I’ve been thinking for a couple of months now about how I can make a good (the best) case for using web 2.0 tools in public school classes. I mean, not just using them – google maps and other tools are awesome for gathering data – but allowing students to gain skills producing and distributing their ideas into the great platform of the Internet. This allows them to participate in local, and global conversations and to experience that effect. While I am interested in full, unhindered access to these tools and the use of them to share content, I’m certainly interested in any attempt to move in this direction.
It seems that many public school systems are fearful or have policy against this idea for one of several reasons. It is not always easy to ensure the security of content that is published online. It’s not possible to guarantee the accessibility of that content in the future. Legally, many schools may not feel that they have control over the content that distributed publicly from the students that they are responsible for. How can a school manage the content that does become available online?
This raises many questions for me. Is it possible for students to create content, as a class project for example, and post it online without the school system needing to take responsibility. What kind of legal agreement can be made to allow a teacher to maintain responsibility, for parents to agree. What burden does this place on the teacher? How can i engage in a meaningful conversation with the school system about these ideas?
Too much to think about. I’ll be sure to write more as I have these conversations.
Thursday, March 4, at the ICA in Boston, RYMAEC (Regional Youth Media Arts Education Consortium) hosted an open mic where many educators, researchers and youth media workers shared tools and strategies. Kara Oehler was the featured speaker and she presented her work with the Mapping Main Street project. They hope to document in some way all of the main streets in the U.S. – and make them available on a web application where others can share comments or other content.
I presented a project that I worked on with a Spanish teacher in which we used garageband and soundcloud.com to create podcasts as practice for the Spanish AP exam. The concept is simple: prepare (or find) a sound file that can be used as conversation practice. The AP exam asks a series of questions in formal conversation and gives the tester time to respond. We can do this using different tracks in GarageBand (or any multitrack recorder). The final project can be exported and put on a digital player or shared using a site like soundcloud.
The Youth Media Reporter (www.youthmediareporter.org) has invited the boston area to be the focus in its upcoming journal. RYMAEC/ICA (www.rymaec.org), New England’s Regional Youth Media Arts Education Consortium, is helping coordinate the efforts to make this journal a success and we are excited to encourage you to participate!
I’m very excited about the possibilities. Some possible ideas might be:
Best practices of working within the system. I’ll write more about this in my next post but I want to highlight two projects that I’ve worked on this fall. Creating Digital Stories with creative commons images and Shakespearean sonnets and creating podcasts as practice for the AP spanish test.
The important part of this is to let the educators come to you. They already have the core concepts they want to teach and experience creating curriculum and lesson plans. Try to support the work they are doing while incorporating media literacy/production.
I’m continuing to try to incorporate media literacy and media production into mainstream education and just completed another project that I think might offer a great example of this kind of work. An AP Spanish teacher approached me with the challenge of creating practice with feedback for the spoken portion of the AP Spanish test. I asked her if it were possible to get recorded examples of what that portion of the test might sound like. She was able to find CDs with previous years examples and practice tests. I decided that the students would create podcasts and then she would be able to listen to these podcasts on her computer or portable player and then offer students feedback herself.
I first imported the CDs and created mp3 versions of all practice and exam audio. I then created a simple web page where students would be able to download these MP3s to the computer they were working on. After students had created a folder on the desktop and downloaded these MP3 files to their computer, they imported them into a garage band project.
Using the computers built-in microphone students were able to record their voices onto a new track in GarageBand responding to and answering the questions that were posed from the practice audio. After recording their voices students then exported these projects as MP3 files that we were able to place onto a USB drive that the teacher could review later. the students were very engaged by this project and the teacher was able to provide meaningful feedback to students in preparation for their AP exams.
I’m trying to incorporate media literacy (the ability to deconstruct and create meaningful messages using a variety of media tools) and to mainstream education. My current position allows me to work directly with teachers and students during the school day. This creates the potential to propose media projects to support the work that teachers are already doing. I believe it is important to have the educators bring the challenge to the media consultant. The teacher already has the curriculum, goals and standards they have to work within. We can try to support this work while teaching media literacy and media production.
