Category Archives: Old Media

A Birthday Reflection

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I turn 48 years old today. When I was born, the Vietnam War was just heating up, the Summer of Love was still five years away, and Kennedy was in the middle of those glorious thousand days that came to be known as Camelot. I am on the far edge of the Boomers and can even claim Generation X status when I get annoyed at what I think is the sometimes smug Boomer culture. All that Boomer optimism had faded by the time I came into the world and those of us in the 13th generation grew up in a much more cynical age. I have a good friend who is on the other end of the Boomers and when we play the Boomer edition of Trivial Pursuit she knows all the answers to questions about Howdy Doody and the Beatles. I get the ones about Watergate and the war.

There have been some positives over the past five decades…such as a focus on environmental conservation. But it doesn’t always feel like things have gotten much better. I lived just 30 miles from Three Mile Island when it melted down and am now sick over the oil gushing into the Gulf. Earth Day began when I was seven because things had gotten so bad that rivers were on fire and whole communities were being poisoned. Now, we regularly see bald eagles flying over head. But we still haven’t figured out how human beings can live without destroying everything else.

And, then there’s education: A Nation at Risk was written in 1982 and I am watching its influence play out now, nearly 30 years later. That report was all about what students didn’t know and that’s what we are busy trying to test now. There was little concern for what they could do or whether they could think and how schools could foster more critical, creative problem solvers. I wonder how long it will take to see any influence from current reform efforts as the slow educational pendulum continues its eternal swinging?

Technology was not absent from my classroom when I started teaching in 1988. They were very old school: film strips, film reels, an overhead projector and an oft-used record and cassette player. I did have a computer in my room…an early macintosh that was used with a laser printer to desktop publish the school newspaper. It was hidden away in the back room. There was no Internet, just the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, most of which we did not have access to. Yet, we learned together with the materials we had. Much of the technologies supported my presentations as a teacher. But they also provided creative outlets for my students. My students used the analog video camera to make public service advertisements. After cleaning the strips in chlorine, they used pens to draw their own film strips. We listened to music as part of our poetry unit and watched the movie versions of Shakespeare’s work which added an interactive element to what was often a text-only approach to literature. I didn’t really think about it as “technology,” the way we talk about digital technologies today, but was glad to have choices related to how I could present and have students interact with information.

The excitement today, I think, is what students can do with the technology. Creating film strips and analog videos seem like cave writing in comparison to digital videos and interactive web sites. My worry? That all this great technology is still mostly being used to enhance teacher presentations and kids don’t get much chance to do their own creation and interaction. I was glad to see that several of my pre-service teachers this semester adopted Google Maps for their lesson projects and allowed students to do the creation. You could argue that it’s not that innovative since teachers have been doing map work with students forever. But what a step away from the flat views with their colored pencil hatch marks. Add markers, draw lines, zoom in and out, check out the terrain, the possibilities are endless.

I’m a huge fan of Google Maps as a great example of the interactivity that I think is really the innovative part of digital technologies. I used it recently to plan and execute my recent walking tour of Denver. I created the map on my laptop, pulled audio from the Denver Story Trek website, and then moved everything to my phone. (Don’t get me started on my phone…I really am in love with my Droid.)


View Denver in a larger map

It’s been an interesting time to be alive. Technologically, watching the world move from analog to digital must be a similar experience to the generation that went from horse-drawn wagons to automobiles. I’ve seen great cultural shifts as well particularly in terms of individual rights. The landmark civil rights legislation was signed when I was a toddler. And while it didn’t pass, the Equal Rights Amendment was part of the milieu as I came to adulthood in the 70s. I’ve grown up surrounded by conversations about race, gender, and sexual orientation and while we are a long way from answers in any of those areas, we’re moving in a positive direction I think as we learn to think of each other as individuals first and then members of particular groups second. We’re complex beings whose identities are woven from disparate threads.

I’ll close with the weirdest thing about being this age: the President of the United States is my age! And, I graduated from William and Mary with John Stewart. My generation is moving in to the leadership, joining but also changing the establishment while the next generation breathes down our necks.

Post Pencil?

