Literacy

Literacy is one word. It has broad applications and depending on the circumstances can be used in describing almost every aspect of communication. Therefore, to have any concrete meaning, literacy must be situated. Alone, Literacy is vague and can be functionally inserted into statements that may not necessarily relate. For example, if reading sign language is a literacy competency, then certainly face-to-face verbal communication must also be a type of literacy. However, when educators speak about raising literacy achievement, they are most likely referring to a student’s quantitative writing proficiency.

To me, literacy alone simply indicates a transfer of information where one of the agents is organically alive. Why so broad? If a chimp can type out coherent messages using an iconographic keyboard, this is certainly an exhibition of literacy. Therefore when packaging the single word 'literacy', saying that one agent has to be human is already too limiting. Currently, communication between two machines occurs as part of a mathematical function and would not fit under the wide definition of literacy. However, as technology continues to fuse with organic life, the definition of literacy will become even more vague. I guess the most specific statement I can make is that for an interaction to qualify as literacy, there has to be some attempt at information transfer. If I posted this piece of writing on a Chinese blog, having no idea what the blog is about and where none of the others users could make meaning of my words, it would still be an attempt at literacy, even though there was no actual transfer of information.

Notes on AERA

I was able to attend the first two days of AERA (American Educational Research Association) last week in San Diego and came away with some interesting ideas. I have attended the conference for the past 4 years and though have not yet presented, it is a goal... Anyway, I generally see the same group of people, the techies from UW Madison and MIT, Linda Darling Hammond and other Stanford folk like Pea and anything related to K-8 tech integration. Kurt Squire is always interesting and this year he presented a big game program he's been working on at UW that uses the iPhone to turn the real world into a video game environment. Using the GPS function he build a game based on an ficticious medical mystery: several children have been swiming in lake Mendota and now they are all in the hospital with mysterious symptoms. Student charged with figuring out what caused their ailments. Using maps built into the software the students head out to the lake taking virtual water samples, searching for sewage that may be spilling into the lake and doing virtual interviews by finding a tagged location that activates the interview stored in the software. A new feature he's working on has to do with barcode like posters that the camera software can recognise. When a student find the poster he can point his iPhone camera at it, unlock the information stored on his phone and progress through the game. If another student comes to the poster they cannot get the same info because the first student has already activated it, forcing the student to develop a new strategy or colaberate with with first student.

In the largest session I attended, Linda Darling Hammond and 3 other past heads of AERA gave a talk on constructivism. While the consensious was that learning is by definition constructivist, teaching is a mix designed by teachers who have to select the best set of techniques for their students. The most interesting thing she said was that much like the "Whole language vs Phonics" debates of the 90s, the new big political debate in education will have to do with 21st century skills. Her opinion was that any this vs that debate is a waste of time and that the important discussion relates to integration.

I wish i had been able to spend the whole week at the conference but no such luck this year. I encourage everyone to work to get their employer (or TC department) to fund the trip to Denver next year.

Gamestar Mechanic

G*M is a web based video game design program. I started working with G*M and GameLab last year during the closed beta test. I designed a unit around the program during the fall 08 semester and am currently contributing to the teacher guide. G*M is funded by the MacArthur Foundation's digital learning initiative. The Open beta test started a few weeks ago, if you're interested follow the second link to create an account.

Please see the following link for more information.

http://www.gameslearningsociety.org/macarthur.php

The public beta website is: gamestarmechanic.com

This will be the focus of my presentation next week and my 3rd credit paper.

Content and Creativity

In working with teachers to integrate technology in a meaningful and progressive way, I have continually bumped my head against a frustrating dynamic. The software and web 2.0 tools that has made technology integration possible in a k-8 environment are almost universally resources for production. At first, these tools are useful in allowing students to express their learning in more diverse and meaningful ways. Drawing from the content of the traditional curriculum they create new responses. However, on the teacher's side there are frustratingly few k-8 appropriate resources for supporting an evolving approach to content. To distill my understanding of progressive teaching, teachers are essentially transitioning from being owners of knowledge to managers of resources. To do this sustainably, teachers need to be confidant that they can access content resources to support a class of students who have varying interests. The internet alone is inappropriate, cumbersome and costly in terms of time management, and often fails completely to have content that is accessible to the student. This puts teachers in a difficult situation. They want to move towards a more progressive approach while continuing to rely on a more or less static set of reliable resources. If a student’s interests stray past the confines of these resources the teacher has to scramble to find content to allow the student to continue their inquiry.

While I have seen teachers “translate” adult texts to make them accessible to their young students this is unsustainable even for the most ambitious teachers and is not the solution. Until this issue is resolved, technology will to be useful in providing end product tools and more fluid communication and dissemination tools, but will continue to be absent during some of the most critical stages in curriculum planning and content differentiation.


While I have seen teachers “translate” adult texts to make them accessible to their young students this is unsustainable even for the most ambitious teachers and is not the solution. Until this issue is resolved, technology will to be useful in providing end product tools and more fluid communication and dissemination tools, but will continue to be absent during some of the most critical stages in curriculum planning.

New Hiroglyphs

This is from a design museum show about 6 years ago. An Italian artists created a global language in with modern iconography. It's hard to see from this photo, but the images are derived from: Health care, war, food, technology and a few more themes I can't recall. His idea was that these icons could be reconfigured to convey meaning across the modern (1st) world.

Digital Artifact

http://invinciblecities.camden.rutgers.edu/intro.html

Hello,

This is a web site my father has been working on for years. I've seen his work in a variety of static forms, gallery shows, magazines, books and newspapers, but this site makes the vast content much more accessible and contextualized. To quickly summarize the larger project behind invinciblecities.com, my old man has been systematically documenting the physical changes in some of America's most impoverished neighborhoods. Over 30 years, he has documents, East Brooklyn, East Harlem, the South Bronx, Camden, South Philadelphia, Gary IN, the South Side of Chicago, Detroit, Oakland CA and Los Angeles. Often taking pictures from the same spot year after year, he has created a visual record that illustrates economic, sociological and political shifts in certain corners of the American landscape. As a child I often joined him on adventures through these strange landscapes, and came to understand his work as primarily a record, not theses on poverty or inequality in American. In the '80's and '90's he had to go slide by slide to create a coherent point about architecture, ethnic shifts or local iconography.

While some online publishers and universities have displayed specific content on their web sites, invinciblecities.com is the first time that he has been able to tag photos according to their date and content and create an environment for exploring the images. What makes this so profound for me is that his apartment is essentially two large rooms completely lined with bookshelves full of albums of negatives. Heaps of slides, light boxes and magnifying glasses were the only tools he could use to organize this archive until slide scanning and back up memory became affordable. Now, with the help of some excellent web designers, he has a single site that ties together all these tiny bits of information together into a vast visual database.

Enjoy,

Charlie

Reversal of TOS for Facebook

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/18/facebook.privacy/index.html

While a quick reversal could be seen as small victory for user privacy, this is the second time Facebook has had to back away from invasive practices. After the complaints about the Beacon marketing software last year and the recent reversal of the TOS, it seems more like social networking sites are testing their uses privacy boundries rather than simply experimenting with a new business model. With such fluctuations in the approach to user data, users should take a more conservative approach to all digital communication or personal postings.