Category Archives: New Media

Battledecks

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I think Tom and Jim, who blog at Bionic Teaching, are two of the freshest voices in educational blogging. I’m a little late on commenting on this post about Battledecks, a very funny and challenging powerpoint karaoke game played at the SXSW festival. What makes Tom’s post particularly helpful is he includes ideas for how this might be integrated in a variety of different classes. And, he makes an important caveat: you can’t do this well with just bulleted lists of information. I’m a visual learner so went looking for video of the Battledecks competition.

Here’s the video from Rocketboom:

I’m already thinking about doing this with my undergrads on Monday! Or, at least show them the video.

Morning Musings

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I usually reserve morning blogging for my personal blog, but I have a few tidbits to share.

Netvibes Universe: Finally, Netvibes has created a way to make a public page. Here’s mine. It was fairly simple to move whole tabs between my personal and my public Netvibes.

Twitter Troubles: I follow several blogs by librarians. Remember, I like anything that combines books and the web, and librarians are all about books. Of course, now they are also about all forms of media, but I will always associate them with the big brick building on Duke Street in that housed the Lancaster County Public Library, my first library. I was surprised to find this post from Steven Cohen at Library Stuff about taking a Twitter break after evidently offending someone with his Twitter posts last week. It is a reminder that Twitter is different from bantering with our friends at the bar. It is public and we may not always know all our followers. But, does that mean we have to worry about offending them? If you aren’t happy with my tweets, stop following me. Hmm…another one of those dilemmas of social networking that I think we will each have to work out in our own way. But, at the least, we should be having conversations with our kids about how to use these tools to build stronger relationships.

More Books on the Web: Chris O’Neal and I posted a blog about books and social networking software over at Spiral Notebook. Of course, if you know me, you know that I wrote about LibraryThing. Last evening, I stayed up late to work on planning a trip to England. I was mostly working on the London bit: don’t want to miss any of the famous literary sites like Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey. In poking around, I found a great website called “Get London Reading.” The goal of the program, which began in 2006, is to get Londoners to connect to the literary past of their own city. They produced a lively, well-written “Rough Guide” to the London literary life. It includes information about the authors that have called the city home and also highlights books that have drawn their settings from London. I spent a very fruitful few hours reading it, wishing I had more time to read, and putting markers on my London map. I also wished, just for a moment, that I was back in the high school English classroom where I could incorporate Google Maps into our study of English literature.

Here’s the map so far:


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Think Twice

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From a colleague of mine as part of a discussion of protecting privacy:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIGtf_ula8k&rel=1]

Sorry, if you’re offended that I embedded it, but you need the effect before the story. Here’s the AP version. And, here’s Doug Feaver’s take on it at the Washington Post. Feaver reviews comments from readers on the story. He says, “I’m with the kid, but of course a recording of whatever message he left has not been made available so perhaps I would have a different view if it were.” That’s what I thought was interesting. The only person who can publish Kori’s message is the administrator’s wife. And, as long as we can’t hear Kori’s message, we really can’t judge for ourselves. Did she delete it? Or, is she just not adding fuel? Or was it a pretty reasonable message and she just overreacted? In the end, it probably doesn’t matter, but like, Feaver, I wonder in whose favor the pendulum of public opinion would swing if we heard the original phone message.

Here were two of my favorite back and forth comments about the incident:

readerny said, “I don’t agree with the tirade by the woman who answered the call, BUT as an employer of young adults, I can say that there are some (not all) who are overempowered and think that they know the whole story, or more than you do, and should be running the show themselves…”

But Nicester wrote, “Overempowered kid” and “self-centered youth” – OK, that’s one perspective. Sounds a bit like “whippersnapper” or whatever the Greatest Generation was calling the Baby Boomers when they were dropping acid and rolling in the mud at Woodstock…”

I just feel sorry for this woman, sacrificed on the altar of the digital generation gap. And, like the story about Heath Ledger and the blogs, it’s a story about the future of “news” in the 21st century. What if the kid hadn’t had access to the Internet? He might have sent the tape to the television news, but they have may have demanded to have his recording. He gets to bypass all those gatekeepers and tell his side of the story in a way that kids have never been able to do.

