For the past 8 weeks, I have poured hours of work into my final project for ETEC 565B. My final presentation is below and a transcript can be found here. Enjoy!
Author Archives: robin mchugh
Understanding New Materialism
This week we were asked to create a New Materialism workshop. The workshop was created to help educational specialists to understand what new materialism is. I’ve created a presentation for this workshop, as well as, have included speaking notes and optional learning activity for the workshop.
New Materialism by Robin
Exploring Educational Technologies: Gamification and Clickers
Twittering Theory Task: Dr. Tony Bates
Tony Bates is the author of eleven books in the field of online learning and distance education and has most recently worked as consultant for Tony Bates Associates LTD in the planning and management of e-learning and distance education. He uses Twitter to share his ideas about e-learning, distance education, and current research in learning and technology. His experience is broad, he has worked for private businesses, government, and universities; however, he currently works as a Research Associate for Contact North, an organization supporting rural and remote Indigenous and Francophone communities access education from their communities. His educational interests include higher education, providing resources for students, faculty, and administrators interested in online learning, and teaching with technology. As a professional, Bates provides leadership and consultation that support the planning, management, and integration of e-learning technology. It has been argued that, John Dewey viewed a community of learning essential to the success of developing knowledge and learning (Cummings, 2000). Like Dewey, Bates advocates for the effective development of online learning environments that are collaborative and build a community of learning.
Bates uses his Twitter account to disseminate information from his website tonybates.ca to his followers. Based on my research of Bates’ Twitter account, he has never retweeted a single tweet that I came across throughout this research process (I scrolled through about 2.5 years of Tweets). The way Bates’ disseminates ideas on Twitter, is closely aligned to how an educator might develop a knowledge-centered learning environment. Knowledge-centered learning environments focus on helping learners with deep understanding developing critical thinking skills. Knowledge-centered learning is constructed and sequenced so that subject matter builds on pre-existing knowledge (Egan-Simon, 2019). John McPeck (2000) and other critical thinking theorists argue that teaching general thinking skills and techniques is useless outside of a particular knowledge domain in which they can be grounded. Dewey argued that curriculum should be relevant to learners’ lives (Dewey & Archambault, 1974). Bates’ Twitter feed is very focused and for someone who does not have some investment or interest in the field of education, the information Bates is tweeting would be irrelevant and his tweets would be easily passed by. Bates is also creating a well-organized, extensive resource covering topics on online learning, distance education, research, open educational resources, strategic planning, cost-benefit analysis for educational technology, virtual reality, gaming, learning management systems, and policy development and management targeted towards higher education, he also tweets about primary and and secondary education. He is disseminating facts, ideas, and concepts that are relevant to education, in a timely manner.
Bates’ tweets about topics related to online learning and distance education. His feed is populated with posts that review books and articles related to e-learning. He advocates for creating effective online learning environments. As well as, shares relevant professional development, education and other resources for teachers, administrators, and students who are interested in e-learning and distance education. Bates’ attempts to balance his tweets, for example, he is attuned to the digital divide that online learning environments can create and in the past two years has tweeted about this on a number of occasions.
Bates bids farewell to Trump.
Bates currently has 6,420 followers and is following 28 others himself. He follows: Steven Downes, Canadian Digital Learning Research Association, Audrey Watters and Hack Education, Office of Educational Technology for the US Department of Education, Dr. Alec Couros, EDUCAUSE, George Siemens, and Lisa Neilsen from InnovatorEducator.com. Bates’ reach is extensive, he has educators, administrators, and policy makers following him from around the globe. Some of his followers include: George Veletsianos, Clint Lalonde, ETHE Journal, PREVNet, Associació Catalana d’Universitats Públiques, Ronald Wagner, LMSPulse, Tessa Davis, The Department of Technology Enhanced at Learning Munster Technological University, Penn State University, Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning and Hong Kong University, and OER Lebanon.
Educational theory is comprised of a number of theories, rather than a single explanation, of how we learn and how we should teach. Educational theory covers the many theories that explain the application, interpretation, and purpose of learning and education. Twitter is reshaping educational theory by providing educators and theorists in the field of education mobile technology to create social discussions on virtually any topic related to the research, application, interpretation, and purpose of learning and education. Twitter is a powerful platform to gather, provide, and access information and data and provides users a way to collaborate and communicate effectively.
