Brooding over Baudrillard

This morning's task is to get my head around Jean Baudrillard's The Illusion of the End, my second reading for the summer.  This book is very different from Technologies of Wonder, as Baudrillard is a sociologist and philosopher looking at culture and society versus Delagrange, an academic looking at digital technology specifically.  So, this blog post will have two parts.  First, I am going to lay out my understanding of Baudrillard's philosophy of history, as history is the foundation of The Illusion of the End.  Then, my ultimate goal is to determine how Baudrillard applies to digital media work.

Reading, Thinking, and Reflecting #6

 My Book ... Too Full of Ideas to Contain! 

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, chapters 12-22 and chapters 22-33:One of McLuhan's running themes is the difference between tribal and literate societies. I have been tracking this thread ...

- "Literacy creates very much simpler kinds of people than those that develop in the complex web of ordinary tribal and oral societies. For the fragmented man creates the homogenized Western world, while oral societies are made up of people differentiated, not by their specialist skills or visible marks, but by their unique emotional mixes. The oral man's inner world is a tangle of complex emotions and feelings that the Western practical man has long ago eroded or suppressed within himself in the interest of efficiency and practicality" (75).

What It Is All About

I have not been good about writing on my blog. But I am inspired to be here today by an email I received from a student who graduated last year and is now a freshman at a large university. She was in my AP English Lit class, and I showed them my blog every now and then -- trying to share that I think about them and learn from them an awful lot. Here is what she wrote to me:

"Hi Mrs. Nobles! I am in a writing class here called 'the future of writing' and we have a class blog where we are supposed to write in the blog 5 times about something relating to where writing is going, and how it is affected by technology. I know your blog has some topics about this, and what you do inside the classroom, so I was wondering what the link to your blog is so that I can get some ideas! I'm coming back home in a few weeks for thanksgiving and I'll definitely be making a pit-stop by FA to see everyone.Oh and also, I've gotten As on both of my english papers here, so I owe it to everything I learned in AP english!"

To see that my blog is a way that my students and I can continue to learn from each other is something I had never considered before. It might be one of the best reasons for blogging yet.

Blog Assignment #2: Digital Identity through Social Software

Boon, Stuart, and Christine Sinclair. "A World I Don't Inhabit: Disquiet and Identity in Second Life and Facebook." Educational Media International 46.2 (2009): 99-110. Print.

I have been wondering about social media. I can be uncomfortable using it, and I notice this in classmates as we use social tools to mediate class. The nature of written chats was even a topic of our written chat – true group metacognition indeed.

Consequently, Stuart Boon and Christine Sinclair’s experiences with digital identity intrigue me. They offer personal reflection founded in psychology and technology studies, providing a glimpse into social software’s effects on users. Boon and Sinclair make clear their article “raises more questions than it answers and suggests that there is an urgent need to theorise online identity, the roles of academics and students, and the codes of practice in such environments” (99). As teachers and professionals who may choose to integrate social software into classrooms and work, exploring how technology affects users is important.

Boon and Sinclair’s goal is “to discover how the act of … ‘inhabiting’ digital selves … affects not only what a student learns in these new spaces but also what a student may become in the process” (101). The authors were in courses using Facebook and Second Life, and they support using technology for education. Thus their discomfort as users is notable.

They focus their analysis on in-common reactions and how theory grounds them. They identify a major concern: “[d]igital selves invariably lack the … verifiability of the real … [T]his might seem like stating the obvious, but what might not be obvious is the emotional effect that this realisation can have on the entire virtual experience. It can result in dissonance … between real-world experiences and experiences within a digital world or environment (e.g. see Land & Bayne, 2006). Facebook does little to overcome this problem and … Second Life does even less. In both …, the onus is on the individual to break down or correct this dissonance” (104). I found this particularly interesting, as my student, reflecting on our Ning, wrote, “When I [do] my journals, I just sort of write what came to mind, so a lot of ideas aren’t fully explained ... Then, someone will … comment and it’s just sort of startling. It’s not bad, maybe good that I’m getting used to it.” It is clearly up to her to reconcile her writing and the digital experience that comes with it. As teachers, we risk assuming our students, raised in this technological world, do not struggle with social software.

Boon and Sinclair do not say to avoid these tools. They see benefits far beyond course content: “the discomfort draws attention to unexamined aspects of presentation of self …, academic and social assumptions …, and even our moral stances” (109). Reconciling the dissonance with the benefits becomes our task as professionals, as Boon and Sinclair intentionally leave us poised to do our own research of social software.

Blog Assignment #1: Case-Study of Social Software

Minocha, Shailey. "A Case Study-Based Investigation of Students' Experiences with Social Software Tools." New Review of Hypermedia & Multimedia 15.3 (2009): 245-65. Print.

Teaching at a 1:1 laptop school, I have used “social software” extensively in my classroom. As Shailey Minocha writes, “the key aspect of a Web 2.0 or social software tool is that it involves wider participation in the creation of information which is shared” (245). Blogs, wikis, nings, Google Docs, Twitter – all are social software. Researchers and teachers are intrigued by how these creation opportunities can stimulate higher student engagement and learning, particularly with writing.

