Category Archives: Technology

Hustle, Flow, and adventures in #PWFWriMo & #RPRGWriMo

Last week, I talked about where I was wobbling in my teaching practice. This week I want to describe a new pose I am trying out.

This week month I’m trying out a pose of sustained writing and “hustle.”

This month is National Novel Writing Month–colloquially NaNoWriMo, which challenges participants to write a 50,000+ word novel in the month of November. It’s a daunting number of words, but when broken into daily amounts (just shy of 1700 words per day) it’s … less daunting (?). I’ve never actually done it. However, I did challenge my 12th graders to participate several years ago. One of my students, Sam, was already a novelist in her own right and the month of November was one where she was co-teaching the class with me and coaching her peers with myriad writing strategies. I talk a bit more about this process of student-driven writing instruction in my book.

In any case, while I’m not writing a novel this month (or in the foreseeable future), I am using the online momentum of NaNoWriMo to focus on getting significant wordage on two current research projects: my work with Cindy O’Donnell-Allen on Pose/Wobble/Flow and my work exploring the literacy practices enacted in tabletop roleplaying games. I am calling these two projects, respectively, #PWFWriMo and #RPGWriMo. (There’s also a contingent of academics tweeting to the hashtag #AcWriMo that I’ve been lurking around.)

I want to describe my writing practices briefly. First of all my rules for my month of #NaNoWriMo are as follows: every day I will publicly update my progress on Twitter – it forces me to feel accountable and to feel bad on the days in November when I don’t write. A day of writing starts when I wake up and ends when I go to sleep. That means even if I’m writing well after midnight, it’s the same day (so chill out imaginary time-sticklers!). I’m also keeping two tracking systems. On my computer I have a simple Excel file where I list the actual words I write each day. It looks like this:

In my notebook I have a chart that measures writing in increments of 250 words at a time. It looks like this:

I will write, at a later time about how I am using Scrivener to allow me to organize my jumble of verbs and haphazard sentences into something useful. For now, here is a screenshot of in-progress messiness and varying writing prompt:

What I think is important to share here isn’t how awesome it feels to be 15,000+ words deep into a couple of projects that I am working on. Instead, I am interested in how reading and writing are fundamentally different in 2013. When I write in the morning and add my progress to a growing number of tweets, I am joining a community of other writers. I feel accountable because of how technology is connecting my literacy practices with others. It also allows me to engage in some good ol’ shit-talking with my friend Daye:

Reading comments in this post from last week, I’ve been thinking about my writing practices this week and the day-to-day stress of work and teaching and home life. I mean, it’s not like my workload is reduced during the month I’m choosing to put (digital) pen to (digital) paper. I think about those frustrating years of working a weekend job and teaching at the same time–trying to cram in grading student essays while working the graveyard shift at a newsstand on Sunset Blvd. Not fun. Cindy talks about GYST: Get Your Shit Together. I wonder if that’s an appropriate “pose” I can take on. It sure is something I wobble with on any given day. One of my early teaching mentors, Jeff Duncan-Andrade, talked about being a teacher and having to “hustle.” And I think about treating my writing and “real” responsibilities as hustle. In the past when I’ve played around with things like NaNoWriMo, I have approached it like this:

And this month I’m trying to approach it like this (while still keeping everything else somewhat together):

I’m only a quarter deep into what is a long month of writing, so we’ll see how long I can keep this pose going. I know there will be days I am not productive but I also know (and have felt) the awesome flow of cranking out 2,000 words on a beautiful Sunday morning. We’ll see where this pose takes me.

What new pose are you trying out?

 

[Also: it’s not too late to jump on the #NaNoWriMo bandwagon! If you get some awesome writing done, be sure to let my friend Daye know how much better you are doing.]

Learning Alchemy: Digitally Mediated Collaboration and Game Design

[The tl;dr stuff:] This is a long post. After the jump I detail how Chad Sansing and I have been collaborating on developing a card game  called Learning Alchemy. Amongst the screenshots of Google Docs and card examples, I try to explore how collaboration is mediated in 2013. The short story: Chad and I have only met in-person 3 times and after both participating in a webinar in July we decided to begin an epic collaboration. Moving from wanting to create … something and play around the with rapidly-shifting landscape of gaming due to crowdsourcing, the narrative below is one of free-flowing thought being honed into something tangible. As I explain below, we are currently playtesting our game, soliciting card-remixes, and looking to “bring to market”* a product for people to enjoy.

* Note: I use this phrase very loosely.

