Pulling it all together

I think I should just address something obvious and get it over with: My ethos value as far as pulling it all together is probably pretty low, considering I never really pulled myself together. There were a lot of assignments that I didn't do as well as I can because of various parts of the situation with my back. At base, I think I have to acknowledge that I didn't have the most realistic view of what I could maintain. I've never run into issues with my back this bad, but last semester the issues created for my one evening class were worse than those in both of my daytime classes. It's less important the specifics of the adjustment I'm making than the basic lesson, which is be realistic about what you can handle. The annoying part about all this is the recognition that my reflective nature seems to end when I pull my nose out of a book, if you will. I think this semester was the first that it really hit me that soldiering on until you bleed out isn't all that brave when you could have ducked in the first place.

Even in academics, I learned I'm still learning to pay attention. My seminar paper was a good example. I had to be rescued from an awful topic by Dr. Cadle because I just wasn't paying attention to either how broad it was or how it applied in my own life. Then she points out the changes going on, the same kind of changes I believe I ranted in this blog multiple times about, and, well, if this were World of Warcraft or a similar venue, my reaction would have been typed as /facepalm. I'm not sure if it was panic from the general tenor of my semester or I just slipped and did something stupid, but I missed a really obvious personal application on a comfortably narrow topic and it might as well have been poking at my eyes with a sharp stick, given how many times I've groused this year about not being able to understand the announcers for Dallas Stars hockey because I was watching it on the online feed and THERE WAS NO CAPTIONING.

Maybe this will make it clearer, but I knew a man in college who was the son of a snake wrangler, the guy who handles snakes for movies and such. He said the guys who get bitten most often were the ones who'd been at it long enough to have forgotten they work with dangerous critters and not long enough to have been reminded by one.

I also think I'm going to start paying slightly more attention to what I accept, both in technology and elsewhere, as a given. I've been watching video clips on the Internet since a tiny, grainy, 5-second-long .avi was the state of the art. I could watch whatever I wanted, as long as I didn't need to understand what was said. Big blind spot because I didn't stop to think that just because there had never been captioning didn't mean there couldn't be, or that it was just peachy that there wasn't. I think I'm trying to say that now I've learned to give consideration to what's possible and not just make do with what is.

One final thing this semester showed me was that composing is composing, really. Now, that's not to say writing is video editing is audio mixing. The tools are different and you're going to perform differently using different tools. But the same process, the same way of looking at putting the piece together, can be relied on to carry you through, I think.

Stupid wittiness

It's what I just spent a few minutes struggling with. Something about slipping because a nasty slip and some cable internet downtime just cost me a week of work. Nothing more fun than not being able to leave a house with no access to research materials because you've destroyed your back getting into a truck. Especially after deleting everything in a frustrated attempt to jump start the idea machine.
My seminar paper is going to focus on steps to prepare yourself to move from traditional to online teaching, which I think I stated before. I'm in the process of reviewing the literature and narrowing down the question still, but it seems a major focus is going to be on preparing for the change in communication style between teachers and students. The readings have talked about this a bit, more by discussing the results of not preparing it seems. The digital immigrants vs. digital natives angle is playing in, but I'm starting to see evidence the divide isn't as big as it's been made out to be.
Unfortunately, I'm already up against the same issue I ran into earlier, where the thing keeps wanting to branch out in different directions. I actually have a handwritten list of things (such as CMS, forum etiquette, e-mail etiquette, etc.) that I'm not allowed to spend more than a paragraph on in my paper. I just have to keep hacking off heads and torching the stumps here.

The Matrix may have you, but that paper's still due Friday

I've decided that the move from traditional classrooms to online classrooms really interests me and I've been lucky enough to have two different assignments feature readings on the topic recently. So, I'm going to take yes for an answer here. Also I'm partially deaf and I don't believe I have to explain why that enhances my interest in online education.
I'm going to start with a focus on teacher preparation for online courses. I've got a pretty good article by Lisa Meloncon on using methods drawn from cultural geography to self-assess one's preparedness for online instruction. She proposes that we break it down into cross-sections, little slices of the overall issue, and examine each cross-section individually before bringing all the information together. Her method really seems like a good bottom-up way of analyzing the issue and it doesn't miss the forest for the trees as such methods sometimes do. In other words, she does call for us to consider that the whole is greater, or at least different, from the sum of the parts and several small discomforts can add up to one huge discomfort.
The chapter I worked with on the digital dictionary was related to this topic, focusing on hybrid classrooms. It discusses the transition to an extent as well as considering the best of both worlds in order to select the best. I'm trying to be more honest in my life, so I'll admit that I can't really tell you more because there is a whole different thing that happens when I read to analyze than when I read to create vocabulary words.