I have done my own reflection after using Web 2.0 tools, from determining whether students reached curricular goals to asking them for their thoughts on the use of the software. However, I have not done formal research into the measurable efficacy of social software in the classroom; therefore I was extremely interested to read Minocha’s article. This article will be equally interesting for others using or studying Web 2.0 tools in classrooms. More importantly, it is also an excellent introduction to using these tools, so a novice teacher will gain much too.

Minocha and her colleagues carefully designed their research plan around empirical case studies. The article delineates their methods plus possible limitations; as a result, Minocha’s findings are credible and verifiable, thus highly instructive to readers. Teacher-scholars are Minocha’s particular audience because the study focused solely on schools.

Minocha and her colleagues had no preconceptions entering this study. This is clear when she presents her research goal: to study the “educational goals of using social software; benefits to the students; and the challenges they experience” (245). Minocha and her colleagues did find both benefits and challenges. They present these in narrative form along with a chart connecting possible solutions to each challenge (this chart is the main reason this article is so helpful for novice teachers because they can see possible pitfalls before they even begin).

Ultimately, this study found more positive results of using social software than negative. The negatives, such as ownership concerns and equal participation complaints, are ones the authors clearly feel, through their solutions chart, can be addressed. I would like to add that I have seen some of the negative concerns become a reality, such as students feeling like they are “being forced to comment” (257), and I agree with Minocha’s overall recommendations: “For a social software initiative, it is important that educators align the usage of the tool(s) to the learning outcomes of a course or programme. Next, it is important to explain to the students the rationale of the tool and how the tool will support their learning and skills development” (260-262). Careful planning is rewarded by benefits ranging from “engagement of students” to “inspirational learning” to a “sense of … ownership” (252-253). If my students are engaged and inspired by work they feel is truly theirs, I have helped to create true writers.

(Note to readers of my blog: I will be posting article and chapter reviews for the next few months as part of Dr. Kevin DePew's Pedagogy and Instructional Design class for the PhD program at Old Dominion University. I hope these give you some interesting reading to explore!)

Technology Tussle

Here is my almost daily question: Why is technology so unreliable? Actually, a more accurate phrasing of that question would be: Why does technology not really do what it advertises it will do?

Here are my experiences just this week:

• Grou.ps -- I moved to this site in August because I was really bothered by Ning becoming fee-based and I did not want to be an ad platform for Pearson (nothing personal against Pearson -- I just felt wrong becoming an ad place for them). Of course, Grou.ps is now following the money PLUS I have not been able to access any payment options for weeks on their site or been able to make my grou.ps public so I can see my front page again. Today, I cannot even access my grou.ps. No notice, just no grou.ps available. Can't wait for my class later today when we actually, surprise surprise, wanted to use our grou.ps to ... collaborate ...
• Crocodoc -- I thought this would be a great alternative to Diigo (which could be a completely different bullet except I have not used Diigo in months because its annotation tools are SO unreliable). So, I get my class all set up, they start annotating, and we quickly have annotations scrolling for pages that are linked to sentences way, way above. No way to close comments or to respond to comments -- just one long list of comments that really are not visibly attached to anything ... so no collaborating on annotating with this collaborative annotation tool ...
  
• Skype -- My professor is trying to use this for the audio portion of our class (because Adobe Connect's -- our conferencing software -- audio is apparently known to be problematic), and he has struggled for two weeks now because half the people cannot hear. It is never the same half of course. I feel so sorry for him because, as technology teacher myself, I know the headache of trying to troubleshoot on the spot. All he was trying to do was to communicate via the web ... what Skype promotes itself as ... hmmm ...

I love the ideas I have about how to teach better and more powerfully through the tools I can harness in my school's 1:1 laptop program. But if I had made a scorecard of hits and misses, I have to be honest that my misses column would be far, far longer. The hits make it all worth it (Google Docs -- thank you for changing to allow synchronous editing!!) ... so just thank you for allowing me to vent.

Not Quite Real Time Collaboration

I have started my students back on Diigo in the past week. We are working on poetry now, and I set up a wiki having learned from my last experience that Diigo gets wiggy on slower websites. Wikispaces, with its emphasis on collaboration, seems to be able to handle the extra layer of Diigo well.

However, all problems are not solved. My students can do great work when they have time outside of class to add Diigo comments and highlights. They did this for Gwendolyn Brooks's poem "We Real Cool" -- see their ideas here. Today I began class by having them read the comments on the poem, then they had to write a blog post about the poem incorporating something they learned from a classmates' comment. By the time we were ready to discuss, they had the poem pretty well dissected in their own minds. They shared the best ideas they had read, and I asked them if they felt they had a good grasp of what Brooks was trying to say. They did, so we next listened to her read her poem then read this interview with her. They were really impressed with themselves to learn that they had thought about all of the things Brooks herself had thought about. Neat.

