Qualitative studies… and narrative analysis!
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The article I read for this week’s class is Gutnick, Robb, Takeuchi and Kotler’s 2011 report Always connected: The new digital media habits of young children published by the Sesame Workshop and Joan Ganz Cooney Center, the same organizations working toward literacy projects in West Africa, as in the attached video. No surprise that there are muppets involved, as Joan G. Cooney was one of the co-creators of Sesame Street back in 1969. Many of us growing up in North America will have fond memories of the alphabet, early numeracy and pop culture references thanks to the long-running television show. The extensive study of children (mostly age 0-11) and their media consumption habits reveals that television is still the predominant electronic media form, which must have come as a relief to Public Broadcasters. It should be noted too that most of the data collected was as current as 2010, and there are several references to iPads and other tablets, yet nothing in the data to reflect the tablet’s role in accessing media. I also have the sense that video-on-demand and Internet-based channels (at the time of this report, Netflix was transitioning from mailing rental DVD to web-streaming video). Another report will soon clear up these subtle changes, and who knows how children will be connected to media at that point in history! It is good to see that paper-bound books are still considered a source of media outside of schools.
One troubling aspect of the report comes in at the middle section, starting with page 22 and the section titled “Finding 3: digital divides still exist, in both access to and usage of media” where a number of the studies reveal the differences between socio-economic status and broadly-defined racial groups, in this case black, white and Hispanic. As much as the United States holds onto the “melting pot” theory of cultural assimilation, certainly there is something a little off with these three categories: how is Hispanic a colour? Where do Asian-American and Indigenous people fit in? If the cultural difference are reduced to black and white, is Hispanic the new black? Or the new white? It was hard to take most of these findings seriously, as they seemed to imply the very limited nature of social change towards historically disadvantaged groups. The status quo remains the same, much in the same way as television continues as the number one media source for American children.
From the outset of the Always connected report, the authors state that they are viewing the results as a neutral party (p.7) it is no doubt in the interest of television producers, PBS and commercial alike, that the TV set stay switched on, even when there is nobody in the room to watch it. Parts of this report do warrent particualr attention from parents and educators alike, but it was hard to grasp who should heed the message about the media. Much of the studies cited in this paper are scholarly, but more come from either JGC or Sesame Workshop publications. Last weekend, I picked up a copy of the slightly more academic Simon and Nemeth’s 2012 Digital decision: Choosing the right technology tools for early education education, and I have yet to decide whether it is for educators or deep-pocketed parents. The old adage says not to judge a book by its cover!
By strange coincidence, today marks the start of the Oreo “crazy flavors” campaign, and it seem to better capture the multicultural blending of society that Sesame Street originally intended.
Spanish Tragedy
Mentoring
Taking a huge step back in time, the early eighties, to mind map the discussion on the digital age according to Jackie Marsh (2010) and David Buckingham (2009). Like much of the technology used today to create it, there was more certainty with the simpler aspects of virtual gaming world a few decades ago.
Here is a link to my Prezi: http://prezi.com/jvy86ebfhqrn/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share
Since none of my embedded files are uploading on this worn-out laptop!
Masques and sonnets, boots and cats.
The article by Patsy Duff, our instructor no less, covers pretty much everything that needs to said on the topic of academic socialization. I’m not just trying to be polite – she is planning to view this blog, isn’t she – but looking down the list of works cited, I cannot think of anyone else who has written in this area. And to be on that list, to have one’s name positioned inside brackets of a highly esteemed colleague seems to be the goal of many academics entering their post doctorate studies. There are plenty of bumps along the way, wouldn’t seem worthwhile to be in these studies if just anyone could be a scholar. The various case studies reported in Language Socialization into Academic Communities demonstrate that there will be some amount of exclusionary practices, but they could be seen more in the light of gate-keeping policies rather than ways of turning people away (or off) from higher education. The one example that sticks out the most, in my mind, involves Séror (2008) study of undergraduate Japanese students in Canada, mostly because my wife went through a very similar and frustrating experience taking an English course last term. I was even having a hard time to decipher her instructors handwriting. When at last we could figure out what changes could be made, it was barely worth the trouble trying to figure it out in the first place as the advice contradicted instructions delivered orally in class. Fortunately, my wife has moved on to a more literate instructor, and loves participating in her short story course this term.
