Final Project Idea

I just read Merit's post from Monday: Notes Regarding the "Transgressively Industrial" in a Post-Industrial World: How Fifty Shades of Grey Blurs the Line Between Appropriation and Autonomous Creation.  It seems that critically objectionable material can spawn a lot of thinking.  (Check out her post to find more on 50 Shades and the state of fan-fiction, filtered through book critics and education theorists.)

Merit suggests that fan-fiction could have implications regarding how we teach English:


I think what fan fiction is forcing us to confront is that the line between appropriation and "autonomous creation" (term Jenkins') is often much messier than we often believe.  And, in this, I find a historical study of appropriation in general is a valid practice in the classroom.  Students may often feel inhibited when writing because they're not the "experts"; when they look at Shakespeare, they see a man who sat down in an day or two and wrote Othello while sitting alone at a desk.  In fact, collaboration and "borrowing" are essential for most writers (Proust is the only one I really know of who managed to write truly excellent books while sitting alone in a cork-lined room). But students don't usually see how many books most writers read in order to become good writers, nor how most of writing is the act of participating in a conversation that is already taking place by using allusions and generic forms common to the conversation to scaffold original thought.  Writing, like most other practices, is less about invention and more about innovation. And that reminder, if nothing else (in this case, there really is nothing else), is why Fifty Shades of Grey might ultimately be valuable in some capacity.


(Should I have written an article-spoiler warning?)  I'm going to borrow from my comments to her post.  


History of borrowing in class: Merit, you may have just written an amazing theme-based unit. Well-known classics are read, not solely because they're "essential" in English class, but to examine the context and process of making the book. Students go on to examine the context of writing today, and use new tools to collaborate and document their processes, and publish a text!


(Is this a really lazy blog entry? Copying and pasting from someone else's blog?)  For our class project, I think we can take this a step further:  

1. Begin with the theory of L & K and Jenkins.  
2. Identify an essential quality of 'new' literacies, a skill from Jenkins' 11 (or Karen's 5) that resonates, or we find challenging.  
3. Choose a canonical text, and outline how we might explore that text with our students, through the lens L & K or Jenkins.*
4. How might students apply that skill through a product of their own?  Which technologies might best facilitate this application?**
5. Which technologies would best suit the publication?

*I think that if the theory we are learning has any real value, we should be able to teach at least some aspect of that theory to our students.  Why shouldn't our students also be critical observers of their own education?

**I don't imagine that the final product would necessarily be lesson plans.  We just don't have the time to get that far.  My goal would be, to put a piece of this theory in context: 

• How it can apply to traditional LA content? 
• How can we challenge students to read traditional content in a new way? 
• What are the difficulties, and factors to consider? 
•  How can all of this lead to students collaborating to produce and publish something new?

I hope some of you are interested because I don't know how to do this on my own.

I don't know what our final product would look like.

Interested?

Suggestions?

First Podcast: Picking Up Sticks

Podcast Powered By Podbean


Sources:
     All sounds and edits are my own EXCEPT: the sample of traffic sounds, downloaded from Free Music Archive (a great resource, by the way, for music and sounds, free to use and edit, in more genres than I knew existed).
     Free Music Archive also made it easy to site the source, with the HTML code to imbed a link to the artist's page.

Traffic Congestion On Interstate 95 Northbound (Sounds of the Early 21st Century) / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Recording, Editing, Constructing with Sound:
Making this podcast, it was evidently clear how important it is to teach to different learning styles, and to offer students a variety of formats to represent their ideas.  I had fun making this.  Every step.  Finding sounds to record, and better methods of recording.  Imaging which sounds would best pair with what I wrote.  Actually, fun is an understatement.  After I had collected all of the samples, I poured everything I had into this for 6+ hours uninterupted.
Something important to remember: I entered this assignment with some experience in audio recording and sound editing, and familiarity with podcast, radio plays, and sound experiments.  So, an auditory learner, won't necessarily love this project, without some exposure to professionals and amateurs, and practice recording.


