This was my very favourite part of this course. I not only enjoyed creating my own project, but I also enjoyed having the opportunity to explore all of the submissions of my classmates as well. It is amazing to me how we all read the same list of criteria and project expectations and we all came up with such diverse submissions. I really wanted to create a multimedia presentation that drew upon a number of major learning areas for me and I am very pleased with my end result. Here is my introductory post and a link to my project website: My Motivation: In some of my other MET courses I have created interactive web pages as a part of group assignments, but I have not yet attempted to create one on my own. Based on the content of the course and our focus on the affordances of hypertext and the internet, I was motivated to create a multimedia presentation for my RipMixFeed assignment instead of using one tool in isolation. There were so many directions that I wanted to take with this reflective task, that I needed more than one outlet to express myself. An additional source of motivation was the fact that I would like to create an interactive web site based learning module for use with my own students in the future and I thought that trying out my idea here would be an ideal experience to prepare me for that endeavour. What I have attempted to achieve: In this project, I have attempted to achieve an interactive website that allows my readers/viewers to peruse the available information and then take their own individual path through the posted, linked, and embedded materials. The open website format complete with hypertext links to external websites allows site visitors to skim over the parts that marginally interest them, while digging more deeply into the areas that are of greater interest. I also wanted to bring in a range of concepts from our studies and use them to evaluate my selected theme ‘old becomes new.’ The Affordances: As mentioned above, the affordances that a website has to offer has allowed me to produce a multimedia project including a wide variety of resources within it. I have included a video that I created using Windows Movie Maker to act as both a hook and an explanation of my inspiration. I used hypertext to provide links to other web based resources, and I also embedded an audio file that served as a source for some of my research. In addition to this, I used the web tool ToonDoo.com to create a simple comic to reiterate my running theme. Simply because I am more comfortable and familiar with weebly.com, that is the web design site that I selected. I had originally considered simply making a list of bookmarked sites using delicious.com, but I felt that it did not encompass enough of my learning. Potential Drawbacks: Being that my website based project is quite expansive, viewers may not take the time to travel very deeply into the website. I have tried to keep the site quite minimalistic, only adding in the necessary navigation to lead the site visitors through four main areas; 1.) home- a brief introduction and welcome, 2.) the song (my project catalyst), 3.) copyright and the Creative Commons, and 4.) my learning connections. Being that the internet is a constantly changing entity, there is the potential that some of my links may no longer be active (hopefully not in such a short time from the creation of the site to its publication). The website format may also not appeal to all viewers who would prefer to view the presentation through just one mode. I have posted my intro video below and here is the link to my project website. I am glad that this article was presented to us later on in the course, as I feel that I was able to interact with it on a deeper level partly because of its timely appearance, and also because I have previously read the New London Group article in another MET course. I was able to make some connections with the text this time around that I had not previously made. Here are my reflections on the article after reading and reflecting upon it through a new lens:
The word literacy today is a very organic and dynamic term that seems to be expanding and morphing as quickly as the technology that we now use to explore text and media is. In fact, the concept of literacy is changing so much that the term multiliteracies has come into being. According to the New London Group, multiliteracies focus on ‘modes of representation much broader than language alone’ (1996, p. 64). The Oxford English Dictionary defines literacy in the following ways: 1.) the quality, condition, or state of being literate; the ability to read and write. Also: the extent of this in a given community, region, period etc. 2.) in extended use (usually with modifying word). The ability to ‘read’ a specified subject or medium; competence or knowledge in a particular area such as computer literacy, cultural literacy etc. These definitions further support the New London Group’s claim that the term literacy undoubtedly has come to encompass far more than just language, hence the coining of the term multiliteracies. The New London Group posits that the ‘languages needed to make meaning are radically changing in three realms of our existence: our working lives, our public lives (citizenship) and our private lives (lifeworld)’ (1996, p. 65). I would like to use this notion as an entry point to examine the purpose of education as outlined by the New London Group, as well as other purposes of education that might productively be considered. I believe that a part of my role as an educator is to prepare my students to be functioning and hopefully contributing members of society when they exit the school system. All three elements mentioned above (working, public and private lives), are critical aspects of successful citizens. Preparing students via their education for these realms of adulthood and providing them with the necessary skill set that they will need to successfully navigate through their future public, private and work lives is also vital. Not all students will choose to further their academic studies beyond high school, but all students will eventually need to function as adults in society. Like the concept of literacy, the purpose of education is