Week 12 Readings Part 2 March 29, 2010

Lisa Lane’s Insidious Pedagogy

“The fact that each technology had a specific purpose implies a goal in its design, an objective that limited or even determined its use. Today’s online technologies are no different, and create serious impacts on our teaching.” The implications of this statement are huge. Technology has a goal, just like the bomb and the microwave, we cannot get around the fact that online web sources and teaching each have their own specific purpose, for better or worse.

Lane makes the important point that many teachers teaching online are novices, maybe not in teaching and maybe not in their subject, but a lot of them are teaching novices when it comes to teaching online (not Steve of course J) but this can be bad because they may not be setting up their classrooms to the best means possible like Kevin DePew and Heather Lettner-Rust’s article pointed out. Like Lane says, we need to help guide these novice instructors in ways that a typical face-to-face instructor doesn’t necessarily need. Maybe online courses in each department should hire an online department head to make sure online courses are meeting rigorous departmental requirements and are challenging students to the same extent as in-class instructors are expected to.

Combating Myths About Distance Education

By Todd Gilman

I think it’s interesting that he points out that even teachers today still look down on distance education as “not as good as” meeting in a classroom so many days a week. Everything in our society is such a hierarchy! I think my online course this semester has been by far my hardest and most demanding, and in fact, most stressful. How can any informed teacher not know the difficulties of taking an online course??

I like his point that meeting in person isn’t always a good thing either. Students can be unresponsive, unprepared, rude, etc. more so than they can be online. When it comes to distance education, students have to respond a certain number of times and in such an intelligent fashion that isn’t required in the classroom setting. Each way of teaching has its own challenges, but they also have great benefits as well.

He says that the online course design and environment can be a lot less forgiving than a face-to-face classroom, and I agree. A student really has to stay on top of every last post and assignment and lecture and discussion and you name it, in order to feel prepared to move ahead in the class and its content. Online courses require a discipline other classes just don’t.

Online-Education Study Reaffirms Value of Good Teaching, Experts Say

By David Glenn

I think it’s interesting that he points out that the medium isn’t the important factor here, it’s the strategies used to teach the lessons to be learned. If online classes happen to be more effective than face-to-face meetings, then perhaps it is because teachers are breaking out of their old, ineffective ruts and teaching through better means. My recent book report talked about this and how teachers need to try out new means of teaching rather than sticking with the old and ineffective things they’ve been doing for the past 20 years or so. I also like that he points out that the new methods aren’t that different from the old ones. Email or video conferencing is pretty much the same as when a students comes to your office and you tell him or her to shape up or risk failing.

They Thought Globally, but Now Colleges Push Online Programs Locally

By Marc Parry

Wow, the idea of a global campus is pretty cool. I mean, I guess that’s what a lot of online classes are anyways, but to think on a global level seems like it’s way more than what EMU and other institutions have been doing. Like I said, I think it’s important for students who are working adults with families like Joel Kohlberg to be able to go to school and work fulltime, but I think schools need to make sure they are doing what they’re doing to benefit students and not just their own pocket books. If an institution is just going online to make money then the program will fizzle like they mentioned, it won’t have to same quality instructors or instruction that many universities demand. Distance education should be to benefit students who want to better themselves, not be taken advantage of.

Week 12 Readings Part 1 March 29, 2010

Mediating Power: Distance Learning Interfaces, Classroom Epistemology, and the Gaze

Regardless of what people think about distance education and its effect on learning, I think that their point that online learning allows for people to go to school who would never have had that opportunity is one of the most important things we can take away from this article. I am a big advocate of education for all, and if that means the classroom has to come to some students, then so be it. Like they said, the importance lies in the creation of course goals and outcomes and as long as students are meeting those goals and outcomes, the method in which they get there (face to face versus online) doesn’t really matter.

I mean, it’s obvious from this study and others that whether or not teachers and students ever see each other isn’t exactly important. Students can still learn and meet the outcomes from online learning, but the tough decisions come from the curriculum designers who have to decide how and what to implement when it comes to designing the class and the technology required. I wonder though, are instructors in charge of creating online courses on their own, or do they have to meet with special course developers to make sure they are meeting the needs of students through online collaboration? I am sure that for this class Steve was able to develop the course on his own because he has such a huge repertoire of online programs, but for people who don’t but still have the task of teaching online courses, do they have support systems to turn to? It’s interesting to think about because I know I am getting the most from this class because steve is so highly informed and educated on the topic and on online teaching and learning, but if other classes don’t have such tech-savvy teachers, how do they get a quality education?

