Digital Portfolios

The use of portfolios is something I’ve been interested in since being introduced to them; the multimodal method of assessment possible with this type of tool is great for allowing multiple types of learning and intelligence to be integrated into assessment. Portfolios allow the student to demonstrate competencies in a varietyof different ways. This is a good thing.

I don’t know if I’d want an entirely digital portfolio to be a requirement in my classroom, but a digital component can be a great tool for introducing technological components into the assessment process. It allows for components such as wikis and blogs to be introduced into the portfolio assessment process, and for components such as sound files and/or digital imagery to be added as well. It also cuts down on paper waste and allows for easy archiving and retrieval.

The purpose of assessment, to me, is to judge whether your students have mastered the material you’ve tried to teach them. Portfolios are a far more true method of assessment than tests or quizzes, for some students learn in different ways. Some students are poor test-takers. Portfolios, when well-designed, provide a variety of paths for students to take in the quest to demonstrate their mastery of concepts. To me, it’s a far more fair and effective way to assess students than the traditional ‘test-and-forget’ method.

Let’s Do This! Internet Memes in the Classroom.

One internet meme which has attained such popularity as to crossover into TV entertainment, commercial advertising, movies, and even military analyses of international relations is the saga of Leeroy Jenkins, a World of Warcraft player who catapulted to fame on the basis of a allegedly drunken video game session.

Picture this: You’re in a dark, gloomy dungeon with a clan of feared warriors. Through the next set of doors lies a veritable hornet’s nest of monsters. You’re in the middle of a complex strategy meeting when one of your guys, who had apparently stepped away from his computer, comes back, puts on his headset, screams a battle cry and charges headlong into the dungeon.

Everyone is slaughtered.

It was a hysterically funny video which achieved internet meme status. Sometimes, memes become such because they’re funny, sometimes because they’re cute, sometimes because they’re tearjerking. It’s the connective power of the net, however, that links us all together, that allows things such as this to spread rapidly.

There’s power to memes. If not, they wouldn’t spread the way they do. They’re something that links us together. As such, they hold power for the classroom as well.

Postman brings up memes as a way of demonstrating literacy, and they are a delivery vehicle for making connections between wildly disparate elements, such as the “Bert is Evil” meme mentioned in the chapter we read. Using memes, one can teach and evaluate on the synthesis and analysis levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy and reach a higher level of learning, as I demonstrated in my video clip assignment.

Our students will repeatedly throughout life have to make connections between wildly varied topics and subjects. Outside of school, not everything is neatly slid into subjects. Memes provide a way to teach connection literacy. It’s something I never would have previously considered, but a fun way to teach this.

The best things in life aren’t free…

Picture an advertisement: “Mountains, deserts, and rolling hills: Now, exceptionally priced”.

Now imagine what that says about our access to these great outdoors.

To experience the world, one simply must have the proper tools and technology to do so. We’re not savages, you know. The days of being hunter/gatherers are over; one must outfit themselves properly to experience the great outdoors. With smart shopping, however, one can experience nature for the best price possible and prove to their friends that they are the epitome of a modern hunter-gatherer: A savvy shopper.

Metaphors are powerful weapons in the war of words. We evolved from primates wandering the plains, but now we must buy the proper SUV to roam mountains and deserts?

This is a way of seeing, but is it a way we want to see? Commodifying the great outdoors? Metaphors can be used for powerful positive reasons, but here is an example of a negative use of metaphors. It illustrates the power of a metaphor, however, and that’s the point that Postman was trying to get at in today’s reading. The power of words, the power of naming things, of granting them a name, classifying them, and therefore providing them a solid place in our mental framework to put them in. Ray Bradbury had a similar concept in the Martian Chronicles, a mildly dystopian SF novel he wrote in the 1950′s.

Once something is named, it’s a round peg to fit in a round hole. We can classify it. We can place it in our comfort zone. That’s the power of a metaphor.

Hunger Games

Dystopian literature has always been one of my favorite subgenres of literature, so once I got into Hunger Games, I was completely engrossed. It’s perfect YA literature; written at a level that teenagers can understand, but engrossing enough to make me, as an adult, unable to put it down.

Hunger Games does exactly what dystopian literature is supposed to do. It yanks the reader out of their comfort zone and into a different reality, then forces the reader to look at things from that perspective. It reframes current issues in such a way as to make one think about them.I was truly impressed, and on the edge of my seat for Catching Fire, the sequel.

We are, in many ways, a decadent society, intent on our bread and circuses. Hunger Games captures that. There’s a metaphor here for the way America treats the rest of the world, the way our prosperity is often built on the backs of those less fortunate. And this book provides a foothold to present these concepts to my students. This is a book I definitely plan to use in the future.

