Final Notes (for now): Tinkering with Video Editing in a Major Way

The final product HERE.

I've never tinkered so hard or so much as in trying to complete the final inquiry project - and I have a feeling most of my classmates shared a similar experience.

Before attempting this video poem, I'd never worked with any kind of video editing or screen capturing software.  With only two days to really work on the example, I originally thought I'd focus on using PowerPoint in ways that would make it perfect for the creation of an Illuminated Text:  I was familiar with PowerPoint (or at least with its presentation-related features) and so my project in its initial conception would have allowed me to work within a familiar framework while trying to manipulate it in new ways to produce a new result.

However, I soon realized that film would make an important contribution:  I wanted images of wind (since a primary theme of the poem is ephemerality, and what better symbol?), but wind only really manifests itself with its effects on other objects.  And immediately after this realization, I found a link on the site I used for Creative Commons-licensed images to a site that provides Creative Commons-licensed HD video clips.  So, I set myself to exploring iMovie with the goal of creating a clip to export to PowerPoint.

This involved figuring out A) how to import a clip; B) how to edit clip length; C) how to superimpose text upon a movie frame; D) how to change the font on the slide to make it identical to the font of my PowerPoint; E) how to vary frame duration; F) how to save my project (apparently Apple has done away with the banality of "saving" a project on iMovie) and start a new one; and E) how to embed video into my PowerPoint.

I had a little bit of a headache with iMovie and more of a headache with screencast-o-matic, which is what I used to "film" my movie so that it would seem more like a film and less like a PowerPoint with bells and whistles on.  My computer had initial issues with Java (enabling plug-ins, allowing it to run on the screencast-o-matic site) and I had initial issues with synchronizing PowerPoint and the iTunes music that plays in the background.  Every attempt at recording had some kind of flaw:  sometimes the  "play" button for the movie clips refused to appear when I hovered my mouse over the appropriate site, while at other times I clicked too quickly and moved ahead a slide too fast.

By early Wednesday morning I had a movie.  My biggest headache, however, turned out to be exporting the video to an external site so that I could post it on the Wiki site and my blog:  initially I tried just adding it here as the file on my computer, but the video ended up being fuzzy and small. I didn't want to post it to YouTube, so I tried Flickr; my computer stalled for a good half hour trying to upload.  Finally, right before class, I managed to get it onto Flickr.  And, in class, when presenting, I discovered that Flickr (unbeknownst to me) has a video upload limit of 1'30".

Now the video's on my Vimeo account (I'm accumulating online accounts with startling alacrity; this is something I'll have to stop and think more seriously about later).  I liked this project because it ended up forcing me to explore tools I'd never otherwise explore.  Even more, however, I liked this because I ended up spending so much time on it.  Why?  I found it meaningful.  I found it vital.  And this is a good indication that maybe some of my future students might find it equally as important.

Notes from Everywhere: Tinkering as the Minutes Tick Away

I hear people say things like "I can't believe it's already July!" or "Is it really Wednesday?  The week's flying by!" all the time.  Such remarks are insubstantial but reassuring, the conversational equivalent of literary cliche; they remind us that we're civilized members of a society, literate in its basic conventions.  For example, "Hello, how are you?--I'm doing well.--Have a good night" is the "conversation" I regularly have with the security guard who lingers outside the doors to my residence hall at night.  Is it substantive?  No.  Even if either of us was suffering through an objectively hideous day--having been caught in the rain on the way to work, then having dropped the house keys down a storm drain--our exchange would remain pretty much unchanged.

I'm aware of the artificiality of many person-to-person exchanges, the formulaic nature of many stock phrases.  And yet--unable to convey my disbelief in any other way, I find myself asking:  do we really only have three classes left?  Is tomorrow really the first day of August?

Despite the progress each of us has made in class, I've been feeling more inundated with information than ever.  Since I joined Twitter, especially, it's been coming not as the slow, manageable river Karen described, but as a torrent of water gushing from a widening crevice in a collapsing cave.  A tsumani of hashtags, links, and blogs.  A veritable hurricane, a threatening wall of water--

My way of putting on a safety vest and picking up an oar is to A) remind myself to take a deep breath.  Of course I'm not going to master the internet in a six-week summer course; it's enough to have started to familiarize myself with tools that could be useful in future, and contacts who can continue to keep me appraised of the latest trends; and B) to use this tinkering blog to explore three (a concrete, manageable number) tools I've been hearing about for the past few weeks but haven't yet had the occasion to check out.

