A few weeks ago, I wrote a frustrated blog post about my Educational Web Design class. I was just hellaciously shocked about the distance between my own perceptions of the Internet, and typical practitioners' experiences with the networked world. I guess I saw this resistance to participate in Web culture threatening to what I am trying to accomplish academically and professionally, that is, teaching people about mass amateurization and network participation as powerful ways of knowing and being in the world. Publicity about educational leaders who just don't get it tend to put me in defense mode about this sometimes.
However, after seeing some of the students' final projects in progress, I see how wrong I was. These Websites are awesome.Wikis, discussion forums, communication hubs between students and parents, self-tests with feedback built in-- all built from scratch without the crutches of an expensive, pre-packaged course management system or proprietary framework. Some have even mentioned starting to use wikis and blogs as supplemental class activities for high school-age students already this year.
It's amazing what exposure to Web culture and the opportunity to noodle around with digital tools can do to a room full of teachers. And I bet it can do the same to a room full of students.
As it turns out, even the Executive Branch of the US government has a hard time with PowerPoint presentations, the New York Times reports:
"The program, which first went on sale in 1987 and was acquired by Microsoft soon afterward, is deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world."
The military apparently uses poorly designed PowerPoint presentations so often that some officials are banning reductionistic bullet-pointing as an "internal threat." We've all seen enough PowerPoint faux pas in our lives to know what they mean: hideous slide layouts, nauseating animations, speakers putting whole chapters on one slide and lifelessly reading off of them, etc. Perhaps everyone should witness Lawrence Lessig's brilliant minimal slide designs-- now that guy knows the power of a slide show.
But here's the kicker: quite possibly one of the most insightful and profound quotes of our entire generation comes from Brigadier General H. R. McMaster's assessment of the Microsoft program:
'“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”'
I just invite you to think about the implications of these words spoken by a United States senior military official. Seriously, just think about it. Carefully.
I never thought that in my life I would be forced to decide between crayons and vikings. And yet, here I am....
My friend introduced me to this the other day, and it's quite fun. From the mostawesomestthingever.com "about" page:
"By endlessly pitting two things against each other, we’ve created a stage set for destruction. You will battle, winners will emerge. Only the strongest shall reach the hallowed halls of the Most Awesomest."
The thing is, by pitting two completely random and unrelated things together, you can actually decide a winner. Quickly. And justify it. Industrial Revolution vs. Burger King's Whopper? Industrial Revolution wins, hands down. Why? Because you couldn't have a whopper without the socioecomonic conditions set forth by mechanization. Makes sense, right?
Sure, it's just a game developed by some nerdy programmers at a creative agency. But hidden behind its frivolity is something very interesting. Set in front of a burning, post-apocalyptic urban street corner, you are told to battle between two arbitrary things. Larry Bird vs. Edamame; Prada vs. Nutter Butter; Batteries vs. Portsmouth, NH. The design of the website makes your decision over which one wins epic and urgent, blowing the loser into a fiery oblivion. One prevails, and one is destroyed. One can only exist without the other. A binary opposition; either a 1 or a 0.
Computers operate in binary code, but the world doesn't. That's an important distinction. Yet I've felt that in the information society, things are increasingly presented to us as such, deeply embedded in an ideology of mutual exclusion. Regulation vs. Deregulation; Universal Health Care vs. Privatized Health Care; Socialism vs. Capitalism; Religion vs. Atheism; Gay Marriage vs. Heterosexual Marriage; Red vs. Blue. Pundits shape the modern world as a field of mutually exclusive phenomena, and this, I think, is "a stage set for destruction." We are battling, and winners will emerge. But in a continuum of experience artificially packaged as unrelated, dichotemous constructs, how can we decide a winner?
It's also interesting to note that the Internet is ranked the #1 most awesomest thing... just ahead of Life and Oxygen. Now that's pretty yaka-wow.
You cannot understand 21st century students without participating in 21st century tools.
During a lesson on Web 2.0 in my Web Design class, one student shook her head in refusal to download a podcast. "You have to take a risk!" our teacher responded. Everyone laughed. I cringed. When participation in Web culture has to be sold to educators as "taking a risk," it shows a crucial disconnect between learners and teachers in the digital world.
In our online message board, another student questioned the use of blogs in an educational context because of her "fear that they can be used for bullying." Sure, this fear is partly legitimate. But it's also oversimplified. Here was my response:
I think cyberbullying is much larger than the tools that students use to facilitate it. Let me ask you this: before the proliferation of the Internet, bullying happened all the time. Would the elimination of recess be an effective solution for bullying? What about allowing recess to happen, but making the students ask the teacher permission every time they wanted to talk to another student? Would these scenarios eliminate bullying?
Unfortunately, events like the recent suicide in Hadley as a result of cyberbullying cause people to have gut-reactions against technology, viewing it only as a new medium for kids to be mean to other kids. It really isn't that simple, and cyberbullying should never be an argument against using technology in school settings or for making new media tools too private or walled-off from the outside world for them to be of any use.
Sure, students could use spaces like blogs to bully other students, and yes, perhaps moderation would filter this out. Yet at some point, moderation would become unsustainable as more students collaborate. The delay that moderation creates would make the tools less authentic and useful for the students familiar with the open Web, and they would likely abandon them or move to other tools that do the same thing without moderation or school branding. Students are smart about these things: as soon as Wordpress is blocked from a school firewall for behavior, students will immediately go to Blogger, Drupal, Livejournal, or a myriad other sites that work the same way.