Twitter is changing the way students, educators, administrators, and policy makers get information. As Bolter and Grusin (1999) indicate, media is ever changing and remediation of media stems from changing an original work into a new medium. It can take months and years to have academic research published in journals, weeks and days to review a publication, hours to publish a news story. Twitter’s 140 character maximum creates an efficient and effective method to communicate and provides immediate access to anyone who signs up for an account. The development of technology itself stems from remediation; cell phones, tablets, touch screens, hypertext, video recording, podcasts, etc. have all been developed to accommodate people’s consumption and dissemination of media. Twitter holds and delivers the content, but the content on Twitter is so vast that a user will never be able to read or interact with all of the content on Twitter. In his discussion of the electric light, McLuhan (1964) says the content of the medium is the activities that the electric light allowed. The electric light has no decision on what the content is, the content may be anything. There will always be new content being remediated from old content, because the desire for more interaction motivates remediation.
References
Bates, T. [@drtonybates]. (2021, October 22). Twitter. https://twitter.com/drtonybates?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
Cummings, C. K. (2000). John Dewey and the rebuilding of urban community: Engaging undergraduates as neighborhood organizers. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 7, 97. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3239521.0007.111
Dewey, J., & Archambault, R. D. (1974). John dewey on education: Selected writings. University of Chicago Press.
Egan-Simon, D. (2019). Knowledge-Centered Curriculum. Chartered College of Teaching.
Jay David Bolter, & Richard Grusin. (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. The MIT Press.
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Signet Books. http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf
McPeck, J. (1990). Teaching critical thinking: Dialogue and Dialetic (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315526492
Tony Bates & Contact North. (2018, September 19). Tony Bates | Online Learning and Distance Education Resources. Tony Bates. Retrieved October 19, 2021, from https://www.tonybates.ca/
Paradigms of Literacy for Maxine Greene
Educators have come to view literacy as a set of context-neutral, value-free skills that are imparted on learners (de Castell and Luke, 1983). Below is a paradigm chart outline Maxine Greene’s educational theory. To develop this chart, I used de Castell and Luke (1983) as a model. De Castell and Luke identify three paradigms of literacy: the classical, the progressive, and the technocratic (de Castell and Luke, 1983). Maxine Greene theories fall in line with progressive reform, where literacy attempted to address the practical speech of everyday life, child-centered curriculum replaced the classical, and the normative stress moved moral and cultural edification to socialization and civic ethics (de Castell and Luke, 1983, p. 89). Looking at de Castell and Luke’s (1983) paradigms chart, I think we would add a fourth paradigm of literacy: the Indigenous paradigm. This theory would include ontologies rooted in worldviews that we are all related to each other, to the natural environment, and to the spiritual world and epistemologies that are emotional, spiritual, cognitive, and physical, which are informed by ancestral knowledge and passed on through storytelling to younger generations.
I enjoyed this intellectual production and enjoyed watching Maxine speak about education and her experiences.
More about Maxine Greene and the Paradigms Chart…
Dr. Maxine Greene was an American educational philosopher and educator who promoted the arts as a fundamental learning tool and in nearly 50 years at Teachers College, Columbia University. Greene was a prolific writer and lecturer on topics in education like multiculturalism and the power of imagination. Greene believed that creative thinking and robust imagining were not just the keys to an individual’s lifelong learning but to the flourishing of a demographic society (Weber, 2014). She believed that learning takes place when a learner takes responsibility and an active part in their own learning and she believed that democracy, social action, and social influence affected education and its outcomes.
Greene believed literacy empowers people. She recognized the importance of authentic speaking and writing – the kind that revels who a person is. She believed that fundamental skills learned in classroom are only a foundation, and learning cannot take place until learners can teach themselves (Greene, 1982). Greene argued that educators should not concentrate on learner competencies and believed that learners should not be reactive creatures or behaving organisms. She believed in aesthetic literacy or education, which assumes that the more a learner comes to know, the more they will come to see and hear. Each time a learner encounters a piece of art or literature, they should engage with it differently than the last time they encountered it based on new knowledge and lived situations they have acquired since their last encounter. Greene believed that art and literature provoked learners to pose questions and ponder their worlds (Greene, 1982).
