The Art of Conversation

I'm not yet sure what the relationship between Turkle and Wesch is just yet, but I hope to have a better idea of it by the time I reach the end of these musings...

I def don't see them as opponents. Their positions are not at odds with one another. They both want to encourage an increase in human interaction. They're just coming at it from different angles. Wesch is focused on the classroom, or perhaps more broadly, the university system. Turkle wants to see it, well, everywhere including, presumably, the classroom. But does this make them allies?

Turkle's greatest concern is focused on how the devices we use are keeping us apart rather than bringing us together. She is worried that we are texting and tweeting just to feel something that isn't there. She suggests that business owners and families set time aside for their people to have conversations. She believes that conversation "sips" are not enough, that we humans need to guzzle or at least gulp down great drafts of talk and interpersonal communication. We're missing out, she says. Let's look up from our phones and see the world!

Wesch, on the other hand, is concerned that his students, all students, are being cheated by the way that teachers are teaching. He believes that even the architects, by the way they designed his classroom, are against learning. He wants students to have a reason to ask interesting and critical questions, instead of "What do we need to know for the test." And he's not just talking about reorganizing his syllabus. He wants to reshape his and his students' learning environment. He calls his idea "anti-teaching." 

I see no explicit relationship between these two thinkers. But there may be an implied connection. They are both dissatisfied with the way the world is now. They think if a change were made, that learning would flourish. Their approaches and fixations are quite different, but they could, independently of one another, arrive at a similar conclusion. 

Viewer Vex Tot!

Here's my text overview so far!

I am not proud of this...

Above is a picture of my "thought process." 

And this was my model.

From that, I produced this, uh, thing.

I am a child.

Digital Illiteracy 101

Hi there! Were you expecting to view an informative exploration of a handy digital tool? Me too! So what happened? Well, I was born in 1969...

After I realized that there was no place to insert an 8-rack tape into my laptop, I tried just googling stuff from Professor Bogad's home page and ended up landing on Pixton. Pixton had promise. I love comics and graphic novels, though I'm not too happy about the flat, dead illustration in most of them. However, I know that to get my students writing, the animation is just a MacGuffin to drive the plot. 

I set up an Educator account (you can also choose Student), named my "class," and then created a younger, sexier avatar for myself. Then I got started on my first comic by clicking My Comics and New. This took me to a dashboard type page where I chose an appropriate Background dropped in my handsome and entirely idealized avatar.

After this brilliant achievement, I decided to make a second panel by pressing the Add Panel button on the left-hand side of the dashboard. I selected a new background and found my avatar floating in a laboratory. How unrealistic! So I selected a new, more gravity-appropriate Pose for myself. Here is the result:

(Poses and backgrounds can be selected from a dropdown or searched for.) Finally, with time ticking before this highly effective, totally tutorial post was due, it hit me:

By adding Words (you can choose from Speech, Though, Shout, Whisper) to my pictures and putting them in sequence, I had made a comic. And furthermore, by writing about it and giving you some directions (buttons highlighted in red), I had made a sort of, I don't know, should we call it a how to?

And you can, too. Probably a lot easier than I. This simple four panel comic took me an hour and half to create. Most of that time was just figuring out how to sign up. But I think that students and teachers that have more experience with these types of tools would have no problem. I foresee this being useful to increase literacy and digital literacy among my students. With a bit more practice, I should be able to walk them through it.

Boys Are Selfish

I chose to examine Kate Lyman's chapter entitled "Girls, Worms, and Body Image"(pp. 139-146).

After overhearing some second and third grade girls fret about losing weight, the author decided she needed to make a change to her unit on women's suffrage in order to shed a light on the issues surrounding the body image of girls and women.

She started by asking both boys and girls in her class to brainstorm nine facts about each other's genders. The "facts" she extracted included such gems as: Boys are selfish. Men are mean and lazy and jealous. Girls are bossy, loud, and picky. Girls always complain and they are too sensitive. Lyman wasn't able to get either gender to admit that these truths were not always so self-evident. 