As for methods of learning, sure, problem-posing methods of teaching and learning will always be more important and valuable than the banking model of learning, because students are not empty vessels just waiting to be filled with knowledge. In order to truly learn and understand, students must be able to understand a problem and solve it. I agree that the way an online course is set up and the background experience of a teacher is important for distance education, and that those instructors really need to think about the implications of everything they do much more than a face to face teacher.

Digital Underlife in the Networked Writing Classroom

Derek N. Mueller

I really liked his introductory paragraph that “The formal scene of teaching and learning ha, for everyone involved, changed: teachers are evermore frequently positioned to make decisions—to act—on digital underlife, on the distal and potentially transgressive discursive activities proliferated by emerging technologies, because their work-space hovers near a saturation point of crossed signals and converging wavelengths supported by portable electronic devices and wireless computing.” The first things that came to mind is 1) I have been there- wanting to pull the plug on my students who were messing around on chat or Google Earth or whatever program we had on the school computers and b) I’ve had a class that allowed us to go on whatever sites we wanted, but assumed we were listening as well. I’ve been on both sides of the debate and while on each side, I felt differently about what was happening. As a teacher, I wanted to pull the plug. Take students back to the classroom where they didn’t have access to such powers that they couldn’t control, but as a student who has messed around on email and facebook quickly and quietly while in class, I never once stopped paying attention to the teacher, and was actually paying more attention to the teacher while on those applications that I was in the minutes leading up to my going online.

I don’t allow laptops in my classroom. Students don’t need them and if we do need access to the Internet for whatever reason, my computer has it. We can look something up, project on the overhead screen, and get the information together. Yet, as I do this, students are on their cell phones checking their text messages, never quite satisfied with what is happening in the classroom regardless of what we are doing in class. They are so used to being entertained in five different ways at once, sometimes I think it would take a circus to keep them entertained and “on top of it all” in the classroom.

I like that article refers to the face book, texting, and iPod problem as an attentional crisis, because that’s exactly what we have on our hands. This digital underlife that pushes the rules, roles, and boundaries need to be dealt with in order for teachers and students to continue on. What must be done, like he points out, is that teachers have to embrace the digital underlife and find ways to bring it into the classroom, like the Twitter Project in Texas. We can’t just altogether ban it like the talks of banning Wikipedia, it’s not practical at this point, but we do need to find a way to make education and technology meet and assist in students learning.

Week 12 Research Update March 29, 2010

Note: this is not the “official” post for peers to comment on- that’s a few entries down

Ok, so this week I am setting goals for myself and my research project. I plan to have the majority of my work done this week. I want to have my last 10 annotated bib entries posted by Wednesday/Thursday at the latest. And then by this weekend, I would like to have the first three to five pages written. I already a working outline in my head of where my paper is going to go, but I will also have that down and “official” by Thursday as well. I know my paper is mainly going to cover issues of how to use remixing in the classroom, but I need to make sure I define digital literacy for my reader and let them know why I think this project and remixing is important to student success before I can move on to the “meat” of my paper. I am feeling energized about it and have a plan of action! If you’re looking for my official project update to comment on, it’s a few entries down on this page. This is just my informal research update for week 12 J

Research update for peer comment March 25, 2010

I guess my research is slightly on hold until I finish my book report and that I’m working on today. Basically though, what I am working on for anyone who doesn’t know is using remixing in the classroom. I wanted to find out how to include technology in the high school English classroom in ways that weren’t too difficult, yet could be motivating and uplifting for students. I am still semi-knew to the creation of podcasts and youtube videos and the editing of imovies, but I think they are technologies students should be getting experience with and I think using them to remix and rethink novels and other stories we read in the classroom would be a great thing. And by remixing I mean taking something that has been read and discussed in class and creating something new that has been fashioned out of new or pre-existing materials. Like mash-ups on YouTube, performances from the perspective of another character, or flash poetry based on a novel, my goal is to show how teachers can use this technology to have students displaying what they have learned in one context and transforming that into another context through metacognition, or informed decision-making. Remixing is powerful because it makes use of images, words, sounds, and any other medium it needs, to make a significant impact on its audience, helping students become literate in a multitude of ways. Through conscious decision-making skills, students can gain agency over their works and become “producers and participants” of a culture rather than just consumers of the texts teachers give them.

