Enduring Questions - Activity 10

This course has, in a good way, left me with more (practical) questions than answers. Consequently, I have decided to create my final assignment as a questioning task, to help me think through and articulate some of the questions I am still grappling with, not as a theorist but as a ground-floor educator.

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Assignment: After reading both articles, come up with three questions, based on your reading of the texts, relevant to your practice as an English teacher. In posing your questions explain the relevance, ideas, context etc for your questions that make them important to think about as a practioner. You can use a quote to help bridge your question and the text. Limit 100 words per question.

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1. How as a teacher do we support literacy acquisition in a digital age?

Knobel and Lankshear, argue that “much of the cyberspace life of young people is text-based…reading and writing mediated by new digital technologies become even more complex…and the “rules” or “language games” associated with different online practices shift and metamorphose into other new literacy practices” (2).

As teachers struggle with concerns about ELL support, valuing “home” languages and the ever-growing demand for focused literacy instruction in the classroom, the complexities posed by digital literacy can work as either a barrier or an opportunity. Using Kalantzis and Cope’s (2010) argument that in a digitally-focused environment teachers need to shift their position in the classroom from authoritarian to designer, I wonder how teachers can effectively approach conversations and lessons about traditional literacy through engagement with digital literacy forms?

2. What attention do we need to give to teaching patience?

“The idea that a new kind of economy- an attention economy- is emerging…formal education has something to do with helping prepare (young) people for the world they will enter…if you don’t grab the average web surfer’s attention within 10 seconds, they’ll be out of your site” (19).

I understand the interplay between demand, supply and consumption. I recognize the need to meet the growing demands and changes to our cyber and physical worlds. However,  I also think that if we have an obligation to prepare learners for the world they are about to enter and ultimately take over, we also then have an obligation to think about the role and necessity of developing and understanding why it is necessary in moments to have and show patience. In the same ways that we teach literacy skills and grammar skills, we need to critically examine and teach the value of patience, particularly in an attentionally deficient culture.

3. If it is impossible to prepare for the unprepare-able, how do we support students to critically enter the world they are inheriting?

“Educators cannot hope to engage in critically literate ways with the new social spaces of the internet without working at knowing ‘how to make the next move’…in the absence of rules or prior experience” (22)

In returning to the first question on supporting literacy development in an ever-changing literate environment and thinking about teaching an undervalued skill like patience in an attention focused world, I am puzzled by my role as a designer. How do I balance the task of designing with care for what I do not understand? The only tool I have to bridge to the future is what I take from my past and if my past proves fruitless in supporting my movement into tomorrow, what are the ethical and practical implications for my designs?

Works Cited

Knobel, M & Lankshear, C. (2003) New Literacies: Changing Knowledge and Classroom Learning. New York: Open University Press.

Critical Cyberliteracies: What young people can teach us about reading writing the world.

http://www.geocities.com/c.lankshear/cyberliteracies.html

Do we have your attention? New Literacies, digital technologies and the education of adolescents.  http://www.geocities.com/c.lankshear/attention.html

The New Knowledge Economy

View my prezi @: http://prezi.com/as8rzxrdquu0/copy-of-the-new-knowledge-economy/

21st Century Education

The education of a 21^st century ‘digital learner’ should be a balanced one. Oftentimes when curricular or pedagogical shifts occur, education and those responsible for its development swing the pendulum so far in (or away from) the direction of the shift, that all else, and all before, gets lost and it is only later, when test scores plummet or market demands don’t match the labor force, do we reflect on our shifts to try and find possible sources for the disconnect. With this metaphor of the pendulum in mind, I think about the digital learner and the need for a balanced education. When Freire (2000) argued that education should lead to liberation, he was asking for critical engagement with the texts, policies and practices that shape the discourses we live in. In order to accomplish this, we have to take Taylor’s (1996) warnings about the complexities of open-learning and its potential to undermine student mobility through the development of ‘knowledge mobility’ to heart. I think that education, especially a digital one, should work to support students as they straddle the “border” between the center, which I see as curriculum, and the periphery which can all too often in classrooms and lesson plans be the “bells and whistles” that teachers sometimes use to obscure learning. – We get so caught up in using the technology and teaching the technology that the content of the lesson gets lost in the delivery. – If the knowledge provided by the technology is not explored, critiqued and used to build a solid foundation for learning (beyond regurgitation or memorization) then we have failed to mobilize the knowledge in a way that can mobilize students towards liberation.

