to make a bold statement infused with certainty, but I am willing to venture into the realm of ideas, play around for a while, and try to figure some things out.
So…
I think that futurelab.org.uk’s article, “The Future’s bright, the future is…” is entirely spot-on when it comes to outlining one of the big challenges faced by students today—that students less and less need a curriculum based on content and more and more need one based on digital literacy skills. Absolutely. (I also think that I should be making my statements in a less first-person-esque fashion, but—as noted by such notable figures as Body Dylan and the folks at futurelab [actual, honest question: Who wrote this article anyway? I assume it is corporate authorship, as no author or authors are mentioned]—“the times, they are a changin’”). And I’ve thought this for years now, and I’ve thought this even more so every single week this winter and spring of 2010. Is it something to do with starting a new decade that seems to encourage this thought that our technological world—our education world—is really changing as fast as we often predicted it would? Or is it really, actually starting to change as fast as we often predicted it would and we can no longer ignore the signs?
It is very difficult (impossible?) to know whether it is really true that “things are changing faster than ever before” today, as that sort of statement has also presumably been true at any other moment in our—at least recent—history. And yet: there is this underlying feeling, as a person today living in a technologically connected first-world country, as a teacher of ideas and writing, that my life—and particularly the life of my students—will operate in entirely different ways when it comes to information and meaning-making in the…quite near future. Does anyone else feel like a clock is ticking?
I didn’t want to use “I” to begin a discussion of this article’s quotation because, well, I wanted to make a well thought-out, analytical claim about the above quotation rather than “talking about it.” But the truth is I feel like any statement I make about the statement that “teaching students digital literacy skills is important and growing more so each day” is just another statement that I’ve already made. A number of times. Very recently.
So it feels like the only place there is to go is “I.” To me. To connect up thoughts, feelings—personal and professional—in a way that makes sense.
And the irony here is that—ostensibly—this is exactly where web 2.0 tools are taking us, each user: to a place where information, thoughts, ideas, feelings, and meaning are no longer consumed and analyzed in a discourse involving three people—teacher, student, and author—but in a way that involves every single person who might be connected to the student, who might stumble upon or be guided to the student’s reactions to the information, and in a way that is—because the student’s name (and often times picture, too) is stamped right on every single comment or reply she makes on her blog or class wiki or Blackboard learner management system. Learning—the interaction of ideas and meaning—is becoming both more personal and more social at the same time: more personal because the individual is now encouraged to put her spin on information and recreate it and rebroadcast it in a way that is intimately and distinctly hers, and more social because this broadcasted recreation—this mashup—will come back to her with comments and critiques from an audience that, well, exceeds her former educational audience of three by factors of ten, hundreds, thousands….
Strangely, the web 2.0 experience is “all about me” and “all about everybody else”: when I sit here at my computer and arrange the world on it in exactly the fashion that I want to, it feels very much like I’m at the center of an ordered information universe that I created; at the same time, I realize that the galaxy orbiting around me is the very thing that made it possible for me to create my own “information universe,” and that every other person like me out there in cyberspace is having the same experience. It is at this moment that I glance up at the “Hyperlink” button on my blog and am reminded that a much more accurate description of my reality online is as merely one link in a long, long, long chain. A "web" of chains.
"When e-learning provides so many resources and in a way so easily personalised to meet their specific needs, what added value can schooling bring to the educational process? Answers to that question - and let’s hope there are hundreds - will help fashion a curriculum which will focus not on content but on equipping students with the skills they’ll need to select, evaluate and make most effective use of so much multimedia all-singing, all-dancing material."
I try not to write in the first person, and I think this is because as a teacher of English whose Advanced Placement curriculum is heavy on analysis, the old rule of thumb in conventional academic discourse is that first-person “I” is not used; rather, an objective, persuasive narrator maintains a person-less hold on the text that admits to no “I,” to no sense of infallible human error, but only is concerned with the ideas and analysis embedded in the text itself, as if those ideas simply and incredibly exist—no need for the feeble reassurance of a human author.
Obviously, I have already broken my own rule. But you knew that way up at the beginning of the previous paragraph.
But sometimes when we struggle to make sense of something (OK: “Sometimes when I struggle to make sense of something”), I need to say it simply like it is: “I think that….” This phrasing suggests more honestly where I am truly at in a given situation as a learner: I don’t yet know anything about this topic well enough to make a bold statement infused with certainty, but I am willing to venture into the realm of ideas, play around for a while, and try to figure some things out.
So…
I think that futurelab.org.uk’s article, “The Future’s bright, the future is…” is entirely spot-on when it comes to outlining one of the big challenges faced by students today—that students less and less need a curriculum based on content and more and more need one based on digital literacy skills. Absolutely. (I also think that I should be making my statements in a less first-person-esque fashion, but—as noted by such notable figures as Body Dylan and the folks at futurelab [actual, honest question: Who wrote this article anyway? I assume it is corporate authorship, as no author or authors are mentioned]—“the times, they are a changin’”). And I’ve thought this for years now, and I’ve thought this even more so every single week this winter and spring of 2010. Is it something to do with starting a new decade that seems to encourage this thought that our technological world—our education world—is really changing as fast as we often predicted it would? Or is it really, actually starting to change as fast as we often predicted it would and we can no longer ignore the signs?