Since (A) is mostly an internal process, it's not here.  But (B), my brief account of experiments with Edmodo, Goodreads, and Evernote, is split into three respective summaries below:

The tagline for Edmodo is "make your classroom a community."  Although I'm more than enthusiastic about anything related to classroom-as-community, I was a little skeptical after watching the introductory film. At first, Edmodo seemed like it was offering a glorified class website:  teachers with accounts can post assignments, quizzes, and alerts.  These capabilities are nice, and maybe streamlined, but not innovative enough to justify the site to me in Web 2.0 terms.  After giving it a little more time, however, I came to see that Edmoto proposes to do for classroom management tools what Google has done for tools used by the social and private sectors:  consolidate them.  It offers a cloud-based storage system for document, picture, music, and video (like Google Docs) which perhaps makes my Dropbox redundant; teachers can share documents and other media with students this way.  A site calendar (like Google Calendar) allows teachers to share events with both students and their parents; a site gradebook presumably makes grades available to select parties as well.  What may be coolest about Edmodo, however, has less to do with students and more to do with professional networking (for which a parallel doesn't quite exist in Google, though I know Google+ has represented the most recent attempt).  Certain features permit educators to convene, via the web, in "Subject Area" and "Partner" communities for support and feedback.  If my future district were to join the site, teachers in all subject areas could participate in what the site calls "district-wide collaboration." Finally, Edmodo offers different methods of data-crunching to determine degree of program effectiveness and level of classroom engagement, making it useful for teachers as well as administrators.  Like every site, I suppose, this is one that can be used as intensively or as lightly as one desires.  But I think I'd use this in the classroom quite frequently to consolidate my reaching-out to parents, students, and colleagues.

I thought to explore Goodreads after reading about what Jen has done with it in the ninth grade classroom, a project she describes on her blog.  I'd heard of the site before but hadn't visited it:  since I generally operate on limited time (who doesn't?), I prefer to spend it actually reading.  However, the site seems great, and I might use it if I'm ever in need of a good book recommendation or even a chat with other book lovers (though usually I can get plenty of those in person, since many of my friends are/were English majors or are affiliated with English as a discipline in some way).  The best thing about Goodreads might be its sly literary evangelism (Alex, you gave this word its currency for our class).  From what Jen describes on her blog, all kinds of students potentially become invested in the site, which allows students to list the books they've read, review them, find similar titles, and take a peek at the virtual bookshelves of their friends.  It seems like a great way to build a reading community within the classroom--and outside of it.

Evernote operates, like Edmodo, on the cloud platform:  like Dropbox, it promises to store your documents (and pictures, and music, and video) wherever you are, synced to all of your devices.  It's quickly becoming clear to me that soon, saying things like "I forgot--that document's saved on my home computer" will be as archaic as saying something like "We can't watch that home video now--the tape untangled from the feeder and we have to wind it back in" (remember the days?).  Anyway, Evernote seems like something I'd use personally rather than professionally (if a niche in my web bookmarking list still exists, at that point, for the personal).  Some features unique to Evernote:  "Evernote Clearly" proposes to make reading online "distraction-free" by clearing away the "clutter" that exists, as a rule of the internet, synchronously with text on most pages.  "Evernote Web Clipper" seems to function much like a bookmarks bar or bookmarking site like Delicious or Diigo--meaning I could take it or leave it--but "Evernote Peek" seems like it could be a cool study aide (if one limited to the iPad), and "Evernote Hello" a wonderful phone app to organize contacts and events and pictures related to those contacts.

Speaking of contacts and social interaction--I think we've come full circle.  As we've learned in class, it's not the technology that makes a lesson great.  Similarly, I guess, tools meant for building community in the classroom can't ever be guaranteed to do so on their own, simply by virtue of existing.  I'm still eager to learn tips and tricks for educators intent--with or without technology--on fostering a sense of community in the classroom.  Part of this, I know, means living by example (my Philosophies of Education had a good discussion about this today using Nietzsche, although his definition of living by example was more of a "let your inner essence emit itself" philosophy rather than a "let your actions speak louder than words" type of thing).  Which means that part of this means relying on convention as a means for conversation as infrequently as possible.  So, yes--it is really Wednesday.  The week's going pretty fast.  How are you, and--oh, here, I found these--did you drop your keys?

