GSEA Spring 2009 conference proposal

Identity and Identification as Literacy Training in the Daily Kos Interface Design

In learning to navigate and participate on a website, users develop literacy skills. Expanding the definition of literacy developed by Gee, literacy in web spaces becomes an active process of learning to make meaning while participating in spaces. A part of this process includes developing an understanding of identity, and what identity means within the space. As users become more comfortable in their literacy, in their meaning making in the space, they can create identities within the space that demonstrate their identification with the community using the space. Drawing on Burke’s theories of identification, identity and literacy within a space become a way a web user signals their understanding and membership to other users. This mixing of identity, literacy and identification make recognized identification as a member of a space a motivating factor for learning the space. To better understand created identities in virtual spaces, the site design of Daily Kos (dailykos.com) will be discussed to show how it trains new members in the literacy practices of the site, allowing members time and space to develop their literacy. As literacy develops, users can become members, and begin participating and communicating with other members of the site. Through this communication a conversation about politics forms, but more importantly members are able to demonstrate their identification as a member of the Daily Kos community through their conversations on the site. The site is specifically designed to foster literacy by providing a space for users to work toward members through designed training in how communication within the community works. Members then demonstrate their identity as Daily Kos members by participating in the conversation in a way that demonstrates their understanding of group identification. This site design will be discussed as a very common way web spaces provide literacy training to web users.

what do videogames have to teach us?

Since initial publication scholars have looked to Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us as a way to incorporate things kids are already doing into classroom space. Gee’s theories ultimately argue for re-imagining literacy and how it functions in education and everyday life, but many still see Gee as arguing for the incorporation of games into classes. Some scholars discussed have argued for specific games, other scholars have continued Gee’s work by pointing out how new media literacy can function in a classroom if a teacher is critically aware of their own assignments and requirements. Ultimately Gee is trying to move educational understanding of literacy beyond reading and writing skills, and scholars who take up Gee’s work argue the same thing. Each has a slightly different use of the term literacy, but all are moving toward seeing literacy as a meaning making practice in a specific space that involves ways of being in addition to reading and writing skills as they relate to the space. This re-imagining of literacy allows composition classrooms to become more meaningful to students when new media literacy skills are also worked into the curriculum as a way to blatantly demonstrate literacy skills students are already using.

reclaiming agency beyond procedural rhetoric

In an essay often cited by rhetoric and composition scholars and students, Ian Bogost defines procedural rhetoric as the way a video game argues based on the coding system of the game. A videogame develops a world that a player learns to read, and successful reading of the game leads to success in the game. Learning how to play as lara croft, to explore the levels to find hidden weapons and treasures makes a player more successful at beating the game. Finding hidden coins and mushrooms helps Mario rescue the princess faster. In these types of video games, the agency of he game (and therefore the power) according to Bogost lies in the coding of the game. The player has no agency, no power, they simply learn to read the domain and then to defeat the game.

The same would hold true of a game like SimCity 4. The player learns to read the game, they learn what the symbols mean, they learn how to zone different sections, and how to grow their cities. They learn to read the coding of the game to work toward beating it. However, SimCity players don’t stop at that point, instead, some participate in online forums, creating mods, help guides and fanfiction surrounding the SimCity games (and their ability to play/manipulate the game). In these cases, the player is in possession of the agency of the game, the player learns to read the game on their PC playing by themselves, then moves their play to virtual community spaces where they can reclaim their agency by participating outside the game. In this case procedural rhetoric does not limit the players, it does not help explain game play. In these cases, players have not read the game as agency on their computer screen that they simply learn to read. They see the game as extending beyond the boundaries of the coding sequence developed by the game developers, and they have reclaimed their agency through fandom. Fandom is agency, and fandom is outside procedural rhetoric. It makes use of the game structure in things like fanfiction, but it reallocates the agency to the players who manipulate the coding to meet their own needs. In this way, in a game like SimCity, players demonstrate their agency through a site like simtropolis.com. they demonstrate their agency through their participation, their creation of mods, and their creation of fanfiction.

