Nina's Multiliteracies 2010 Blog

Artifacts, please! and thanks for completing the Striking a Balance survey

If you have any evomlit artifacts (blogs, ePortfolios, &c) to share, please let me know so I can show them off at the upcoming TESOL Convention in Boston!

Thanks to all who completed the Striking a Balance survey. Although I originally said I would keep it open until Wednesday, I closed it when it hit 80 responses since that seemed like a nice round number. Thanks to you I collected almost as many responses this time around as I did in the original posting in May 2009. I hope to summarize the results for you soon.

Nina

EVO Ending... Multiliteracies Continuing

Another EVO (my fifth) comes to a close today. As a co-moderator in this session, I've had to wrestle with guilt over not only which tasks I have not completed, but also for not staying on top of my moderator responsibilities (following what everyone else was contributing and responding in a timely manner, maintaining the YG calendar, and so on). But I don't want to wallow in guilt today! I would prefer to thank Vance and Jennifer for their forbearance and for helping me to learn so many things. I would rather congratulate the Multiliteracies community (a living, breathing community--I just approved a new member of our YG yesterday!) on the vast amount of teaching and learning that has gone on here over the past six weeks. We have such wonderful participants here. You branched out in so many ways that we could not have foreseen, taking advantage of the rather loose structure of the session to explore the concepts and tools in a variety of ways. Many of you then shared your thoughts about what you had learned, read, or heard here or elsewhere, contributing to the learning of all of us. Thank you!

Vance has always made it clear that Multiliteracies, unlike most other EVO sessions, is an ongoing project. I want to state my intention here to keep in touch with all of you, to go back and work on reading/hearing/seeing some of the resources I missed during the session, to post my thoughts about them here, and to keep striving to become a multiliterate individual and teacher.

Best to all,

Nina

Notes on listening to the recording of Mike Coghlan's synchronous session on Changing Literacies

I really meant to attend this session, which was at noon GMT today. I haven't been to work since last Thursday because of snow; we are experiencing our second major storm of the week as I write this. But I forgot that I had to subtract five hours and get up at 7 am, so I missed it. Darn!!!

Anyway, now I am listening to the recording and wishing I were participating in the chat along with Vance, Joel, and Berta, so I decided to make my comments here as I listen.

Mike began his session by reminding us how inconvenient it used to be to show a video or movie or share a photograph with students back in the 80s. I so remember that! Watching a movie was a major undertaking back then. I remember once having beginning students bring in family photos and talk about who was in the photo; but of course no one else could really see the photos in any detail.

Something odd going on with Elluminate... Mike launched a YouTube video, but Vance couldn't see it, so they were talking over the video. It reminds me that our new technologies can be equally challenging to work with! They don't always work as we think they will.

Mention of Andrew Keen's book "The Cult of the Amateur" reminds me that I still haven't watched that famous Keen-Weinberger debate! Another to-do item.

Mike mostly skips his slide about blogs, podcasts, wikis, flickr etc. because the group is so small. Wonder how many people, like me, will be listening asynchronously; maybe he should not have assumed a small audience. It was only a small interactive audience.

Kinds of literacies: Pegrum's 5 lenses (technological, pedagogical, social, sociopolitical, ecological, rhetorical, functional, critical, print, information, search, media.... Does multiliteracy encompass all of these? I think so, that is how I see it.

A site to check (courtesy of Berta): http://www.multiliteracies.ca (the Multiliteracy Project)

Is it possible to teach all of these? (And is it our role as ESL or EFL teachers to teach them?) (But whose role then?)

Mike suggests an ethical lens to add to Mark Pegrum's many lenses, bringing together Pegrum's culture, class, and identity lenses. He asks, What values determine how you teach? One value that determines how I teach is my belief in cultural relativity. My ideal is to accept and tolerate different beliefs and customs. I do not succeed totally; for example, I am unable to be neutral about things I feel strongly about, like women's rights, female genital mutilation, and religious intolerance. I think I would not want to accept such things. But I try never to assume that students want to (or should) adopt American values or customs.( Then again, there is the value of academic honesty: I do teach them not to plagiarize; at least I try. I try to explain to them what the underlying value is, but at the same time I let them know that for them, the disadvantage of plagiarism is that they might get caught and expelled from the university. A practical emphasis, in other words.)