Notes Regarding the "Transgressively Industrial" in a Post-Industrial World: How Fifty Shades of Grey Blurs the Line Between Appropriation and Autonomous Creation

Were I to place myself on the spectrum of people who have any kind of opinion about Fifty Shades of Grey (my opinion based on principle alone rather than on any exposure to the books themselves), I would say that I agree with Katie Roiphe from Newsweek who, in a review of E.L. James' bestselling trilogy, wrote that what is “most alarming about the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomena, what it gives it its true edge of desperation, and end-of-the-world ambiance, is that millions of otherwise intelligent women are willing to tolerate prose on this level.”  Usually I refuse to pass judgment on books until I've at least sampled them myself.  In this case, however, I trust what I've heard:  the writing is trite. The themes are cliched and even antithetical to the rights modern women proclaim they deserve. I can't think of any redeeming study of the trilogy besides maybe a horrified investigation into what, exactly, in our culture makes these books so appealing.


No matter how much I dislike the series itself, however, it turns out that the nature of its origin has some surprising connections to what we've been discussing in class re the post-industrial web (this is the only reason, I think, James' name would ever appear on my blog). I stumbled across this article from The New York Review of Books (the lead to the post having appeared on my Twitter feed) about the connection between the multimillion-dollar-grossing series and fan fiction, which illuminates the ways in which James' profit transgresses the unspoken social mores of the fan fiction community.


Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that the first incarnation of Fifty Shades of Grey appeared as a fan fiction story on a Twilight forum, a series I similarly loathe on principle alone. But I suppose I am:  no matter how poor the prose, I guess I'm still used to the author/reader binary. Self-publication via services such as Lulu is becoming the industry norm; more and more frequently, publishers of popular fiction will offer contracts to books only after they've gained a substantial readership independently. This practice at once removes the red-tape involved in publishing (knowing a guy who knows a guy from your MFA program) and maintains its essence, which is networking (knowing a guy who knows a guy who has stumbled across your writing in the vast literary desert of the web and thinks it's quality stuff). While the latter depends heavily on chance, it may be more egalitarian. Web 2.0, if nothing else, is all about egalitarianism (at least initially):  Facebook brags that "anyone" can create a profile.  "Anyone" can sign up for Twitter. Then, as internet users, we trust in the democracy of the web:  more popular figures on Twitter gain followers because they post uniquely funny or informative tweets, not simply what they've had for breakfast.  More innovative or interesting websites, such as Postsecret, rack up hits; others without quite as innovative or interesting a premise fade away.  


Sometimes this democracy of the web works phenomenally.  At others, it results in Fifty Shades of Grey, the popularity of which (over ten million copies sold) most critics ascribe to praise of the most democratic nature:  word-of-mouth. Whatever the quality of the outcome of the democratic process of the web, however, it's hard to deny that the critic/reader relationship is changing in a way that subsumes the traditional cultural authority of the critic to the authority of the reader. As Emily Eakin writes in her article, "It’s tempting to argue that the Fifty Shades trilogy marks the apotheosis of a new industry paradigm, in which power has shifted from high-status cultural arbiters—agents, publishers, and professional reviewers—to anonymous readers and fans" (Eakin).  Is this resurgence of mass culture (versus "high" culture) for the better, or is it, culturally, for the worse?*


But I'm getting off track.  What Eakin argues in her article, and what I'd like to complicate using chapter 3 of Lankshear and Knobel as well as our most recent reading from Jenkins, is that there is a problematic divide between the collaborative, "resolutely anti-commercial" nature of fan fiction and the attainment of commercial success in the publishing industry.


In a definition of fan fiction that could just as easily have appeared in Jenkins, Eakin writes that "Fan fiction [...] exists in a state of dependency, borrowing not only a source work’s fans, who provide a ready-made community of readers, but its characters (and frequently its settings and basic plot) in order to tell the story in a new way" (Eakin).  In other words, fan fiction relies on appropriation. A fan fiction story is a work which takes already-extant characters from books like Harry Potter or movies like Star Wars and places them in new stories, rewrites of a particular scene, or uses them to create alternate endings to the "official" book.  In Twilight fan fiction, Eakin specifies, "Edward [...] is variously reconceived as a surgeon, a high-school principal, and a cat, and his teenage human love interest, Bella, as a wedding planner, a divorcee, a US Army sergeant, and an assistant pastry chef. There are children and car accidents, creepy government experiments, divorces, disappearances" (Eakin).^ Because it so explicitly borrows from published works, using the characters, worlds, and situations "property" of the works' authors, fan fiction supposedly cannot be sold; to protect themselves from intellectual property lawsuits, fan fiction authors place disclaimers at the beginnings of their stories in which they acknowledge appropriation of intellectual "property" from the original author.