Then it rained and all the earthworms popped out of the ground. During recess, some of the boys were chasing some of the girls with worms and the girls were screaming. Lyman attempted to acclimate the girls with the worms by having them make a terrarium in class. It worked! The girls no longer fell into the "the weaker sex" stereotype. They stopped being afraid of worms!

But they were still making negative body image comments. So Lyman asked them to look at a Barbie. She wanted to know if they thought it looked like anyone in their lives. NO! She asked them to look at magazine ads for cigarettes, make-up, weight-loss products. She wanted to know if the ads were conveying positive messages to the students. NO!

Finally, she set up a participatory activity for the children called "Old-Fashioned Day." She had the girls wear long dresses and the boys wear slacks and long-sleeved shirts and tiny clip-on ties. She changed her curriculum to penmanship, spelling bees, and times tables. Many children got to sit in a corner wearing a "dunce" cap. But another old-fashioned thing was going on. Girls were being treated as if they were inferior to boys. Boys would get called on more often, given more chances to answer a difficult question. Girls were being punished for their "sloppy" handwriting and told they weren't "ladylike." Needless to say, the girls didn't like this behavior and said as much during a class roundtable after Old-Fashioned Day was over. The full immersion exercise helped them to understand just how difficult things might have been in the past, and Lyman hoped it cause them to see how unbalanced perceptions of gender still are. And though she didn't "solve" the body image problem, she felt that she might have at least got her students thinking differently about the topic.

Lyman tried to find a way to show her girls how to face their body issues and to examine some possible sources in culture and media. She had varying levels of success in getting her point across. Admittedly, she doesn't have the budget or reach of Madison Avenue. But she cares about her students, girls and boys, and she wants them all to be healthy and more critical of their environment, more self aware and less anxious about their appearance. She knows from her own experience that body image is nothing new, and so she is doing what she can to try to break the cycle. 

Disno!

I'm going to say something now that may shock you, so please put down your coffee, tea or adult beverage, situate your emotional support animal securely in your lap, and listen to my harrowing declaration: I have never, ever liked Disney movies. Never. Not once. Not even remotely. 

I liked Disneyland. When I was a boy, I lived a mere 20 miles from there. And it was relatively cheap in those days, so I visited it maybe a half-dozen times a year with my family until I was ten years old or so (though I haven't been back since). The rides were fun but I never associated them with movies. It was just an excellent, maybe the very best, amusement park. The movies, the ones I remember watching that is (i.e. Snow White, Cinderella, Peter Pan, Dumbo, Bambi, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Jungle Book) were always a little, uh, boring to me. I always felt I was watching a Disney lesson rather than a Disney movie. Here's the kind of cartoon I liked as a child:

And here's the kind of cartoon I enjoy as a childish adult:

I'm not sure what it is about Disney cartoons and movies I don't care for. (I mean, I was born on Walt Disney's birthday so you'd think there would be some kind of connection there.) Perhaps it's the inherent racism of Micky Mouse? Or perhaps it's the formulaic stories? Or the incessant and devious marketing strategies? Or, I don't know, the fact that Disney's squid-like tentacles have slimed themselves over nearly every corner of the our popular culture?

Perhaps I'm exaggerating a bit. For effect. But I do feel like this gargantuan corporate enterprise has a much too expansive hold on our lives, not just in North America but across the globe. I, like "Pam and Nicole" (Christensen, p.183) won't allow my son to watch Disney movies, though I'm aware that I may someday lose that fight (so far, he's unaware of their existence). My objections on my son's behalf have more to due with consumerism and conformity than the implicit or explicit messages within the films themselves, but I'm not too impressed with those either.

To my eyes, Frozen was nothing more than an animated Broadway musical for kids. I don't mean that as a compliment because I also hate Broadway musicals. (And believe me, I'm aware that this is an unpopular and minority opinion, but that's a whole other blog, you know?) It's lesson was the same as ever: Be yourself! Live your own life by your own rules! Good advice. Good, boring, generally unachievable advice. The messages about what is valued is basically as S.C.W. A. A. M. P. as it gets, updated for today's audiences (the true love is not romantic but sisterly; the hero knocks out the bad guy all by herself; the "bad witch" turns into a "good witch"). Like the Black Cinderella in Christensen's chapter (p.180), the updates don't change the fundamental flaws of the form.