Random notes for the week

In working on the Digital Dictionary, I was reminded of how hard it can be to define a term if I didn't initially learn it as vocabulary. I've dealt with enough admins to make it a simple idea in my head, but try wording it so that it actually explains it to someone who's never dealt with an admin. Let's everybody take a moment and just admire the perseverance of the people who put dictionaries together for a living.
I find it really hard to believe sometimes that people do not recognize the change in thinking that has happened with these advances. Language in a society molds thought for the society, so when language changes, thought changes. Consider the idea of a black-and-white television: when it was introduced, it was a television, period, and people were quite taken with this new invention. Then came color and "black-and-white" had to be tagged on and suddenly this thing was no longer desirable. It was what you had if you were unwilling or unable to get color. The TV didn't change, but the label and the thinking did. Both were caused by the advance in technology.
Thought is often working with information to prepare it for delivery. It should be obvious that if you change the method of delivery, you are going to change the packaging of said delivery.

Getting the message

The thing I'm going to take from Selber's final discussion of multiliteracies is the consideration that is given to the fact that nothing happens without impacting the whole. My first exposure to computers in an educational setting was on the old TRS-80s in computer literacy. I say that then thank God that we're not turning in our technology narratives in their final form until later in the semester. Getting back on point, at the time there wasn't a whole lot of literacy in the computer literacy course. It was taught by the same teacher who ran shop. To an extent, there's a kind of rudimentary logic to assigning the most mechanically apt person with teaching certification to the computer class. After all, if one of them breaks and he doesn't know how to fix it, that'd put the matter to rest fast, now wouldn't it?

Coming back to Selber, I'll bet the administration at my junior high was convinced that this was a neutral decision. Get a warm body in the room, toss the textbook out there, no problem. Most of us knew this shop teacher and, even though I cannot remember his name, honestly liked him and therein was part of the problem: we knew him because he continually drew these kind of assignments. Standardized testing? He was at the head of the class. High school requests the middle school kids take the National Driving Test? He came down, he popped in the video, he collected the papers, and I even heard that he drove the answers over, all to help the senior high rework their driver's ed program. Teacher calls in sick and kids are just watching a movie? Don't pay a sub, send him on down and put the sub in shop for the half-day he works.

If you're guessing that we got the message that computers were not important, you got it in one. How could we think otherwise when the teacher in the room primarily taught a different subject, a subject we had seen treated as almost totally unimportant? We ignored the typing component, goofed off during taped lectures on the history of computers, and learned just enough Basic to create graphics, which stereotypically meant hearts for the girls and crude middle fingers for the boys.

We learned computers were just toys and it did not at all come from the curriculum. Honestly, I can't say that last as a fact because I don't remember the curriculum at all. However, I think Selber is correct in calling for each department on a campus to take an active interest in computer literacy because I think it's important to avoid messages like the one we got. Integrating provides further evidence to students that they have to treat computers as something that runs through their entire lives. I think most students don't really see computers as part of their academic world and this furthers the stereotype of school curriculum being based on Victorian principles that no longer apply.

I just hit the blog site for this week's readings and I'm a little bit off-topic, mostly because I'm deaf. In order to get the full effect of the recordings, I had to have the site open in two spots at the same time, one for the transcript and one for the actual recording. Normally, I would just read the transcript but my thinking here is that if a writer makes the decision to use spoken word in a space that mainly caters to written text, the sound itself may make the point. So I made sure to listen.

That process reminded me of the instant watch option on Netflix. I don't use it because they do not offer subtitles on their films. I'm not entirely certain why this decision was made, but it means that I don't get the full use out of my subscription, compared to others. Now, I'm not really complaining because this feature was introduced after I subscribed, thus I'm not losing anything, I'm just not gaining it.

