Digerati Boombati

I was just browsing The New York Times online, and I came across this article about an eighteen year old student in England who made a thirty second film serving as an ad for the new iPod Touch, put it up on YouTube, and was then contacted by Apple ad representatives who wanted to turn his ad into a slightly more professional HD production which will be aired during football games this Sunday. According to the student, named Nick Haley, Apple preserved his vision for the ad.

The article begins with the following: “The idea that you do not have to be a professional to create a good commercial is becoming widespread, in a trend known as consumer-generated content. Leave it to Apple to — paraphrasing the company’s old slogan a bit — think differently.” Apparently these goons over at the Times haven’t read Jenkins or they’d know that we’re now calling this “participatory culture” and “bottom-up consumer creation.” It’s not surprising that Apple has reps scouring the web for consumer content, knowing what we do about their primary demographics and their impressive past with the iLife awards and their software which is catalyzing the participatory culture movement, but this sort of circumstance seems like it has to start a trend among consumer electronics, especially among devices such as the iPod with such devout followings.

The most amazing thing about this story, I think, is that the student said nothing of being interested in going into advertising. He is a student of politics at Leeds. I don’t think majoring in politics will serve his cutting-edge-ness, but Nick Haley seems to already be an exemplar of a young person who is building an impressive shape-shifting portfolio without any aid from his formal education. I find this story incredibly inspiring as a future educator who hopes to be able to tap into students’ outside web-related literacy and design skills and encourage them and push them further. The world is looking like a much cooler, flatter place when not only can we as consumers create our own content and make it accessible to anyone on the web, but we can also infiltrate major media and have the potential to be commissioned and paid well for work that we created on our own terms. Very cool.

Here’s to hoping that I don’t get beat up by a gym teacher!

I’ve created a page containing each aspect of my project on podcasts, including a project narrative and rationale, my streamable or downloadable podcast (which is still kinda rough), lessons using podcasts, articles, and podcast resources.  Just click the tab at the top of this site that reads Podcast Project or click here.  I figured I’d make my blog work a little bit harder instead of making physical folders which most of my colleagues would neglect anyway.  Plus, we’re moving toward a paperless world.  Plus, you’ll never lose my project folder this way–unless the apocalypse comes.

You can leave comments about my project as comments to this post or as comments to the project page by scrolling all the way to the bottom of that page.

T-Rex pretty much has it right, other than the efficiency part. Schools aren’t businesses or web applications; they shouldn’t prioritize efficiency the way businesses should. Duh. If you guys aren’t reading Dinosaur Comics on a daily basis, then you need to change that. Here is the link to the comic in its original size.

I wanted to share this video that runs like a promo ad for “progressive education” back in the forties. My favorite part is when the narrator says, “Johnny learned impossible to spell words” in the traditional-style school. It’s also pretty cool to see and hear John Dewey at the end saying, “The world is moving at a tremendous rate. No one knows where. We must prepare our children not for the world of the past, not for our world, but for their world–the world of the future.” Seems reasonable enough, right?  Has seventy odd years been long enough for the words to sink in?

The qualifications for teachers aspiring to move toward this preparation have obviously changed greatly. We still need a great deal of ingenuity, probably more than anything and more than ever. Patience? Check. This “actual experience” learning is messy and time-consuming (or at least that’s what I’ve heard). A thousand eyes? Hmm, now maybe we’ll be able to get by pretty well with just a bloglines account. And nine-hundred ninety-nine other web applications. Great physical endurance? Yes, including great web stamina. But, I find the endless pointing, clicking, reading, and typing of the read/write web far less tiring than working with pen, paper, and heavy textbooks.

While reading the Big Shifts section of Will Richardson’s book, “Big Shift #6: Readers Are No Longer Just Readers” struck a chord in me.  In this brief section, Richardson addresses the fact that reading was once a “fairly passive experience,” whereas with the exponentially increasing daily proliferation of content/text via the ease of publishing thanks to the read/write web, readers must now more than ever be “editors with all of the information literacy skills they need to discern good information from bad” (130).  Richardson is addressing explicitly the need to discern between information which is worthy and unworthy of your project purposes and not wasting time reading texts which aren’t useful.  But, I think that this stigma of reading as a passive experience, as an activity which does not require discernment, but a kind of universal love for all written words, especially when it comes to literature, is one that has existed throughout my lifetime, which has existed entirely in the period of time in which visual media, primarily movies for most of my life, has had a larger and more captive audience than, say, literary novels.  For this reason, when many people see how many books I own, they make an assumption that I just like to read, that there is no element of discerning taste in my selection of reading material, that I’m indiscriminately interested in everyone’s stories.  My girlfriend’s mother even once suggested that I read the self-published memoirs that one of her co-worker’s gave to her as Christmas presents.  She admitted to me that she didn’t think the memoirs were very good or interesting, but she thought I might like reading them anyway.  I flipped through a few pages and came to the conclusion that the woman wrote the memoirs not for herself or to question her life or find any meaning in the world, but to exaggerate her experiences with pretentious words and push them on everyone she knows.