Bullying is a much deeper problem that needs to be addressed with deeper methods that get right down the the culture of school in general. Blocking and restricting websites is useless...it's like having weeds in a garden and snipping off their leaves when they get too big-- this will stop them for a moment, but they'll always grow back until you pull them out from the roots. Cyberbullying needs to be addressed from the roots, not just snipping off the leaves of social networking.
Sorry about the rant, but I get really frustrated when people dismiss new media because of its potential for bad behavior. However, it's definitely a reality we have to face as the Internet empowers everyone, not just those we want to empower.
Web culture is a deep part of young peoples' identities, and this is not a bad thing. It's a different thing. And parents, teachers, administrators, and anyone else in leadership roles around students must understand this. So instead of fearing that which you don't fully understand, go read a blog, write a post, share a link on Twitter, just do something interesting on this thing we call the Internetz, because that's what everything is really all about, in the end, e.g., this:
This interview with David Lipsky over at The Howling Fantods made me very, very excited for the Rolling Stone journalist's new book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace.
This man, Wallace, will be, or maybe is, a legend. Dude was able to make you crack up with familiarity and blow your mind right out of its skull in the same damn page. He could use the words "catadioptric," "astigmatic," "cojones," and "weenie," in one breath. One sentence, even. There will be a very interesting tension between " author: the person" and "author: the writer" embodied in Lipsky's book. Or perhaps its not a tension at all, but a congruence? Either way, it will be fascinating and sad and hilarious and profound and, I'm sure, deeply inspiring. This quote from Wallace himself in the Fantods interview really got to the nut of what makes his work so special:
“What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit—to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we’re mostly aware of only on a certain level. And if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Wake the reader up to stuff that the reader’s been aware of all the time.”
And isn't this, in a way, what bloggers do with the Internet, too? Give us the freedom to be hyper-aware of the world around us and share it with the world? (Or four subscribers on Google Reader?)
Ugh... haven't been able to write in a while. Many ideas are floating in my brain folds, but I can't seem to find the words to express them in the time I've been allotted here on P. Earth. Please point me to the killer app that gives me more time in the day...
Things I've been internally pontificating about, lately:
What I really like about Chatroulette is what it reveals about the state of the Internet. We've been jamming away on the "social Web" for the last few years, but there is still something very uncomfortable or foreign about the social web + strangers + Webcam combo. "I'd never show my real face on that thing," a friend of mine said after telling me about his late-night sessions on Chatroulette wearing a giraffe mask and playing guitar (if you see him, tell him I say hi!). That we are totally ok with carefully constructing our Web identities through asynchronous, text-based interactions but not quite ready to fully attach these interactions with our facial identities in real-time is significant. I think we've seen a similar phenomenon with location-aware social networking, which may be wearing off.
And if you've been living under a digital or physical rock and haven't seen this yet, just.... watch it:
2. The "digital divide": I've had a post drafted about this for, like, weeks. It's still not done. Maybe I will post it someday.
3. Graduate School: I'm in it. I just got done writing a literature review about "authentic tasks" in education, and so I've been thinking a lot about "school culture" and how to use technology to extend beyond it. The efficiency of the academic factory model has grouped learners into a bland simulacrum of the lived world instead of creating a safe space for exploring their intellectual boundaries in situated, authentic tasks. Simply put, operating within the norms of exams, grades, detention and recess just doesn't jive with the culture found outside of school in the "real" world, and therefore new knowledge and learning is cognitively filed under the "school" category rather than the "everything else" category.
One really interesting tool I've been seeing recently that extends the traditional classroom into reality is Ustream, a free service that let's users stream live video over the Internet. Last month, Karl Fisch used the website to facilitate a conversation between his 9th grade class and Cory Doctorow to talk about his book, Little Brother:
I would have loved the chance to talk to a real author about a real book while I read it in high school, it just makes the concept of literature seem so much more salient.
Also, an elementary school class got to chat with the owner of Molly, a barn owl who has recently hatched baby owls live on Ustream:
I fondly remember every pet I ever had in my classrooms, and by observing someone else's pet via the Internet, you never have to clean its cage! (Which, if you watch the above video long enough, you will learn that Molly is sitting on about two inches of her own vomit, thus making any cage cleaning empirically gross).
Anyway, there are tons of other ways to facilitate authentic tasks or experiences with technology, some of which I cover in my paper. If you are interested, I would be happy to send along a pdf.
I am documentary filmmaker fascinated by technology's power to construct how we as humans "know" the world around us.
Currently, I am studying in an M.Ed program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst focusing on digital media and education. My goal is to give users the tools to explore a networked and mediated world and to think critically about their existence within it as members of a participatory culture.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a frustrated blog post about my Educational Web Design class. I was just hellaciously shocked about the distance between my own perceptions of the Internet, and typical practitioners' experiences with the networked world. I guess I saw this resistance to participate in Web culture threatening to what I am trying to accomplish academically and professionally, that is, teaching people about mass amateurization and network participation as powerful ways of knowing and being in the world. Publicity about educational leaders who just don't get it tend to put me in defense mode about this sometimes.
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