Mike ends with the thought that it is not necessary for teachers to be literate in all of these different areas, but we can still encourage our students to use these varied tools to produce work, as long as it fulfills the objective for the task. Since I always feel like I can never catch up with all the new (and old) and evolving technologies, this makes me feel good! :-)

Mike's take on edupunk: he isn't one! He finds the label provocative but not very useful. Vance thinks there have to be people who "get out there and do things", whatever you call them. "You need to do what you think is right." I agree, but do not consider myself a "change agent" in this way--I am much too cowardly.

Mike ends with the thought that teachers who focus on formal learning spaces, mass learning, competition, restricted and constructed learning, instruction and content need to shift their focus more toward informal learning spaces, personalized learning, collaborative learning and assessment, creative and extended learning, personal author and innovator and knowledge and understanding. We will serve our students better if we do.

Thanks, Mike, for an informative session. I am really sorry I missed it.

Beginning Week 5

Week 4 got away from me. I don't think I read/watched/did anything on the syllabus! I am twittering more regularly than before and I have installed TweetDeck on all the computers I use, including my brand-new laptop (which I am using now--my very first laptop). I am home today for a snow day (the Washington DC area is buried under over 2 feet of snow which feel Friday and Saturday, and we are bracing for more snow tomorrow) and after baking bread, having lunch with friends, and doing some financial work with my husband, here I am finally turning my attention to evomlit.

I started out by reading a blogpost by Jim Groom, "The Glass Bees." This includes a rant about how BlackBoard takes ideas from other people and sells them for its own profit. He writes, "The insanely irreponsible advertising for BlackBoard 8 suggests that Academic Suite release 8.0 will "enhance critical thinking skills" and "improve classroom performance." What LMS can do this? What Web 2.0 tool can do this? This is total bullshit, how can they make such an irresponsible claim? These things are not done by technology, but rather (by) people thinking and working together." I so agree! It is a very irresponsible statement and is not provable.

Even though we webheads love using web tools for ourselves and with our classes, I don't think any of us think that the tools by themselves result in enhanced learning. They may lower students' resistance to what we are trying to teach them; but the students do the learning (I guess teachers are ideally learning along with them), teachers do the teaching (sometimes students), and the tools are just tools.

Jim Groom continues, "Blackboard makes an inferior product and charges a ton for it." Aha, this hits home. I teach at the Maryland English Institute at the University of Maryland, which provides ELMS (Powered by BlackBoard) as its LMS. I am encouraged to use ELMS; there is lots of support, weekly webinars and MEI's CALL Coordinator also helps us to use it. But I hate it. I have forced myself to use the Gradebook for a couple of semesters now, whereas I used to use the free gradebook Engrade. I much preferred it. It was easier to use and I liked the interface better. I felt I should become more familiar with ELMS, so I started using it for my grades. But I have never liked it, and I have never been able to use it for anything other than grades and an occasional homework assignment posting. I don't use Wimba, which is provided as part of the package. There just doesn't seem to be any reason to use it. I am not tempted to use it. It is not inviting to me. (To be fair I have to add that grades on ELMS are backed up automatically, while grades on Engrade aren't, or at least weren't, making it necessary for me to backup my grades or risk losing them in the event of a crash--which did happen, one time in the several semesters I used it, but maybe once is once too many.)

OTOH, it's worth remembering that for me, a lot of web tools don't make sense because I see my students for 3 hours a day, 5 days a week. Why would I use a discussion board? My students are living in an English-speaking environment. They don't need to interact with other non-native speakers around the globe, even though it might be really interesting.

Reading the 100 responses to the post is quite interesting too. This is a discussion board right here on the blog. I liked the post on Corrie Bergeron's blog (linked in the comments) explaining why he rejects edupunk; he calls himself an edufolkie instead. After the comments there is a list of trackbacks and pingbacks. I understand that these are created when someone else links to the post, but I still don't know how this happens.

I note that this post and the comments on it are already two years old. What about edupunk today? Is it still being discussed? I google it: at the top of the list is a Wikipedia article (!) I learn that Jim Groom is the one who originated the term in a blog post (the one I read!) I next read Stephen Downes' response to Jim Groom's post. Actually most of the links that came up in the search are those recommended on the Multilit Week 5 page.