This stigma surrounding reading and literature largely has surrounded ELA classrooms as well.  We all know well that students are often led to believe that just because they don’t enjoy reading the classics that they apparently don’t enjoy reading or aren’t “readers.”  The shift towards reading as a “more active undertaking” should have happened long ago, but maybe the emergence of the read/write web will lead to more questioning of the curriculum as it stands and change peoples’ minds about what is means to be a reader, which they all are already anyway.  I don’t know; I don’t really see it happening, not even at the School Without Walls, where the students are supposedly able to decide what they want to learn and can walk out of the room if they aren’t interested.  It seemed to me that the school’s curriculum functioned much like a college’s: the students chose what periods and genres they wanted to experience, but the teachers mostly dictated text selection and prepared lectures, at least from what I saw, which was a couple of classrooms, and they went down very much in the traditional sense.  In the two classrooms I spent most of the time in, students were not bringing in their own texts and evaluating many texts.  Most of them hadn’t done the assigned reading for the week, but they also hadn’t done any outside reading of their own.  The school seemed to have built a great community, but as far as instructional practices go, it seemed like there were a couple teachers who encouraged literate thinking and discerning reading choices in their students, and some other teachers who were tolerant of lackadaisical attitudes toward teacher designed curriculum to the point that it was as much of a waste of time for many students just as you see in the average high school.

Anyway, I didn’t intend for this post to transform into a criticism of the School Without Walls, one which I have great admiration for largely, but I do find it disheartening that even in Utopian-seeming schools such as SWW, there are many students who spend hours each day wandering the halls rather than interrogating the world around them on their own terms.

(Pictured above is my Second Life avatar, Cozmo Baroque,posing in the photo booth on SUNY Cortland’s Island)

As I think I explained in class previously, I set up a second life character for myself a couple of months ago, possibly, but I had a difficult time with the orientation, didn’t know where to go or what to do, and was kind of off-put by the shear amount of physically enhanced and endowed avatars running around. I briefly toured the SUNY Cortland Island, but even just a couple of months ago the island seemed less developed.

A few nights ago, I gave Second Life another shot. I didn’t alter my character at all, simply because I didn’t know how, but I went to a few places, was beginning to get discouraged, but went back to the SUNY Cortland island to see if anyone was there and anything had been added, and who else could I have run into but Steve? Steve as a woman, who you can see in the pictures below. Steve gave me a little orientation, took me to junkyard island to get some free stuff, like the pontoon boat that we subsequently took to Martha’s Vineyard and cruised around in for awhile. Other than SUNY Cortland, we didn’t visit any other educational institutions or landmarks or talk about pedagogy one bit. But, just from the single hour that I spent “in world” (learned that from Steve, and I’m not sure that I like it because it makes me remember the horrors of reading Bobbie Ann Mason), I noticed the way that narratives are constantly constructed in SL and can be documented and retrieved in order to be shaped and exchanged with others as story. I think that there are great narrative possibilities in the archiving of chat logs that are particularly telling, as well as the possibilities for photo narratives which are made possible by the wonderful snapshot feature which I used to capture some images of my SL foray with Steve.

Obviously, there are countless criticisms of Second Life. Just like real life, SL brings back to mind the idea of the attention economy. Second Life is quite scary in its all-encompassing consumerism and is just another possibility for getting students to think critically about the ways in which they participate in culture. SL may further trivialize traditional ELA activities if they are translated to the virtual world where students can more easily vote with their attention and be diverted, an idea taken from Mark Prensky, who seems to believe that classrooms should be seen as critical audiences that need to be engaged just like a room full of adults, but SL seems to be a place where you can make it anything you want it to be. Just like some teachers are better at engaging a room full of students better than others, there are certainly many teachers that will find ways to adventure “in world” with their students and hold their attention or help them design projects which will be engaging.

Here’s another snapshot of my avatar sitting on a lamb (or some animal that I couldn’t quite decipher) that was grazing on SUNY Cortland’s island.

