Self Reflective,Meta- Cognitive Post

I am quite surprised at how much I’ve been exposed to in New Medias and New Literacies. I’m not certain what I was expecting, but oftentimes during the course I found myself realizing that I had vaguely heard some of the buzz words, terminology and references we covered, but that I didn’t actually understand their context, the meaning or the usage. The course feels like one that is necessary to bring everyone using this environment up to speed. The digital environment has emerged and is evolving so quickly. It is impacting our lives as we participate as consumers and it affords the possibility to each of us individually and collaboratively to impact our lives as creators and participatory members.

I enjoyed reading the work of Jenkins. He has great faith in the global community, particularly youth, to create social and political change through participatory culture. I can recognize small niche subcultures in my students and because I now have a bit of information, I can ask questions to fill in the blanks through conversation and their shared experiences. The framework he presents including mentoring, guidance and multi-generational connections, shared expertise and group knowledge building toward creative innovation, sounds like a fine place to start in building  competencies in new literacies in education.

“The Digital Citizen” was an interesting tidbit. I didn’t know anything about the structure or history of a civics class in high school. When I asked a few students their impression of our schools program, I got a huge earful of discontent, irrelevancy and anything BUT discourse or discussion. Apparently this is true of several Global History classes as well. There are SO many questions on the test….no time for bantering ladies and gentleman. Sounds like we need some seeds for change.

Until “Networked Public”s I didn’t really ever think much about broadband access. Who controls flow of information, who does or does not have access. And it never crossed my mind the political and economic implications of infrastructure. Honestly, I don’t think I could have had an intelligent/informed conversation about Net Neutrality, yes or no, before this class…I mean with any real information. All the  tech geeks in my life were saying…”OMG, Net Neutrality, open source and creative commons”. I understood the basic concepts, but it certainly feels like the right thing to more fully understand at this point in history. When I listen to the radio I can actually tune-in to those conversations about infrastructure, ubiquitous WiFi in transportation communities and other assorted contemporary technology and Internet related  issues.

I appreciated being introduced to the wide range of video chats, lectures etc. Ted Talks are awesome, and somehow because they are TedTalks, they seem pre-approved as far as reliability goes. Maybe not .

While doing research I did find it cumbersome to have to check resources…and by the way, is there a way to check accuracy and reliability of resources? There is so much information that supports any side of the fence. Evidence, research and studies are at an infant stage. Studies, like data are relative to the lens they are looking through.

Marshall McLuhan was an amazing dude. There is occasionally in history, someone who sees so clearly that they can imagine the future. It’s almost as if an intellectual renaissance was in the works at that time. .A window, and  many people peering through.( It makes me think of the late 1800’s, Emily Dickenson and the Enlightenment) Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Thomas Merton,Popism..attention economy, Carl Jung, TV and advertising, and Marshall McLuhan to name a few…a very few. “The Medium is the Message”….so on the mark. So what this class has been about. This is what Green’s diagram is depicting.

 Kress and van Leeuwen was a tedious read, but I think it is good information to have, particularly if you are teaching media literacy. Between that text and creating my literacy guide, I have decided to incorporate a straight up deconstructing media unit into my visual arts classes. There a number of artists who engage media from a critical perspective. Several are quite humorous…Ji Lee has thrown thousands of blank voice bubbles over print ads throughout several cities. His expectation is that people will participate by, “talking back”: by writing dialog…and they have.

Crystal’s “Language and the Internet”  was a  lengthy read,  mostly read on a plane coming and going to visit family. Every day it seems new words arrive for expression, description and labeling or categorizing. Today I learned that collecting digits means getting phone numbers…and maybe there’s a cute babes reference in there too..hmmm.Ode to nuance.

 The one thing that was surprising to me in retrospect was, how hands on this digital learning environment was. I created a blog, a literacy guide, I did not, but should have and will created a video. I participated in discussion forums, downloaded, and uploaded. We looked at advertisements, video, spoken word art and shared links. We explored traditional literacies and had an opportunity to think about trans literacy. …the past, present and future of literacies… various ways of communicating and sharing knowledge…experiences and personal histories .I liked the group effort created through asking and answering questions, it created a digital community of shared student concern. I learned a lot from my classmates through their sharing of experiences and insights, and through the research and individual interests they shared through their videos.

I am surprised at how frequently the content and relevancy of this course has entered my everyday thinking. I have had several conversations with colleagues about the effects of social media interference in the classroom, and today I did a tuning protocol with a colleague suggesting use of social media to create an art event where students are empowered by experiencing the effect of organizing a collaborate “statement”. ( For example; What if 500 students added a piece of everyday trash to a pile throughout the day , and someone documented the accumulation?)