According to Greene, the goal of an ideal curriculum is to provide a learner with an opportunity to make sense of the systems that shape and organize the world. She believed that when educating a learner, you are introducing that learner to a way of being and acting in the world that are new to his or her knowledge or experience. She believed both educators and learners need to be in a state of intense consciousness to focus on components of their curricular life-worlds in order to begin the process of learning (Zacharias, 2004). Greene believed in a progressive education philosophy. She believed educators should not only work as instructors in a classroom, but should empower the learner to search for meaning and not give them the meaning (Giarelli, 2006). Greene also believed in democratic pedagogy. She believed educators should encourage questions, critical thinking, and creativity. Greene believed in order to be authentic and effective the educator must be inquirer, discoverer, critic, and loved one. A true educator must come to class with all of the questions answered and subjects turned into an object ready to consume, but must come to class prepared to think critically, participate in discussions with students, defining the norms that governs their classroom, and allowing for possibly (Greene, 1982).
Greene believed that standard exams can’t quantify aesthetic engagement and learning is a transformative experience rather than a series of tasks that can be measured on a rubric (Gulla et al., 2020). She believed the primary outcome of education was to empower learners to think conceptually and to look through wider and more diverse perspectives in the world. She believed we owe learners the sight of open doors and open possibilities (Greene, 1982).
References
de Castell, S. & Luke, A. (1983). Models of literacy in North American schools: Social and historical conditions and consequences. In de Castell, Luke, and Egan (Eds) Literacy, Society, and Schooling. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Giarelli, J. M. (2016). Maxine Greene on Progressive Education: Toward a Public Philosophy of Education. Education and Culture, 32(1), 5–14. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.5703/educationculture.32.1.5.pdf
Greene, M. (1982). Literacy for What? The Phi Delta Kappan, 63(5), 326–329. https://maxinegreene.org/uploads/library/literacy_what.pdf
Gulla, A. N., Fairbank, H., & Noonan, S. M. (2020). IMAGINATION, INQUIRY, & VOICE: A Deweyan Approach to Education in a 21st Century Urban high School. Sense Publishers. https://www.lehman.edu/academics/education/middle-high-school-education/documents/ImaginationandInquiry-Gulla.pdf
Weber, B. (2014, June 5). Maxine Greene, 96, Dies; Education Theorist Saw Arts as Essential. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/05/nyregion/maxine-greene-teacher-and-educational-theorist-dies-at-96.html
Zacharias, M.E. (December 2004). Moving Beyond with Maxine Greene: Integrating Curriculum with Consciousness Educational Insights, 9(1). http://www.ccfi.educ.ubc.ca/publication/insights/v09n01/articles/zacharias.html
Edtechdev: A Digital Design and Development Project
Background Information
Alberta Council for the Ukrainian Arts (ACUA) is a non-profit, provincial arts organization located in Edmonton. It is the mandate of our organization to promote and support the development of Ukrainian art and artists through exhibitions, tours, festivals, educational programs, professional development, workshops, and special project. ACUA currently supports artists from 6 of the 7 traditional genres of art including sculpture, painting, literature, music, performing, and film. Currently, ACUA has over 150 artists who are actively engaged with our organization. As well as, have a number of artists in our membership who have previously engaged with us or support our work, but don’t actively work with us on a regular basis.
In my current role, I work with ACUA artists on a day-to-day basis and hear from them the struggles they face as artists to move from the role of emerging to professional artist. While in Canada, there is an uptake in arts and humanities graduates securing employment in the tech sector (Lewington, 2019), less than half of fine art graduates work as professional artists after they graduate (Jahoda et al., 2014 and Statistics Canada, 2017). As a result, ACUA started to research the possibility of offering a professional development series to assist artists in learning skills that professional artists need to have in order to run a business, as opposed to working as an employee. There are a number of non-member art organizations and post-secondary institutes in Alberta who strive to promote the arts and artists and offer professional development in business and education in arts and humanities, but to date, ACUA has not found a program that is all-encompassing and focuses on arts business professional development, as outlined in Appendix A. As a result of our research, ACUA has identified the need to develop and implement a professional development series targeted at recent graduates of fine arts programs or emerging artists.