Week 11 Readings Part 2 March 21, 2010

Facebook and Academic performance: reconciling a media sensation with data

Is there a relationship between facebook use and grades? That’s an interesting point I had never thought of before!

But seriously, now that we’ve talked about a lot of these issues in class over the past weeks, I am much more interested in reading about the positive effects of these technologies in students lives rather than all the negative paranoia. Unfortunately, no matter what I do, my friends and family are still not convinced that texting and facebooking will not be the end of intelligence as we know it. My mom even forced me to watch that silly “In the year 2025” song on youtube for like the fiftieth time insisting that that is where we are heading if we don’t stop all this stuff, lol.

It also made me think about the summer class in TC where all of us grad students were playing around and working on our technology projects while you were in the back talking and walking us through stuff. We were easily able to multitask! We were sometimes working on podbean stuff even though you were talking about Twitter or whatnot, I don’t think students should be on facebook or texting in class, but at the same time, like with the Twitter experiment, students were able to understand what the instructor was saying, keep up with the class discussion, and participate all at once. Like several of our other readings have noted, this is a generation that needs to be multitasking. They thrive on doing many things at once and I think we need to give them more challenging things to do in the class or else they will multitask with the materials they brought with them.

Thanks for the Ad, now Help me with my Homework

It really was nice to read an article that didn’t just slam the negative effects of these technologies on students’ lives. I think reading this really helped me to see my own biases against gaming as a means of learning and how those thoughts are unwarranted and a little too negative, just like all the naysayers against social networking site. Is it because I understand SN but not gaming? Probably! I use fb all the time and I am not some delinquent! So why would students who game be? They’re not and we all need to learn how to embrace this.

I thought it was important that this article noted how student writing has actually increased because of social networking sites. My book review book talks about this as well. Students may be “butchering language” in their texts and facebooking, but they do know the difference between how to write in emails versus texts, versus school papers. A lot of our paranoia is unfounded, students are learning a lot of new skills from technology and we as educators need to embrace this, just like Gee and Prensky and them were talking about.

3 Ways educators are embracing technology

I have never Skyped and haven’t used the technology, but I know a TON of students are using it and I think I need to try it out! I loved the idea of the Spanish-American dialogue happening between the two classes and countries; it’s like having a pen pal but one that can help you learn in authentic ways. I agree with the conclusion of the article, we can’t ban these technologies (like the article on the banning of Wikipedia mentioned) and it’s silly to even try. The more we try to stop students from using them, the more they will rebel and the more policing we are going to be forced to do. Let students use their cellphones in between classes, who cares? Just make sure they know they can’t take advantage of this and come late to class or keep texting once they get there. I think it can be done, but it would take a lot of discussion rather than lecturing to get students to get on board with it.

Week 11 Readings Part 1 March 21, 2010

Facebook, Myspace divide along Social Lines

This isn’t the first article I have read about the fight between Myspace and Facebook, while I have to admit that I don’t have a MySpace, I used to. I thought it was realy cool when I first started it, but then as I got older and my friends were talking about Facebook I was a convert and quickly realized that Facebook was the place to be. I closed down my MySpace and welcomed the more mature audience and the way I could connect with family and friends in a way I just didn’t get from MySpace.

I thought the trends and statistics about Facebook versus MySpace were interesting as well. It’s weird that even the technology we choose to use can define and stereotype us.

Zen and the art of Twitter

I liked that the article was informal, but at first wan’t sure if it was a joke or not. As this just a Google article meant to entertain? I think it is important to “explore living wisely in our modern age” but Twitter wasn’t the first thing that came to my mind.

I think his point that social networking can become overwhelming is important. To a lot of us, it’s just good fun and a way to procrastinate and chat informally with friends, but to many, it just adds up to work. I like his point to try and learn something new. I tell my students, even if you think you know it all, there’s still something you can learn if you’re open to the possibilities, and it’s true for every facet of life, even Twitter I guess J

I also like the “post not to fill empty space, but to add value” as well. It reminded me of the readings about chat rooms and YouTube from last week where people think that because their posts are anonymous they can say whatever they want. People should respond to add value and not insult.

