May/100
It’s the pedagogy, teacher.
This was a phrase that got tossed into our conversations from time to time in grad school. It's a silly play on the famous phrase from the 1992 Presidential election. When you spend the majority of your time talking and working with other Instructional Technology doc students, it's easy to get sucked into the technology black hole of creating and tweaking new technology tools for teachers and students. There is definitely a time and place for new innovations, but sometimes the most appropriate solution to an educational problem lies in an innovative use of an existing tool. Almost every one of our conversations came down to this point: It's not the tool so much as what you (the teacher and/or students) do with the tool. Along these lines, the concept of repurposing resonates with me.
Anyway, I read a post today by Dan Meyer that reminded me once again that technology is really only as good as the teacher who is using it. I won't recap the entire post, but the conversation just goes to show that a teacher can find ways to make a very long video of water being poured into a tank engaging to the students. This also reminds me of the Clark and Kozma debate, though the conversation highlighted on Meyer's blog is much less about the technology and more about how teachers use media and their students' responses to it.
The take-away message for me? Don't underestimate the art of creative and innovative teaching.
Mar/100
The Powerlessness of Some Stories
I am still thinking about stories, memory and learning. As I wrote earlier, with a quick scan down the list of former students I can recall the digital story each one of them created for my class. I have had former students tell me the same thing. They can remember the stories created by their classmates, recalling some of the most amazing details. When I read the names of my students, I could hear their voices, see the images in my head, remember the anecdotes they shared, and in some cases, associate the music they included as part of their projects.
This made me think of another project I was involved in while I was teaching these undergraduate classes. I spent the better part of two years of my life working with teachers and helping they and their students create short historical documentaries by mashing up archival material and user-generated content. The movies ranged from the Harlem Renaissance to the Great Migration, to the causes and effects of the Civil War. I worked with about a half-dozen teachers and approximately 150 students. I didn't spend as much time in those classrooms as I did with my preservice teachers, but I did spend enough time with them that when I scan the list of students from each class I can place a face with the name. Over the course of 3 very intense projects, I helped them make about 150 movies, give or take a few students who missed too much school or didn't use their time wisely.
Oddly, I could remember very little about the movies they created, even though they shared many similarities with the movies created by the preservice teachers. In contrast, I helped over 200 preservice teachers create digital stories over a 4-year span and I can remember every single story. As another contrast, the quality and form of the movies was quite different. This is not meant to be a knock on 6th graders, but undergraduates at the University of Virginia knew a little more about storytelling and expression than the 12-13 year olds I was working with. Here are some of the notable differences in their projects:
| 6th Graders |
Preservice Teachers |
| Chose images from a pool hand-picked by teacher | Took or found their own images |
| Most of the stories used the same images | Every story was completely unique |
| Narrative was an expository essay | Narrative was a story |
| Most of the narratives covered the exact same main points (convergent coverage of the topic) | Narratives were totally unique (divergent coverage of the topic) |
| Stories did not have music | Stories had music |
| Stories reflected what the teacher told them they had to remember | Stories reflected personal learning |
I know this is probably not a complete list, but this is what I was able to come up with after viewing a few of each type of story. Honestly, the 6th grade movies all sounded and looked the same. Yes, the topics were covered in different order, there was slight variation on the images used and the narrative was worded differently, but for the most part they were identical. Kind of like Kevin Costner movies.
This is an interesting topic to me, and I plan on covering it more in the future. I am leaving tomorrow for SITE, and I hope to have some good conversations about digital storytelling and other tech-related teaching strategies.
Mar/100
The Power of Stories
I have recently been reading (and re-reading) some interviews I conducted with former teacher education students at the University of Virginia. The purpose of the interviews was to ask each person, who also happens to be in his or her first year of teaching, which aspects of their educational technology coursework they are using now that they are full-time teachers. The information obtained from these interviews has been fascinating, but what is even more amazing is how much they remember from the Digital Storytelling project we did. Most of these teachers were in different sections of my class and made their digital stories about various (sometimes random) topics. Some of them did creative writing, while others told personal stories. Some of the movies were based on a topic from the school curriculum, while other themes will likely NEVER find their way into a textbook or unit of study.
I always made a big deal about these movies. I would put them all into one, long movie and added my own silly introduction and somewhat sentimental/inspiring conclusion. We brought in food and generally had a lot of fun watching everyone's story. It was always a great way to end the semester.
As I was reading through one of the interview scripts, it dawned on me that I actually remembered the movie made by every participant in my study (n=8). So, as an experiment I went back and looked at every class list from every ed. tech. class I taught at UVa. Sure enough, I could recall what every single person's movie was about, just from reading each name! Stories about fathers who immigrated from other countries, stories of working with special needs students, stories told from a dog's perspective, stories about stuffed animals that wandered away from their class on a field trip and discovered the UVa Grounds in the process. Stories using scanned photographs, stories that were hand-drawn, stories using images from a memorable experience, stories with roommates posing as the characters in the story. I was amazed and was briefly lost in the symphony of stories washing over my memory. I remember pitching digital storytelling as a great activity to engage students in writing, but it's now clear to me that the real power of stories was completely lost on me at the time. People connect, identify, place themselves in, and yes, even remember stories.
Has anyone else experienced this power in their own use of stories in the classroom?
Mar/100
Oh, be careful little CV what you say
A colleague just passed this CV along to me, which is quite creatively displayed in Google Maps. I think this a good example of how one can mix new media (interactive map) with an existing purpose (CV) and create a completely unique message. I will definitely be showing this to my students, both as an example of an innovative use of media and as a nonexample for how to write for an intended audience. Let me qualify my impending rant with this statement: I am in academia, not in advertising or copy writing, so the standards and expectations for a CV may differ quite a bit between the two worlds. Furthermore, the owner of this CV is a professional writer and undoubtedly knows more about his audience than I do.
That said, I have three main observations about his CV, which I think would be great conversation starters for graduating seniors or grad students. First, how casual is too casual for a CV? I think I am just too accustomed to the stuffy academic CV. The overall tone of this CV is quite casual and resembles something you might read on Facebook or a blog. Should style change with the medium? Would a more formal tone undermine the affordances of the interactive map?
Second, he does a pretty good job of focusing on the high points of his career, but he also commits some major job interview no-nos: talking about goofing off in college, bashing (or at least making fun of) a former boss and mentioning dissatisfaction with an old job. I have sat on several committees where we interviewed teachers for an open position, and I was always able to tell what kind of colleague the person would be just based on what he or she said about former students, principals, schools and districts. If a former principal or colleagues were described as "horrible," chances are he or she would find something horrible about future colleagues and principals. I was always "coached" to be very positive about former work environments and be selective in what I said about colleagues and bosses. In Ed's defense, he doesn't say anything really scathing and he is much more positive than negative in his descriptions of former employers.
Finally, some of his humor is a little misdirected. Considering the recent earthquake in Chile, the comment about Chilean geography may come across as insensitive. I am not an overly sensitive person, and I was immediately struck with how untimely and inappropriate this was. As a person who knows a thing or two about digital media, I know it won't take very long to move that little pin to a different place on the map.
Overall, I think this is pretty cool and I hope it ultimately leads to a job. Best of luck, Ed!