The development of the series will be led by Larisa Sembaliuk-Cheladyn who is a successful and professional artist. Larisa has worked for over 30 years as an artist, has exhibited her art throughout the world, and has commissions in collections throughout the world including in Prince Philip’s personal art collection. She holds a BFA in Art & Design, a MA in Ukrainian Folklore, and is currently completing a PhD in Media and Cultural Studies. Larisa has worked with universities to develop coursework in art and cultural studies programs. She also has a wealth of knowledge in the arts community and will be able to recruit individuals who will be able to successfully develop and instruct this professional development series.
At this point in the project a series outline has been developed by myself and Larisa. It has been determined that the individual courses in the series will be delivered as synchronous workshops, which allows for short-periods of delivery, flexibility for length and frequency of sessions, and the workshops will build on one another, but can also be taken individually. We do recognize that based on the variety of workshops that will be developed, the broad range of skills participants have, and the amount of information that will need to be covered in some of the workshops, some workshops may require pre and/or post work, which will have to be completed by participants asynchronously. We anticipate the first 8 workshops in this series will include the following topics: bookkeeping for artists, framing and presentation, writing grant proposals, preparing artwork for reproduction, preparing for exhibits and festivals, developing a website, social media marketing, working with art galleries and agents, and contracts and considerations for commissioned works.
Project Description
The next step in this project is to develop a tool that can be used as a learning management system, registration and enrolment system, and communication tool to engage ACUAs active and inactive artists in this project. The infrastructure of this tool will be developed using the content management system WordPress. By using WordPress, ACUA will be able to maintain the tool with the current IT resources they have once my role with the project is complete.
Initially, myself and ACUA will use the tool to create two-way communication between the organization and artists. The tool will be used to reach out to artists and tell them about the professional development series that is being developed. Artists will be able to sign up to receive more information about the project. This will allow ACUA to generate a database of potential series participants. Also, as part of the development of this tool, a survey will be created that artists can complete when they visit the website that will tell the artist what professional development workshops we would like to develop and allow ACUA to survey artists about what type of professional development workshops they feel they would benefit them. Although a draft outline of the workshop series sessions exists, this information will be used by ACUA and Larisa to develop the first eight courses in the workshop series. Going forward, ACUA will be able to use the tool to reach out to artists and have them respond back, providing powerful data to ACUA to integrate into their decision making for the professional development series and allowing artist to provide feedback to ACUA. For example, once we start development of the series, we would like to use the communication tool to find experts who may be interested in developing and teaching series sessions.
The infrastructure of the WordPress site, will also provide a tool to manage participant registrations and workshop content once the development of the professional development series is completed. In order to do this, the tool will integrate a WordPress LMS plugin. Being a provincial organization, ACUA has artists spread across the Province of Alberta, in BC, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario. It is likely that the workshops will be offered online in order to accommodate artist availability. Implementing a WordPress LMS plugin will allow ACUA to organize workshop content in one central location, will provide learners with unlimited access to the learning materials, will provide instructors a way to track progress and performance, when required, and will allow instructors to easily integrate social learning experiences. It will also be an affordable way for ACUA to develop course content, with most WordPress LMS plugins costing between $150-300 per year. Going forward, ACUA will be able to easily develop content consistent to what has been previously developed. For the purposes of this project, a simple registration form and course shell will be created. As the project develops, these templates could change.