Continue reading

New DML Post: Critiquing iPads in LAUSD

I have a new co-authored blogpost over at DMLCentral called “iFiasco in LA’s Schools: Why Technology Alone Is Never the Answer.” Written with Thomas Philip, this post takes issue with the recent “hacking” of LAUSD devices by students and builds off of recent research Thomas and I have done together.

Critical Media Literacy, Fair Use, and Copyright

Last month an article I co-authored was published in Learning Landscapes. “Transforming Teaching and Learning Through Critical Media Literacy Pedagogy” can be freely read and downloaded here.

And now I want to talk a bit about copyright and fair use and critical media literacy.

In writing this article with my colleagues, Robyn and Jeff, one of our central arguments is that Critical Media Literacy today is fundamentally pushing toward a more productive space. Tools now standard on computers, easily installed on mobile devices, or quickly googled on the ‘nets make making really easy. As a result, critical media literacy in classrooms today has to shift even more toward critical production instead of just criticism of mass media products.

This is something Jeff and I (along with a few of colleagues – Peter Carlson, Mark Gomez, Clifford Lee) tried to do in a set of graduate classes for preservice teachers in Los Angeles. The students in these classes were constantly creating media products. Some of these projects are described throughout our article.

In our original manuscript several images were included with the descriptions of how these student-created products extended a pedagogy of critical media literacy in the second decade of the 21st century. Most of these images are featured in this blog post. While making revisions to our manuscript we were notified that our images may be a conflict with regards to copyright and we were asked to take them out.

Before I go on, I should be clear that I am not an expert when it comes to copyright law today. It is a passing interest: scholarship by Lawrence Lessig and Aufderheide and Jaszi (in particular their 2011 book Reclaiming Fair Use) inform much of my practice and the workshops I’ve run (such as a one for the UCLA Writing Project called “Copy Left, Right, and Center”).

In discussions with teachers I emphasize four main components of fair use:

  • Purpose
  • The nature of what is being used
  • The amount
  • The effect

Note that those four components of fair use need to be taken collectively. This isn’t something  teachers always consider and, I suspect, many of us infringe on this in ways that highlight how archaic these laws are (and if you’re looking for someone to blame, I would read the slightly dated The Pirate and the Mouse or watch the doc RIP: A Remix Manifesto – though this one slightly conflates different copyright laws).

Let’s unpack an example: say you are asking students to create a video slideshow about a book as an assignment and say that a student chooses to have an appropriately thematic song playing in the background. Maybe this song is a chart-topping pop song. This seems like a typical assignment students would engage in and a creative (and easy) way for kids to customize their interpretation of the work. However, this would not be considered fair use: the song is not used in a short enough amount (though there is no specific time length in legal documents despite what you may have been told otherwise) and the song’s purpose and effect are not significantly different from what they were in a non-school context. I should also point out that being a teacher or using media in a classroom does not grant us special exception from copyright law. We just usually infringe unknowingly.

While all of these components of fair use are not simple to quantify, they act – as Aufderheide and Jaszi note – as the spectrums across which legal actions are determined. Because the images we included with our manuscript (and featured here) are not of commercial quality (they could not be used professionally in the dpi we have submitted) and because they were to be used in ways that clearly and intentionally change the original meaning, they seem like an appropriate case of fair use.

In the fair use research I’ve done, the importance of using others’ work in transformative ways is underscored. I think this is a key point of the critical media literacy article and of the images we were using.

I should also add that I don’t think copyright laws really help media producers innovate today (which, as Lessig argues, was the whole point of copyright to begin with). I don’t describe how I–along with lots of other teachers–probably unknowingly infringed on these laws as a teacher because I think they are good laws. I’m stating my understanding to help somewhat clarify the linearity of my thinking with regards to this article.

Ultimately, my appeal that these images constituted fair use was not enough for the editors to feel comfortable including them. I should note that I do not fault the editors and appreciated their consideration and dialogue throughout the process. The images highlight the challenges of how participatory culture confronts the dilemma of traditionally consumer-driven media markets. Fair use, copyright, and advances like creative commons are areas of this research we did not address in our article and that we need to continue scholarship around in the future.

Haiku Deck & The Suckiness of PowerPoint

A quick post to play with Haiku Deck embedding in WordPress. I have been appreciating this app for presentation design and I like the idea of creating a PowerPoint to talk about why PowerPoint kinda sucks.

This is for a technology seminar for Graduate Teaching Assistants this afternoon.

Article in Harvard Educational Review

An article I recently co-authored with Thomas Philip is now published in the Harvard Educational Review.