 I am thankful to everyone for their contributions, shared thoughts and openness in responding to the exploration and content of the course material. I think it is interesting how I feel as if I know some of my classmates through their writing. Their voices on their videos were not so surprising to me.

Good luck to everyone on their journey to creating and participating in supporting/ guiding and innovating change in this beautiful world.

Literacy Guide For Visual Literacy Education

Literacy Guide for supporting visual literacy education in middle school and high school: for educators and student learners.

“Considering the many ways in which media literacy skills are important to an individual’s successful functioning in society-and that they are likely to become more important in the future-media literacy should be a consistent part of students’ formal education.”

                                                                                                                  - Media Education Lab

The purpose of this guide is to create a resource for educators who use visual materials with their students. This guide would be particularly helpful for visual arts and humanities based educators, and although I was writing the guide for middle to high school aged students, I have used some of the methods and tools working with younger children. Included in the guide are resources that demonstrate and or/illustrate simple methods, questions, and tools for teachers to incorporate into everyday classroom use to support thinking skills that become habitual and transfer from lesson to lesson: oral and written language literacy, visual literacy,  and collaborative knowledge building  among peers.

The general framework or goal is to incorporate activities that introduce and support visual literacy in the classroom in an interdisciplinary manner, to help students to see connections, to ask questions, to trust their perceptive intuition and to learn to read artifacts as text/communicating information greater than the surface or initial “reading” . The purpose is to teach students how to research through inquiry and how to identify cultural, social, historic, political and affective context of visual artifacts in support of critical literacy.

Some of the sites listed are places for educators to brainstorm, to be inspired by or to see examples of how art and media educators are incorporating visual literacy skills into their curriculum, with global concept based lesson plans. Most of the sites are student friendly.

 In my own teaching I have recently added  spoken word  videos, visual journaling, dance, graffiti for social justice, poetry, graphic novels, semiotics and typography. I have found specific favorite sites and artists etc, that  support my teaching that I use to engage my students. There is SO much out there. I think the trick is to find what speaks to you, and then to use it as your tool. You can share a method, a framework, resources, even a philosophy, but the mash up is your own.

 I can see the organic and ever growing nature of this thing we are calling a literacy guide. When I cruise around the Internet, or when students, friends and colleagues turn me onto a meme , an image, a book, a u tube something, a tumbler link, a blog, an open source site, music, a new technology, another tool in Photoshop, an app or a zine that they find interesting, my resource list grows… and grows.

Here is a working description of some of the sites/tools in the guide: 

(The guide is then listed separately. Feel free to make use of whatever you can.)

VTS (visual thinking strategies) Using VTS in the classroom has been documented to have a positive effect on both teachers and students. It is a simple process of inquiry and observation that supports key behaviors sought by Common Core Standards, 21^st Century learning skills and more importantly, the” other” critical thinking.The site has a great simple example/tutorial of VTS being employed in its simplest form.

Art 21, The Getty, The Whitney and The Spiral Workshop each develop conversations and lessons around concepts and ideas having to do with contemporary issues in culture:  personally and globally. They are great resources for ideas, inspiration, and understanding. Art 21 has video clips and programs of varying length that can be used in the classroom, or for teacher education. Contemporary art can be hard to understand. It contains lots of ambiguities, but it is a great resource for looking at the world. Students are often times perplexed when introduced to an unfamiliar form, but the number of questions and emotions that come to the surface are a true sign of engagement. The line between art and media are blurring, and this is their world. Visual expression always has context and a relationship to its own history.

Google Culture is a great collection of visual artifacts. The “How to use Google Culture” tutorial says it all. You (teacher and student…it’s that simple) can research an artifact; compare it to another artifact, even from another time. You can curate a collection, and what’s really great , is that you can research the cultural, historic and social context of an artifact.( An artifact might be a photo, a letter, a tool, an artwork etc.)

Lite Mind has great examples and tools to help students become familiar with graphic representation as a form of communication , to learn to map and to see their own, or the groups connectivity,…meta-cognition…kids love to draw if it has nothing to do with true representation. Lots of artists are playing with mapping, systems and visual representation..particularly when expressing our dear friend data.

The Media Education Lab, The Media Literacy Project and Spark Media are really important resources. Each site has links to deconstructed advertisements, powerful videos and media campaigns, u tube videos and examples of student content….all really student geared and student friendly. The site contains specific lesson plans about teaching students how to identify and evaluate propaganda, the 5 key questions and 8 media concepts integral to media literacy and materials to support lessons. Suggestions/ discussions about student creation and distribution, with a participatory interactive link… for feedback/data gathering and crowd sourcing. 