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Sharon has been writing eloquently about Sherry Turkle’s book Simulation and Its Discontents, which I also read as part of the “choose your own reading” part of the course. Go read Sharon’s posts, particularly the one about socks, and then come back…no, really, go…

Turkle’s book is a microcosmic look at experience of the analog to digital transition. I am part of the generation that is living through that transition. Like Turkle’s engineers and architects, I face the fundamental question: As technology replaces so much of what we do “by hand,” what analog practices do we want to keep around? I know that some of my colleagues would probably say none, having developed digital lives for themselves.

But, as I face the transition, I find that there are certain things I like to do with a pencil in my hand and the digital alternative is simply not as satisfying. The main one: my to do list. I use it, in conjunction with a print calendar, to map out my months, weeks, and days. It’s the way I’ve always done it and I have yet to find an online alternative that satisfies me. I begin my day by jotting down what I want to accomplish and still get a thrill when I can draw a line through it at day’s end.

I also prefer using a pencil and paper for brainstorming and drafting. Like Turkle’s folks, I sometimes feel as though word processed text looks too complete and the highlighting and commenting tools do not provide the same level of contact with the text in order to complete detailed editing. Of course, my advisor and I used these tools to pass drafts of my dissertation back and forth but my own work on the draft often include lots of handwritten work from outlines, to diagrams, to chunks of text. My spiral bound notebook is included in the archives of the project because much of the thinking about themes was concocted in its pages. At some point, I tried using a digital graphic organizer but somehow the technology got in the way. I wanted to scribble, to draw wavy arrows, to circle words, to jot pictures, to create messiness, and the software seemed to demand neatness and order. I wasn’t creating for someone else but instead trying to dig into my own thinking and the pencil was more inviting than the mouse as the tool to facilitate that process.

While these activities seem mundane compared to Turkle’s folks who are grappling with the meaning of simulations for their very work, they illustrate in a very practical way the decisions we make each day about our use of technology. I think it’s important to consider these decisions and provide opportunities for kids to understand them as well, lest they become like the younger designers who see no value in the old ways and rely, sometimes too completely, on the simulation.

140? We Used to Do it in 8!

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I had a funny, when-I-was-their-age moment. I had found my way to this Teachers Network website and saw this headline: IF U CN RD THS U CN LRN TO RITE, which linked to an article about adding a twist to the typical “what I did this summer” essay by having students start with texting their responses. For some reason, I flashed to an old, rainy day worksheet I used to have that gave a list of vanity license plates that the kids had to decipher. Maybe they represent the original text messaging, and a little googling showed that having students create personalized license plates for themselves or other characters was a popular lesson plan. Everything old is new again, this time around with a few more characters allowed.

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).

State Contractor Files Federal Lawsuit Against Me » Maine Web Report

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State Contractor Files Federal Lawsuit Against Me » Maine Web Report

So, I keep thinking that I need to get back to reading about media literacy and working on my bibliography.  Then, I take “just a second” to check my rss feeds on netvibes and some media story captures my attention.  Today, Andy Carvin pointed me in the direction of Lance Dutson, who was sued by the advertising agent for the state of Maine.  What did he do?  He published a copy of their ad that includes a 1-800 number that goes to a sex site.  I missed this when it first broke in April.  Grad school does that to you.

Stories like this illustrate the fact that the curriculum for a media literacy course is happening right now.  What are the issues here?  If a print or online newspaper like the NY Times published the ad along with the news story, I don’t think the ad agency could do anything but hang its head.  So, why go after the blogger?  Because he isn’t a “real” journalist?  He does belong to the Media Bloggers Association, and pressure from bloggers and others led to the lawsuit being dropped.

This is old media versus new media.  Once again, as in the case of Wikipedia, old media resorts to the courts while new media resorts to public opinion.  Old media thinks it can own stuff, particularly software, so a seemingly cutting edge company like Blackboard, which even though it operates on the web really acts like old media, uses the patent system to put pressure on competitors.

Leonardo da Vinci

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Leonardo

Leonardo da Vinci in Milan near La Scala Opera House, June 2004

Read Sherwin B. Nuland’s biography of da Vinci.  It is part of the Penguin Lives series, which are short bios (< 200 pages) written by non-biographers.  Nuland is a surgeon who teaches at Yale.  While his biography focuses on da Vinci’s anatomical work, there are also some interesting comments about art and vision that relate to media.