          
It is in this light, that I think the education for the 21^st century digital learner should be a balanced one. Jenkins notes that “Literacy skills for the twenty-first century are skills that enable participation in the new communities emerging within a networked society”( 55). This networked society is both human and cyber and students need to learn how to mediate between and within the two. Computer/technological literacy skills then should translate and be transferable between and within contexts to support students as they straddle environments. To this end, one medium that I think should remain, be further opened, but not all encompassing to students in their scholastic endeavors, is social media sites. Specifically, spaces like Facebook, should not be blocked or left unregulated for student use in school. Instead, a balanced approach should be used whereby students are taught how to harness the information, resources, and tools in Facebook to help them think through particular curriculum and life demands they may encounter. Secondly, sites like Facebook help bridge the digital/human divide by allowing students to interact technologically with real bodies - a skill they need to know. Also, the skill sets necessary to (for example) clearly condense a complete thought into a tweet, or create a profile for a character reflective of their essence, based on a literary reading, should not be dismissed or underestimated. Further, the transferability of such skills into other social or academic contexts will greatly support the learner as they develop their academic and personal identity in the networked world.

Consequently, a balanced approach of allowing, teaching and supporting social media for example will teach students context appropriateness as well as allow them to develop a plethora of skills which as Jenkins says can support them as they endeavor to participate and succeed in a networked world.

Sociable Media: Second Life Strife

I chose to play around in Second Life, since although I had opened an account years ago, I think I used it for about 20 mins, got bored and never signed back in. I wanted to see if now that I was older, and a little more tech-savvy, I found whatever I was missing the first time; I didn’t. That being said, I asked my son and daughter (both 12) to sit with me and navigate the environment. That was interesting! My son, who normally will indulge me with anything computer-ish refused, as he thought Second Life was boring and would rather play Halo. My daughter jumped right in. She then proceeded to spend forever creating my avatar.
We didn’t actually get to play around in Second Life as she was so taken with my hair and eye color, spending 30 or so minutes trying to get my skin tone, body image and dress style—just right. As she was “barbie-ing” me up, I asked why this mattered so much and she explained that on her Wii she was limited to “how Black” she could make me, but this gave her “so much more options”. Grammar aside—I was surprised by how important it was for her to replicate my Blackness in ways that, I am guessing, traditional avatars don’t allow. This observation brought me back to the Barbies and Cabbage Patch dolls of my childhood, which I was not allowed to have until they made a Black one. I remember going to Consumers Distributing with my mom and my delight at finding a Black doll since all of the dolls of Toys-R-Us at the time were white with long hair. I then remember my annoyance when I realized that the Black doll was really just a white doll with darker skin—the features did not “look Black” enough to me. At that time, I had just come to a point in my life where I realized that I was different to the white kids in my class and so became hyper-conscious of my Black otherness when in their presence. The ability to commercially purchase a Black doll in a "white" society, spoke to me then, of a consumer affirmation of my existence and legitimacy in greater society. In this way, I relate to my daughter’s exuberance at her ability to create a “true” Black identity for me that she can share in the cyber-world. This observation reminded of Boyd’s (2008) point that “teens are modeling identity through social networking profiles so that they can write themselves and their community into being” (120). I think Boyd is arguing that social networking profiles help teens come to terms with their identity by developing, playing with and trying out notions of who they are with other cyber-beings. But beyond that, it seems that for my daughter, she is not only writing but legitimizing her (my) real identity through interactions in the cyber world as well; through the artists and architects addition of dark skin shades on the palette, and her ability to create these shades and have the avatar interact with others she is able to “prove” to herself and others that we are a part of the worlds she resides in. I may have some use for Second Life after all.