Project Outcomes and Key Frameworks
The outcomes of the project are:
- To undertake the development of a WordPress site that can be used to communicate with artists, organize workshop content, and assist with the management of participant registrations
- To create a tool that will provide ACUA two-way communication with artists
- To create the infrastructure for ACUA to develop eLearning content in a central location
- To be able to track registrations electronically, once the content has been developed and gone live
The key frameworks that support the design of my project proposal are related to social-constructivism and connectivism approaches to learning. From a social-constructivist perspective, learning is the active construction of meaning through interactions with both the social and physical world (Bush, 2006). The social emphasis that is relevant to my proposal would occur through the use of collaborative learning activities that will be developed, while the physical world would exist within the infrastructure the WordPress site. Looking at learning from the perspective of Siemens’ connectivism theory also enhances my proposal (Siemen, 2005). This theory suggests that that people no longer stop learning after formal education and continue to gain knowledge from other avenues such as job skills, networking, experience and access to information with new tools in technology. As McWilliam and Taylor (1996) indicated, the issue of life-long learning has become associated with the advocacy of open learning, and open learning has become associated with the development of an electronic means for the storage, retrieval, interactive development, and transmission of information.
The key frameworks that support the design of my project proposal are also related to communication theory in media ecology. As McLuhan (1964) proposes a communication medium itself, not the message it carries, should be the primary focus of study. He argues that the medium or the outlet, somehow changes our understanding of the content and the message is secondary. In order for the messages to be communicated to artists, the most important part of the message is the medium or the structure in which the message is created on the WordPress site. It is then up to the artist to decode the message, and it will be important for me to ensure that the message being sent is clear. McLuhan (1964) indicated that there is interdependence between different media and between us as we consume this media and one of the characteristics of the global village is instant communication. If the WordPress site is developed at this point with the WordPress LMS plugin, it will communicate to artists that the professional development series will include eLearning technologies and the survey that will be created to collect data from artists about the type of professional development they require should allow me to collect more relevant data.
Design and Verification
Design is an important part of the process and I recognize that it’s also important to assess the effectiveness of my design throughout. As Bates (2019) indicates in the SECTIONS model, it is important that users not get bogged down on learning how to use educational technologies or making technologies work, the cost of technology integrated can not become too expensive, and feedback is an important part of interaction. Given this framework, the design of the WordPress site must be easy to use for both the artist and ACUA administrators. I will choose a pre-formatted template to design the WordPress site. The design must also be cost effective for ACUA to maintain. They currently have IT support to maintain a WordPress website and have approved expenses for an WordPress LMS plugin. Finally, creating a space for artists to sign up to receive more information about the proposed professional development courses will start to engage current member artists, but may also attract artists that ACUA has not worked with in the past. As well as, creating a survey to collect data about perceived shortfalls in artists skills, will provide ACUA with the data needed to move forward with the development of topics to cover in the professional development series. The hope is that artists who are providing this feedback will shape the development of the series, and increase the interaction with the WordPress site.
It is important my design is innovative and authentic. Throughout the design process, I will employ a number of verification activities to ensure the design objectives are being met. I will be designing the tool on my own, but will evaluate it from an instructional design and learner perspective. I will also receive peer feedback by presenting my design to my classmates, who are educators with vast knowledge, skills, and experience. Finally, I will also receive instructor feedback by presenting my design to Suzanne de Castell, my instructor for ETEC 565B Metatheory: New Materialism meets the History of Educational Media. This feedback will help me to identify errors and allows for improvement of the overall design of the tool.
References
Bates, T. (2019). Chapter 8: Choosing and using media in education: the SECTIONS model [E-book]. In Teaching in a Digital Age: Guidelines for designing teaching and learning (2nd ed., pp. 306–361). Retrieved from https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/
Bush, G. (2006). Learning about learning: From theories to trends. Teacher Librarian, 34(2), 14-18.
Jahoda, S., Murphy, B., Virgin, V., & Woolard, C. (2014). Artists Report Back. BFAMFAPhD. http://bfamfaphd.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/BFAMFAPhD_ArtistsReportBack2014-10.pdf
Lewington, J. (2019, April 29). An arts degree could get graduates a job in the tech sector. Macleans.Ca. https://www.macleans.ca/education/yes-you-will-get-a-job-with-that-arts-degree/
McLuhan, M. (1964). The Medium is the Message. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (pp. 9–23). Signet Books. Retrieved from https://designopendata.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/understanding-media-mcluhan.pdf
McWilliam, E., & Taylor, P. (1996). Pedagogical challenges of open learning: Looking to borderline issues. In Pedagogy, Technology and the Body (pp. 59–77). Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers.
Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2(1) http://www.itdl.org/
Statistics Canada (2017). Are young bachelor’s degree holders finding jobs that match their studies? [Data table]. Statistics Canada. https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/as-sa/98-200-x/2016025/98-200-x2016025-eng.cfm?wbdisable=true
Media Ecology of an Educational Technology
This is my second Intellectual Production for ETEC 565B. This week we were required to analyze an educational technology that explains the technology’s users and uses, including when, where, why, and by whom our technology had been used as a learning tool. This week we also delved into Marshall McLuhan and read about McLuhan’s work with a focus on his tetrad framework. As well, we read about Bruno Latour’s research on Actor Network Theory and Parliament of Things. Our assignment required us to incorporate McLuhan and Latour’s frameworks and research into our own assignment.
Research in Media Ecology: Tablets by Robin.
Educational Media Ecology
Image created by Robin McHugh
Lewis Mumford is considered one of the founding figures for the field of media ecology and is more often than not unsung and overshadowed by Neil Postman (Strate & Lum, 2000, p. 56). Mumford drew his observations from his interest in architecture, design, and technology, and his media ecology encouraged considerations of the relationship between humans, media, and environments (Strate & Lum, 2000). It was Postman who gave media ecology an institutional base and intellectual forum (Lum, 2000). The idea of or phrase media ecology was introduced by Postman in 1968 as the study of media as environments. Strate explains, our understanding of media is not that of an object, institution, or organization, it is a very broad term that includes technology, symbol systems, code, symbolic form, and art. You can reverse the definition and say that media ecology is the study of environments as media (Patti & Ciastellardi, 2012).
Media ecology is a field of study for understanding media, communication, and culture. It attracts varied interpretations or reactions as to what it is or does. It is the study of media environments and the idea that technology and techniques, modes of information, and codes of communication play a leading role in human affairs. (Lum, 2000)
Early on in Postman’s study of media ecology, he begun to think about the institution of school as a medium for communication. The school was just one medium through which a culture communicated some of its important ideas and I understood that were other media in the culture to do it (Lum, 2000, p. 3). Strate indicates, the emergence of media ecology as a field of study or theoretical perspective was in part a response to the dominance at the time of the so-called administrative school of communication, which is rooted in the social scientific tradition and quantitative methods while focusing on the study of short-range media effects from the behaviorist perspectives. At the same time, media ecologists were proposing the study of how change in the dominant form of communication media in society may facilitate large scale cultural changes. (Lum, 2000, p. 3).
de Castell et al. (2014) illustrates the idea of building as interface, the environment can be both a noun, and a verb. As a noun, the environment is a building, a room, a place, a thing, and as a verb, the environment is transformed into an action or trade of constructing something – a medium (de Castell et al., 2014). As de Castell et al. (2014), point out it’s important in new media studies to think about environments. Environments are often unquestioned and invisible. Eric Klopfer explains that classrooms and learning environments are complex systems. The same situation, in the context of the same classroom when similarities vary ever so slightly can lead to widely varying outcomes. As de Castell et al. (2014) indicates, designing sustainable educational ecologies means transitioning to a paradigm of students and teachers and designers and developers of new and emerging technologies, not just users and consumers of them. Education is active, situated, knowledgeable, and productive and an ecology that demands its teachers and students to learn, themselves, how to maintain it, is as educative as it is equitable (de Castell et al, 2014).
Media ecology asks the fundamental questions, how do you define media, where do you look for cultural change, how do you link changes in our media environment to changes in our ways of behaving and feeling, what kind of subject is this to be, and where do we place it (Lum, 2000, p. 4).