Performing:
The most challenging aspect was the performance.  It didn't matter how much time I spent planning and drafting before, or editing in Audacity later, I still had to repeat my parts until I could understand what I was saying.  Unless vocoders and text-readers become standard for audio news and essays, there's no cure for my enunciation. Which is strange, because I don't remember the last time I thought about my handwriting.
Beyond legibility, when recording my voice, I was really aware of how I was performing.  Was I conveying my excitement when I said I was excited?  When I complained about my jobs, was it humorous, or did I just sound miserable?  I swear I like to be outside. And I enjoyed landscaping in high school, when I could see results.  
I was aware while writing, that I was writing a script to spoken.  As much as I could, I kept my thoughts short.  I tried to use straight-forward language.  
These thoughts will be just as important when I'm standing in front of a class.  Am I conveying my excitement about this text? Is my speaking clear?  Are my intentions clear?  Students shouldn't have to interpret my tone during instruction.

To Update:
     I will try to share as much of my notes as I can.  I will also post some images of screenshots from my Audacity project. It's kind of a mess.  There were more than 20 tracks used, but I really didn't do anything advanced, in terms of recording and sound editing.

In Defense of Shiny Techno Toys

My Animoto:


Come Visit North Korea!

My process:  I started with the music.  I'm not sure where the initial impulse came from, but once I saw how restricting the themes can be (which can absolutely dominate the content of the images), I recognized that for those 30 seconds, at least the sound was totally in my control. 

The music: The song is a clip from Motherland Megamix from the album Radio Pyongyang: Commie Funk and Agit Pop from the Hermit Kingdom.  It is released through a record company that specializes in field recordings from remote locations around the world.  On this particular album, Christiaan Virant, compiles recordings from his visit to North Korea in an "audio collage:" "Captured within are rare live recordings from various performances and mass games demonstrations, sounds lifted from People’s Army television dramas, samples from hard-to-find CD releases obtained in the capital, and of course, news reports from the “real” Radio Pyongyang..."

Call to Class: How can we get into reading our own blogs?

I think Karen's right: we have to be the ones to make this work.  It we don't know how to connect with other blogs (in our own small class), draw interest to our own (maybe I'm speaking for myself here), establish some kind of online collaboration (not even community), how can we expect to teach our own students to use the class blog for something other than a homework bin?


How can we extract the kind of writing from each other that all of us would want to read? (We have to do this with our students.)

I don’t know anything about my classmates.  Maybe I would care more to check your blogs if I did.  I suggest we start a challenge: Design a post topic that everyone will want to write about, that will illicit responses that everyone will want to read.  

Blog Writing: Who's my audience for this?

Who is my audience? My writing here is awkward, stilted.  Actually, I don’t know what it’s like, because I don’t want to go back and read it. I’m writing to my classmates, but I know that no one’s really looking (I can see the views) and I know that I’m not really looking at anyone else’s.  And I’m also writing for “the world” or THE INTERNET, so I tone it down, I limit links to controversial content.


But what does it mean to be available to the world?  I have four blogs in my dashboard.  Three of them inactive.  And apparently, these blogs continue to get hits from time to time from surprising sources: Who in Australia is interested in a 9th grade humanities course?  Who in France is interested in my thoughts on readings for a Visual Culture class?  Apparently, last month, those two people were.  My thinking is, unless I actively seek to promote my blog, linking to others, and .... (not really sure how else blog promotion is done).  Unless I actively promote, it seems I will draw as much attention as a candle in the woods, dense with night-time darkness.  If no one can see me, I might as well play a little.  Pick my nose if I feel like it.  Eat like a slob.   No one will see the stains on my shirt.  If they do, no one has left any comments yet.