sight and mind

jamais vu - never seen
deja vu - already seen
linguistic cousins

we claim deja vu as our memory playing tricks on us, a past life trying to peak through our consciousness, our consciouness remembers. we claim jamais vu when we can't remember conversations, they never happened our consciousness doesn't remember them. both are tricks of the mind, tricks of the sense of sight, but attributed to the mind. linguistically they both refer to sight as the culprit, but mean the mind. we make so many connections between our consciousmind and the sense of sight, especially in the language we use to describe what we experience.

not much of a post

This isn't much of a post, but i thought this image was very fitting for this blog. so i'm adding it here.

knowledge as a noun because of assessment

Rereading Gee’s “What Video Games have to teach us about learning and literacy” for the third or fourth time for a class, I’m truly starting to understand the idea of viewing knowledge as a verb instead of a noun. So the discussion question in the board was related to assessment, how should assessment change if we look at videogame learning as a basis for understanding our education system. Gee spends most of this book showing how videogames reward players for learning, how they open space for players to apply learning principles in new contexts, the focus is on achieving goals during play, of beating the game. In the beginning of the game learning is easier, tasks are easier, other players are in place to overtly assist with learning (a parental type character will provide ‘helpful’ information that more expert gamers glean over due to their expert status, they assume they learned it before. Novice players will read all the help bubbles and try out the points as part of their learning process). So when we read all this, and we see how failing in a videogame is giving up, because the game will provide ample opportunity to try the task again (unless you’re playing a 25 cent arcade game, then opportunity is limited to funds) because the focus of the game is playing and learning, not on achieving something. When this book and the assessment question is introduced in discussion so many resorted back to the idea of knowledge as being assessed, so we approach knowledge differently. But we haven’t really understood Gee’s point that knowledge in videogames is learning, it’s doing, it’s a verb. As soon as the dreaded a word is mentioned we resort to traditional views of literacy and education as reading, writing and arithmetic accompanied by grades and tests. All of this focused on assessment of the content, did you read the right literature, and can you talk about it the right way, did you learn out to produce the right math answer. What we should be looking at in education is did the student learn how to arrive at the right answer. Did they understand the process? If it took student A 1 try to get the process and student B 50 tries, student B shouldn’t be punished with a lower grade. But we get so caught up in teacher time, and testable information that knowledge will never move into the realm of verbs, it will remain a noun because it’s something to be assessed.

cheating and redefining what it means to win at school

For my other class I’m playing SimCity 4. it’s a game about building cities, basically. It seems pretty boring, but I think it’s fun. There is no win state, there is no point where you’ve beat the game. It’s also a game that is inherently designed for cheat codes. So in my presentation on the game I asked does a game with no win state make the idea of ‘cheating’ different, since you’re not cheating to win. This brought up the discussion does winning always have to be an outcome, or is winning ‘not losing.’ In SimCity having your city not fail is winning. Having your city fail is losing. So if we applied this idea to education could we have a different idea of cheating and actually focus on learning instead of performance in skill and drill? Maybe. Maybe we should think about school as not winning at something but success is when a student doesn’t fail, that becomes the mark of winning. Then, if students needed a little help every now and then it wouldn’t seem so drastic like cheating. It would be an extra boost like a walk through to keep a student from failing (but also providing them with extra work to keep from failing, is that really a bad thing?).

We certainly go through a lot of effort to look up walk throughs, and then figure out what they mean, and what they mean in the game, and then how to use the information they’ve given. Walk throughs are not straight forward they say random stuff like “walk toward the dark spot, kill all the monsters.” Not really helpful, but if the key to that level is the walk pattern, and the person figures that out in game, they’ve decoded text (acquired learning). And they’ve used a research skill that required them to test a hypothesis in the game. So have they really just cheated? Or simply not failed?