shifting too. As educator’s we must now educate the whole child in ways that traditionally has not been done in typical classroom settings and this shift can at least partly be attributed to changes in literacy. In this week’s article, the New London Group mentions ‘the new language of work’ (1996, p. 66). As an educator, I am constantly bombarded with 21st century learning jargon. We are told that the employers of today and assuredly the employers of the future are going to be looking for active thinkers, collaborators, contributors and creative problem solvers in their prospective employees. Students entering the workplace will need to be ready to cope with and thrive in an environment that ‘stresses adaptation to constant change through thinking and speaking for oneself, critique and empowerment, innovation and creativity, technical and systems thinking, and learning how to learn’ (New London Group, 1996, p. 67). These words do not fit the picture of the traditionally educated student that rises out of an ‘old school’ education system in which the teacher imparts all knowledge and the students’ role is limited to regurgitating the information adequately on a test as a gage of their success as a learner. If the expectation placed upon students in the future work place is changing, so too must the educational purposes and practices of today. By teaching our students in a way that prepares them for the new language of work, we will enable students to become employees who are ready and willing to ‘speak up, negotiate, and to be able to engage critically with the conditions of their working lives’ (New London Group, 1996, 67). One would like to think that young adults leaving school and entering into the work force with such skills would not only be an asset to an employer, but to society as a whole as well. The need for teaching in a way that addresses multiliteracies has a great deal of merit. I believe that the value and importance of this is illustrated in the rise of a number of new school based initiatives that are gaining in popularity and are current educational buzzwords. Many teachers and administrators right now are gearing their professional development focuses on things like self-regulation (like the Mind Up program), and critical thinking and inquiry based learning (like the Critical Thinking Consortium), both of which are examples of educational approaches to cultivate 21st century learners. Education today is no longer a process in which content is put forth by teachers, consumed by students and is then reproduced by them in culminating assessments; it is instead a process that has meaning making at its core. References: New London Group (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66, 1, 60-92. Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved from http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/109054?redirectedFrom=literacy#eid A part from using Powtoon and Moovly a few times for short animated videos, I have not had any experience at all with movie making. I felt more comfortable on my computer than I did on my iPad, so I chose to use Windows Movie Maker and although it was a very challenging endeavour, I am pleased with the end result. Here is my post, video and script for my first major project for this course; my documentary on the history of paper and the pen. My video documentary is a brief history of paper and the pen. As I chose to present information on both of these important tools in the development of writing, the historical account that I was able to give for each is quite brief and really only scratches the surface of the evolution of the two. I chose to cover both topics as I felt that they are so tightly bound together that addressing one without the other would have resulted in an end product that felt incomplete. I tried to share information about the way in which paper and the pen changed over time, while also addressing the way in which these changes impacted the development of writing in society. I chose to create my video using Windows Movie Maker. Having not ever made a video of any sort outside of making short animated movies online using tools such as powtoon.com and moovly.com, I had very little experience with the movie making process. I initially began to create my video with a newer version of Windows Movie Maker, but after too many frustrating attempts to get started I called upon the assistance of my husband to help me download an older version of the program that used an interface that was much more similar to the drag and drop timeline format that I was used to from my experience with the above mentioned web resources. Once I had this older version at my fingertips, I was able to import my selected images and record the narration for each section of my video with little to no trouble. Although my video may appear plain, and lacks video transitions, after viewing my production with and without animation, I actually preferred the simplicity of the video without transitions. I felt that it looked more polished and professional and less like a novice video presentation. I selected my images thoughtfully and carefully and tried to pair my graphics with the related narration as much as possible. All of the images that were used in the making of the documentary were taken either from flickr.com’s Creative Commons gallery, or from the Wikimedia Commons. For a first attempt at making a video production such as this, I am pleased with my end product. I was actually grateful for the time limit criteria for this video assignment, as it forced me to really narrow in on my topic and revise my research to focus on what I felt was the most relevant information in regard to my selected topic. I hope that you enjoy my video and as someone very new to video making, any constructive criticism that you would like to share with me would be greatly appreciated. Occasionally, there is a break in the formality of the discourse in the web blog community. One of my classmates began one of her submissions this week with a Weird Al song clip and surprisingly, this combined with her own personal opinions on the matter, resulted in my own personal reflections about my choices and the expectations that I place upon