I used "supposedly" purposefully in the previous sentence.  E.L. James' work is apparently an exception; so, too, are books like Pride and Prejudice with Zombies (seen but not yet sampled) and many other Pride and Prejudice cult favorites--published!--that follow Mr. Darcy and his new wife to Pemberley. But if we consider the examples Jenkins gives of the cultural history of appropriation, in which Homer "remixed" different Greek myths and tragedies to produce his works and Shakespeare similarly "borrowed" plot threads and themes from his contemporaries, what is the limit?  Where is the line demarcating "autonomous authorship" and "creative collaboration"?


In the examples from Twilight fan fiction Eakin lists above, the situations and alternate personas for the characters in the series seem almost too fundamentally different from the author's original creation to belong to his or her original conception of them. At some point, then, autonomous authorship springs from creative collaboration.  Fifty Shades of Grey morphs itself out of Master of the Universe (James' original Twilight fan fiction) which derives itself from Stephanie Meyer's popular series. Key in the legitimization of Fifty Shades, if not the noncommerical aspect of fan fiction (which obviously becomes irrelevant as soon as any volume is published) is autonomous authorship:  Eakin notes that "Fan-fiction writers and legal scholars have argued persuasively that the genre meets the legal criteria for fair use, because it is [...] “transformative” (it adds novel insights or meanings to the source work)" (Eakin).  In other words, Fifty Shades is a work of fiction in its own right (technically, if not aesthetically) because it has taken Edward and Bella from vampire-land and made them so unrecognizable that they can masquerade as Christian and Ana in your typical corporate America.  But it had to start with Edward and Bella.


I think what fan fiction is forcing us to confront is that the line between appropriation and "autonomous creation" (term Jenkins') is often much messier than we often believe.  And, in this, I find a historical study of appropriation in general is a valid practice in the classroom.  Students may often feel inhibited when writing because they're not the "experts"; when they look at Shakespeare, they see a man who sat down in an day or two and wrote Othello while sitting alone at a desk.  In fact, collaboration and "borrowing" are essential for most writers (Proust is the only one I really know of who managed to write truly excellent books while sitting alone in a cork-lined room). But students don't usually see how many books most writers read in order to become good writers, nor how most of writing is the act of participating in a conversation that is already taking place by using allusions and generic forms common to the conversation to scaffold original thought.  Writing, like most other practices, is less about invention and more about innovation. And that reminder, if nothing else (in this case, there really is nothing else), is why Fifty Shades of Grey might ultimately be valuable in some capacity.


*It's worth noting that this high culture/low culture divide is not a new concern.  The Beat poets caused such consternation way back in the '50s; now nearly every college survey of contemporary poetry includes a study of "Howl."  
^I hope, in at least one story, Edward as cat gets together with Bella as assistant pastry chef.  And that they're in a spaceship.

Notes from the @Twitter(verse): #news, #networking

I come in peace from the year 2008.

That's the year I remember Twitter developing into the cultural phenomenon it is today.  That's the first year I remember hearing "tweet" used not only as a verb ("I tweeted about it last night, yo") but as a verb used by "legitimate" forms of media (such as when a phrase such as "Barack Obama tweeted..." or "Sarah Palin made a statement on her Twitter account today..." appeared in The New York Times or The Washington Post).

I remember noting a dissonance between the conception of the internet I'd had then, which was probably more Web 1.0, and the conception of the web that was developing at that time with Web 2.0 as the expert/novice binary began to fracture.  Facebook allowed college and high school kids to speak to their friends and share photos, videos, and links.  I used it.  Twitter, it seemed, operated on what seemed simultaneously to be both a more personal and more global level:  the platform allowed college and high school kids to interact with presidential candidates, "following" their instant updates and, in some cases, being "followed" back by the campaign.