In the end, I find her tirade to be funny rather than offensive. “Snot-nosed brats” was the worst of it. It is more important as a reminder that digital recording and distribution is almost transparent, and perhaps will finally lead to people living by the old adage, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” We have left behind the era of deniability.

I’m tagging this one 21st century skills because I wonder how this fits in? I’m also going to tag it adult learning 😉

Bebo White: Is Web 2.0 the Future of the Web?

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Bebo White is from Stanford. He is known as the first webmaster of the United States. And, he really does look like Santa Claus.

He started with renaming his presentation: The Big Ideas in Web 2.0. But he admits to hating that name (Web 2.0). He thinks a lot of it is just hype. But, certainly there are plenty of Web 2.0 start ups…he has a similar list of logos to Terry Anderson, yesterdays’ keynote. (I would have blogged that one, too, but the conference was having wireless issues.) The question is: how many of these companies will survive? He uses the example of Stumble Upon, which basically allows you to discover random websites. Google bought it for 75 million. But he says, don’t define Web 2.0 by the companies. And, he says that he can define it by what it is not.

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Underground Digital Story Telling

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An interesting abstract from my advisor for an article about the semiotics of multimodality, or texts that utilize a variety of media. I have to get the article from inter-library loan so I haven’t read it but I did visit the D.U.S.T.Y. website to see some of the examples. What a wonderful project! I can’t embed the videos here so I’m going to have to rely on you to check them out…

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21st Century Learning

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My colleague, Donna, asked, “What would you show educators as an example of what 21st century learning looks like?”

I would start with my upcoming trip to Texas. I’m giving a paper at SITE, any my husband and I are going early and poking along the gulf coast looking for lighthouses and whooping cranes. I’ve written about how I used the web to plan and track the trip in another post. That’s 21st century learning in a nutshell for me: use the web to find information AND use the web to customize, organize, and share that information. When it’s done, I’ll post my Google Earth overlay to the discussion forum. I used the overlay for National Wildlife Refuges to locate refuges in southern Texas. And, I can’t wait to create my own “mash-up” when we get back, incorporating pictures and weblinks into Google Earth and displaying it on a web page to tell the story of our trip. That, my friends, is 21st century learning.

If I were a music teacher, my kids would be composing music to include at freeculture’org’s Free Music Project website. They are collecting “free” music–that means copyright-friendly stuff–and there aren’t really any gatekeepers. Participating in a project like this–or a project like Librivox.org, where users record audio files of famous public-domain novels–helps kids learn about the collaborative nature of the World Wide Web. They become creators as well as consumers.

I spend a lot of time talking about Wikipedia. It’s tough for people to get the concept and not be skeptical. So, I am going to start including a link to this story from the BBC. (Forget the pretty amazing fact that I have access to a new source like the BBC…) The story talks about a professor who is requiring students to read and write articles for the online encyclopedia. What a GREAT idea! It provides our students with the authentic audience that was tough to find in the past. AND, it helps out Wikipedia, which has been suffering from negative press of late. This is a great example of putting CONTENT into a 21st century CONTEXT. Why not use your new-found knowledge to inform others?

I am definitely going to include The Great Big Vegetable Challenge, a blog started by a mom to encourage her child to eat vegetables. I chatted live with the mom the other evening…she’s in London.

I am using more and more video from YouTube as part of my work. Communicating visually is a 21st century skill…how often do we give our kids the chance to communicate that way? Go to YouTube to watch Michael Wesch’s Web 2.0 video. Then watch the video responses. Or watch Introducing the Book at YouTube and then watch the video clip from a Norwegian news program that reports the popularity of the clip on YouTube.

I’m going to end with the K12 Online Conference…it’s the best example of 21st century learning that I know of. It was held in October 2006, completely online! And, that’s the beauty of it…you can still attend. All the presentations are available online.

Oh…I’ve started finding more and more educators intrigued by the idea of Second Life.

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Now We Know How the Monks Felt

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I’ve been using this McLuhan quote at the beginning of my research focus statement.  It’s from The Gutenberg Galaxy, published in 1962:

“An age in rapid transition is one which exists on the frontier between two cultures and between conflicting technologies.  Every moment of its consciousness is an act of translation of each of these cultures into the other.  Today we live on the frontier between five centuries of mechanism and the new electronics, between the homogenous and the simultaneous.  It is painful but fruitful” (p. 141).