Oh, and Steve and Kate tracked down some great articles on Second Life–very long, but compelling stories which brought up important issues. You may be tired of hearing about SL now, but here is a link to some NPR podcasts that I found about Second Life.

After our 506 class yesterday in which Jonathan and Steve screened their inspiring videos for us and many of us expressed interest in pursuing our own video projects, I was reminded of these clips I found a couple of weeks ago that feature Ira Glass expounding in his singular, wonderful way on the art of storytelling, particularly in radio and television broadcasting, which he is a master of, being a host, executive producer, and contributor to the beloved This American Life, which is no longer just a radio show, but also a television show on Showtime, which I’m sure most of us have never had the pleasure to see since no one I know actually has Showtime. Anyhow, I originally found the clips on YouTube, but the other day when I was navigating the various features of current.tv, I found their amazing video pod producer training section which includes a section of videos featuring the likes of Glass, Sarah Vowell, Dave Eggers, Robert Redford, all talking about the art of storytelling. The Ira Glass video can be found here.

These resources provided by current.tv are invaluable. They’ve given me inspiration and ideas for planning my future video project, but the Ira Glass interview about storytelling has also helped me in the production of my memoir podcast which I will be presenting in class next week. Writing the short memoir came fairly quickly, but editing it so that it would sound natural and authentic in my voice has been the difficult part over the past week or so, having to do it by myself with no outside input. I don’t know yet whether I’ve done a good job, regardless of whether or not the story is any good, but I’m focusing on trying to make my voice sound natural, not like I’m reading off a script, which is hard. And it’s something that Ira Glass has mastered. Though in this interview, he plays an old clip from the time before he was a radio master, in which he seems to underline/italicize/emphasize every third word that he speaks, and it’s awful and hilarious.

Glass’s ruminations on the art of the anecdote and baiting to draw suspense and raising questions have also made me reconsider the meat and potatoes of my story, mainly the transitions. What he’s saying in this interview isn’t anything that most people familiar with stories don’t already know deep down, but I’ve found that when you’re trying to write a story, if you get stumped or trudge through the story too fast, you can lose touch with what you originally sought out to say. I’ve found that having the voice of Ira Glass talking about the art of storytelling helped keep me on my target.

I strongly suggest watching the video if you plan on making a digital story with video or podcast. For us first time digital storytellers, it can be hard when the initial product isn’t as polished, professional, and good as we imagined it being. Ira Glass has some encouraging words: “You will be fierce; you will be a warrior; and you will make things that aren’t as good as you know in your heart you want them to be.” Ira expresses this as a given; and it is a given.  Not everyone is a prize winner off the bat.  We know this, but it’s very easy to forget.

P.S. I just realized today that we actually get the current.tv television network on digital cable. The channel is somewhere in the hundreds. I didn’t know because I don’t watch much television, or rather, everything I watch I record with the DVR, so I don’t do any channel surfing. But, I can’t wait to watch some current.tv this weekend. Maybe someday one of our videos or some of our own students’ videos will be on the network.

I can’t get enough of current.tv and these iLife student video award winners.  All of the videos are interesting and edited surprisingly well, but I think my favorite of the student winners is the “Word of the Day” video, which focuses on pointillism in art.  The girl’s narration is very natural, the transitions and paintings are smooth, and the boy’s role as Georges Seurat and his French accent is great fun.  And after they feature the student work with pointillism, I find myself wanting to learn more about the technique and try it out myself.  The video has all the markings of a successful, educational video.  I cannot believe the video was made by fifth graders.  I mean, I can believe it, but I’m just astounded and impressed.

When we talk about how our students need to do not just real work, but real work for real audiences, it’s great to know that current.tv exists and that it’s probably the beginning of a new way of building a television network.  YouTube and GoogleVideo are great outlets for sharing students’ films, but there is something ultimately more enticing and motivating about producing a professional-looking video which examines a good story which has the potential not just to be viewable on a website, but can be voted onto the current.tv television network.  From what I’ve seen in my observation last year, in which one of the ELA classes I visited was busy making iMovies, most of the students were producing absurdly silly comedies about epic floor hockey matches in the hallways or other nonsense, which I loved and is a great honing of writing and filming skills–we can never have enough comedy–but, I don’t think the student filmmakers were given enough background or modeling before they began filming their own projects.  If students were shown current.tv and other video outlets like it, more of them might not be as prone to purposefully churn out amateurish parodies in which the actors laugh on camera throughout.  Again, I love the amateurish parody/comedy videos, but they don’t seem to be as lastingly important as the non-fiction work which dominates current.tv and the iLife award winners, which can also have comedic aspects.