References
de Castell, S., Droumeva, M. & Jenson, J. (2014). Building as interface: Sustainable educational ecologies. MedienPädagogik Vol. 24, DOI: https://doi.org/10.21240/mpaed/24/2014.09.08.X
Lum, C. M. K. (2000). Introduction: The intellectual roots of media ecology, New Jersey Journal of Communication, 8(1), 1-7, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/15456870009367375
Patti, E. & Ciastellardi, M. [mcluhanstudies]. 2012, January 4. What is Media Ecology? – Lance Strate for the International Journal of McLuhan Studies [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osKSiQVody4&t=117s
Strate, L. & Lum, C. M. K. (2000). Lewis Mumford and the ecology of technics, New Jersey Journal of Communication, 8(1), 56-78, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/15456870009367379
Linking Assignment 6 Speculative Futures
Find a link to Laura Ulrich’s Speculative Futures task.
Laura and I approached this task quite differently. Laura published two narratives the first using Twine and the second as a Podcast. I published two audio files that described my narratives using futuristic characters Raj and Jing.
In comparing tools that we used for this task, Laura and I approached this differently. For Laura’s first narrative, she published a Twine. She used SIM 4 and Photoshop to produce images that are viewed within her Twine. And she used Twinery.org to create a non-linear story. For Laura’s second narrative, she used a voice recorder on her phone to record the audio and then she used Audacity to edit the audio. I think that Heidi’s published content is creative and user friendly.
For my narratives, I simply used the Voice Recorder on my laptop, which runs Windows 10. I wanted my voice to sound futuristic or robotic, so I used an online free Voice Changer. Because this was the first time I had used this tool, I used one of the pre-programmed voices, however, the tool allowed you to create a customized voice of your choice.
Laura and I are using the same web authoring tool to publish these tasks, however, we are using different pre-formatted themes. Overall, I think that Laura’s webspace is intuitive and easy to navigate.
I feel like if a user, outside of our ETEC 540 class, landed on either Laura or my page they may be confused as to the content that they were reading. Both of our posts are specific to the weekly tasks and assignments that have been assigned in the class, neither of us created any posts that were not class specific. However, I do enjoy that Laura has provided some insight into her life outside of this class.
Throughout this process, I haven’t changed the architectural design of my webspace. However, after completing all six of the linking assignments, I can see from viewing my colleagues content where I could make improvements to my webspace to make navigation easier, retrieval of archived or older content better, and use of different tools to make the reading experience more interactive. Overall, I enjoyed learning from my colleagues through the linking assignments.
Linking Assignment 5 Algorithms of Predictive Text
Find a link to Heidi Dyck’s Algorithms of Predictive Text task.
Heidi and I approached this task similarly. We both wrote and published a blog post that contained information relevant to our weekly task, as well, we both used our web authoring tool’s Blockquote function. Based on reading Heidi’s blog post, I feel that we had a similar experience when using predictive text, in that we both expressed that while some of the text that was produced may be words that we used often, the actual final microblog post that we published didn’t sound like anything we would actually say or publish publicly.
In comparing, web authoring tools, Heidi and I are both using WordPress as a web authoring tool for this class. However, Heidi uses the theme Proudly and I use the theme WPshoppe. I don’t like all of the styling options of Heidi’s theme, however, I think that the end-user interface is intuitive and visually appealing. For this specific task, as I mentioned Heidi and I both used our web authoring tools Blockquote function and provided a JPEG image to accompany our post. However, if you look at each of our posts they look very different.
When you go to Heidi’s homepage her blog posts are listed in a grid with the title of the post, an image that was posted within the post, and a link to the category archive for each post. When you click on the category archive, you see a list of posts that are linked to that specific category or you can click on a post to open the specific post. I chose not to categorize any of my blog posts, however, going forward if I were to continue posting I think for ease of access for users on my page I would have to create some type of categorization. I think that the way the Proudly theme categorizes blog posts is great for a user who is looking to read specific content on a webspace.
Heidi’s webspace also had a sidebar that is always available. In the sidebar, a user can easily click on her home page and posts for this class. As well as, click on recent posts, comments, and there is a calendar. When you click a specific post, in order to go to another post, you have to use the menu. This is a bit tedious and outside of the users of this class, I’m not sure that a user would land on Heidi’s webpage and know what each of her links meant in order to find more content.
Overall, I think that Heidi’s webspace is intuitive and easy to navigate. I think that in comparing Heidi and my own webspace in terms of literacies, both of our posts are text based, and speak to writing literacies.