From the DS106 Assignment Bank (visual) –
Make a set of ten photos which take something familiar to you–a town, building, object, etc.–and defamiliarize it, make it seem foreign. Use a mix of extreme closeups, weird lighting, foreground/background focusing and odd angles and other effects to make something that you know very well seem like something you’ve never seen before, something spooky and/or luminous and/or magical.
More information at DS106
What is it in life that makes many of us define our lives by associating ourselves with external forces, whether it’s products, or political parties, or sports teams? This question seems to be at the heart of the story by Marina Burana titled “Soccer Sunday” (http://munyori.org/fiction/marina-buranas-soccer-sunday-a-short-story/ ). She finds in her Grandma’s obsession with the sport of soccer the love and connection that had been missing for so many years.
In this story we find out that her Grandma was not the kind of Grandma that she envisioned she should be. Her expectations were that, “Most people have fascinating grandmothers, or at least, in general, when we mention grandmas, the image of a sweet, tender, loving woman comes to mind.” But that was not her Grandma.
Her Grandma (who was in her 80s and 90s during the story) was perceived as rude, didn’t seem to care about the rest of the family, and had a single obsession in life – soccer. But it was when Marina decided to share her Grandma’s obsession as a last resort to get close to her that she discovered, “She was this whole other person in there….And that’s when I met my grandmother. In the soccer field.”
And it was when she eventually helped her Grandma stay in touch with the thing that was so important to her that her Grandma started sharing the love that Marina so much wanted from her Grandma. And so that external force became the common bond that joined the two women, even though one of them had never shown an interest in soccer before.
Looking at this story using Jason Ohler’s Assessment Traits, I decided to focus on the following three traits:
I enjoyed this story because of the compassion, humor, and feeling that was displayed by the author. Although I was drawn to it by my love of soccer, I stayed with it because of the author’s ability to share the universal feeling of being connected with someone you want to love.
On Friday, 12 August 2016, Sean Michael Morris gave one of two closing keynotes at the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute held at the University of Mary Washington. The title of the talk was Not Enough Voices and can be found at – http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/hybridped/not-enough-voices/ .
There are a number of thoughts that Mr. Morris shared that intrigued me, including his insistence that we need to get away from the idea that learning is about one person standing at a podium telling the students what they need to learn. It is instead much more about each person in the class, including the instructor, learning to listen to the many voices and how by listening, we can start to create real knowledge.
As he said, “I do my best to stay quiet because when I’m quiet, I can hear you. And it’s you I’m interested in. Your stories. Your efforts. Your insights.”
And this learning to listen also pertains to online instructors, instructional designers, and educators as a whole. He laments the emphasis that is placed on quantifying, measuring, and structuring learning. As he says, “…quantifying learning — that thing that administrations want us to do and for which so many functions of the LMS exist — depends on right answers. And right answers are based on recall of content.”
It is recall of content from the instructor, or material the instructor provides, that earns the approval of administrators. Students regurgitating the facts and numbers and ideas. Not creating ideas on their own.
According to Morris, it is the listening to multiple voices where true learning occurs.
“The answer doesn’t lie in turn-taking, but in changing what it means to speak. Make speaking a collaborative event. Join your voice with the voice of students. Join your voice with the voice of other teachers. Join your voice — and this one is really essential if we’re to make any headway — join your voice with the voices of educational technology”.
As an Instructional Designer and an Educational Technologist, it is incumbent upon me to find ways to share the voices in the class. Measuring is appropriate in it’s place, but I must not make measurements the goal of the class. Instead, I need to identify when and where real education occurs, and make those learning moments my goal.
Describe in writing for someone who cannot hear, the feeling of silence
Silence is the thing I cannot find. Unlike you, there are times when I try to imagine a world without sound. But I never find it. Everywhere I go there is sound. Always, relentless. Even when I cover my ears as best I can, I still hear the sound of my own heart beating. Do you hear your heart beating?
I’ve been reading chapter one (Sampling “The New” in New Literacies by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel) of the collection A New Literacies Sampler ( edited by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, Vol 29. 2007) which looks at the definition and description of New Literacies. Literacies is a term they use to describe the literacies of everyday life that are part of our social construct. Or as they describe it, “Sociocultural definitions of literacy, then, have to make sense of reading, writing and meaning-making as integral elements of social practices”. Literacy is not divorced from life and our everyday social interactions, but it is an integral part of what we do and how we live our lives. New Literacies are the literacies needed to interact with the new sociocultural environment of cyberspace.
Of particular interest to me in this writing is the discussion of new mindsets that come with these new literacies. The new literacy requires participation in new “Ethos Stuff” where there is an evolution away from the old mindset of physical space and the literacy expected in those spaces (people are considered individual producers, production is typically based on physical space, products are material artifacts, etc.) into a new mindset of cyberspace as a physical space with it’s own rules, definitions, and concepts of literacy (focused on collectives as the primary producers, expertise is considered a collection of contributors, space is fluid, etc.)
Just one example is their discussion (pg. 21) of what creates value of any given product. In the old mindset, scarcity creates value. The more scarce any given product is to the market, the more costly it is to obtain this product. The example they use is scholarly credentials. The more difficult it is to obtain a degree, the more value there is in that degree. Where in the new mindset, it’s the relationship with information that is of value. Networks of people working together on a product have much more value than individuals working on their own. Or as Schrage argues (2001), “Anyone trying to get a handle on the dazzling technologies of today and the impact they’ll have tomorrow, would be well advised to re-orient their worldview around relationships.”
This blog post covers just one of the many interesting insights in this text. There are many more insights, including an interesting discussion about how Web 2.0 is an evolution of the mindset about web applications and how they are often not “owned” by any particular company or person. It is through the strength of a network of interacting individuals that the products on the web become more reliable, useful, and productive. There is also an examination of how “tagging” (or what they call folksonomic orginazation) by many, many individuals of pictures, documents, and other items has made the information about those items much more useful.
And an evolution of literacy is part of this new world.
David Sampson 