I’ll have some reflections on the DML conference later on. For now, I wanted to share the slides from our presentation below.
Also, if you are interested, Sheryl Grant live-blogged our session. You can read a great overview here.
Meanwhile, data on air quality at the conference has been collected over the past two days at blackcloud.org. The sensor will be back in South Central on Monday.
I’m in the process of slowly weaving various conferences into my teaching/studying/dog-walking schedule.
This Friday I’ll be participating in the Digital Media and Learning Conference in San Diego. I’m speaking as part of a session titled “Orality, Pedagogy, and New Media: How Children Develop Self-Awareness and Collective Consciousness.” I’m pasting the info below. Registration is closed, but if you’re heading down there anyways, drop me a line.
Orality, Pedagogy, and New Media: How Children Develop Self-Awareness and Collective Consciousness
Location: Room 4004
Chair: Antero Garcia (University of California, Los Angeles)
Participants: Antero Garcia (University of California, Los Angeles), Greg Niemeyer (University of California, Berkeley), Davida Herzl (Aclima), Dehanza Rogers (Cal State Northridge), Scott Ruston (Arizona State University, Hugh Downs School of Human Communication)
An analysis of the convergence of orality, pedagogy, and new media, this session looks at how new technologies are still rooted in oral culture and the implications of this distinction on pedagogy. Presenters will discuss and provide interactive opportunities around ways these themes tie into game play, literacy development, data aggregation, and DIY filmmaking. Alternate reality environmental game, the Black Cloud, will anchor part of this presentation and allow real-time prediction and aggregation opportunities for participants. Similarly, session participants will engage in cell-phone literacy demonstrations, help author a FlipCam documentary, and engage in traditional dialogue. Further, presenters will examine the role of radical transparency and collective eco-intelligence as they disrupt existing measuring systems. As social media proliferates and cell phones continue to overcome barriers within classrooms and informal learning environments, the role of orality within education continues to be disregarded. Reexamining new media’s emphasis of an oral culture through text messages, status updates, and twitter feeds, this interactive symposium provides analysis of orality as it plays out in gaming, cell phone applications in a high school context, data aggregation, and the role of documentary filmmaking. Looking into the connections between John Dewey and Walter Ong, this symposium and its interactive dialogue help guide practitioners and researchers towards expanded media and pedagogical opportunities through orality.
Further down the road, I’ll also be presenting with a group of friends at the Critical Teaching in Action Conference on March 13. The full program is not online yet.
The AERA schedule is up too, but I’m still figuring a few things out.
My dad would be 58 today.
The influence that both of my parents had on shaping how I see the world and interact within it cannot be overstated. As I’ve spent much of this past year focused on schooling and teaching, it’s been useful for me to come up for air now and then and reflect on the experiences and moments of growth that have guided me. I typically avoid acute personal information on this blog, but feel that this process of reflection is as integral to our learning and progress as anything else.
Someone asked me a while back about this, so below I’ve copied my speech from my father’s memorial service that took place a bit over three years ago. If you’re interested in reading through it, maybe you’ll also want to listen to one of my dad’s songs as well.
We are both storytellers. Lying on our backs, we look up at the night sky. This is where stories began, under the aegis of that multitude of stars which at night filch certitudes and sometimes return them as faith. Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surround them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.
[btw, if you’re interested in getting the entire text of Berger’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos in regimented daily doses via email, sign up here. Not a bad way to get a bit of refreshing thought in the clutter of junk and business.]
This is from the booklet of the new Gil Scott-Heron album, which I recommend (though I realize buying CDs kinda puts me in the minority these days):
There is a proper procedure for taking advantage of any investment.
Music, for example. Buying a CD is an investment.
To get the maximum you must
LISTEN TO IT FOR THE FIRST TIME UNDER OPTIMUM CONDITIONS.
Not in your car or on a portable player through a headset.
Take it home.
Get rid of all distractions, (even her or him).
Turn off your cell phone.
Turn off everything that rings or beeps or rattles or whistles.
Make yourself comfortable.
Play your CD.
LISTEN all the way through.
Think about what you got.
Think about who would appreciate this investment.
Decide if there is someone to share this with.
Turn it on again.
Enjoy Yourself.
Gil Scott-Heron
The title track, a cover of a (smog) song, comes across differently after having read this.
The situated moment, the connection with the music as an object (like my current studies of information as a thing), and the duality of music as both individual and collective experience point toward the ways I hope learning can create kinship, enrich identity, reify space as a fluid negotiation. Perhaps music, like dancing and photography, can become a totem of student agency. A totem of a mutual agreement to do away with the hegemonic “rings or beeps or rattles or whistles.” What will make our students want to “turn it on again” when the CD player clicks itself back to its point of origin and we are returned to our uncontested space? What will it take to feel transformed in this space? To feel “new here, again”?
From an anonymous colleague: “I am officially ending my visceral hatred of charter schools. I finally realized that for me to hate charter school teachers is like a Detroit autoworker hating a maquiladora worker. We all get pimped.”
– How do you spell Shakespeare?
– Shake, like shake your ass. And spear, like throw a spear. But with an E at the end.
– Robin Williams is in this?
– Yeah he’ll play a guy named Osric at the end.
– Robin Williams the guy from Flubber?
– Yeah. The guy from Flubber.
A couple of students have figured out that, by wearing a collar underneath a sweater when walking on campus in the morning, they can skirt past the uniform policy. Always impressed with my students’ cunning response to authority. I wonder how long this will work.
A student asked me to put these photos up – my third period is writing an essay analyzing the narrative and intent behind a recent mural on campus.