I remember feeling left out of that electoral conversation, yet reluctant to do anything about it. Sources such as the PEW Research Center mention that younger teens have been, and remain, more likely to use Facebook than Twitter.  For me, at least, that was true--although I can't say why.  I've always been a little bit of a news junkie, so it's not as though the political access Twitter affords didn't appeal to me when I'd previously considered creating an account.  It's also not as though none of my friends have Twitter accounts.  In all likelihood, I think I was resistant to Twitter because it was Twitter, and therefore representative of the new technology to which I continue to remain wary of being "tethered."  After all, barely a week goes by without the publication of a new report declaring the demise of person-to-person interaction.  I can't say those reports are entirely false:  often my college friends would pull out their phones and absently thumb through their new Twitter updates while we'd be watching a movie or hanging out over drinks.  I've caught myself participating in such activity, Twitter account or not, and hated myself for it.  The technical term for what could be termed an unhealthy attachment to one's cell phone is called "nomophobia," and I'd be surprised if I and my friends didn't all have it to some extent.  Last Monday I left my phone in my room from about 4 pm until 11 pm while I went from class to a running club meeting to a restaurant; I found myself worrying the entire time that someone would text me and not receive a response for hours, leading them to wonder where I was.  When I got home, the first thing I did was to check for messages.


Maybe I'm succumbing to being "wired."  Maybe being in a new place with few acquaintances has made it OK for me to spend my time with people (and, interestingly, organizations) who aren't physically in the same room as I am.  But, as in my last post, self-awareness is key--and I think a responsible use of Twitter has far more advantages than disadvantages.  Twitter is where news, and scandal, and, as in the case of the Arab Spring, revolution, often first erupt.  It's also where future colleagues of mine might be having conversations from which I'd be excluded without an account.  Maybe this means I'm joining to compensate for what will otherwise be a knowledge deficit; maybe I'm giving in to a cultural movement that weakens the kind of culture I prefer (which privileges the personal, not the virtual).  


But I'm trusting, again, in the power of self-awareness.  So, to make this more of a tinkering blog (and less of a personal grappling blog) let me tell you what I've achieved on Twitter.  I have a username, a picture, and a profile that is appropriately impersonal.  I have "followers" and people and organizations I "follow":  a sampling of these includes  Education Week, The Paris Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The Huffington Post.  I also follow The Met, NYC event organizations like TimeOut, the feed for the Olympics (London2012), etc.  On the technical, discourse-knowledge-specific side of things, I've figured out the "@" symbol and hashtagging (to a certain extent).  I know what "trends" are and where to find them; I know how to retweet a post and reply to one.  


Etc, etc.  I promised Jordyn my posts would be shorter, so here's the final paragraph:  I'm excited to see what I can do with Twitter in terms of maintaining a professional network.  I'm already getting great articles from Education Week; when I make friends who teach, I'll follow them for what will hopefully be content-specific tips and tricks and even conversations.  No one can predict whether Twitter will be around in two or five years from now, the internet being what it is--but if it is?  And if I manage, in that time, to cultivate a network of educators with whom I can trade ideas?  #awesome.  #righton.

Notes from a Podcaster: On Technology and Innovation

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Let me get right down to what will be a deeply personal entry, if one that also attempts to reflect upon the more academic implications of Lankshear and Knobel’s theories. 

I found our Skype session with Paul Bogush on Monday so perspective-altering that I felt almost as though I couldn’t contribute to it because there would have been too much to ask. I wanted to know more about “unschooling” techniques, and ways to reach particularly restive students, and how to tailor approach to demographic.  I wanted to find out what happens on the first two days of Mr. Bogush’s class that draws the students together into a community, and whether it’s simply meaningful assessment that invests students so much in their work that they’re willing to work harder than they do in any other class.

The session was as rich on a pedagogical level as it was troubling on the personal level.  Our class conversation forced me to confront what is a deep crisis for me regarding teacher predisposition and effectiveness. 

I don’t think anyone enters the teaching profession expecting to be a mediocre teacher.  I could be wrong, of course - but I think that, more often than not, teachers who are ineffective may think they’re doing a great job when they’re not.  Like members of other professions who may not perform at the top of their fields, they may have settled:  settled into a certain, static type of pedagogical orientation or settled into the practice of absolving themselves of student disinterest. 