It seems that edupunk has to do with freer student-centered learning, less about a curriculum, more about what students feel the need to learn.Leslie Madsen Brooks calls it a "scrappy, DIY spirit" (I wonder, is there any connection to Dogme language teaching?.) Unfortunately, the reality for most of us is that there is a curriculum that we are responsible for teaching and students are responsible for learning. No Child Left Behind, oozing up from K-12 into Higher Ed, and the need to be accredited, has underscored the need for a written curriculum (which unfortunately turns into a laundry list of things to make sure we teach).

Notes on watching Michael Wesch's "Portal to Media Literacy" 7/10/08

The video is here.

Michael Wesch, an ANTH prof at Kansas Stat U, is the creator, with his students, of The Machine is Us/ing Us and A Vision of Students Today.

Students say they like learning, but they don't like school. (Not a surprise.) They don't think what they are learning is relevant to their lives. (Might they be wrong?)

Some nice quotes:
"Being human is all about learning--it's the hallmark of humanity."
"The room is designed as an information dump."
"Questions are the catalyst for great learning."
(the crisis of significance) We need to make meaningful connections to create significance. HOW? 2 types:
1. Semantic: meaning is how something relates/connects/contrasts
2. Personal: meaning is in how we relate/connect/contrast with others (Cooley: the looking-glass self). (Students learn from those they care about and who care about them)
3. These are inseparable and interdependent

FIND A GRAND NARRATIVE THAT CREATES A BIG PICTURE.
CREATE A LEARNING ENVIRONMENT THAT VALUES THE LEARNERS (Unleash the creativity of students.)
REALIZE/LEVERAGE THE EXISTING MEDIA ENVIRONMENT. PUSH STUDENTS BEYOND YOUTUBE AND FACEBOOK TO USE THE MEDIA FOR LEARNING, NOT JUST ENTERTAINMENT.

There are no digital natives! These tools are too new. Students don't know how to use them to create something interesting and new. We are all equally stupid! We can't assume our students are media-literate; they need help.

"We look at the present through a rear-view mirror as we march backward into the future." (McLuhan)

With the internet, information is no longer scarce. (cf. Marshall McLuhan) But less than .01% of it is on paper ("a thing"). And it is no longer as hard to find due to tagging and folksonomies. Tagging lets you put the same information in lots of different folders. RSS gets information to find us, rather than the other way around.

Files and folders may not be the best way to organize information anymore.... Putting websites into categories is limiting. We are still "unpacking the power of the hyperlink." (info can be in more than one place at one time)

Collective intelligence (Nobody is as smart as everybody)--challenges the idea of authority.

Authorized information is beyond discussion: find out about the discussion behind the scenes as Wikipedia (tell your students this! Try this out yourself!)

http://netvibes.com/wesch is Wesch's class portal (to check out later--he describes how he uses it in the middle of the video)

Class models (for large classes):
Network model = participation (goal) Networks grow exponentially.
hieracrchy model = authority (doesn't work for classes)
mass model = follow (bad message)

He describes a "game" he and his anthropology students created: imaginary cultures in the world of 1450, and the ensuing history of colonization and independence, &c. Everything gets uploaded to the wiki.

Conclusion: it's an upload world. Students need to learn to create. Move students from being knowledgeable to being knowledge-able. (Cf this article by Wesch, which says much the same thing as the video) Quote from the article: "one simple technique, which makes everything else fall into place: love and respect your students and they will love and respect you back." But these new pedagogies raise new issues of how to assess what students are "learning".

Notes on Beginning Week 3

I'm standing at the teacher's desk in my smart classroom at the University of Maryland, and my students are writing about "one or two cultural differences [they]'ve noticed while living in a foreign country...." I was looking at the tasks for Week 3, which begins today, and decided to have a look at Zaid Alkagoff's slideshare presentation "Twenty-Five Edublogs You Simply Don't Want to Miss." I am embarrassed to admit that I had heard of only five of the 25 recommended bloggers (Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Robin Good, Will Richardson, and Wesley Fryer). Of these, I have only read the blogs of the last two, and I stopped reading even those because of time constraints.... Vance's remark about "sipping from the firehose" keeps coming back to me. The web is a firehose of information. It comes streaming at you (if you let it, say via an aggregator), threatening to drown you or at the least knock you off your feet. The trick is to sidle up to it somehow, take a few sips without getting drenched, and take pleasure in the learning you've managed to achieve.

