Media Converging on the Classroom
Podcast:
This pod cast deals with the ideas surrounding 'media convergence' that Alexander discusses, especially how they can/do apply to the composition classroom. It next moves through some of Ong's ideas about the artificial nature of writing as a technology. The discussion also veers into the questions of online copyright issues and touches briefly on Rhienhold's article regarding smart mobs.
(16 votes)
Comments
Nice job
I'd like to coordinate some destruction, please. Is there a sign-up sheet?
ps: Bringing in the connections to Quintillian and Lanham was a nice touch.
"Legen...wait for it, and I hope you're not lactose-intolerant because the last part is...dary!"
Considering "Restructured Thought"
Hi Ntty41,
Good post!
I appreciate the way you linked the texts together as a conversation with each other and it really got me thinking. It has become apparent to me through these first weeks of readings that the “Q question” (and I would add, the ideas of terministic screens) are fundamental to engaging these readings and I predict will come up repeatedly as we seek to understand the implications of new technologies on social life. I agree we cannot look at technology without considering the market environment, as you pointed out. This is particularly challenging for schools and as you point out, in providing relevant student curriculum. We might consider how computers and the internet have "restructured thought" to engage both issues of access and curriculum.
For example, blogging on the web has normalized ideas about collective scholarship (co-writing, guest posting, commenting, decentralized authorities). Something like this could be implemented in a classroom through a group writing assignment. Or, building on Rheingold’s discussion of smart mobs, I’ve heard of new school techniques of grouping students not by grade but by ability. In one district, a school instituted large classes, with children of various ages and abilities. Children were freely allowed to float between the groups of teachers, each teaching different subjects. Students were required to take ownership of where they go next and to focus on the group they are currently in. These same sorts of skills of discretion are necessary when interacting with technology. I’m sure the success of these programs will depend on the way in which they are received (their “reputation” to again reference Rheingold).
Of course, difficulties arise in this example but the practice itself is an explicit acknowledgment of collective intelligence. By educating students at individual levels, and reorganizing their environment, we are adjusting learning so that the collective capabilities of the group are expanded. I’m not suggesting that using the technologies under consideration isn’t desirable or that issues of access shouldn’t be addressed (or that developing these programs comes at no cost). I’m suggesting we can find the implications of technology in everyday (non-technological) practices.
In with the New?
As someone interested in pedagogy, I found your discussion of media and classroom applications interesting. I agree that restricting classroom content to print-based applications might alienate students, a valuable point given that students so often ask the “When am I going to use this?” question. Additionally, such restriction might overlook the changing communicative skill sets necessary for full participation in 21st century life. However, those who oppose teaching expanded literacies argue that because students so regularly utilize these non-traditional ways of communicating, traditional education need not address them.
I disagree with such a stance, what Henry Jenkins terms such a “laissez-faire” approach, for one of the reasons you point out: unequal access to technology. Preparing some students for this culture and not others could maintain divisions between students prepared to produce messages and students merely prepared to consume them. This he terms the “participation gap.” In Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, (not on our syllabus...encountered in my thesis-related reading) he also warns that curricular exclusion maintains an ethics challenge, a point Christa/cew3008 mentions in her podcast. Finally, refusing to allow discussions or production of such texts in our classrooms because students seem so fluent already assumes that students innately understand how media shapes their perceptions, an issue Jenkins terms the “transparency problem” (15).
Does “making room” for these new literacies jeopardize traditional literacy skills and the reign of the traditional essay? I think that's a common perception, but a more strategic approach I think would try to meet the traditional goals of education in new ways. Or might new literacies lead to new goals?
Second Orality
I’m glad you included the concept of second orality. It struck me as one of the more important ideas I’ve come across lately. It’s instantly applicable to contemporary musicians. I have sought after authenticity in music and, in doing so, elevated the conditions by which certain artists thrived to some sort of Platonic goal devoid of inauthentic obstacles. I have in mind artists like Mississippi John Hurt, the Delta Bluesman. Now, Bob Dylan grew out of this milieu (sort of) by listening to artists like Woody Guthrie and though he heard the records, the live music circuit of the late 50s/early 60s situated him in the heart of a bustling music scene from which he could draw inspiration. My generation has been influenced heavily by artists like Bob Dylan who have been packaged more successively than most—this packaging includes the authentic mystique of artists like Mississippi John Hurt. But by the process by which we access Dylan or Hurt is perhaps second orality (if not tertiary orality). There are countless illiterate musicians who cannot recognize counterpoint or name the theoretical modes a virtuoso might use, but who can nevertheless play perfectly well in a codified and recognizable style, which belongs to a community that has been enabled and sustained— first over records and VHS tapes, now the internet. There is a regional orality that transcends geography. This paradoxical relationship either demonstrates the failure of our terms to designate meaning [to which I don’t for a second subscribe] or the failure of a previous era’s terms to account for the multiplicity of meaning that new media has created.
On a different issue, I appreciated your concern over the socio-economic issues when incorporating technology into the classroom. That school districts have different budgets, materials, and so on, must be taken into account.
Pedagogy and Technology
I like Kristen, also value the pedagogical approach to the readings as that is also my interest/focus. As both you and Kristen have noted not including technology in the classroom could be a source of alienation to our students. I agree. Our students’ lives are completely immersed in technology. And I believe it is good pedagogy to allow students to be the experts and use the skills they have already developed to further develop new skill sets and their own cognitive thinking.
You brought out Ong’s point that writing isn’t natural and that it functions as a technology that restructures thought. I agree with Ong. I think that because writing is not natural, it has the capacity to take us outside ourselves and forces us to understand things at a deeper level than we would by just “thinking.” You also mention that other technologies function in similar ways as writing. These other technologies will restructure though or perhaps different thoughts. I completely agree. As we read last week in Lingua Fracta, Brooke references Burke and Miller’s concept of “alchemic opportunities” that are made possible through new media, explaining that these “opportunities require us to think in terms of interfaces, the central, medial moltenness, rather than the textual objects that we throw forth” (25). It seems to me that integrating technology in the classroom and having students compose across multiple technologies deepens their level of engagement and learning. It most definitely restructures thought as it causes them to think across an interface rather than a singular textual object.
On this note, Kathleen Yancey and Darren Cambridge speak to the importance of integrating technology in the classroom and the ways it can increase student involvement and work to develop their cognitive awareness and thinking skills. Yancey and Cambridge focus on the use of digital portfolios as a means of integrating technology and helping students both demonstrate their learning and development over a period of time, but also across different forms of media forcing them to develop cognitive awareness of different genres and rhetorical implications.
New Media in the Classroom
You, as you mention Ong did in his article, rightly point out that writing is itself only another form of techne, though, in a world that has moved on technologically, we seldom stop to appreciate it as such. It is by good logic then that you contend that newer technologies cannot/should not be excluded from the classroom where there is money to finance them. Where you write (or say! my inveterate textual/old media bias comes shining through!) that "regardless of the method of delivery they [new media technologies] they occupy the same purpose in society as print texts therefore they are of value to the classroom," I think it is also important to point out that, just as Ong demonstrates that the advent of the technology of writing allowed for a new hyper-logicality of thought that was unachievable by oral culture/wisdom, the advent of new media technologies in our own day is probably allowing for new modes of thinking in the classroom, and out of it, that were not accessible to prior generations, such that new media technologies cannot rightly be said to occupy precisely the "same purpose" as writing in the classroom. But I do think that this idea is present, or at least latent, in your podcast, where you say that new media technologies can "reconstruct the same ideas" as writing, or indeed, "new ideas."