Defining Creepy Treehouse

The definitions are wide and actually really funny, lol. I think I really did laugh out loud when reading some of them J

One thing that stood out to me was when he said, “they may repulse some users who see them as infringement on the sanctity of their peer groups, or as having the potential for institutional violations of their privacy, liberty, ownership, or creativity.” I have seen this a lot in technology classes where some people refuse to put up pictures because they think someone will steal their identity or just don’t want to participate in something like Face Book because they’re terrified of the possible ramifications. I guess because I like face book I never really understood this, but maybe because I’m more of a “native” to it.

I also thought the idea that using tools that mimic the tools students enjoy using on their own time is a part of the creepy treehouse effect. We talked about this in the summer class and how using Twitter or FaceBook pages as a way to make learning cool or fun can actually have a negative effect. Students don’t want teachers invading all aspects of their lives, they want facebook for themselves and not have to be forced to check the classroom facebook page, then it’s just a creepy treehouse and no learning takes place.

How Twitter Will Change the Way we Live

Interesting and funny all at once! Who knew hearing about my friends’ breakfast cereal choice could change my life! The idea of ambient awareness was pretty interesting and how seeing into their lives can be deeply satisfying. I think more than anything it would make me laugh, which either way, is still good for one’s health J

“In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it’s doing to us. It’s what we’re doing to it.” The use of Twitter in the classroom as a way to open up dialogue on a subject is fascinating. We watched that one video from TC about the woman who uses it in Texas and I think it could be a really cool way to get kids who wouldn’t normally talk in a classroom discussion to openly participate on screen. We tried it in the TC class and here as well, and I think it could be a fabulous tool.

ParadoxandPromise:MySpace,Facebook,andtheSociopoliticsof

SocialNetworkingintheWritingClassroom

Maranto and Barton

I think this article was really interesting, especially the way it talks about how these SN tools have both potential and potential problems. I know from experience that they are highly abused by teachers and don’t mind that they are blocked on school campuses. One of my exboyfriend’s best friends is a teacher and all he does all day long is get on facebook and/or email back and forth with his buddies. To me, this is an abuse of the system and should be policed by the schools. I’m not all crazy about not having email and technology on capuses, but I do think that teachers and students who are using them incorrectly should have repurcussion. This same teacher also has his students on his Facebook page where he talks about drinking and partying and also allows students of his to come over and let his dogs out when he is not home… female students too. Granted he’s a mess, but I would venture to say if this guy is doing it, so are a lot of others. I know some more too.

As a high school teacher who was single, I NEVER allowed students on my facebook or myspace pages, I made my profile impossible to find. One boy searched for three years but found nothing.I believe he even paid money to try and find me… He found my old address in Texas, he found my parent’s address back in Michigan, but he did not find my social networking profiles. I was not about to risk my job and my credibility just to look cool to my students. I have some friends who are established in their schools, married, have families of their own and accept their students on their facebooks but these to me seem like “safe” people. If that makes sense. They’re the ones who don’t drink, don’t “party” and don’t put pictures up of them doing anything “wrong”. It may seem hypocritical, but I think some people can get away with having students on their SN sites and some cannot. I didn’t accept any of my Vegas students on my facebook page until I moved out of the state. Even when they graduated I knew present students could possibly see my page and I wouldn’t allow it. It’s true, with SN these days one has to be careful about what they say and do. I agree that “electronic media and social networking is perilous terrain for educators” and “lends itself to the possible interpretation of an improper relationship” which is why I do not allow students on mine.

I do think it’s important htough that with all the change in literacy and the teaching with technology that “scholars in the computers and composition community are naturally curious about how these sites can be used to teach writing and authorship.” We need to keep finding ways to incorporate technology in the classroom if we are to make learning relevant to students’ lives.

Week 11 Research Update March 21, 2010

Well, with my MA exam this weekend I was not able to work on my research. But as of Monday I will be going to it full force. I want to work on my last 10 bib entries and really start outlining my paper. I think I’m going to start out by answering the question- why does this matter? Why do we need remixing in the classroom? I want to point out that it’s not just for fun, but because visual literacy and new media literacies are expanding and becoming ever more popular and important in today’s day and age that we cannot possibly ignore it. I guess this paper is my attempt at explaining how and why I will use remixing in the classroom when I go back to teaching at the high school level.