demonstrating identity

James Paul Gee finds that “when people learn to play video games, they are learning a new literacy” (13). He then outlines ideas of acquiring knowledge in games and learning knowledge in games and how those tie to literacy. Literacy is not just reading and writing, but a way of learning specific content within a specific context and being able to demonstrate proficiency with that knowledge. Ideas about literacy begin to include identity, and demonstration of identity within domains. In Gee’s version of literacy, identity and recognized identity within a context become the best demonstrations of proficiency with a given literacy. Instead of teaching history content and then testing students, their ability to speak the right words about History, and demonstrate their understanding by acting as a history student are the best indicators that learning has occurred. This is more common in college education, especially freshmen composition courses (ENG 101). Inherently, the course is a skill driven course; students are expected to learn how to write. There is no native content that needs to be taught to students in ENG 101. Grammar is not mandatory, but is not necessarily content. So the purpose of the course becomes teaching students to demonstrate their understanding of their student status through the college essay. The college essay isn’t just a way for students to write, it isn’t just a way to present content, it’s a way for the literature student to show their identity as a literature student. The correct use of the correct terminology is the best demonstration of understanding of the content of literature, it’s also the best way for a student to demonstrate to a teacher that they ‘get’ the material. So, as Gee discusses how videogames cause good learning through 36 learning principles he lines out, we in education can use them to see if our students can demonstrate beyond a test score that they understand the material by presenting the content in a way that is accepted by the community they wish to belong to.

what is winning

In things we call games we typically consider someone as a winner, there is a point where someone wins. in single player video games, traditionally there is a win, Mario saves the princess, you defeat all the zombies and save civilization, you complete all your missions, etc. there are now new games (some considered simulations) where there is no such win condition. no civilization is saved in simcity, the point is to create cities. no princesses are saved in Farmville, but you continue to harvest crops and grow your farm. in games like these, commonly considered casual games because they don't require as much time an effort, winning can best be defined as not losing. losing is clearly the opposite of winning. however, some casual games have losing, and no winning. in simcity your city can die, it can become overcrowded, it can go bankrupt. in farmville your crops can die, you can spend all your money. you can lose, but you can't win. so, why do people play games you can't win? what do people do with the games if they can't move toward winning?

technology is always already social

In many ways, new media is very social. Video games can be played online, iphones and facebook created apps that allow players to play and hang out and work together to play the game. Fansites have increased, technology in the hands of humans is very social. A classmate in my video game class mentioned that she got stuck for hours at a particularly difficult fight scene in a Zelda game. Eventually she mentioned to her 10 year old nephew that she was stuck there, he immediately told her all she needed to do was go around the corner. She had spent hours in the game, and hours online scouring websites trying to figure out how to win, when all she neded to do was talk to someone else playing the game. In Farmville on facebook a user sets up neighbors, and for xp and cash can be a farm hand on friends and neighbors farms, but if they don’t go through the exercise of making friends, they’ll never achieve the same goals. These games are inherently designed to require communication among members. So as my mom needing tech support deems me 1800.tech.support, she has a point beyond what she imagines. Technology in human hands has become inherently social, we can’t succeed in many tech adventures without being social, discussing our problems, our fights, our farms. We need to socialize about what we’re doing with technology, we need to share our iphone apps, we need to figure out how to open the email, we need to figure out how to defeat the shadow monster, or we need to figure out how to grow our crops. We’ve taken what many fear to be a solitary activity and designed it to be inherently social, so how do we create our 1800.tech.support network?

literacy or literacies?

If we rethink literacy (traditionally reading and writing) as literacies (meaning making in certain spaces) we begin to reconceptualize what education is, what learning is and where it all comes from. Traditional education focuses on skill and drill education, teacher delivers content to student, then quizzes mastery of content. The content is delivered in a classroom setting, removed from the context to which it is relevant (besides the classroom) so the mastery of the content is appropriate to the classroom but no where else. If we instead begin to see literacies as ways of making meaning in spaces, we’re always already looking to the context to situate the learning practices and the content. An example of this is you are sent to mars on a mission to teach baseball to martians. You can’t show video, you have no baseball tools, you have no pictures, you have no other human helpers, can you teach martians baseball? The point of this exercise is to see that once you begin explaining baseball and inevitably fandom to the martians, the game and the fandom will take on a life of it’s own. Do we define baseball without fans? Can we extract the rules of the game and still call it baseball, or is the rest of it (the uniforms, player, owners, fans, hot dogs, beer, bats, gloves, cards, etc) all a part of baseball? All that extra stuff adds a little something to our idea of baseball, and can be different for each individual person. We all make meaning differently in that context. For the uberfan, the score is super important and all the calls made by umpires affect their concept of baseball. For the fair-weather fan with free tickets, the ball park nachos are a part of baseball and add to their concept of baseball. So if we turn this on education, the teaching of science in an elementary school classroom is content that is out of context. Students experience science everyday, and experience rules of science everyday by falling off the monkey bars, but are forced to learn gravity in a textbook through text. Higher education is slightly better with the contextualization, but also dealing with students who have incorporated abstraction of content into classrooms as part of the entire schooling process. So, given this reconceptualization of literacy to literacies how should we be envisioning the classroom to help students learn both content and higher level learning skills? How do we move this online?

