December 28, 2008
December 8, 2008
Howard Bernstein on Knowledge, Power & Teaching
Thoughts of one of my favorite college professors, Howard Bernstein. He was a real outsider-type in the university and ended up leaving Wesleyan the year before I graduated. He was denied tenure, having focused more on his teaching then on his own research. He died about a year ago. Enjoy.
December 3, 2008
OpenEducationResources [OER]
These are some resources I gathered a while back (in mid-December!) but left in draft form on my blog… but now I’m trying to use this space less to share my thoughts and more to keep track of my research. I have not gone back and annotated these links because I don’t think I would really profit from the process, but in the future of course I will aim to identify the purpose/contribution/hook of the resources I gather.
Open Textbooks: Why? What? How? When?
National Education Technology Plan [ED]
Electronic Frontier Foundation
National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture [NAMAC]
Center for Social Media @ American University
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Publishing in the 21st Century (LOC Webcast)
Open-Source Reality (LOC Webcast)
gee, pup
In one of his masterful Keynote lectures [How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law - TED], Lawrence Lessig invokes the discourse of document permissions in describing our contemporary culture as “RW [ReadWrite] culture – a culture where people participate in the creation and re-creation of their culture – in that sense it is RW.” The opposite of RW culture, according to Lessig, is “read only culture – culture where creativity is consumed but the consumer is not the creator – a culture that is top-down, owned, where the vocal cords of the millions have been lost.”
Gee characterizes the experience of a young person engaging with a “good” video game in similar terms. On page 41 he writes: “Since the child [plays the game successfully]… he can understand (“read”) and produce (“write”) appropriate situated meanings for elements and combinations of elements in the domain (game).” Gee argues that successful playing of first-person shooter video games requires that an individual establish proficiency in that semiotic domain. This means cultivating an awareness of the existence of the semiotic domain as a bounded community of practitioners who speak, write and behave in ways recognized and sanctioned by the group at large. In order to become a recognized member of a new community, an individual necessarily must engage with the community at a meta-cognitive level, thinking about the community as a socially-constituted entity that observes certain conventions, is concerned with certain ideas/issues/questions/problems, communicates in a highly specialized discourse about certain topics and not others, and generally shares a common set of values, norms, goals and practices.
portrait of a pup
One of the things I appreciate about Gee’s argument is his broad construction of what counts as reading. Dismissive of the notion that reading can be reduced to the act of decoding printed characters – a la phonics or DI (direct instruction) – Gee argues that literacy is the ability to make symbols contextually intelligible, the ability to make use/make sense of the abstract representations on the page or the screen. His conception of reading grows from a broad conception of text as any representational system in which meaning is encoded – similar to the notion of what constitutes a text in the developing field of media literacy.
An interest in popular culture films about teachers in urban schools has prompted some of my recent forays into the literature of media literacy. There is a good deal of scholarship that is concerned with developing in teachers and students the capacity for push-back against the oppressive and continual assault of mainstream media messages. As I have been familiarizing myself with the field I have noticed a great deal of emphasis on pedagogical approaches that seek to empower students to deconstruct mass media artifacts like pop songs and junk food advertisements. But the flip side of deconstruction is, of course, construction – yet the literature I have read tends to de-emphasize the building of new culture (the “write”) as it champions the importance of critique of existing culture (the “read”). Gee, however, finds much of value in the process of building new meaning to replace the meaning one has torn down. He spends a great deal of time elaborating throughout the book the distinction between active learning and critical learning – in the latter case the learner “reflect[s] overtly on the goals, values, feelings, and desires that compose this system [the semiotic domain].” His framework maintains that critical learning (or “write” culture) is the highest form of learning.
December 2, 2008
meet Hangzhou, my pup
I was curious to see what Gee had to say about video games, having first read him six years ago in the only good course that was part of my masters in education degree – courtesy of the City of New York Teaching Fellows Program at crappy Pace way downtown in the crude anthill purgatory that is the Financial District. In Social Linguistics and Literacies Gee articulates a sociocultural approach to language, learning and literacy. It kind of shocks me in retrospect that my “preparation” to be a high school English teacher of 17- to 21-year olds in the stand-in cinematic ghetto of Bed-Stuy was so spotty, and this in what was considered a model fast-track certification program. <shudder>. I remember finding Gee very compelling when I first read him – thinking the political implications of his work ground-breaking. So it was interesting to read Gee again, post-meat-grinder, from my later vantage point as a grizzled veteran of the inner city hallways.
hangzhou
Trends and buzzwords are the bread and butter of teacher education – one of the things that people were always telling us in our classes was to “activate prior knowledge” in order to get students interested in seemingly arcane topics. A lot of what we were taught – aside from how to use the right *scientific sounding* to prop up the floundering reputations of schools of education (as if they were ever prestigious!), was pretty unobjectionable – like, of course, as a teacher one should be intentional when introducing topics and always new ideas to what students already know. It is not a quirk of inner city students that they resist learning about things they don’t think are relevant to their lives. We all do it, or at least we should.