“The Importance of Still Teaching the iGeneration: New Technologies and the Centrality of Pedagogy” can be found here. This article extends some of the thinking I began in my dissertation and in a research project with Thomas. I’m excited about expanding the possibilities of this article by working directly with educators around these ideas.

The abstract for the article follows:

In this essay, Philip and Garcia argue that visions of mobile devices in the classroom often draw on assumptions about the inherent interests youth have in these devices, the capability of these interests to transfer from out-of-school contexts to the classroom, and the capacity for these new technologies to equalize the educational playing field. These overly optimistic portrayals minimize the pivotal value of effective teaching and are implicitly or explicitly coupled with political agendas that attempt to increasingly control and regiment the work of teachers. Through discussing student interest and issues of educational technology in urban schools and highlighting the affordances and limitations of the texts, tools, and talk that teachers might facilitate with these devices, the authors offer a teacher-focused perspective that is sorely missing in the contemporary debates about using mobile technologies in schools.

Catching up on DML

A busy semester with updates in abundance soon. For now a few quick, DML-related notes:

 

Coming up soon: discussing mobile devices and pedagogies, creating action, and driving in the snow.

That time I gave an ignite talk for an audience of one

During the NCTE convention last month I gave a five-minute ignite talk. It was fun and stress inducing and of a different style than the other presentations and meetings I participated in while at the Las Vegas conference. Apparently, the talk was supposed to be recorded but it wasn’t. I was asked to repeat the ignite talk in a small room directly to a camera … which is weird. I tend to feel more comfortable being awkward and bumbling in front of a group of people than being awkward and bumbling in a room with one person. In any case, I’ve blogged about all three of these topics before (and I’m currently trying to write up something academic-ish about Dark Twisted Pedagogy). Enjoy!

 

 

Tweeting, mediation, and worrying about doing it wrong

Just because we can have an entire class via Twitter doesn’t mean we should. Scrolling through my morning news the other day, I cam across this Chronicle blogpost: “In Classroom Experiment, All Discussion Happened via Twitter.”

Based on the article, the experiment took place for one class. It’s not clear if the class will sustain its Twitter use beyond the single lecture. Some students “had created Twitter accounts just for the class” so I suspect this was a bit of a one time thing.

Just to be clear, I am a fan of Twitter and I am a fan of using Twitter for learning and classroom engagement. I’m also a fan of experimental classes where things go kinda bananas once in a while (see my recent post about arming students with chalk or dig for student tweets about geocaching). My Composition 301d course began with a chaotic run through of “Do Move Say”.

So a class that uses Twitter to explore cellphone culture makes a lot of sense to me. I think it would be really strange not to have Twitter integrated into that class. And I’m reading into this, but it doesn’t seem like it is. Integrated, I mean. As a one-off activity, I wonder how effectively Twitter is used as learning tool as much as simply an Oulipian constraint for the class to hurdle over. In my own practice and in the way I see others integrating Twitter in ELA classrooms, it is the persistence and amplification of voices over the course of a semester that makes Twitter a valuable resource.

I think what troubles me most about an article like this is its implications for non-tweeting readers: it sounds like maybe this is the way to use Twitter. I am slightly terrified of this article encouraging others to gather a bunch of people in a room and ask them to silently tap on phones together. Why even show up? The powerful hashtag spaces I tend to lurk like #engchat and #literacies help connect me to other educators that are discussing similar topics that interest me. But the whole point is we don’t have to be anywhere near each other for this to take place.

In my own research, I’ve been drawn to the ways that mobile devices and apps/resources like Twitter can help mediate communication and experiences. By cutting off other kinds of communication practices, Twitter is being forced into a kind of tool that isn’t so useful for developing conversation. It is inauthentic. Having a class sit in a class and tweet in order to “get” Twitter isn’t what Twitter seems designed for. A backchannel? Great! Asynchronous communication? Awesome! Prolonged communication across spaces. Rock! Lecture and discussion in a silent room? Not so much.

To Professor Groening’s credit, this is an experiment and a temporary one. I just question the premise of the experiment to begin with: “The Twitter discussion was just one of the course’s many experiments in “experiential learning.” Others have included asking students to create photo essays with their cellphone cameras, and a final project in which students use their phones to organize flash mobs.”

And I’m sure the class was fun. The syllabus looks neat (and most students on the hashtag seemed to enjoy themselves). However, I think about the lessons this sends others about using Twitter in learning spaces. For one class in one space: go hog-wild. When the Chronicle reports this as awesome (and why is this even report-worthy to begin with?) I get a little worried about what kinds of pedagogical directions this sends.