This first example has to do with language teacher approaching me with the challenge of contextualizing Shakespearean sonnets. She wanted to do in media project and wanted to have the students responsible for choosing the materials that would be in the media productions. I suggested creating digital stories with music and images that the students could create and download. Each specific line of the Shakespearean sonnet they were working on would be represented by one or two images.
First, pairs of students typed each sonnet in Word and thought about what each line next to them. they rewrote each line in language that was meaningful to them. They then found two images using creative Commons search feature to correspond with each line. all of the images were imported into an iMovie project and placed in the proper order. Next, each line was copied from the Word document and paste it into the iMovie project so that it would be displayed over the two corresponding images. finally music was chosen to match the overall mood of the sonnet. Many students found it difficult to use creative Commons to find music or did not have the time to create their own music using GarageBand so we allow students to use copyright music. This means that the work could not be shown on our local public access channel or could not be put on the school website.
I wanted to write a reflection on my experience today at the Statehouse. The Advocacy Day was organized by the Massachusetts Afterschool Partnership (MAP). Gwynn Hughs, the executive director introduced the event in the Great Hall of Flags, which is a pretty cool room in the Statehouse. She then brought us through a program that included speakers who work in different afterschool programs and performances by youth from those programs. The overall idea was to all gather in the great hall, in a rally-the-troops sort of way. Then, we were each to go and meet with our local legislators to discuss the importance of our prorgrams and why they should be thought of when the budget was being created. We were even given handouts citing line items of the budget related to the ASOST quality grant program and other items related to early education and care and prevention programs.
It feels good to advocate right? It’s motivating to gather with like-minded individuals and work together on common issues. Well, this is true, but I couldn’t help but think about recent topics from Ronald Ferguson’s class I’m taking at the Harvard Kennedy School. There were two particular issues that arose for me. First, the concept of framing when presenting information to the public. Even in this case, when the audience is largely made up of people who all agree on some overarching issues related to youth. Second is the concept of creating and Afterschool and Out-of-School Time Coordinating Council.
Frames are extremely important. I must admit that I have started to cringe when I hear people say that a program is important because it keeps kids off the streets, or prevents them from getting into trouble, or getting pregnant. I know the intention but I think we need to strategically think about framing messages that portray youth as inherintly bad or savage. We know that we are talking about the dangers of the streets, but that isn’t how it might be interpreted. I think it’s important frame messages such that opportunities are offered and not that tragedies are avoided. Then there is no question about what we are talking about. We all want opportunities. We recognize that we probably would’t be where we are without the opportunities that we’ve had. Representative Wolf probably did the best job in using this kind of frame. Talking about her personal experience, she emphasized the importance of needing to create new opportunities for youth and not once mentioned the kinds of trouble that youth can get into or the troubled world that youth today live in.
About the council. Let’s do it. Let’s have young people involved and let’s have representation from around the state.
Media literacy concepts and curriculums have evolved since the 1970s, building on successes and incorporating new pedagogies to engage the learner. Although much has improved, there are four major problem areas, in addition to the myriad of internal conflicts, with the current state of media literacy in the United States. First is an issue with the terminology itself; the phrase ‘media literacy’ does not adequately represent the complexity or significance of the practice. Second, in many instances, media literacy is based on a model developed two decades ago, which positions the student as a powerless victim of the media and uses a pedagogy based on that assumption. Third, there is a lack of comprehensive, critical media concepts taught in traditional school curriculum. Finally, digital culture is changing the way we communicate and it is necessary that we change the way we teach and interact with media to represent these societal changes.
As stated by Tessa Joles (2008) and the Center for Media Literacy “Media no longer just influence our culture. They are our culture”(p. 42). Media literacy, or media education, therefore, is positioned to be at the crux of art, culture, entertainment, politics, business, and identity formation. Only with a solid understanding of technology, and the ability to communicate on a global level using many types of media, will our young people be able to fully participate in the future we are creating. A comprehensive media education must go beyond the deconstruction of media; it must guide a young person through the process of creating media messages of various types and explore the new skills that become necessary as we shift from a culture of individual expression to a participatory community (Henry Jenkins, 2006). In addition, it must be a core part of education, not just an activity in a single class or after-school program.