What's Wrong With Digital Nativity

Danah Boyd makes it clear that Presky's digital native/immigrant metaphor doesn't hold up to close examination. Her take is that though many youth are, in fact, knowledgable users of new technologies and social platforms, many are not. To continue in this vein, many native practitioners of a language are well-educated, well-read users of their mother tongue who have an explicit awareness of its mechanics and a passion for making the most of it, while there are many others who speak the same language that have only a superficial knowledge of how it works and they will never realize its fullest potential. (Not to mention all the in-betweens.)

After reading Boyd, I wouldn't feel comfortable with using the terms and ideas of this false dichotomy because they aren't accurate (for many more reasons than the one I mentioned) and they are incomplete. Academics and critiques have moved on from using these terms, but some journalists and school administrators still use them. The power of the metaphor is strong perhaps because the less metaphorical issue of immigrant vs. native is ever present and on everyone's mind. Speaking in this polarizing manner is also an uncomfortably convenient strategy of letting parents, teachers, and legislators (among others) off the hook, giving them license to think or say that youth will sort out their own digital literacy issues because it comes naturally to them.

And then of course, there is the problem of access and how it affects or is affected by the label of digital native. In Boyd's book, she quotes Henry Jenkins (seen here posing as the literal embodiment of a digital immigrant):

"Talk of digital natives may make it harder for us to pay attention to the digital divide in terms of who has access to different technical platforms and the participation gap in terms of who has access to certain skills and competencies or for that matter, certain cultural experiences and social identities. Talking about youth as digital natives implies that there is a world which these young people all share and a body of knowledge they have all mastered, rather than seeing the online world as unfamiliar and uncertain for all of us." (Boyd, 2014)

The digital divide rides the same rails as our nation's shameful economic divide. The underserved youth, who might only have full internet access at school or a public library, cannot be presumed to possess digital nativity, just as they cannot be presumed to have the means to go to college. The term digital native has been loaded down with untrue or exaggerated claims and connotations. Perhaps it's time we renounced its citizenship.

Am I A Digital Immigrant?

Why yes, I believe I am a digital immigrant. I was born a long time ago, before even our esteemed professor. I am an only child and spent tons of time alone (latchkey kid!) with the family tv where I learned more about my parents' and grand-parents' generation than my own by watching black and white (and very, very white) shows like I Love Lucy, Leave It To Beaver, Dobie Gillis, to name a few. I have an iphone but I was very late in getting it and I'm pretty sure I could live without it most of the time. I like having access to information, however, but the most common way that I use my phone (not counting Red Sox recaps) is to use as a kind of meta-textual resource. For example, I was reading a book published and set in the early 70's yesterday and the author mentioned a particular brand of English car that I had never heard of, so I looked it up and it gave me a fuller picture of the story. I also get strange ideas about the etymology of English (or other) words while I'm reading. For example, I read something with the word "snake" and I suddenly needed to know why we use that word more than "serpent" (which is the word, or some variant, used in most Romance Languages.) 

So, I think I see the internet and the various devices we use to link into it as "extras." If they disappeared tomorrow, I would be fine. I would not feel like I was missing out on anything. Yes, some things would be less convenient. I'd have to locate and buy a paper map, I guess, and I'd have to make more solid plans about where and when I'm going to meet with somebody rather than texting "there in 10 mins", but my life would continue blissfully along. I don't think the same would be true for the digital natives. But since they are not likely to disappear, it is I who have to continue learning the language, until it gives me a headache, until I begin to dream in its idiom.

Pleased To Meet You, Hope You Guess My Name

You don't have to guess my name; I'll tell you. It is Brent Legault. I'm in the TESL program working on a degree and certification. This is my penultimate class. I live in Providence with my wife and this guy:

His name is Errol and he'll be two next month. He's not in daycare so he is what I do for most of the summer (my wife has a "real" job!)