fear of writing

I’m reading my freshman writing text in preparation for classes next week. I’ve assigned the chapter introducing writing to students. There is an entire page devoted to dispelling the myth that writing is a ‘natural talent or gift’ instead of a skill to be learned and acquired. The teacher copy says to take a poll in class to see how many of the students believe writing is a natural talent, especially one they don’t possess. I can guarantee, without doing the poll, that most the kids in my classes would say yes to this question, especially being placed in the developmental class instead of 101. this idea began with romantic poets during romanticism in the 18th century. This was at the time of the industrial revolution, hundreds of years ago. We, in education, continue to value the writing and art from that time period in literature classes throughout high school. We also impart skills on reading for information, so our own valuing of these texts seems to be hurting our students writing skills in the long run. What do we do to change the opinion of writing in our current culture? We certainly haven’t embraced online writing as a skill, even though millions of people engage in that type of writing every day. Maybe, over time, that will change, and with that change the fear of writing may begin to disappear.

based on reading Foucault, what came first?

Foucault situates the idea of identity as a construction and function of current culture. As ideas of the body/mind duality have shifted, especially after Englightenment, ideas of identity have formed. When philosophers began locating the mind/soul/thinking center within the body, explanations of variation between people began to form, what we would consider personality. With ideas of modernism soundly rejecting ultimate Truth for truth within situations and cultures, environmental (nature) influences on the person’s character development began to be discussed. Darwin developed his ideas during this period. In literature, authors like Faulkner, Woolf and Hemingway began writing about the inner workings of character’s minds. Focusing on the idea of identity. Postmodernism reacted to modernism’s character development finding identity as a state of being, allowing for multiple identities depending on situation. Postmodernism is largely located Post WWII, and since we’re living the aftermath of postmodernism it’s hard to tell if we’re still postmodern, or if we’ve moved beyond (perhaps beyond labels). The idea here is wrapped up in identity, identity being influenced by current culture, and being postmodern, it varies across situations. This is most obvious with the increased usage of social spaces on the internet where a user can be, can electronically embody whomever they please. So, in a chicken versus egg type question, do we more readily accept the idea of multiple identities across cultural contexts because of the availability of play on the internet (meaning the internet heavily influenced postmodern ideas of identity even in the 1980’s when it was in its military form) or do we simply better understand and can identify identity play based on the space provided within the internet?

post-summer break post

i'm reading "everything bad is good for you" where the author explains the work an audience member puts in to follow modern television shows (even reality TV), the mental work and skill it takes to play video games, the mental work to learn new programs on a computer and on the web. essentially he's claiming that everything demonized by modern media sources as dumbing down americans, is actually making us work harder for our entertainment. what i found particularly poignant is a reference he makes to blogs as the proof that there is mental work outside of entertainment. johnson says "these diaries [meaning blogs] are, after all, frequently created by juveniles. But thirty years ago those juveniles weren't writing novels or composing sonnets in their spare time; they were watching Laverne & Shirley. Better to have minds actively composing the soap opera of their own lives than zoning out in front of someone else's." so as further proof of the increased amount of mental labor put into digesting entertainment, johnson points to blogs. even among younger generations, the amount of writing produced daily (he sites a study by yahoo that some 270000 blog entries are published every day) is astronomical. but, because it's in a medium that threatens the old medium (printing) mass public automatically fears it (lots of mcluhan here). so, in an effort to continue to increase the intelligence of american through mental work, cultural digestion, and increased text, here is my blog post.