Thanks to those of you who logged into Goodreads to catch up with my anticlimactic comments on Learning the Literacy Practices of Graduate School. I agree with many of the reflections posted on-line from other classmates, and agree that these experiences will be similar yet separate for each of us. The same sense that I got from looking over the list of Crucial Elements (Richardson, 2008, p. 261-3), reinforced by the readings this week: we all already do many of the things listed, and written about in the first section, yet are still in the process of proving it to others. Sometimes, according to John S. Hedgcock the process of proof-in-the-writing will take an entire career to establish.
Learning the Literacy Practices of Graduate School: Insiders’ Reflections on Academic Enculturation by Christine Pearson Casanave
The two readings selected for this week examine a question very close to my concerns over the children growing up digital, whether the technology that surrounds them at school and at home makes them into a different type of learner than what is described in many scholarly research. With a fondness for Vygotsky and the cognitive psychologists so influential to my early educational studies, I am inclined to say there is no great difference between what children were able to do prior to on-line interaction and now. They simply have abilities to use tools, modeled by their parents and peers, and will continue their development into higher mental functions the more they internalize use of such tools. Virtual worlds such as Club Penguin or Minecraft will enhance the imaginative or “figured world” (Holland et al, 1998) that include many of the same types of play that could be found in living rooms and playgrounds. It is still nice to have data that backs up this theory, and therefore looking at Jackie Marsh’s research provides some quantitative evidence alongside her qualitative study of primary grade students who use virtual social media sites.
Pre-Disney Club Penguin
My first encounter with one of her studied website, Club Penguin happened on my practicum, where laptop computer cart would be wheeled into the classroom so that the grade four students could work together on a social studies wiki I had designed. Those who finished the tasks early usually demanded free-time, and I became interested to see what the students could do independently with monitored access to the Internet. Most of the time, students would fuss over their log in name (or forgotten passwords) but once in the game showed a high level of compitence. As Marsh points out, most of the collaborative gaming happened between friends already in the classroom – usually one student asking another to join them in a particular chatroom or on-line activity. For most of the girls in the class, there was the cuteness factor of raising “puffers” and the boys seemed to enjoy the sledding and skiing activities, plus both girls and boys would gleefully engage in a snowball fight with whomever was on-line at the time. A benign game, as far as I can tell, and not so much under the influence of Disney cross-promotional marketing (users can now access Avengers penguins, based on the Disney-owned Marvel film franchise, are penguin princesses far behind?) that was promoted as the safest on-line site for children. Marsh investigates more thoroughly the possibilities of student interaction and cultural capital of both Club Penguin and Barbie Girls. Her conclusion, like many others investigating this field, is that more research needs to be conducted, and I would happily like to add my final project for LLED 558: Multimodalities and Literacy, once it is in a more publishable form!
Another American agency monitoring
21st century learners and educators!
Following Marsh’s engaging research, I decided to investigate one of the major professional organizations listed on the course outline, hoping to uncover some digital literacy gems for local Early Childcare Education professionals (such as my wife) but surprised to find most were American agencies. It is not such a surprise, at the PhD level, to encounter more information on education in the United States (even with my Master in Educational Technology, much of the latest trends seemed to be coming up from south of the border). The only international website (ISTE) linked me to a stub, one of those message pages that indicate the page could not be found, yet on further investigation, located the Standards for Teachers page, which like much at in the field of education (including the very department I got my master degree from) had gone through a process of rebranding to keep up to date with Web 2.0 changes. As for the document itself, Advancing Digital Age Teaching, it seems to be well thought-out and includes many buzz-worthy words and phrases (such as innovate, technology-enhanced learning environment and engage) that share a positive outlook on the future of teaching children younger than the ones Jackie Marsh. Yet while presenting a open-ended guideline for the qualities administrators want to promote with the educators they will hire (and possibly fire for not meeting their expectations), I can already hear the cry of complaint: “what do they really expect us to do?” One sticking point in particular is the respect for copyright nicely tucked into the second page of the document. Education 1.0 already features copious pages of photocopied material, some of it falling within the legally permitted 10%, and the occasional teacher playing a DVD or video for the class, skipping over the explicit warning that this video is not for public viewing (usually home use only). It is this mindset that produced the document on Education 2.0, I strongly argue, and it seems a bit more rethinking of values such as copyright is in order to make education truly relevant for 21st century citizens.