Part of “settling” in the teaching profession, I think, is failing to recognize (or losing the ability to identify in the first place) the ways in which “baggage” limits an individual’s practice. Mr. Bogush mentioned that he became a teacher because he was dissatisfied with the way the majority of teachers went about the business of teaching. Namely, Mr. Bogush specified that many people who become teachers do so because they were the students who were “good” at school.  The baggage of this type of teacher is the baggage of a comfort zone reinforced by the educational establishment. These teachers were the ones for whom the current system worked, and works, perfectly:  because they were good at reading, writing, and listening carefully to an authority figure in class, these teachers model their teaching practices and expectations for students on this model while failing to recognize that this model is neither the most effective nor the most comprehensive—nor, most importantly, innovative in the way that pedagogy needs to be innovative. As Ken Robinson so effectively and artfully explains in his RSA Animate video, the current educational system is ill-adapted for the 21^st century in many ways.  Yet many teachers are complicit in the system. They may write solid lessons structured around curriculum-based assessments, but they fail to revolutionize current practices.

There are a few reasons I’m hesitant about heading straight into teaching next year at 23, but this is the main one:  I have been nothing but a “good student” my entire life.

Part of my reluctance to share my Animoto video in class on Monday was because it was personal and, like Pat, I tend to shy away from sharing too much.  My five-word memoir for the presentation, interspersed between admittedly formulaic and crappy default pictures, is “Is this the right continent?” (I wanted to use “What if this isn’t the right continent?”—but while the rules admit memoirs that consist of less than six words, I don’t think Smith Magazine would tolerate seven).  Many of my friends are doing radically different things this year:  those who have chosen to stay domestic are getting their first jobs, moving into their first places, relishing their first paychecks.  Those who are going abroad, as many from my college traditionally do, are teaching English in Thailand and South Korea, or else doing scientific research in Germany or working to promote public health in Rwanda or starting their own nonprofits in Cameroon.

And I am in school—albeit a very good school—doing exactly what I’ve always done, which is to complete all required reading and annotate it thoughtfully and write essays which synthesize several articles or complicate one in particular.  I’ve gotten better at contributing to class discussion, but I remain most comfortable with listening intently and following class procedure. 

This is why our class conversation with Mr. Bogush affected me so much, I think.  I would like to say that “school” qua institution has done this to me, but in reality I think that it’s me who’s done this to me.  I had other options this year that would have forced me out of my comfort zone:  theoretically, like my schoolmates, I could have taught in Seoul or Hong Kong. I could have worked on a vineyard in California, or tried to get into the publishing industry. I was actually placed as a Teach for America corps member in Newark, NJ, before receiving my acceptance at TC.  I declined the position because, after much internal debate and conversations with professors of education at my college (which nonetheless continue to leave me conflicted regarding the purpose and effectiveness of teacher education programs), I felt that I would ultimately serve my students better if I pursued traditional route certification. In doing so, however, I gave up a chance for self-discovery and growth that I sometimes regret.

The best teachers are innovators.  There is no question about it.  The best teachers—the life-changing mentor types—are the ones who find authentic ways to invest students in their work, to see both its personal and societal relevance, and (most importantly) to change their approach if students seem unresponsive. They’ve probably done many things and learned enough about themselves in the process to rely on their own judgments and ideas; consequently, they’re able to identify problems within the system and develop visions appropriate to fixing those problems.  Complacency fosters neither anger nor innovation. 

And technology is integral here, not only because it more fully prepares students for the collaborative nature of the professional world they’ll be entering, and not only because it allows students to publish to a (theoretically) worldwide audience, but also because it depends on innovation of the tried-and-true for effective use. The justification for technology in the classroom shouldn’t be to “engage students”; learning doesn’t need to be “fun,” and standards should never be lowered to “cater” to students. What learning does need to be is meaningful. The implications of work in the classroom need to be real and immediate, which is why I believe blogging can be so effective and why it is an example of a technology essential to the English classroom. Nothing needs to be sacrificed to integrate it into the classroom, and the class as a whole stands to gain more than can be measured in terms of motivation and investment when students write conscious of reception by their peers and communities.

Only some technologies, of course, facilitate true innovation.  Those that fail to enhance the curriculum in meaningful ways can be abandoned for their old-fashioned counterparts without repercussion. It might even be better if they are:  efficiency is not always key, and it should never be the key justification for the inclusion of technology in the classroom. On the personal level, I can only hope that I’m not relying too much on the innovation the right technology promises to save my classes from banality:  there are certainly many ways (probably a majority of ways) to be innovative in the classroom that don’t require new technologies.  