Leonardo was one of the first to do drawings of actual cadavers.  According to Nuland, most physicians of the time “regarded drawings as distractions from the text, using them only to support theoretical constructs about which the student was meant to learn by reading.” (p. 121).  This bias continued for many centuries.  Nuland quotes a review of the famous Gray’s Anatomy by Oliver Wendell Holmes that criticizes the text for its numerous drawings: “[L]et a student have good illustrations, and just so surely will he use them at the expense of the text” (p. 121).  And this from 1859!

John Zuern’s contemporary answer to Holmes is found in his essay, Diagram, Dialogue, Dialectic: Visual Explanations and Visual Rhetoric in the Teaching of Literary Theory.   According to Zuern, images are not just window dressing, something to accompany the more important text.  Instead, “at their best, images that seek to help students understand ideas are able to perform two tasks: providing a clear representation of the concepts and offering a way of testing, challenging, critiquing that concept” (p. 70).  He laments that most images in popular books about philosophy and literary theory “almost never exploit the capacity of the image to question the concept it is supposed to convey” (p. 70).  Da Vinci understood, as his contemporaries did not, the importance of seeing as a way of supporting thinking and understanding:

“It is direct vision that differentiaties Leonardo’s studies from all that fell under the heading of Galenic.  In order to answer his perennial question of why, he had first to understand how, which demanded a meticulous attention to accurate anatomic detail such as had never before seen so much as considered by any predecessor.  To see clearly, to interpret objectively–these were the keys to solving nature’s riddles.  His was the artist’s eye, but his also was the scientist’s curiosity and the scientist’s apperception that only by reducing a phenomenon to its component elements can it be fully understood.  And only by knowing that minute particulars of structure can function even begin to be elucidated.” (p. 128).  Nuland goes on for several pages singing the praises of Leonardo’s drawings an dillustrations.

Finally, Nuland describes Leonardo’s work with the eye.  While the thought at the time was “that vision was perceived within the lens,  he was able to satisfy himself that seeing is in fact the result of light being focused on the retina.” (p. 134).   He did not, however, solve the riddle of upright images.

What’s the lesson here?  There are at least two.  First, as long as we continue to rely on printed textbooks as our primary texts, we must be thoughtful about the images we select and include as many as possible.  In addition, we must recognize the power of the image to expand understanding rather than simply mimic the text.  Second, we must seek out images to share with our students and discuss them openly with them, digging into the image to pull out is meaning.  And, as one of my professors at WM does, we need to have them construct their own images and models that help them better understand their learning.

Giacometti Quote in SL

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“I used to see the world through the goggles of the existing arts.  I would go to the Louvre to see the paintings and scultpures of the past, and I found them more beautiful than reality.  Today, when I go to the Louvre, all these representations of the external world — and until fifty years ago, all painting, all sculpture were direct representations of the external world, weren’t they? — strike me as partial, precarious.  I ask myself why the devil they could have seen it like that.  And what astonishes me, what really gets me, isn’t the paintings and scultpures anymore, but the people who look at them.  Now I look only at the people who are looking.”

Alberto Giacometti, 1967

The Space Issue…

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Here's a random thought about old media versus new media: the space issue.  I just filled two grocery bags with printed copies of three different journals to which I subscribe.  All of them are available in digital format online to subscribers as well as through the databases at William and Mary.  Besides browsing through them when they arrive each month, they are really not all that helpful for research.  I kept one favorite and will recycle the rest of them.  But it only makes a small dent…the basket beside my bed is overflowing with all the print stuff I've received since the beginning of the year and there's another one in the hall bathroom.  I'm desperately trying to at least open them before I recycle.  And it's frustrating…sometimes I'm interested in the articles and sometimes I'm not.  But I might become interested at some future time.  That's when I'm going to ERIC to see what's available on the topic.  Only then will the article become important.  And, it will be available in digital format for download to my hard drive.  Much more space-friendly…and this from someone who lives in 1350 square feet.

Finally–since this is pretty long for a random thought…I have different attachments to different types of media.  I can give up magazines without a problem…but I love books.  Don't like reading online.  And right now lots of my books are in the boxes in the garage.  I went looking for one yesterday and felt a real pang of loss…I miss my books…