my own students in regard to the quality of their writing. Here is the video clip and my own reply to the classmate that shared the clip in her post. The current module requires us to be reading about a variety of big ideas about the history and transformation of text from a variety of authors with much to say on the topic. Normally, I am able to narrow in on a focus question quite quickly in my course work and my post is often taking shape in my head while I am reading the article(s). This week however, I got to the end of my readings and I was not sure which direction I wanted to take. In the end, I decided to dig more deeply into two authors that were not being posted about by many other classmates in order to push myself to do some deep thinking and to possibly spark some new discourse about a slightly different topic, as much of what is being posted pertains to Ong’s thoughts on the origins of text. Here is what I ended up posting:
Although I have studied linguistics in the past, I was struck by a number of points made in this week’s readings that for some reason had not really penetrated my thinking previously. After completing the readings from this portion of the module, I came away with a feeling that the advent of writing was both a blessing and a curse; it is a challenge to become literate, but it opens doors that would have remained shut if humanity had not crossed the bridge to literacy. Having been a learning assistance teacher for four years, an instructor and an assistant to the director of education at a remedial learning center for 11 years, and a classroom teacher for 9 years I have had a wealth of experience working with students that struggle to both decode and encode text. With my specialized training, I felt that I had some understanding of the barriers that were potentially standing in the way of these struggling learners being able to become proficient readers and writers. It was not until I read Gaur’s (1992) breakdown of the complexity of phonetic writing in our module notes that I began to get a much clearer picture in my head of just what is truly involved in the encoding process. This idea that essentially humans are first tasked with constructing the sound (or thought) of words, then they must deconstruct that sound into individual phonemes, and finally they are required to reconstruct the word using symbols that we have assigned to represent the individual units of sound. Add to this the need to attend to all of the established writing conventions and you have a very complicated process that we expect young children or people of any age that are trying to learn how to read and write, to be able to grasp and become proficient at. I will be sure to keep this idea in mind when I work with my students who are still struggling with their literacy skills. Writing allows us to express ourselves in ways beyond the spoken word, but it is not by any means, easy to learn and master. One of the other points in our readings that resonated with me was the noted differences in regard to language storage in oral cultures and literate ones. As Biakolo posits “the basis of oral thought and style is memory’ and ‘[t]o serve this mnemonic purpose, this language must be rhythmic and narrativized’ (Biakolo, 1999, p.44). Tied to this need to be able to remember and then recall information in oral cultures, discourse in oral cultures is predominantly ‘traditionalist and conservative’ and ‘demands continuity and stasis, and eschews experimentation’ (Biakolo, 1999, p. 44). The ability to store information for future perusal opened the door to new ways of thinking. Thoughts no longer needed to pertain to the confines of the concrete and familiar human life world (Biakolo, 1999, p. 44). According to Biakolo, ‘[s]ince information storage and retrieval no longer present any problem, the spirit of novelty is given free rein’ (1992, p. 44). In support of this same notion Gaur states in his work ‘A History of Writing’ that ‘[a]ll writing is storage’ and ‘[t]here is, in theory at least, no limit to the amount of information that can be stored in written form’ (Gaur, 1992, p. 14). The ability to write our thoughts down, return to them later and alter them as we see fit provides literate cultures with a great deal of freedom to create and recreate recorded discourse. A spoken word, especially those shared in an oral culture to a listening audience cannot be taken back and refined and reworked in the moment. A final thought in relation to how an understanding of the orality and literacy connection can be used to better develop literacy skills in our learners came out of the information shared by Biakolo in regard to the work of Hildyard and Olson (1999, p.56). Their conclusions indicate that readers and listeners exhibit different approaches in comprehending information. ‘[L]isteners pay primary attention to the theme of the story, and ‘readers, on the other hand, are able to pay closer attention to the meaning of the sentences per se, recalling more incidental but mentioned details and being more accurate in their judgments of what was in fact shared in the text’ (Biakolo, 1999, p. 57). This difference in approaches can be utilized in our efforts to teach literacy skills to our students. By using a balanced literacy program in our classrooms that includes both oral and text foundations, we can create children who read well and listen well (Biakolo, 1999, p. 58). Oral practices such as using rhyme, rhythm and language patterns can help students memorize and master some of their core language skills and give them a more solid foundation upon which to build their literacy skills when they begin to delve into the text rich world of reading and writing. References: Biakolo, E. (1999). On the theoretical foundations of orality and literacy. Research in African Literature, 30, 2, 42-65. Retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v030/30.2biakolo.html Gaur, A. (1992). A history of writing {revised edition}. London. Retrieved from http://lmc.gatech.edu/~xinwei/classes/readings/Gaur/History_of_Writing/p1-58.pdf |
ETEC 540
Text Technologies: The Changing Spaces of Reading and Writing Archives
December 2014
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