relearning learning

If we start with knowledge and accept it’s not something we hold and carry around but something we access contextually we have knowing, not knowledge. We are knowing in different situations, knowing more in some contexts than others. If we expand knowing to learning and school, learning is something we are always doing, school is simply one context where learning occurs. So, teaching is making meaning in specific contexts with certain content. So what happens when we introduce technology to this equation. We clearly have individuals who are technophobic, some event has caused them to look at computers in a very specific, very negative way. How do we get them to look at technology situations, and computer situations as learning situations. The goal of teachers is not to teach and model learning, it’s something we always already do, the goal is to contextualize learning. How do you contextualize computer learning (what are commonly referred to as skills, but since we can’t carry knowledge, we can’t have skills, just ways of accessing knowing in context). How do we teach technophobes to look at computer usage as something like what we already do in everyday life? Are old dogs really less apt to learn new tricks, or are they simply out of practice? If they are out of practice then again, how do teachers demonstrating learning on the computer so students can mimic or scaffold to move away from their technophobia? Essentially, how do we introduce new contexts to the technology content so the learning associations can be rebuilt in a positive way? How do we teach teachers to approach learning in this way?

introduction to my comp paper

Online Composition Courses: Consideration of Space

With an ever increasing number of students enrolling in universities and community colleges, freshmen composition classes have been left with the task of accommodating this increase. Many universities have turned to online and hybrid freshmen composition courses to accommodate the large number of students without an increase in physical classroom space. The increase in these online courses allows for the teaching of a larger number of students without the need for additional classrooms, so in many ways, cost effectiveness is a key concern for universities implementing these courses. Hybrid courses offer similar benefits, since they only require limited classroom space for the limited time they meet face to face. This turn to online courses affects the delivery, pedagogy, as well as the place of the classroom. The following is a review of current literature surrounding the teaching of freshmen composition in hybrid and online environments. By understanding the current state of scholarship we can begin to see the place of online and hybrid courses within English departments, and the places and spaces of the actual classrooms when they are online.

Space and Place

The most significant difference in online and hybrid composition courses is the introduction of the computer for a large portion of the delivery of the course. To situate the current scholarship about online and hybrid composition courses it is helpful to consider the differences in space and place for both the teacher and students. Drawing on Christopher Keller and Christian Weisser’s explanation, “place is often seen as a modification of space; space is devoid of meaning, while place is endowed with meaning by humans, space seems open-ended and undelimited, while place is bounded and structured” (p. 4). It is places that have meaning, based on the use when occupied by people, and spaces that are created by places in use. Dobrin (2007) further expands Yi-Fu Tuan’s ideas of space and place finding that “places are spaces to which meaning and organization have been attached” (p. 15). Places and spaces are always connected, but places have order imposed on them, giving them identity and understanding, comfort. “Place is the temporal instance of observation of a site of ideological struggle and is written by whomever is winning the struggle at that moment” (p. 18). According to Dobrin, place is the site of the ideological struggle as determined by the winner of the struggle, while space is freedom, outside of struggle. Since places are infused with ideological ideas and identity, they are always already structured by both teachers and students and course material. When composition courses are moved from face-to-face interaction, their places are moved with them to the online environment. Traditional classroom spaces have a preconceived place, especially freshmen composition courses. Students come to class expecting to write, learn about writing and grammar. They also expect to interact with the teacher face to face, and with their peers. In online course spaces, the interaction is always mediated, changing the tools available in the space, and how meaning in endowed in the place. This is an important way to think about online courses, and will be revisited throughout the paper.

