Hello fellow ENGL 7741ers,
Please visit Zach’s and my wiki about our video clip assignment. Also, feel free to leave a comment — but only if you liked it. If you didn’t like, keep it to yourself (kidding, of course).

21st Century Media Literacy

Asking Americans in 2009 to objectively consider the media messages all around them is like expecting fish to consider the water they live in. Cable TV, billboards, business logos, fashion, food packaging — we swim in this stuff all day without the least amount of scrutiny, as though they were naturally occuring phenomena.

Thus the media literacy kit’s #1 core principal: “All media messages are constructed.” This notion, as “duh” as it may seem at first, is the key, I think, to media literacy. Not to get too dorky, but it’s kind of like the The Matrix: our media-created culture is the matrix, and getting out requires you to, in the words of Morpheus and the ML kit, “Free Your Mind.”

O.K. That’s seriously the nerdiest reference I’ve made in a while, but I thought it was apt.

Two elements of the ML kit I really liked were 1) it’s emphasis on letting students make their own anlysis of media messages, rather than telling them what this or that means. Media Literacy must be about training them to be critical media consumers outside the classroom. And 2) the kit distinguishes between cynicism toward media and taking them in with a critical eye. We shouldn’t teach students to avoid these messages — as if it were possible — or to consider them all evil. We should teach how to be smarter media readers, which translates to being smarter consumers, voters, and citizens.

"Free Your Mind."

Wikipedia v. Old-dusty-book-pedia

Our group compared Wikipedia’s entry for Jainism to the 1999 edition of Encyclopedia Americana’s entry for the same word. The verdict: Wikipedia wins by a knockout in round 1. No contest.

First of all, Wikipedia’s entry is organized in a more useful way. It tells me, up front, some basics about what adherents of this ancient religion believe:

Jainism (pronounced /ˈdʒaɪnɪzəm/)is an ancient Indian religion that prescribes a path of non-violence for all forms of living beings in this world. Its philosophy and practice relies mainly on self effort in progressing the soul on the spiritual ladder to God consciousness. Any soul which has conquered its own inner enemies and achieved the state of supreme being is called jina (Conqueror or Victor). Jainism is the path to achieve this state.

If I’m researching a religion, first things first, I want to know what it’s all about.

Oldmanpedia begins by telling me Jainism is “an ancient monastic religion of India,” the follows with

It is a heterodox religion in denying the validity of the Vedic (ancient Hindu) scriptures, pantheon, and ritual and the authorityof the Brahman priesthood (667)

Wikipedia wins.

Up-to-dateness is an obvious advantage for Wikipedia. The dead-tree version states that Jainism has 2 million followers. Remember, this was printed 10 years ago. Wikipedia says 4 million people practice in India alone, and it references and links to the Indian government census.

These are just a couple of reasons to chuck the old tome out the window in favor of Wikipedia. I’d write more but the class is moving on to something else and I don’t want to get left behind.

 

 

BWP Chapter 4 — Let’s hear it for wikis!

Other than wikipedia, I had never been on wiki site before last semester, much less thought about how they work and how they might be used in education. In an education course last spring my classmates and I used a discussion board on a wiki to exchange our thoughts about material posted on the site. Interesting, but not really wikiing (is that the verb?). In another course we created group wikis to make a class presentation — an good learning experience, but still not wikiing, if I’ve grasped the essence of wikis.

As a wiki layman, this chapter really got me thinking about the potential of wikis in the classroom. The bit about the Georgia students who collaborated with kids in Bangladesh was really cool — so cool I immediately went to the livingroom to tell my wife (a second-grade teacher) about it. It was an example of how wikis, blogs and other internet tools can shrink the world for our students, helping them develop global perspectives on what they learn. As an English teacher, I get excited thinking about the opportunities wikis present to give students hands-on experience in producing and evaluating writing for public consumption — essentially experience as writers and editors.

BWP Chapters 2-3 — Blogs

I blogged for the first time last week, but I’ve spent enough time on these things to get a feel for what they do. Even before Tuesday, I had the fundamentals: you can publish your posts; throw up videos, images, music; you can link to other sites; others can post their comments to what you put up — I knew all that. What I hadn’t realized was how many ways this medium could be used in the classroom. Most enlightening in these chapters was the section in which Richardson runs through some of the ways teachers already use blogs: as class portals, online portfolios, school Web sites, etc. The part about Richardson’s students exchanging ideas with writer Sue Monk-Kidd got me fired up about the possibility of some day doing something similar with my students. More broadly, I’m drawn to how blogs fit into a broad approach to education that is constructivist, collaborative, and that breaks down barriers between students and opportunities to learn beyond the classroom walls. When I was in high school, collaboration as I recall meant having other students critique your writing, or having a class discussion about something we read. As Richardson points out, blogging eliminates physical limitations to how students interact with each other, their teachers, and with sources as far away as the other side of the world. Very cool.

Blog's are very nice.

I wanna be like this guy

Saw this in Topics in Literature last semester. If that doesn’t get you pumped about being a teacher, check your pulse.

Eureka!

After 30+ minutes of fooling around with this stuff I was able to get a NYT RSS feed running. TTT is beginning to take shape. Lookout master bloggers, here I come!

Test Video (I don’t watch this stuff … really)

Blogging … step two

So we’re learning how to do all kinds of neat stuff on these here blogs. Let’s see if I can whip this boring page into something cool.

Today my blogging self was born.