I love the wide variety of content on current.tv, but I’ve found that there isn’t much video work on running.  I don’t know if I’ll be able to accomplish this for 506, but ideally, I’d like to take a video camera to one of the upcoming marathons in the Northeast and find some stories worth telling.  From my limited experience, it seems to me like marathon runners are some of the most eccentric, interesting people in the world, and they have lots of time to think and lots of time out there in the dangerous world.  There is an adage about marathons that anything can happen in them.  I’ve only run one marathon and nothing earth-shattering happened to me, but I’d be interested in arriving early at a marathon and striking up conversation with some of the runners, particularly the older ones, and getting their best anecdotes out of them and getting at the heart of why they run marathons.

While we’re slowly/quickly becoming acclimated to the magic of Web 2.0 and its collaborative potential with blogs, wikis, social networking, social tagging and bookmarking, etc., the web gurus are already out there conjecturing on the forms (or lack thereof) which Web 3.0 will take and making us feel like dinosaurs.  I came across the blog/site of Tim O’Reilly, who is the now sorta famous guru who unwittingly coined the Web 2.0 movement when he used the name for a conference on technology.  On Thursday, he wrote about the “nonsense blogstorm” surrounding what Web 3.0 will entail.  Most of the post is techie jargon that I can’t decipher and about stuff I’m not familiar with, but the post is useful in explaining the evolution of Web 2.0 and what may be develop.  At the heart of the post, Tim O’Reilly adds his two cents to the “nonsense blogstorm” of ideas about Web 3.0 (or whatever it will or will not be called):

“What are things that will give a qualitative leap beyond what we experience today?

I think it’s the breaking of the keyboard/screen paradigm, and the world in which collective intelligence emerges not from people typing on keyboards but from the instrumentation of our activities.”

This is where we finally move towards the potential of all the once absurd science fiction, the Asimov, the Philip K. Dick, the Total Recalls, the point where your On Star system is no longer in your car, but in you–the point when we’ll all be leaving digital trails so wide that we’ll have no hope of ever resorting to lives of crime because it will no longer be possible to be on the run from Johnny Law, or even your mother-in-law.  Personally, I’m already beginning to see the progression in the most unlikely of places.  I got the latest issue of Runner’s World magazine yesterday, and in it there are ads for smart things that you put on your wrist–things that look just like watches, but are much more–and they will track and store data on your heart rate, speed, mileage, etc. over long periods of time, chart and graph the data in some fancy way, and wirelessly sync with your computer to transfer the information.  Granted, this is technology that the average runner would still deem excessive, an item for the conspicuous consumer, the iPhone of running gadgets, but the running world is moving in this direction.  Most of Nike’s upper tier of running sneakers come equipped with a sensor built into the heel which wirelessly syncs with iPods somehow to keep track of steps/mileage.  I’m not sure how it works, but I’m sure that in a few months when my Nikes wear out and I have to buy a new pair, I’ll be instantly won over to the technology (even though I map out my routes, It’d be nice to know how many footfalls have occurred).

We’re moving into an increasingly dichotomized world, as can be seen on this map of global connectivity, a world which will continue to reveal North America and Europe as wired hot spots, fully realized sci-fi, and the rest of the world as the heart of darkness.

Anyway, this just reminds me that possibly the best suggestion I’ve heard, even though it sounded the most preposterous coming out of his mouth, was when Yong Zhao suggested to us at his lecture at Syracuse University this week that we, the burgeoning educators, should all become politicians.  Of course we don’t want to be politicians–no person worthy of office ever seems to want to reside there, but when we recognize that most ELA classrooms don’t have computers or more than a single computer which is still running Windows 2000 and has a lackluster software suite, and that the way we interact is changing ever more quickly, and that most of these interactions are neglected or banned from the lion’s share of educational institutions, it becomes increasingly clearer that Zhao’s absurd-sounding suggestion, one that he delivered somewhat wryly, is actually, probably the only real possibility for moving toward adequate progress.

I’m sad to say it, but this probably means that we shouldn’t be curating festivals which celebrate the burning of large men or large portfolios.  Just as we need to move our students’ use of technology from being primarily escapist and consumerist to critical awareness and versatility in literacy, we as teachers, if we want to enact change, need to realize that we can’t do it in a vacuum amongst ourselves, groveling in private, otherwise schools are going to show up as dark spots on the map that charts Web 3.0 or whatever develops.