I’m proposing the outline of an “introduction to media” course that will emphasize media production and communication technology skills while building upon the core principles of deconstructing and constructing media messages. Frameworks for media literacy education have been created by the Center for Media Literacy, the National Association for Media Literacy Education, the New Mexico Media Literacy Project and several other organizations and institutions focused on media literacy education. These frameworks provide the base that this course is built on. Media production in various formats will be another focus. Skills necessary to be successful in a digital participatory culture, such as transmedia navigation (Jenkins, 2006), will also be incorporated into the course. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the New Media Literacies project, media practitioners and scholars have identified these skills and their utility.
Creating effective messages is integral to many types of communication and only through a variety of experiences will students develop these skills fully. To do so, students will be encouraged to work on projects for other courses using new skills and technologies introduced in the media course. Ideally, these projects will be supported by the media class and by other teachers for which the projects are created. Initially, this course will be taught primarily in isolation, but eventually core concepts should overlap, feed into and be reinforced in other courses.
The first week of readings for Chris Dede’s was comprised of Chapter one of Christensen’s Disrupting Class, three articles and two web sites. the book is interesting in that each chapter is introduced with a little narrative of Randall Circle high school in Southern California. After a brief narrative or vignette the author goes into more technical detail. Chapter one is about learning in different ways. as he points out “schools interdependent architectures forced them to standardize the way they teach and test” which creates a conflict with the actual act of learning.I breezed through this chapter as I feel very familiar with these concepts. Such an interesting book I went ahead and red chapter 2 and 3 but those notes will appear next week.
The next article that I read was a PEW study on tagging. Here are some brief bits that I pulled:
28% of online Americans have used the Internet to tag content
on a typical day online , 7% of Internet users say they tag or categorize content
tagging is the process of creating labels for online content
Taggers look like classic early adopters of technology. they are more likely to be under age 40 and have higher levels of education and income
Towards the end of the article was an interview with David Weinberger. I grabbed a couple of meaningful quotes from this interview
“if you need to find everything about a topic , you often can’t rely on tags”
“In fact , by analyzing how various social groups use tags, we can do better at understanding how seemingly different world views map to one another”
the next article was about emerging technologies for collaborative , mediated , immersive learning. one fantastic point I got out of this article was that current students are already adopting new technologies whether we like it or not. It seems that schools should not fight against these technology trends but rather try to incorporate them into systems of learning. Some of these technologies and approaches involve massively multiplayer online games (MMOG), modding and machinima. we are also introduced two kinds of contexts with technology: MUVE and AR. MUVE, or multiuser virtual environments allow students to experience different created environments and allow for creating scenarios and situations inaccessible in the real world. AR, or augmented reality is needed immersion intertwined between physical and digital contexts.
Next I read an article about the behavior of tutoring systems. this was a ridiculously long article that I only skimmed to get the basics of what tutoring systems are. Essentially they are software that has been developed to augment the experience of a learner in the classroom. They are intelligent in the sense that they can and tied a students through the process of solving problems. This is not artificial intelligence. The tutoring systems are not able to learn that they are able to recognize patterns and with in a confined contexts able to you help a student along a certain path.
the article broke the concept of tutoring systems into a two loop process. the outer loop is to decide which task the student should do next. The inner loop is responsible for determining The steps within a task. A step is a user interface action that is part of completing a task. the purpose of this manuscript was to demonstrate how tutoring software works. perhaps the largest impediment to wider adoption of tutoring systems is the terms that are used. Tutor implies that the software replaces teachers and many assume that the software is designed for the drill practice.
the education broadcast network was one of the web sites and seem to me sort of a failure. the handheld augmented reality Project was the other web site and this groups seems rather interesting and responsible for Alien Contact and Gray Matter