What does it mean to take chances with my writing?  I don't know what content exactly.  But there have been posts I've published, that I couldn't stop thinking about, that made me cringe when I thought of the possibility of someone finding it, that brought me back to my lap top later to unpublish and correct.  I think that if my writing can make me feel a little anxious, I might be getting to something honest.

Diigo v. Delicious

Tinkering with Social Bookmarking


I should start off saying, this sub-title is misleading.  I've only read about the social aspect of these sites described by Richardson (89-99), with tagging, and RSS feeds of user tags, etc.  I have been tinkering with adding and organizing links. 

Google Earth and ELA and ESOL

This past weekend, I took a workshop on Literature in the ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) classroom.  The concern for the lack of fiction (novels, poetry, short stories, etc.) is not unique to ELA (English Language Arts), and many of the claims made by TESOL theorists apply to English instruction for native speakers.  Collie & Slater, Literature in the Language Classroom, note that fiction provides “a rich context in which individual lexical or syntactical items are made more memorable” (5). You want to teach kids to pay attention to language? Make sure that language they're reading is compelling enough to experience and remember it.


I didn't need much convincing. What I wanted to explore, was how to use authentic texts (not written or adapted for specific educational purposes) with struggling readers. For the required group lesson plan, our professor, Dr. Fuchs, added the additional challenge of using technology.

Google Earth for Education and Activism

A cursory list of resources for using Google Earth in the classroom.

Online Now

Film-makers' Perspective on the Web: Online Now



The short film (about 11 minutes), composed of many vignettes, explores and explodes the impact of the Internet on social interaction.  This film seems to highlight concerns threaded throughout our in-class discussions: Isn't the Internet a substitute for real interaction?  A teenage girl texts at a movie theater seated next to her younger sister, a young boy hides inside his oversize jacket texting on the playground, a young woman seems isolated in an elevator surrounded by others texting on their phones, a father grows irritated while watching a movie at home with his family, and his children seated on the same couch are somewhere else, on the phone, on the lab top, not present with him and his wife.

On New Literacies

In this chapter, Literacy is defined within a particular context, historical, social, cultural and within the history of pedagogy.
"Literacies are bound up with social, institutional and cultural relationships, and can only be understood when they are situated within their social, cultural and historical contexts" (12)

     In a recent class discussion on this chapter, there seemed to be some confusion or difficulty in pinning down, and itemizing 'new' literacies.  Speaking for myself, I was under the impression that there was some new pedagogical model called New Literacy.  After going back to this chapter, I've ruled out that possibility.  Because ____ & ____ state that 'new' literacies are made of different ontological "stuff," I'd like to clarify at least what it isn't.  I don't anticipate reaching transcendence, "in which two forces that exist in tension with one another 'work out their differences', as it were and evolve into something that bears the stamp of both, yet is qualitatively different from each of them" (29).  I'm not feeling that ambitious. 


     Below, I summarize some of the movements discussed in this chapter, and draw connections to my teaching experience.  I also raise some questions that I think may hold 'new' literacies accountable to the past. It's not transcendence, but no one was really expecting to find that in a grad student's blog.

Tech and Pedagogy

My intentions as a writer
     With this blog, my posts will often be very rough drafts, sometimes including many scattered scraps of thoughts.  If blogging is truly collaborative, it seems necessary for what is published, to still be in process.  Clearly, I'm still coming to terms with this, because I feel the need to preface an incomplete piece of writing.

Scattered thought/bullet points
     I also find it helpful to write thoughts as I think them, leaving notes and reminders to come back to, which also demarcating paragraphs with titles, when I would otherwise have obsessed a little longer to find that best transition.  "Scattered," though, is pejorative.  The potential for connectivity in blog writing, as suggested by our readings, requires an embrace of this kind of thinking.  This writing isn't chronological.


This post is incomplete, and many items from this list below will remain unanswered. (Bolded text in parenthesis is there as a note to myself to return later).

This is a test for mobile blogging. Just in case I have something so urgent for my edu blog, I really can NOT wait until I get to a computer.