But—to return to the concept of “baggage”—the dangers of ignoring new technology consist of much more than depriving students of the knowledge of how to create a podcast or web video, much more, even, than of depriving them of authentic assessments. The danger is for the teacher, who without due consideration of new possibilities (digital or not) risks complacency in a day and age when complacency is unacceptable if the educational establishment really is as troubled as it seems to be.  It is a personal danger as well as a societal one; it is a difficulty that requires constant self-awareness and assessment to combat.  It’s a danger that, as a “good student,” I feel particularly prone to, but one which I plan to fight tooth-and-nail.

Notes from Henry Clay: Determining Technology's Place in the Classroom

Some crazy stuff's coming out of MIT.

In addition to standard scientific frontier-expanding inventions, such as that of an algorithm enabling robots to scan the hulls of ships for mines (also, apparently glasses-free 3-D TV  is pretty imminent), this past spring the university offered a 150,000 student class on "Circuits and Electronics" which was profiled today in an article in The New York Times.

This class is part of a larger free online education initiative by Harvard-MIT called edX.  Although free lectures from major colleges and universities have been available since the launch of iTunes U in 2007, the Harvard-MIT initiative is remarkable for one reason:  it proposes to offer actual interactive and collaborative classes.  While online classes have been available since 1989 (way back in the day, as far as the internet's concerned), they have typically been the purview of for-profit institutions.  EdX proposes to offer a free and coherent education, complete with instructor, TAs, required texts, and peer interaction (albeit through forums).  In so doing, it also proposes to make an Ivy League education more completely a function of merit rather than lottery or connection. 


Of course, there are disadvantages to this type of program.  It's reasonable to guess that any applicant offered a physical seat at either MIT or Harvard with the means to afford it will take it, online option or no.  Most students still prefer traditional education, primarily for the enhanced academic experience but also, perhaps, to avoid the social stigma associated with online education, which for years has been associated with practicality at the collegiate level (think working single mom or dad seeking new career) and introversion or behavioral disorders at the secondary level.  Additionally, the 7,157 students who actually passed "Circuits and Electronics" will not receive any sort of certificate of completion.  Though the president of edX speculates that a longer and more comprehensive program of study could eventually result in the awarding of an honorary certificate by the university, which may be an acceptable form of accreditation for some employers, I imagine few would want to invest their time and energy into Ivy League-level work for a sustained period without anything to show for it.

Certificates aside, however, what edX proposes to do is ultimately a very good thing.  As this article from The Atlantic points out, physical constraints related to available classroom seats (and not a dearth of qualified applicants) are typically what limit class sizes at Harvard to 1000.  "Our goal is to change the world through education," Professor Anant Agarwal says.  EdX's utilization of the web to reach students in Brazil, China, and Mongolia as well as those stateside in lower-income communities and various stages of life means that the platform is a tool of democratization for education at its finest.  The withholding of a degree in the potential advent of a full degree program is potentially problematic:  since so much of the cultural capital of any Ivy resides in its selectivity, MIT and its peers may idealistically "support" free education without being willing to cede a degree rightfully earned.  However, the creation of edX may be an important step in affirming that the acquisition of knowledge, if sought, is a human right.  This may be a compromise worth making.

Just as online education technology has its advantages and disadvantages, so too do the new technologies used within the physical classroom.  Often new technologies allow us compromised access to things that we would otherwise have no access to.  In some cases, this compromised access is to education; in others, it's to experts and Discourse communities.  I was impressed with some aspects of the video conferencing technology we used in class discussion on Wednesday:  we were able to gain access to professionals in the field of technology and English education who would have otherwise remained inaccessible.  The chat discussion allowed everyone to participate, and often the responses to students' questions came as much from us as they did from Teresa and Gary.  Other aspects made me reluctant to rely too exclusively on such technology:  on the affective level, I was too self-conscious on camera (before we turned our cameras off due to bandwidth issues) to fully absorb what Teresa and Gary were saying.  I also regretted that we didn't get to address some points as fully in the chat as they probably would have been addressed in discussion (i.e. my example in class regarding the links posted in chat without further comment, though I understand now that there's a convention - a Discourse-specific knowledge! - that I lacked knowledge of).  The constant attention I had to pay to the chat stream and to the video discussion was exhausting after a while, especially when the discussion centered around one topic and the chat around another.  


I think my choices regarding the use of new technology versus old technology in the classroom will often rely on a consideration of the pros and cons of each.  Despite my discomfort with some aspects of video conferencing, and despite how much more preferable it is to have a discussion with someone in person, I would ultimately rule in favor of utilizing video conferencing in my classroom if it permitted my students to access authors and critics that they would otherwise never get to meet. I appreciate the collaborative nature of blogging and the interpersonal connections students can discover when they're sharing their writing with each other and reading their peers' thoughts in the comfort of their home environments rather than in the data-driven, outcome-focused atmosphere of school. 