Week 10 Readings Part II March 13, 2010

Composition, Computer Games, and the Absence of Writing” by Kevin Moberly.

I thought it was interesting how they pointed out that video games and other such forms of communication are going towards voice communication. It is faster and more efficient than composing. Is this the future of the classroom? I don’t see us getting rid of composition any time soon and replacing that with voiced over speeches so I’m not sure how relevant this is.

The author talks about Kings Quest and how the film succeeded the book, which are both succeeded by the video game. Because they can overtake and rewrite the original texts, video games that call for active participation are more meaningful, they claim, than the text. Although they don’t deny the book, they allow participants to make their own decisions. This reminded me a little of remixing. The participants get to take the materials and turn it into what they want it to be/go the route they want to go rather than the one way the text allows them to go.

Moberly makes the interesting connection between the player who spends years creating an identity online in his or her gaming world, but never does anything with that identity in “real life” to the composition classroom where students spend hours and months creating writing pieces that rarely make it into their outside lives. He goes on to say that the WOW identity creation  “require students to participate in a mode of discourse that is traditionally privileged by the university: a process that is designed to acculturate students into a socio-political understanding of what constitutes ‘meaningful’ participation in the context of the academic and non-academic discourse communities in which they are involved.”  What do other people think about this? Do you see how gaming and WOW has more meaning than what we’re doing in the English classroom?

He says computer games have a lot of potential in teaching students how to create characters, navigate through the creation of a conceptual framework, understand process, pop culture, etc. but at the end he says teaching through video games will help students “recognize the master discourse of consumerism for what it is…” but by buying and buying into video games, aren’t they becoming a part of that homogenized consumer culture?

Alice Robinson “The Design is in the Games”

I know I am resisting, but just because video game designers structure their games in similar ways authors create texts doesn’t mean we have to teach using video games. Does it? As long as they’re saying we should restructure the composition classroom and the way we teach, I am ok with that. I know we need to make changes and make sure the “what” and “how” we are teaching is relevant to student’s lives, but as long as they aren’t saying we must teach through video games, I’m ok.

She says that from video games “formalist, textual, and experimental properties to their ability to inspire a host of sociocultural experiences, video games have been theorized and studied for their value and potential to the humanities…” They inspire interactive meaning-making and engage participants in complex ways. It would be fantastic to make the writing classroom as exciting as playing video games, but how do we get students to link writing and composing with “play”?  Chris Novak says he works backwards based on what he wants his players to say, and I think teachers have done that in some ways with the backwards design principles of what do I want students to learn and then going from there.

I thought it was interesting that game designers have outcomes and standards just like the writing classroom, but theirs are more tailored to what they want their players to say and think and feel as they play, while teachers’ have educational outcomes in mind. Her concluding thoughts that video game designers are like curriculum designers was something new to me. I’d like to see an example (or multiple examples) of how composition teachers have developed units or lesson plans based on video game design. Do you have any of these Professor Krause?

Week 10 Readings Part I March 13, 2010

Daniel Floyd’s “Video Games and Learning”

Brain training, huh? I’d like to train my brain better, maybe I should start playing video games! I’m serious. Maybe I’m missing out! His video was awesome. Games can teach us something, he says, and they don’t have to be boring to do it. Only thing I didn’t appreciate here was the image of Monopoly as he said the “boring” bit. There’s nothing wrong with wholesome family games that people can sit down together over and chat while they play.

He talks about the discrepancies between games meant to teach and games meant to entertain. They’re not only separate in the way we think about them, but in the industries themselves. I do like the name, “edutainment” though. The digital world makes fun names for things J

Within the divide between “fun” games and “educational” games both are currently lacking. He says educational games hit you over the head with a lesson (which isn’t fun) while the fun games leave you lacking in having accomplished anything (like growth as a human). His solution? Games that enable learning rather than just have the purpose of education.