Sociable Media: Literature Studies and Facebook

As a secondary English teacher, a significant portion of my curriculum time is spent on characterization. Whether it is understanding the development (or lack thereof) of a character in poetry, non-fiction prose or literature, I attempt to use the analysis of character as a means by which students think about, discuss and develop their own understanding of self, through their understandings of another and his/her actions. In this way, this task in my English curriculum parallels the position of Weber & Mitchell (2008) who argue that "young people’s interactive uses of new-technologies can serve as a model for identity processes"  (27). Yet, where Weber and Mitchell see new technology as a means to assist in an understanding of self, most commonly, I stick to traditional and often canonical verse to accomplish the same outcome.

However, as the proliferation of and accessibility to technology in the classroom continues to accelerate, I find myself slightly more able to intersect, our parallel lines. For instance, most recently, students in my 11U English class were reading Shakespeare's Macbeth and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby simultaneously. Although comfortable in their reading of Gatsby, they often struggled with the language of Macbeth and so their comprehension of the content was at times shaky, preventing them from relating to the texts in the ways that I was hoping for. To assist students with their difficulty, I asked students, in groups, to each create a Facebook page for the main characters of the text, and in-character, focus on "their" profile, wall tweets, and e-mails to and between each other. By asking the students to alter their identity for a few moments and embody an other, they were able to reflect on the events of the text and think about the emotions, thoughts and contexts that drove the behaviours of the characters’, slowly (hopefully) realizing not so different to their own; they were able to access Lady Macbeth and see her relationship to Daisy in ways different to how they related previously. Students took “Facebook Breaks” while reading to reflect on the events of a scene and then “tweet” on their walls about what was happening. Some choose to write an e-mail across texts to ask questions about actions or thoughts and others posted (drew) pictures of events including captions and “tags” to explore critical or high points in a scene.

In this way, the ability to use a medium they are comfortable with to explore a medium somewhat foreign to them, gave students the ability to actively note the ways in which technology helps shapes their understanding of literature, the world around them, human behaviours and most importantly, their own place within and amongst these changes. 

Weber, S & Mitchell, C. (2008). Imaging, Keyboarding and Posting Identities: Young People and New Media Technologies In Youth, Identity & Digital Media (David Buckingham, Ed.). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

E-Learning Paradigms: Border Terms as they apply to me

Summary: Rethinking the ‘problem of gender and IT schooling: discourses in literature by Abbiss (2008)

In Rethinking the ‘problem of gender and IT schooling: discourses in literature Abbiss(2008) reviews and challenges past and current discourse around the ‘problem’ of the gender divide in IT.

Abbiss begins with a review of liberal equity discourses[1] of IT by showing historically the way gender differences in computer use move from being thought about as a result of gender differences in attitude about computing (girls not liking and boys liking computers)[2] towards differences in learning and teaching orientation[3] where teachers, for example, “are seen to discourage females from participating... and to reinforce masculine computing culture”.[4] These actions on the part of the teacher and consequent reflective behaviours in the student account then for boys, for example, being seen, according to Turkle as “hard masters”, who dominate and impose their “will” over computers and girls being seen as “soft masters” , being more intuitive and interactive—artists who work with their materials.[5]

In order to challenge these particular ways of thinking about girls and IT Abbiss counters with theories of agency, articulating the ways in which girls may actually be saying ‘I can, but I don’t want to”[6] when it comes to computing practices that don’t appeal to their needs or desires. She argues that girls may choose based on “self-interest” what they want to do with a computer versus thinking about them as “lacking confidence or self-efficacy.”[7]

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[1] Abbis, Jane (2008). Rethinking the Problem of Gender and IT Schooling: Discourses in Literature. Gender & Education. P161

[2] Ibid p.155

[3] Ibid p.155

[4] Ibid p. 156

[5] Ibid p.155

[6] Ibid p.158

[7] Ibid p.158

 

Bibliography

Abbis, Jane (2008). Rethinking the Problem of Gender and IT Schooling: Discourses in Literature. Gender & Education, 20,2,153-165.