Class is over. Time to pack up and go to lunch!

Notes on listening to Mark Pegrum's second video

http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/2010_Week3 (scroll down to video)

Digital Literacies:a good focus point for education, a way to teach students key skills and make them aware of how technology will influence their future

Groups: from traditional/simple to complex/new
1. literacies bound up with language: We must not neglect traditional print literacy, but we also need to realize that language is changing (txtspk, netspeak, new punctuation, hypertext...). Marc Prensky and Mark Pegrum have suggested that a certain level of code (technological) literacy is needed as well. Nina says: Much of what we do on the web is read, and if we want to respond to what we read we often comment in writing, so old-fashioned traditional literacy is not irrelevant.

2. literacies bound up with information: we access and assess info differently now. You need to understand search engines, tagging; evaluating web information has become very important. "Filtering literacy" means a way to filter all the stuff out there: where we go to find the experts/authorities. Nina says: Teaching students to evaluate websites as sources of reliable or unreliable information is very important. On a very basic level, I always tell my students that a .com domain means that someone would like to make money off you (Sorry, Ning, PBWorks, Yahoo!, Google, etc!), so more objective sources of information include .edu, .org, and (for those of us who trust the US government), .gov. How this applies to other countries I don't know. "Attention literacy": we cannot pay attention to everything, and this affects education, personal relationships, health, stress, etc. Nina says: Ah, yes, striking that delicate balance among one's various lives!

3. literacies bound up with connections: personal literacy (online persona) and how you hook into networks, leverage the networks and contribute to/influence them. Participatory literacy--getting people together to contribute to a class wiki, but also participating in political protests, which can be very dangerous. Nina says: We must teach students how much information to divulge and what not to divulge online--like home addresses. I am not a good model for names, however, as I generally use my full name and prefer it because much of my web presence relates to my professional life.

4. remix literacy: the hallmark of digital culture, heavily associated with the younger generation. Calls together all the other literacies. Nina says: This is the one I feel least able to handle myself, and certainly am not qualified to teach others about it!

This is where Pegrum's research is currently focused. He would like to know:
*How are language and literacy changing as a result of the web?
*How should educators approach literacy in the classroom? To what extent is it our responsibility to educate them about these different literacies and to warn them of the dangers?

I Have a Dream

I am listening to the Rev. Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech (http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm) and remembering how before the web, how I had to find a video or audio of the speech and transcript in the library if I wanted to have my students hear it (I even remember transcribing the speech myself in my 2nd year of teaching, France 1973). And now it is available at the click of a mouse. Wow.

Looking back on Week 1

The university semester and EVO both began this week. I met eight new students and 59 participants in our session (there are more registered, but 59 people introduced themselves on the Yahoo!Group, and I assume most of the others are just lurking or have reconsidered). I actually completed most of the tasks for Week 1! I read, listened, and blogged; tweeted and twibed (?); tagged, read what others have tagged, and commented. I re-read the introduction to From Blogs to Bombs. I attended a few synchronous events: the usual Sunday chat, Maggie Tsai's presentation on Diigo which had to be rescheduled due to audio problems, Marian Heddesheimer's class in WiZiQ. I watched the Diigo tutorials and promised myself to get started with Diigo, as soon as Chrome supports its toolbar. And I created a wiki for my class with a page of links to tutorials on web tools! And now, I am going to bed.

Notes on Week 2 Tasks

I am looking at the tasks and objectives for Week 2. Set up a ProtoPage, Netvibes, PageFlakes, or iGoogle? I already use iGoogle as my homepage, but I don't think that is what Vance means. Other than my email, my Google Reader feeds and my to-do list, there isn't much that is me on that page. I think he is referring to the elusive "ePortfolio" we are supposed to create. I envision that as a space on the web where I can collect links to blogs and wikis I've created and am proud of, maybe post my CV (is that wise?), perhaps have some way to access documents I've made... am I thinking along the right lines?