However, I also think that advocates of new technologies should compromise with advocates of the old:  though technology may permit us to do things more quickly, more cleanly, and with greater precision, it doesn't always mean we should.  There is a certain joie de vivre in using a real paintbrush on a real canvas to create a picture that can hang on the wall beside your bed.  Likewise, there is an aesthetic beauty and personal character to handwriting that cannot be replicated in any font.  I love the instantaneous nature of emailing, and I don't know how I would maintain all of my close friendships as well without texting and Skype and Facebook, but I still don't know if there's anything better than opening an old shoebox and finding a pile of old letters from friends inside.  


In sum, I think it's dangerous to base any pedagogy completely on computer screen or print text.  Students should learn the nonlinear thinking required of them on the web by participating in fast-moving chats and moving from article to article by clinking on link after link.  However, they should also learn to immerse themselves in a good book for an hour, two hours, even five or six.  They should learn to listen to a multitude of others' voices, then sit quietly and listen to themselves.

Notes from Joey Chestnut

This is the hardest tinkering blog to write yet.

I think this is because I've reached the point where my knowledge of the web is broad but not specific.  Last week I took the time to explore Google, as well as all of Google's "extracurricular" functions such as Google Docs and the like; as far as search engines go, I have at least one (at least partially) figured out.  In the past two weeks I've also had the opportunity to finally determine how Wikis and blogs work and how they can be used in the classroom.  As a class, we've explored a major photo sharing platform (Flickr) and a site for  web video creation (Animoto).  I guess I should be feeling quite accomplished, but - as with knowledge in general, the more I know, the more I realize I don't know.

This makes it difficult to choose what to explore.  Should I focus on finding sites that relate specifically to the wealth of free English literature available online, such as Poetry Daily or the extensive archive of The Poetry Foundation or Project Gutenburg?  Should I search for more sites to share with students like Born Mag that integrate poetry and art and animation?  Or - should I focus on finding classroom tools that will help me to generate collaborative and meaningful projects for students?  Should I explore how to make a video on Animoto or on iMovie, or how to make a podcast, or how to create a digital story or a picture presentation?  I could make my exploration personal and focus on sites similar to The English Companion Ning that would connect me to the Discourse community of English teachers, but I could also devote the limited time we have to exploring bookmarking sites like Diigo and Delicious and sites for WebQuests, sites that provide rubric generators and digital gradebooks and ePortfolios--

Fortunately and unfortunately for me, I decided this week to explore a site which fractures my knowledge even further.  Delicious is a site on which users can post things (websites, photos, tweets, viedos, etc) from around the Web that interest them.  These things are grouped into related categories, or "stacks" (which presumably attract and form different Discourse communities), for easier exploration:  there's a stack for favorite cookie recipes, a stack titled "Getting Around" that features links to the MTA, stacks for compiling effective ab exercises and stacks in different languages.  It reminds me of a site like Pinterest, albeit with a more general, less Home and Garden focus.

Under the "Education" header, there's a stack for educational resources that could be quite useful in the classroom.  There are also stacks which propose to collect links related to technology in the classroom (and even a stack which concerns itself solely with iPads in the classroom).  As with many other collaborative sites (Flickr comes instantly to mind), users can participate as much or as little as they desire; I was able to access all of the posted links without a Delicious account, though I'd need one if I wanted to contribute to the community as an active member by posting links or comments.  In addition to offering links and comments, users can "follow" Delicious feeds that cater to their particular interests.  They can also "like" a particular stack on Facebook and post the link to their Twitter feeds - meaning that the Web continues to tangle itself tighter and tighter, organizing itself around distinct Discourses, even as it fractures into increasingly specialized sites.  


I don't know how or if this site would be good for students to use in the classroom (I don't know if any of the links would be particularly relevant to what we'd be studying), but I do think occasional visits to the "Educational Resources" stack would improve my practice.  When this class ends, I'd also like to visit the stack related to technology in the classroom to keep my toolbox fresh and to stay abreast of the latest trends.  At this point, I feel like Joey Chestnut - if a Joey Chestnut who's hungry for new websites rather than for hot dogs.  I guess I'm lucky that one of my first was Delicious.