fashion

One of the big questions of the internet, especially for those who frequent Social Network Sites (like MySpace and Facebook) is “are you human?” One of the ways of understanding this question is through signaling theory, the way we signal to others that we are human, and the specific ways we interact with others in spaces to signal humanness. One of the ways to do this is through fashion, not just fashion of large fashion houses, but the route of fashion as an honest form of signaling group membership. Fashion is a way to show development along the trajectory of a society. It demonstrates social status, high fashion that no ones knows the label of will signal to certain people within the group. A Hello Kitty design will signal to most of society your access within society, your position as knowing Hello Kitty. Within online worlds this is particularly important. We, as humans, are always trying to determine if the asynchronous interaction we’re having is with a human or a machine, and we do that by socially contextualizing the interaction and the person we’re interacting with. If I interact with a person’s MySpace page who has Hello Kitty plastered across their profile background, and they’re number 1 friend is a Hello Kitty fan page, I have a specific idea of who that person is based on their identity signals. If I interact with someone who has PETA plastered across their page, and their number 1 friend is PETA2, I have a very specific idea of the identity of that person, and I know not to show them pictures of my fur coat (assuming I even owned one). Ultimately, it is through fashion, through our signal of social status in an online environment that allows other users to contextualize our humanness, and to present themselves in a friendly manner based on our signal of ourselves. Who knew fashion was such a form of information prowess?? what am i signaling about myself as a blogger, as a blogger on this blog with this photo? what does this signal about my understanding of who reads this blog?

lyrics save the day once again

So this week I’ve been reading about media literacy, which is problematic by itself. Media literacy as a concept assumes there is a skill set that can and needs to be developed (thereby privileging a certain way of being) about media. And, that this skill set will ultimately lead to an increase in civic participation, which is the end goal of most composition studies. So beyond privileging a certain way of being, media literacy as a concept also means there is one type of literacy, one way of reading information, one skill set, not multiple skill sets for different contexts. So, obviously problematic. Different students learn different things, different individuals will be drawn to different contexts. Finally, current media literacy studies are pushing for participatory media consumers, calling them various terms, but ultimately active media consumers.

Our class guest speaker is a journalism professor, who was using this definition to critique contemporary journalists who use an us against them model. So journalists frame issues as two sided, and lay out the two sides. They never leave room in the middle for the middle ground between issues. They never expect issues to be multidimensional.

So, as I was leaving class an Against Me song came on my iPod that was so fitting:
And we rock,
Because it’s us against them.
We found our own reasons to sing,
And it’s so much less confusing
When lines are drawn like that,
When people are either consumers or revolutionaries

So if we look at media literacy from an Against Me standpoint, the alternative to being a consumer is being revolutionary. They are clearly mocking the two sided set up of arguments, and their two groups are especially important for media literacy. With an increase in the number of blogs and web news sources many feel that news is becoming revolutionary, so we need media literacy, or a critical discourse about our news consumption. Other believe media literacy is a critical participation in the news discourse, and in seeking out information and its source for clarification. But, using the Against Me analogy, I feel this is just a way to make metadata less confusing, instead of truly talking about how to develop critical thinking skills about our consumption of information, especially when we actively participate in finding that information.

literacy is problematic

Literacy is a word drenched in political meanings. For most it is a gateway from non-educated social status to a more educated social status with the economic rewards. For others it is a highly contested space where hierarchies are reinforced and certain ways of thinking and being are privileged over other ways of thinking and being. Most notably, the question and response (Homeric) way of learning is privileged within the school system. This is not the same learning style taught to many non-white kids in their homes. That makes schooling difficult. But, when we add technology to the mix, this whole equation becomes even more problematic because we now have issues of access as well as know how.

Recently I read an article that called for increased digital literacy as a way to empower digital users in managing with the copious amounts of information now provided by various sources via the web, including news sources, blogs, and special interest group websites. Rheingold finds that literacies are ways that humans make sense of (transmit and receive) information that helps them understand power and knowledge, and can eventually lead the individual to understand and participate in community. For starters, redefining literacy for the millionth time is problematic to me. There has to be another way to think about these things. Most importantly he calls for increased awareness about the different technologies and the information afforded in different spaces, and the communities that evolve in those spaces. He finds that literacy is the link between technology and sociality. What I wonder is if we really need another call for increased literacy. If we as humans are being expressing sociality in these spaces, we will probably flock to spaces of groups with interests similar to ours so the time between finding the community and being able to participate in the Discourse is small. As we find that community we will probably be exposed to various media that are new to us, and we’ll learn how to use them to remain a current participant in that community, or we’ll find a new one to join. But, we’re not hyper-aware of the literacies we’re developing. In Gee’s terms we’re acquiring Discourses instead of learning Discourses. So, when we call for increased attention to, focus on, and specific teaching of digital literacies (which presumably are held by the teacher transmitting the knowledge) are we really helping more people participate, or are we simply drawing attention to what we as researchers are studying? Am i validating what i do by teaching it to my students, or am i actually helping them acquire the skills they need to participate in democracy in the new shape it has taken online?