I'm going in a circle here, so let me get back on track and say that the issue I'm thinking about right now is how technology divides instead of unites. I think as a society we tend to hail the connectivity of technology today, the way it can bring us all together. We gloss over the wedge this drives in between us at times.

I'm going to leave aside socioeconomic status considerations. Frankly, Jonathon Kozol and others do much better with that facet of this issue than I would. So I'm not talking about a child told to go home and type a paper when going home means riding the bus because the family cannot afford a car. I'm talking about the deaf child in the age of radio experiencing only the looks of joy on the faces around her. I'm talking about the blind child listening to his family say “Look at that!” in fascination at the images on their first TV. I'm talking about sitting in a class in sixth grade and fighting tears as the sign language interpreter relays to me that we're going to be watching a movie. At that point, it had been less than six months since I'd lost my hearing and I knew I would understand neither the movie nor the interpreter.

It did not help at all that the teacher arranged for neither a closed caption decoder on the television used nor a movie that featured closed captioning. Keep in mind, in 1989 the legislation requiring decoding capability to be built into televisions was still a year from writing and four years from the implementation date. The movie itself was a Wonderful World of Disney production and was followed by a discussion. My participation was limited to trying to look interested when the teacher looked my way.

Technology will move forward and there will be new things. These new things will find their way into classes. We cannot and should not fight that. Without the advance of technology, I'm deaf, period. But that ten year old boy is begging you to consider everyone in your classroom when you introduce tech.

Processing Citeulike

Note: This post and the next are actually about a week old. I say to you do not trust the cable company when they say they will fix your Internet within a day. That was Thursday.

I'm staring at citeulike right now. I'm also a bit stumped about my presentation. I've done the background reading, hunted around on the net a bit, and have a generally good idea what the site is about so it's time to register.

Now I'm nervous. Not because anything has become difficult, far from it, but that registration page is beginning to make me nervous that there's not a whole lot to say here. That might be fine, I talk too much as it is, but I do have to do a presentation here.

Registering is simple, one page and you're done. It's easier to register for this site than it is to register to vote on all-star selection for any of the major sports. Of course, a lot of the added complexity in all-star voting is security measures because people cheat. Bots and all kind of nonsense abounds when it comes to such things, but that's another post.

I'm registered and I've forced my brain off that tangent. Now it's time to play a bit. I'm not noticing a whole lot of difference between this and social bookmarking sites I've been to. Home page with your list of references/bookmarks, page showing you who's interested in what you are, search engine, etc. The big difference is the content, which is a good sign because if the difficulty level of the material wasn't higher on Citeulike I'd be worried. One of my biggest pet peeves on the net is silliness masquerading as scholarship and Citeulike seems to maneuver away from that fairly neatly. FAQ says they check and move things around so the peer-reviewed articles get precedence.

This site, as I play with it more and more, seems more and more like a no explanation really needed type of place. In a classroom, I'd probably just get everyone registered, show them the tools, then make them do searches and play with the tools. When it comes to educational tools, computers included, I'm a big believer in allowing students to choose what they will use and I think necessity will push the student to learn the tools on the site that they will actually use. Unfortunately, I'm again concerned that there's a lack of material to work with. Honestly, I've worked with less to get a grip on, but never when it was the major focus of the lesson. I love the site, don't get me wrong, but I have this bad tendency to linguistically panic when there's nothing left to say and I feel like I should be saying more.

For instance, the bookmarklet. I went looking for it because I use Del.icio.us all the time and I wondered if Citeulike had a tool like their marking tool. I found it, I installed it, and it works. It works the way it's supposed to. It doesn't lock up, screw up the information, or anything else.

It's not supposed to work. It's supposed to hand me endless problems with a gleeful chuckle. Then I get to say “One thing to watch out for...” only there's nothing to watch out for. I'm beginning to see a pattern here, actually.

In the end, I think the simplicity that is a strength of this site is going to make me simply present and then advise people to play with it. Nothing wrong with that, but I've got this suspicion that I'm going to be griping at myself in my next post.