It is very difficult (impossible?) to know whether it is really true that “things are changing faster than ever before” today, as that sort of statement has also presumably been true at any other moment in our—at least recent—history. And yet: there is this underlying feeling, as a person today living in a technologically connected first-world country, as a teacher of ideas and writing, that my life—and particularly the life of my students—will operate in entirely different ways when it comes to information and meaning-making in the…quite near future. Does anyone else feel like a clock is ticking?
I didn’t want to use “I” to begin a discussion of this article’s quotation because, well, I wanted to make a well thought-out, analytical claim about the above quotation rather than “talking about it.” But the truth is I feel like any statement I make about the statement that “teaching students digital literacy skills is important and growing more so each day” is just another statement that I’ve already made. A number of times. Very recently.
So it feels like the only place there is to go is “I.” To me. To connect up thoughts, feelings—personal and professional—in a way that makes sense.
And the irony here is that—ostensibly—this is exactly where web 2.0 tools are taking us, each user: to a place where information, thoughts, ideas, feelings, and meaning are no longer consumed and analyzed in a discourse involving three people—teacher, student, and author—but in a way that involves every single person who might be connected to the student, who might stumble upon or be guided to the student’s reactions to the information, and in a way that is—because the student’s name (and often times picture, too) is stamped right on every single comment or reply she makes on her blog or class wiki or Blackboard learner management system. Learning—the interaction of ideas and meaning—is becoming both more personal and more social at the same time: more personal because the individual is now encouraged to put her spin on information and recreate it and rebroadcast it in a way that is intimately and distinctly hers, and more social because this broadcasted recreation—this mashup—will come back to her with comments and critiques from an audience that, well, exceeds her former educational audience of three by factors of ten, hundreds, thousands….
Strangely, the web 2.0 experience is “all about me” and “all about everybody else”: when I sit here at my computer and arrange the world on it in exactly the fashion that I want to, it feels very much like I’m at the center of an ordered information universe that I created; at the same time, I realize that the galaxy orbiting around me is the very thing that made it possible for me to create my own “information universe,” and that every other person like me out there in cyberspace is having the same experience. It is at this moment that I glance up at the “Hyperlink” button on my blog and am reminded that a much more accurate description of my reality online is as merely one link in a long, long, long chain. A "web" of chains.
Library 2.0 mashup--an animoto video
An animoto video illustrating librarians Lilian Trousdell and Sharon Doyle's vision of library 2.0.
OA and OJS--making quality accessible
In his article, “Open Access and the Open Journal Systems: Making Sense All Over,” UBC School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies Assistant Professor Rick Kopak puts forth a positive review of Open Access (OA) and the Open Journal Systems (OJS), discussing ways in which OA and OJS can serve as wholly positive technologies in the effort to encourage our students’ critical thinking skills.
A serious issue facing K-12 teachers and TLs today is the pressing need to teach digital literacy to students, and the rush to find quality resources and tools to do so effectively has this teacher, at least, scrambling. Because cultivating the ability to successfully search for, find, evaluate, and use quality information is a skill that I regard as so important for students to master, I feel a genuine sense of urgency around teaching this skill and teaching it well. Kopak hints at the genesis of this sense of anxiety that I feel as a teacher: “The increasing availability of information via the Web brings much of good quality, but also much of less discernible authority, trustworthiness, and provenance.”
The good news offered by OJS technology, then, is that it offers greater access to “the production and distribution of the main currency of the academic research process, the scholarly journal article.” In this way, my students researching particular topics for personal or group projects would now have a new option for their first source for information searching rather than that current—and relatively long-standing—favorite, Google. Essentially, OJS give students easy access to quality information. Granted, this quality information may also be available on databases that the school library subscribes to, but OJS has the obvious advantage of being free and accessible to all—not just students enrolled in my school with passwords to access my library’s database subscription. As a result, OJS, in some ways, helps skirt one of the big issues that many students (and teachers, horrifyingly witnessing the result of student research) face: successfully locating quality information on the Web. This one detail looms large in the lives of some students: some of my students feel so overwhelmed by the thought of sifting through Web-based information in order to locate usable information that they sometimes procrastinate in their efforts on what should be a fairly simple assignment; when simply finding acceptable content is only the first step in a project, and even that step seems consistently insurmountable—to overdramatize the situation in distinctly teenage fashion—“Why go on!?”
The above is not to say that OJS are a panacea with the effect of teachers no longer needing to teach digital literacy to students. OJS are, however, powerful tools that enable students to have a first place to look—at least one de facto “wise choice” that can be made before diving into the information sea—or crawling upon that information web?—that is Google.
As an additional benefit, OJS include an interface—known as Reading Tools—that provides a number of items that enrich the learner’s experience with the online scholarly article, ideally leading to great critical engagement. The Reading Tools space for any article includes links to such things as the following:
• “Abstract” provides the abstract in a second window
• “Review policy” provides information about the journal’s policies for receiving and reviewing submissions
• “How to cite the item” includes quick information on article citation
• “Supplementary files” include downloadable supporting materials associated with the article
• “Notify colleague” provides an instant email client with the title of the article in the subject line
• “Email the author” provides the same but with the author’s email address inserted
These features have obvious potential for increasing students’ critical engagement with an article, and serve as excellent examples of productive applications of the web 2.0 hallmark of information-sharing and collaboration.
[image attribution]
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