fanfic

So I recently discovered fanfiction. I read a book, originally published in 1855. I didn’t think the ending was enough, I wanted more, we’d been talking about fanfiction in my class so I googled book title fanfic. Because of course, in the ‘scene’ its fanfic not fanfiction. Fanfiction.net is amazing. The amount of time spent reading and thinking about the characters to try to write an accurate depiction. Some of the brutal honesty when the depiction is not accurate in the comments, it’s all astounding. This is what some people do for fun, and they enjoy it. While I, lurk. So, the moral of my story is, if you ever thought a story didn’t go far enough, check out fanfiction.net. Make sure to check the rating, some stories are rather graphic. Some pair characters in unexpected ways, some just tell the story of barely seen characters. It’s a great way to continue a book, and think about what you would do next with the characters.

Critical pedagogy

So I’ve been reading about critical pedagogy for a class. For the most part critical pedagogy encourages students to challenge domination, and creates assignments that allow students to build critical consciousness. Of course some professors implementing this type of teaching pedagogy are not critically aware of their position, and what they’re pushing students to do by selecting the overarching theory they believe will create critical pedagogues. What is especially troubling is examples of use of critical pedagogy are most often from urban schools where teachers encourage and privilege the use of hip hop and poetry slams to expose students to the use of their own voice. Reaching out to a student through a communication method they’re familiar with is useful, but at what point is teaching teachers to reach out in this way just another way dominant culture is co-opting expression on the margins?

so i went to several panel presentations at a conference today that i thought would introduce me to the reading i need to do to be more media savvy. instead they focused on how to use interfaces, and how to be friends with students through myspace and facebook without having it impact your personal social use of the social network sites. there was a very interesting session on using wikipedia to teach research skills. i really liked it. also an interesting implementation of wiki spaces to teach students academic tone, which will teach them to comunicate better with us, the teachers. very interesting stuff. now i just need to figure out where to get my exposure to academic writing on new media . . . . .

harnassing skills or teaching skills?

I was recently reading the NCTE post on the importance of reading and writing in the 21st century, specifically related to digital reading and writing that have increased the amount of text the average person encounters and produces. Their statement focused on the critical skills necessary to write in a new media age. Obviously blogging would fall into that problem writing category. With bad punctuation, spelling and capitalization always already normal. But where does the situatedness of a particular type of writing for a particular type of audience take it outside the realm of the classroom and make it inaccessible to teachers? I certainly wouldn’t want to talk to students about how they tweet, or write comments to friends on MySpace. But I would want to talk about how they recognize the ‘right’ tweet to a particular audience, and how a particular public MySpace comment can be made recognizable only to a small group of people is phrased just right. So, am I teaching digital literacy, or am I simply accessing the digital skills kids are building anyway because their friends are all online, so they have to be? I had a teacher start her class this semester by saying we’d be talking about the theory behind socializing online, not learning how to use the internet, and there was a very key difference. Are we just researching the internet to push it into a ‘hip’ pedagogy?

not book related

A friend from school is giving away a free apron if you just reply to her blog. It's pretty cute, you should check it out. http://www.jasonandmarenbuchanan.blogspot.com/

cultural literacy

I’m reading Convergence Culture and the chapter on Photography and Democracy because I think it will assist me in learning the language of the space I’m joining. So, I’m reading The Matrix chapter just because it is SO interesting.