The New American Experiment

(This is a response to Postman Chapter 7)

I found Postman’s writing style to be amusing even as he brings up serious questions; he heaps disdain on the educational buzzwords and catchphrases of the educational world, but at the same time, he questions the very foundation our educationalsystem is based on, and the way our educational system sometimes leans too far toward celebrating other cultures at the cost of celebrating the narrative of our own. He makes a valid point; to participate in the freewheeling matrix of argument and decision, debate and discussion that is the hallmark of a fully functional democracy, one must learn the narrative of that democracy, both the bedrock and quicksand that that democracy’s institutions are built upon.

Our nation has evolved into the most inclusive, diverse nation in the world. Surely the study of that nation is in and of itself a study of diversityand culture. Our culture is fashioned of threads from almost every other major cultural group in the world. Postman makes the case for the study of the social experiment we live in, as part of the experiment in education that we teach and learn in.

He also makes the case for the inclusion and exploration of technology in these educational experiments, which is probably why this was selected as a reading for ENGL 3241. He links this into the social experimentation of his earlier points, that we “experiment to make things better,” both technologically and socially. He’s right. It’s food for thought.

Image Analysis and Little Brother

We discussed visual rhetoric in class today, and my partner and I looked at this image as an example of this concept.

This was obviously a quick snapshot, given the chaotic conditions in lower Manhattan the day this picture was taken. However, the fact that it was taken by a professional photojournalist means that we can assume that most of the elements that make this picture so striking were purposeful.

One element that doesn’t need much explanation is the setting. Anyone who was of age in 2001 recognizes it. 9/11/2001. The day the towers fell.

This speaks to the power of images and visual rhetoric. All of us who share the American cultural background instantly recognize the situation.

The photographer captured that chaos; the faces of the people in front in focus, fear and confusion painted on their faces, while a dust cloud malevolently blossoms behind them, emblematic of the destruction that reigns outside the frame of the picture.

Little Brother

Like the picture we chose for our image analysis, Little Brother by Cory Doctorow deals with terrorism and its aftermath. Little Brother, however, is a work of fiction, and a platform to discuss freedom, civil liberties in the internet age, and the abuse of power in a young adult-friendly setting. I thought it was a great novel for teenagers; not only does it address very real concerns, it does so in a modern fashion that will grab the attention of current-era readers. The average 14-year-old has a hard time connecting with Johnny Tremain. They won’t have a hard time connecting with Marcus, the protagonist of Little Brother.

This is a visual response to Little Brother, meant to convey the combination of freedom and imprisonment that the internet offers in the near future world represented in the Hunger Games. The fuzz surrounding the central focus area is meant to represent the uncertainty of the digital world. The handcuffs on the keyboard represent the opportunities that there are to use the internet against private citizens, as does the desktop background, but the fuzz also represents the wide world of the internet that a private citizen can disappear into.

Credibility, Wikipedia, and Internet Research…

Trying to find information on the internet is like trying to find good bands on MySpace. Occasionally, you’ll find something great, but you have to sift through a lot of crap first, and sometimes the best-looking pages are the ones least likely to provide something good.

Today in class, we looked at several websites and rated them for credibility. The first one, http://zapatopi.com/blackhelicopters/,  was a detailed explanation of how microscopic black helicopters infiltrate the human skull to control our minds in preparation for the New World Order. It’s a professional-looking site. Clear and easy to read, with ads and a well-thought-out interface, it includes many visual aids that are clear and appear credible. It’s rather obvious to an intelligent adult that the whole thing is hogwash, but to someone without the filters that an intelligent adult has developed, it could make a scary amount of sense, as the ridiculousness of the message is disguised by the slickness of the packaging.

Flow Chart of how Black Helicopters reproduce

Flow charts. They make everything look 29% more credible, until you realize it’s a flowchart on the reproduction of black helicopters.

This is one method of making a website look more credible than it should be. Great packaging.

Another way of being fooled into the credibility of a website is Google ranking. We looked at the google rankings when an individual types in ‘Martin Luther King Jr’, which would be a common search term for students. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of the most commonly studied figures in secondary education.

And the number 5 search result on Google is this:

Martin Luther King-A True Historical Examination

Google is often erroneously regarded as an authority on information; people often forget that it does not rate information on accuracy; it rates sites based on the number of sites it links to, the number of sites that link to it, and paid advertising, among other things. The fact that this site is called www.martinlutherking.org makes it appear to be credible to students who have not yet developed the skills to evaluate and judge the crediblity of web sites, as well as contributing to its high ranking on Google, which also makes it appear more credible to the average student.

Wikipedia has an amazing breadth of knowledge and is mostly accurate, but the user-edited nature of the site does call its credibility into question. You simply can’t know how accurate something is without doing further research. However, Wikipedia can be a good springboard into further research, as Darren Crovitz and W. Scott Smoot point out in an article on Wikipedia in the classroom. “After introducing students to Wikipedia, teachers
might begin by using the site as an entry point into deeper and more creative research than typical assignments
require,” they point out, and this highlights the opportunity Wikipedia offers to teachers that counterbalances the weaknesses of the site. One can also use the references that accompany most Wikipedia articles as a way to judge its accuracy.

Wordle for digital project