I contend we stand at a similar frontier right now.  And nowhere is it better illustrated than in David Rothman’s rant about Second Life.   Here we see what McLuhan calls an “advantage” of being on the frontier of a culture class: the ability to generalize.  Rothman, after complaining about a software upgrade that had eaten his password, decides that he would rather spend his time with books but, more importantly, he assumes that his opinion must be shared by millions: “On-screen instructions say I should contact tech support, but should I bother? I’d rather catch up on my book reading and on RSS feeds relating to books and e-books. I’ve got enough media in my life, thank you very much, and millions of other people would probably feel the same way.”

I’m sure there are people who feel that way along with people who prefer having this particular media, and frankly, that’s what makes it pretty darn exciting. I am a bibliophile like Rothman.  I prefer nothing more than curling up with a good book and am still in the process of reading pdf files without printing them out.  But, every other week, I take a visit to Second Life to meet with other teacher-educators from all over the world.  Yes, there are plenty of other ways we could meet virtually (chat, elluminate, forums), but I find doing it in SL fascinating.  Rothman, probably, would be OK with this use as he sees value for specific kinds of uses of SL.

But, I sometimes visit just to sit quietly with my avatar along the river or ride the intertube that someone had thoughtfully created.  It is winter, I am in graduate school, and I miss my kayak.  I visit the planetarium or chat with folks outside an art exhibit.  My involvement with SL has not diminished my commitment to typography; it is completely different.  If anything, the media I have begun to abandon is broadcast television.  I can watch whatever I need to online when I am ready.  So, it is rare for me to reserve time to watch television.  I am what Jenkins calls a zapper…I move restlessly from channel to channel.  But increasingly, I am not turning it on at all.

However, I am not going to make the generalization leap that Rothman does:  I do know from talking to people that others have also indicated that they tend to watch less television than they used to because they have adopted other media for getting the news or entertainment.    But I also know that lots of people still watch television.  They may also consume other media related to that television program, but they also sitting down at a specific time to tune into a specific television show.

I would suggest, in an addendum to McLuhan’s ideas about generalizations, that these frontier moments open the possibility for a wide variety of media relationships that may, in some cases, be determined by the analog lens that you apply to the new media.  For instance, people of the book come into the World Wide Web looking for ways to share information about a printed technology.  Librarything, Librivox, and Book Crossing are just a few of the websites that celebrate Gutenberg’s technology.  And, for Rothman, that’s as far as he wants to go.  And, that’s fine.  We each make personal decisions about how we are going to get involved in any media, both old and new.

Not to sound like a Pollyanna here (it’s a literary reference, BTW), but I would like to see us embrace the diversity of relationships that we may have with media, and try not to generalize our experiences for others.  As I begin my own research into the literacy practices of students and teachers, I want to uncover the individual voices and experiences, beginning as Lemke (2006) does “with the study of how people make meaings and experience feelings across real time as tehy interact wiht rich, complex multimodal artifacts and environments” (p. 9).

YouTube – Lewis Black Demands CNN Remove banner from screen

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YouTube – Lewis Black Demands CNN Remove banner from screen

Why do I keep reading about media and media literacy when it is happening all around me?  Here’s a segment from CNN with Lewis Black in which he complains about the crawl at the bottom of the screen.  It’s distracting, he says, from the people talking.  But part of the new media is having multiple things going on at once.  Is it distracting?  Or is it more a commentary on the people talking…that what they are saying is mostly just sound-bitey pieces, already scripted…after all, Black was there selling his book.

LearningTimes Network –

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LearningTimes Network – “MacArthur Series”

Found this link somewhere in the NMC Campus in Second Life.  Here’s the best argument I’ve heard for media literacy and technology integration:

“The working hypothesis of the effort is that digital media tools have advanced significantly in recent years, enabling new forms of knowledge production, social networking, communication, and play. People who have grown up with access to these new digital tools are engaged in an unprecedented exploration of language, games, social interaction, and self-directed education that can be used to support learning. They are different as a result of this exposure to and use of digital media and these differences are reflected in their sense of self, and how they express their independence and creativity, and in their ability to learn, exercise judgment, and think systemically.”