So many moments from Shakespeare in Love to choose from, and the scene watched in class was a good way to start off our discussion of how we see Shakespeare and the Renaissance today. The scene includes the nervous backstage happenings moments before the first-ever staging of Romeo and Juliet and the stuttering tailor-turned Prologue marvelously gets up to speed with the audience. Proof against the notion that these are literary text, like the ones written and edited by the University Wits, but rather utterances collected and put on stage for a wide variety of Londoners to enjoy. Compared with the stifling seriousness of an earlier scene, where the Lord Chamberlain’s Men perform Two Gentlemen of Verona for Elizabeth’s court, the playhouses were the purpose behind most of these memorable moments in early modern drama. And while big-moneyed patrons were not to be sneezed at, the plays gained their international appeal by being for everyone, especially the illiterate. Most of the Oxford edition scholars (Gabriel Egan, Carole Levin and Peter Thomas) agree that it took a society like late-16th century England to produce these plays. Someone as attuned to all the intricate details of life in the theatre and in such a city like London could turn what seemed like a half-baked movie pitch (let’s have Julia Roberts as the actress who played Juliet) into one of Tom Stoppard’s finest contribution to filmmaking – still not sure what to make of his adaptation of Anna Karenina, but that is another story.
Turns out that I picked a winner with my article presentation, Jonathan Gil Harris was described as a “hot commodity” among literary criticism, and the last book of his to come out was published here in Vancouver! It would be great if he has plans to return to UBC, especially as the Digital Literacy Centre is looking for someone to speak at our conference. While his study of “things” and the lives objects have may go off in many unexpected ways – who wouldn’t want to know about the smells associated with Blackfriar Theatre productions of Macbeth? – Harris seems to represent the purpose of multimodality: more than just the one way of seeing things. I jotted down in my notebook that he might be a post-thing theorist, and it would be really cool if there is a connection to string or chaos in his research. One thing he is not, it seems, is a New Historicist and it looks like the sun is setting on this critical movement. Harris even has the final word on Greenblatt’s brand of criticism: New Historicists cannot agree how the Civil Wars started, just as Marxists cannot agree how they ended. Our instructor gave another way of describing NH’s way: “funky anecdote from obscure literary source matched up with highest canonical text” like some hermit’s diary linked up with Edgar’s lines from King Lear. For my presentation (and the DLC conference) I will be finding out lots more on JGH, but it seems like he has taken historicism a step further: take a tidbit from anywhere in complexity theory and explore its connection to what we already know about the plays.
Set design for Blackbird Theatre’s
Uncle Vanya
Today’s class began with introductions and outline reviewing, as well as a two-part discussion on the ways in which graduate schools could or must change. To better understand what each of us are getting ourselves into, we read as much of the one of these two articles: Nicolas (2008)’s optimistic Researcher for Tomorrow and the seemingly more pessimistic Taylor (2009) End of University as We Know It. Both express ways in which graduate schooling has to keep up with present-day demands for research and job opportunities. The key phrase comes from the mechanical engineer Nicolas, who advises in a workmanlike way, to have graduates who know where to dig, rather than digging the same holes as their mentors. Sounds very much like Tapscott and Williams (2007) were investigating in the book Wikinomics‘ chapter on Goldcorp.
Having been introduced to the methods and readings that in weeks to come, I took the thoughtful lessons about becoming a professional language and literacy educator and went to see a show with my dad, Blackbird Theatre’s production of Uncle Vanya. In an eerie way that has started with my master program, everything I come into contact with outside of the classroom has some relation to what I am studying. Here it becomes obvious with Anton Chekhov’s caricature of a professor past his prime: Aleksandr Vladimirovich Serebryakov. Ageing and aching from gout, he returns to his wife’s country estate to wreck havoc on the remaining inhabitants (his wife, Vanya’s sister, having passes away and the professor remarried to a much younger woman) who he partly ruined by leeching off them during his studies and long process towards retirement. Of the many people he has upset along the way, Serebtyakov’s worst habit is his disregard for the lowly farmhand, Ilya Ilych Telegin, the only character who took an active interest in what the retired professor has to say. I have seen that look, the confused “who is this person?” brush-off that seems to be a bad habit of surrounding oneself with ideas rather than other people.