But anyway, one of Gee’s points is that video games, like books, help us build a more robust mental framework by contributing to the construction of linkages between first-hand experience and the life of the mind. He also says at one point, and then barely touches on it since in all that I’ve read, that access to high quality video games is a plausible social justice agenda. Maybe that’s why I have this vague sense of Social Linguistics and Literacies as a political book – tossing bombshells like sunflower seed shells on my classroom floor…
November 5, 2008
October 9, 2008
Blogging in the University
I’m sure most of us have come across coverage of NYU student Alana Taylor’s post on MediaShift about the lack of new media course offerings at her J school and the paper-bound career-ladder-climbing mentality that prevails among faculty members. She quotes one of her professors, and, as if on cue, the professor responds by banning live-blogging and twittering in a class entitled “Reporting Generation Y.” Taylor has been admonished by officials at NYU who basically accuse her of poor form – personally and journalistically – in not clearing her piece with the professor and fellow students, but NYU authorities and blogosphere pundits recognize that while NYU, as a private university, is technically exempt from the First Amendment concerns that would certainly be in effect in a CUNY classroom, to engage in active censorship in the form of declaring classroom discussions off-the-record is a losing argument and not what anyone really wants.
Taylor’s reportage may sometimes veer into the snarky and sound-bitey, as when she characterizes the journalism department as “exceptionally estrogen-infested,” but I think the volume of controversy surrounding her piece in the blogosphere point to a definitional weakness of the university. Universities are effective transmitters of well-defined bodies of knowledge, but less so of emerging realities and developing social practices. Universities are composed of many individuals with highly specialized knowledge bases and expertise. In many instances, groundbreaking and paradigm-changing work does flow from institutions of higher education, especially insofar as experts are employed as tenured faculty (think of a university-based historian or a research scientist) as opposed to part-time emissaries from the private sector (business school adjuncts, for example). What I’m suggesting is that universities as they are traditionally organized may not be structurally compatible with quickly-developing expertises like social media.
Not earth-shattering, I know, what can you expect? – this is just a blog, folks.
September 26, 2008
class & communication
Yesterday we toyed around with the idea of online identity/ies – one or many? consistent or fractured? Dayna invoked YouTubers’ spiralesque discourse and the way some participants in quote unquote online communities seem eager to slip into the crowd, slip out of responsibility for one’s words. Mitch commented that he has frequently been impressed by how online communities are often very diligent self-policers, and the way rational vigilantes almost rise up, sphinx-like. And Rose pointed out that there is a sort of movement under way in which people who want to be taken seriously on the internet, often people whose professional identities are in some way connected to the internet-specific work they do, endeavor to build consistent identities across different kinds of spaces, in the quote unquote real world and on the internet. I’ve seen this, or what I think maybe she was referring to, and Rose correct me if you read this and you meant something else, but you did mention you were building a wiki. This one teacher-lady Vicky Davis aka coolcatteacher is a wikilover (http://coolcatteacher.wikispaces.com/) is an example of someone with a pretty unified identity, and if you go to the about page there is even a black and white posed studio picture of her from like 1990. Anyway, we moved on to a discussion of the internet as a space for communication and interaction versus the internet as a medium that discourages sociality.
This afternoon I was looking through some of the materials from earlier in the semester, more specifically the chapter on panoramic travel in The Railway Journey by Wolfgang Schivelbusch. I found the last five pages or so especially fascinating, when he discusses how reading while traveling became a thing to do. It turns out that among a certain class of people – those who before would have traveled by stage coach with a small group of close friends before in “intense conversation and interaction” (p. 67), it became very a la mode to remark on the insufferable banality of modern travel. But what they really missed was the easy conviviality of their past selves. So they mopped up their disappointment with highbrow travelogues while annihilating space and time. Meanwhile the working folks who traveled third and fourth class with no compartments as in first and second class had nothing to compare rail travel to, and so they loved it and all piled in and had a great time and didn’t read.
Schivelbusch cites a contribution to the so-called medical congress of 1866 that declared “a new form of locomotion has so profoundly altered the traveler’s relations to each other” (p. 69). If you replaced locomotion with communication that sentence could have been written today. In this rich rich country we are made complacent by our objects, devices, and my – as I call it – my “little machine,” and so we all, all classes, absorb the excess capital.
September 22, 2008
Harvey
I’ve listened several times to David Harvey’s lecture podcasts, one on globalization and the other on the neoliberal city. I find his talks and the articles posted on his website somewhat easier to parse than the superdense Condition of Postmodernity. That my sense of him is as a substative thinker, not unnecessarily obtuse, fairly profound, etc, I am pretty sure I need to read the book over a few times to offer any worthwhile critique. Also I’m getting sick…
But I’m interested in his use of a Robert Park quote. “The city is man’s most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself.”