But then things broke down. My next plan with Diigo which was to tackle another poem applying what we had learned about line breaks from Brooks. I planned to record their ideas on the poem using Diigo, and this is the wall I hit. As they were sharing ideas, my highlighter would work only half the time; comments sometimes appeared therefore and sometimes not. I ended up using markers on my dry erase board (which doubles as my projection screen) to do the highlighting just so I could stop hindering the forward flow of the discussion. Not quite what I had envisioned with using this tool.

My students were very patient with me as I struggled through this, but it ended up provoking comments from them on their experiences with Diigo. Turns out that most of them have these same problems repeatedly. They find Diigo therefore frustrating, and while they are obviously persevering and getting the out of class work done using it, it is not at all what I had thought was happening when I saw all of their homework done. I talked to them about how I love what Diigo can help us do -- how seeing each others' comments earlier in class had really informed their individual interpretations. Because they are kind people, they nodded and could see what I meant, but I am not sure the frustrations are not winning out in their minds. To be honest, they are starting to for me. An entire poetry discussion was derailed by trying to make Diigo work.

My wonderful tech resource Susan Morgan has done research for me into these issues, and what she has learned has left me feeling a little hopeless about solving them. Evidently, Diigo can be messed up by random settings on individual laptops. So, what could be stopping my highlights from always appearing is probably not the same problem that is stopping one of my students from seeing any of his comments. I am glad that Diigo seems to be a secure program, but I cannot troubleshoot individual blocks. I do not know enough, for starters, but who has the time for that?

What to do? Is this technology not the right answer for this work? Am I trying to fit a square peg into a round hole for the sake of technology here? I do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but I struggle with using Diigo only as an out-of-class tool when what I really want is a real-time, immediate collaboration tool. Something I thought Diigo could be ...

How Is It Going?

I had my class reflect on their work in our Othello ning today. For homework last night, they had no set work to do in the ning; instead they were to explore what has been going on and comment where they were moved to do so. To start class today, I had them send me an email that began, "I noticed ..." They could finish with things they learned about the play, their classmates, the ning, whatever had struck them.

Here is what one student wrote: "I noticed...that I LOVE the Ning! It’s been really helpful because I’ve been able to see other’s thoughts. I liked that I was able to compare the different paraphrasing people did of Iago’s speech, it helped me get a strong understanding of what he was saying by looking at all points of view. Also, in my character discussion group of Desdemona, I find the Ning very helpful. I really like that we can just throw an idea on there and then let others add on to it or find evidence to support it. It’s a great way for us all to be able to work together without getting confusing."

Wow. I want to hug her. I want to jump up and down. I want to hope that my other students are feeling at least a part of what she feels.

A Quote

"While most kids’ uses of these technologies are 'friendship based', the more compelling shift is when their use is 'interest based' or when they connect with other kids or adults around the topics or ideas they are passionate to learn about." (from Will Richardson's blog)

So this seems to be where we as teachers come into play ... helping students see the power of the web on their minds and passions. Yes, many/most students use technology all of the time, but they still have more to learn that we can teach them (if we take the time to learn ...) even when they might know more technological applications than we do.

Thinking, Thinking, Thinking!

I just had to share the presentation one of my students just did about the Torah. (See post below for an explanation of these presentations.) Joe structured his whole presentation around questions he had about the Torah, and he did this beautifully. He began with the questions, told us we would return to them, walked us through all of his findings (so great because we knew we was exploring stuff that he, and therefore we, really wanted to know), then at the end he had us return to his questions and discuss in groups what we had learned. So really what he did was what I have tried to do all year -- present our studies based around essential questions, use technology to explore things we are truly intrigued about, and bring it all together to discover what we've learned and what we can do with that knowledge. I am just so proud of him.

Here is what he created: a document for us to use for notes and thinking plus a website to explore. (And if you listen to the audio file, yes, those are two of our Jewish students Joe recorded reciting a Hebrew prayer. He also brought in one of the student's actual Torah.)

Do they get it?

I am finally reading Clay Shirky's book, Here Comes Everybody. I know, I should have read it months ago like the rest of the world, but if you haven't read it yet either, it still resonates even in this rapidly changing world. Listen to this:

"When I was a teenager, I remember reading letters to the editor in my local paper, where the grown-ups were arguing about whether to allow students to use calculators. The unspoken worry was that since calculators had appeared so suddenly, they might disappear just as suddenly. What none of the grown-ups in that conversation understood was that there would never again be a day when we needed to divide two seven-digit numbers on paper. What seemed to them like a provisional new capability was actually a deep and permanent shift, one we students recognized immediately" (Shirky 294).

Do all of your students get this today about the web and all of its possibilities? To be honest, I am not sure all of mine do, and that is why this quote makes me think so much. As a teacher, I feel so often on the back-end of the "Web 2.0" movement -- barely hanging on. Yet, for some (many?) of my students, I am pulling them along. I am showing them not only, to keep Shirky's metaphor going, why this calculator is here to stay but also why they should be recognizing this as part of THEIR worlds.

So in the end, am I in front or back?

Literary Terms Quiz

After we study our class literary terms handbook, my students have fun testing themselves with this quiz -- it even requires correct spelling (something that kills some of them ...).