On page 101 of my copy Jenkins discusses the meaning of the numbers in the movie, and how they also tie into the video games. He talk about Neo’s apartment number 101 being the same number used by George Orwell in 1984 (is it strange that this discussion occurs on page 101 . . . . .oh Jenkins, you’re so sneaky, or super lucky). A paragraph earlier Jenkins talks about the license plates DA203 and IS5416 referring to Bible passages (David 2:3 and Isaiah 54:16). So what this immediately brought to mind is the literacy debate brought on by E.D. Hirsch with his book Cultural Literacy (which has been rewritten a couple times I believe). In basic literacy classes in this department, and in other courses that touch on literacy, Hirsch is dismissed SO quickly, and the elitism that is the cultural literacy that he promotes is completely bashed. But, as I’m reading Jenkins I’m starting to think that a level of cultural literacy needs to be present for television and movie shows that have the cult following like the Matrix. I think Lost fans are very similar, with Dharma from the Dharma project being dissected as a term and a word, and the time travel and all it’s relevant authors being highly discussed as literary (also talked about by Jayne in class on Tuesday). So, participatory culture seems to require an entrance level literacy level for participation to occur. There also seems to be a lot of overlap with Hirsch’s list of things we need to have read to be culturally literate. This access to hidden nuggets in movies and television shows requires us to have exposure to so much, not just other groups that figure it out, but to the original reference as well. Are we seeing a return to Cultural Literacy ala Hirsch to fully participate in some of these cultures?

reading about writing

in one class we're focusing on learning about the writing process(es). It's so strange to read articles from the 1980's where we were still debating whether the culture we were raised in impacted our writing. then as colleges became more racially diverse we realized that different cultural backgrounds created writers with access to different writing styles. it was such a novel concept. today it seems so obvious. now, we see writing as still evolving, as becoming a way for writers to organize ideas, to think out ideas, to participate in their culture, to learn about other cultures, to critically engage. writing has taken on a participatory tone, again making it more difficult to teach the importance of situational writing, especially academic writing. what's really important in all this, though, is thinking of blogging. bloggers are not just putting content out there into infinite cyberspace, they are thinking through ideas, working through culturally based language, separating themselves even further from academic writing. the imagined audience we're writing to as bloggers really is imagined. so how do we try to teach real audience to freshmen composition students who have only been imagining audiences as bloggers?

SNS and the law

The internet raises tons of questions about privacy rights, and keeping personal information private. when Google really took off employers began googling potential employees. Now that everyone has social network site profile pages, employers are accessing MySpace and Facebook profiles while screening applicants for positions. law professors are beginning to write on the ramifications of this type of applicant screening. unfortunately their position is not very hopeful for all us social network site users, and bloggers. it all comes down to an individuals' (because they will not make mass claims for all users) perception of their own right to privacy when using these sites. in f2f situations, if i tell 1 person a big dark secret and a week later the news is running my terrible story, i can sue, i had a reasonable expectation that my secret would be kept. if i post that secret to my facebook page, and only 5 people have access to that part of my facebook page because i've done a stupendous job with all my security settings, i'm covered. if i thought i set my security settings, but now everyone knows my secret, i have no rights. so the law can't necessarily protect the users of these sites when it comes to privacy. but, the sites protect the user from employers in a way. the popular SNS require log in, and if you create a log in you must confirm you won't violate the terms of use, which prohibit misuse of the pages. if a particular person has privacy settings, and a potential employer finds a way around those privacy setting, the employer is violating terms of use of the website. of course proving any of this in a court of law has not happened yet, and will be incredibly difficult. so remember kids, what you put out there stays out there forever, for everyone, and so far the law isn't planning on protecting us.

history

i'm reading several articles on the history of rhetoric and composition, and the split between speech departments and English departments over rhetoric. these articles are pointing out various histories and historical developments that ultimately led to the modern conception of the mandatory composition course. what is most interesting about them though is the idea that histories can be written so differently. that historians in liberal art fields can search the margins for those left out to tell their story to enrich our overall understanding of history. but most importantly that history is written based on the materials immediately available to the historian. if i have a different composition textbook from 1900 than you do, i've got an entirely different history to write about.

the golden compass

I'm not reading for enjoyment, a luxury not afforded during the school semester. I began reading the Golden Compass series. I blazed through the first book, and have now begun the second. I saw the movie first, but luckily the book is so different and so much better than the movie. I'm completely addicted to reading these books.