I like his point about tangential learning. Learning about something that’s within a topic you’re already engaged in and interested in. getting people interested in new topics so they explore self-learning is a fantastic idea at heart, I think it’s what most of us teachers strive to do on a daily basis. I mean, I’ve taught plenty of things I thought were super cool and interesting and tried to get students pumped about it, but sometimes they are just apathetic to most everything. I mean, I can’t exactly assign them to watch 300 so they can get excited to research past “heroes”. I think even if I asked them to do that on their free time I would have tons of parental freakouts.

He makes some interesting points but I still just can’t get behind the whole, “let’s bring video games into every part of life and learning.” I’m being open to it, I swear! But as of right now, I’m still not convinced.  At the beginning of the video I thought I was going to be really open to learning from this and integrating his ideas and such, but I’m not sure I can. I think it would be cool if video games do indeed start making it easier to facilitate tangential learning, the more a students can learn the better for sure! If they’re learning outside the classroom- great! But I still don’t think we need to bring video games into the English classroom. If there is a way to make students enjoy their learning more and be up for self-motivated, challenging work in the ELA class, then hey, I’ll talk about it and be open to it, but how to make these ends meet, I don’t see it.

“Games above all should be fun” and we can expose them to new concepts and facilitate learning.  He says, They should be able to bring things from their entertainment sections of life and into their everyday life.  But really? Is it necessary to bring Guitar Hero and Mortal Combat into life? I get what he’s saying and he makes some good points, but I don’t see why we would want to bring Mario Kart or whatever else into “real life” or why so many people seem to be against classroom learning these days. There are ways to make learning relevant and important without video games. Ok, I guess I’m not as open to the video games as I thought I was an hour ago L

Gee’s “What Video Games Have to Teach Us…”

I like Gee and the way he presents his materials to readers. I liked that at the end of the introduction he says that he is not going to be addressing the fact that video games can be violent or stereotypical against women. He knows people have issues with that, he threw his thoughts about those things right away, got them out of the spotlight for topics of his book, and went on to show how his text is so much more than that and how it can help with teaching students today and making learning relevant to their lives. This piece made me kind of wish I chose video games in the classroom as my topic, because I wanted to know his 36 points!

I thought it was important that Gee linked learning and mental achievements to social activities and the ways we read, write, and think about things to the groups we align ourselves with. It’s true, I am in graduate school not only to better myself as a scholar and an educator, but also in part because the groups I am a part of expected it of me. After high school it was expected of me to go on for higher education, then to grad school, and to continue that education throughout my lifetime. The odd thing was, as I continued my education I was “kicked out of” one group of friends I used to hang out with. I surpassed them and their own achievements and was no longer welcome. So now I find myself with new friends that I have made during my time at graduate school and know that because we have similar achievements and ways of viewing the world (and don’t mind challenges to our beliefs) those friendships can continue successfully. I know Gee doesn’t quite go into that kind of depth about this with video games, but those are the connections I made because like he said, my past experiences have influenced my thoughts.

I would like to know how gee goes on to tell us how we can make school just as challenging and worthwhile for students to learn from as video games. He says he was more than happy to sit down in front of the TV for 8 hours and play his game, but we can’t get kids to stop zoning out in class. What are his 36 principles of learning from video games that we can bring into the classroom?

I understand that because of the non-video gamer group that I am a part of, I am having an even harder time understanding the significance these games play in student’s lives, but I hope the next couple readings help me see more of how this can be important to the ELA classroom.

Madrid and September 12^th.

I was not a fan of either games. I couldn’t get all the candles to light and didn’t get the purpose of the shooting game. There didn’t seem to be a purpose to either. As for playing regular games, I don’t have a gaming consol but may try to see if I can use of of my sister’s.

Week 10 Research Update March 13, 2010

Not a whole lot going on this week. I have my first 10 annotated bib entries up on the Wiki. I feel like I have a pretty decent background of where my paper is going, I also think that Steve’s CCCC conference paper may help me understand my paper a little better since he’s done stuff with remixing, the topic my paper is on. After the MA exam next Sunday I will really buckle down and begin my paper for this class and finishing up the second 10 bib entries. I think I have a pretty decent plan for finishing out the semester successfully, I’m just hoping I do “A” work throughout J This is just a crazy semester. I’m taking three really tough and work-load intensive classes, plus teaching, grading, lesson planning, running my first half-marathon, writing my first conference paper, trying to find a job when I graduate in April, etc. it’s just a lot, but I think I’m holding up nicely J