   Literacy Guide for supporting visual literacy education in middle school and high school: for educators and student learners.

 

Adbusters.org Journal of the mental environment, anti-consumerist magazine.(media literacy project) (also Adbuster advertisements @Google images)

 Art 21::Peabody Award-winning television series, using the power of digital media to introduce people of all ages to contemporary art and artists. Artist interviews categorized by theme. http://www.pbs.org/art21/about-art21

Art Babble referred to as  “You Tube of the Arts”, the site offers high definition videos of art, classical to  contemporary. http://www.artbabble.org/

The Getty Museum/ Open Studio the Getty Artists Program, for a target audience of K–12 teachers, with the goal of making contemporary arts education accessible to teachers and classrooms across the nation and around the world.( Artist ,Xui Bing, using symbols)  http://www.getty.edu/education/

 Google Cultural Institute brings together millions of artifacts from multiple partners, with stories that bring them to life, in a virtual museum.(Interactive research and viewing site/interdisciplinary ) Great site for comparing and deeply observing visual materials, placing materials in cultural/historic context. (Good how to tutorial to get started.) https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/

Litemind.com: “Exploring ways to use our minds more efficiently.” (Including mind maps) Visual thinking tools that help to structure information, helping you to better analyze, comprehend, synthesize, recall and generate new ideas.

 https://litemind.com/what-is-mind-mapping/

The Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island advances media education through research and community service. They emphasize interdisciplinary scholarship and practice that stands at the intersection of communication, media and education. http://mediaeducationlab.com/

 

·         Analyzing Contemporary Propaganda ( A project by the Media Lab Education) Promotes dialog and discussion about what constitutes contemporary propaganda and the positive, benign or negative impacts on the individual.(Interactive, crowd sourcing) http://www.mindovermedia.tv

 

Media Literacy Project approaching media literacy education from a media justice framework. Five key questions for teaching media literacy.

 http://medialiteracyproject.org/learn/media-literacy  

Open Culture: “The best free cultural and educational media on the Web”. Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. Video, e-books, sound recordings, poetry, teaching resources, lectures, MOOCs  and lots more. https://openculture.com/

Spiral Workshop, at the University of Illinois at Chicago.. This site is designed for art teachers to share innovative approaches to middle and high school art curriculum, developed by research from the UIC Art Education Program, focusing on “the collaborative task of rethinking the style and content of art education in the 21^st century.” (Innovative(sometimes collaboratively based) lesson plans) The Big Questions Project https://www.uic.edu/classes/ad/ad382/sites/Projects/P003/P003_first.html

Spark Media Project (Spark) aims to create opportunities for all young people to develop the communication, critical thinking and problem solving skills and habits of mind they will need to become active participants in the 21st Century. (Radio, video and animation) Student made videos are available for viewing.  sparkmediaproject.org/

 How to ….do anything, make, fix, tutorials

 You tube.com

 Whitney Museum.org

Activities that focus on works of art in the Whitney’s collection and special exhibitions. Through discussion, research, art making, and writing activities, the site encourages close looking, fostering conversation between students and connects artwork to classroom learning…with teen specific focus. http://whitney.org/Education/ForTeachers/Activities

Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is a method initiated by teacher-facilitated discussions of art images. It is perhaps the simplest way in which teachers  can provide students with key behaviors and thinking skills that become habitual and transferrable to oral and written language literacy, visual literacy, and collaborative interactions among peers www.vtshome.org/

www.vtshome.org/what-is-vts  ( 10 minute intro to VTS in action)

Adolescent Interview...the more the merrier

It seems that I am always in the presence of teens.  My lunch break, prep time time, and 9^th periods have become a mini hangout for a mix of students who are bored with a study hall or who are escaping the drama of the cafeteria. Asking one student for an interview found everyone else in the room wanting to participate, so my questions elicited several responses that I am generalizing in my reporting. 

My 5 interviewees are each 16 years old females, 2 freshman and 3 10^th graders, who prefer not to be in the culture of the crowded cafeteria. They do not know one another from common classes or common out of school interests. I am making some generalizations here, but I would say that each of them comes from a fairly stable family, they are bright and are scholastically B-ish  students. Two students are white, three are latino. They are an open-minded group of kids. None of them belong to a clique or particular group per se.They are not art majors, but definitely like to noodle around with materials, ideas and are in general a lighthearted group. I mention all of this, as I do not think my interviewees represent the most general population of adolescent high school students.

I started the interview with the basic questions…What devices do you use? How much time do you spend each day electronically connected? Do you use your phone in school? How do you use the internet as a tool in your schoolwork? Multiple devices, definitely phones, too much time, yes to phone use in school, Google search, wickipedia and maybe a data base  or jstor for info. They generally preferred video and reading as primary ways to learn school content. Not instead of a teacher, but to enhance learning…they all agreed that the visual stimulation of a video kept them engaged. Pretty uneventful responses.

Then I asked about social media, free time, and personal interests and the discussion livened up .I found the conversation really informative, as I don’t use social media very often. The uses and nuance of each site seems quite specific. Facebook, Tumbler, Twitter and Snapchat were the most widely used social media sites. The first thing they did agree on, was that they preferred to talk with friends face to face because it was easier to communicate with facial gestures, actual expression and there isn’t a weird response time lapse. And rather then phone calls, they use group chats to hang out together from different locations. 

 Facebook is used to for contacting friends and family.

 “It’s not a space to express yourself or to really communicate. You can’t have an opinion without lots of drama. People believe everything on Facebook to be true. It’s uptight.”

 They thought identity creation on Facebook was, “pretty bogus and suspect”. Facebook is generally considered old school and is pretty public.

 “You don’t “really” expose anything about yourself, and people who comment on your stuff aren’t really “friends”, sometimes they don’t know you at all. And then there’s the drama with people saying stuff second hand.”

Snapchat was regarded as a venue for creating a diary style communication with a few friends. “You take pictures of dumb, random things and send them to people. Jokes or maybe what you ate for breakfast. It’s usually just to goof around, just for fun.” 

Twitter communications happened between acquaintances or with people they know. Didn’t seem that there was much activity happening there, but they did immediately mention it as a 3^rd media site.

When they got to Tumbler…OMG…I almost had to ask them to raise their hands, so I could hear them.

So what is it about Tumbler?!

 There was a momentary deep silence, some giggling…and then, ”Tumbler was created to get away from Facebook. Its everything you can imagine! It’s a different environment, you can follow whoever. It’s just a bunch of people, its less uptight, there’s a playful mood. It’s a place that you can be less self-conscious, kind of stream of consciousness. It has a peculiar sense of humor. It’s a collection of oddball odds and ends. There’s some of everyone’s interests.” 

What kinds of stuff? I need a little more direction here.

 “It’s artsy, political, sexual and funny. You can be Tumbler Famous…(I’m thinking of Andy Warhol’s prophetic statement, “ In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.”)  “We photoshop memes…like the D_O_G_E meme”.(They spell it because they agree that none of them knows the real pronunciation). “We change stuff and share it. Sometimes you post spam- you know, useless creative videos of yourself or to u-tube.  When I first went on Tumbler, I felt like an outsider at first. The sense of humor was too weird…I didn’t get it. Then you go on for a while and you do it too”.  “There are blogs for social justice and women’s rights. It connects you to the whole world of what people are thinking about.”  

Have you made any friends from other places through Tumbler, people you personally contact?

 “I communicate with a girl from France about our common interests in movies and books, and 2 girls from England, we like the same music and  we talk about how different things are here and there.” “Sometimes you follow someone for a while and then not for a while”.

 How do you go from blogging to becoming friends?

“You can check out who they are through say, Facebook and send a message, it can become a chat and then you can agree to skype”.

Do ever feel your privacy is at risk, or you are ever in danger of anything?

“ No, you have the option of blocking people, you can report or delete strangers. And then there’s Rule #1, Never talk to anyone you don’t know on social media.” 

Where did you learn that?

 “I don’t remember, ever since we were little you always hear that.”

 Okay, last question. What do you consider a drawback of social media? Do you find it distracting?

“All we do is stay on our phones watching u-tube videos.” “ Ever since I found the computer, I never go outside.” “I know I could be more productive, I need to get a hold of time management.” “ I feel addicted to Tumbler. Its never the same, its always changing”.  “If I have 3 hours at night, I spend most of my time on social media or the computer, and then I have to rush through my homework. If  I try to do homework first, I rush through it to get onto my phone”. “I can’t cut myself off. There is a program on my tablet. It reminds you of your time spent. You can set it up to cut you off.”

Do you use it? “No, not yet,……. but I guess I should think about it.”  

Now I'm curious to see one of their tumbler accounts. My grown up friends' sites don't seem quite so "funny" .

 It would be interesting to really get an inside view of what is tweaking the interests of these adolescents, from the fly on the wall perspective...only for a moment of course.We don't really want to know the all of it.