Highly Experimental Technobabble

zip-boom-ba

2009-05-08T06:40:00.000-07:00

When I first entered and registered for the class, I was expecting the class to be a direct way of how to teach technology to students and children in general, what the class actually taught was much more. It was interesting trying to think of the application of many of these new programs into libraries.

The discussion of video games especially seems helpful for many people are still not seeing the place for video games within a library system. On the other hand, many of the discussed mediums I can't see of being great use, Twitter, Facebook, etc... but as I think about it more and more I'm coming around to those more and more. It seems as if it's a fly by night fad and it takes someone or multiple people to work on keeping these up to date, it could be worth it to promote your institution and also as a reference tool.

The readings were incredibly interesting, although I didn't agree much with Postman or McLuhan, its definitely though how many people still feel about many new technologies/mediums, so it's good to know what you're up against so to speak.

Overall, it was a good class, I do wish that there was more direct conversation towards lesson planning and directly how kids respond to instructional tech teaching. Anyway thank you all its been very exciting and the discussions in class were always very interesting.

I'll end the course with this video again from the TED series of Brewster Kahle discussing the complete digital library.

youtube v. hulu

2009-04-26T11:04:00.000-07:00

I've never been crazy about youtube, I understand why people are, but it seems poorly designed and filled with trashy content. Similarly to how I ended up feeling about myspace, too many advertisements and the content is poor.

Youtube has many many videos of poor quality concerts that I've tried to sit through and just get disgusted at the crowd-noise and I'm always disappointed with my search results. If I search for "David Cross" for example I get everything at the top usually with David Cross, but I also get everything with David and with Cross (many religious results here) the search doesn't seem to react to my use of quotes, to only get results with David and Cross.

I struggle with determining who uses youtube, because to me its almost a humungous site of America's Funniest Home Videos, without the voiceover to make it mildly tolerable. I sound like a gloomy-gus, but it is a site that is one of my pet peeves.

I truly appreciate the content that is under their shows tab because that is a rare opportunity to see free television show content that has a producer/writer/director...

Which brings me to hulu.com which I have been in love with now for about six months and really enjoy the content, because I don't have cable so I can watch the daily show and colbert show in entirity here without being troubled by comedycentral.com breaking the show into clips. Its very freeing and I could watch old episodes of WKRP in Cincinnati as well, and they have a few movies but they are mostly movies no one would ever want to watch.

These are great steps for the internet and shows progress to what the possibilities of the internet can hold, I wonder if hulu was in the writer's strike agreement, I'm sure it was.

To teach with youtube can be a bit dicey I can imagine, creating a video is a fantastic way to learn about many things that go into the media, but posting it on youtube could end up in being a disappointment for the class or it could be very exciting... perhaps the school could schedule an assembly to watch the videos as a school, I think that would be much more rewarding overall.

I'll close this post with the ad for hulu.com with Alec Baldwin that aired during the super bowl and somewhat frequently afterwards:

bid ideas.

2009-04-19T09:20:00.000-07:00

So I was having a discussion with some of my friends this week about the internet and what the next step could be from here, and began to think of this video:

In the video Luis von Ahn discusses a few of his big ideas to make the Internet more academically useful and how to implement games to make simple problems fixable and quickly. It seems really simple but this combines so many of the ideas we've been discussing in class I had to put it here as well.

The words that OCR (Optical Character Recognition) cannot pick up or does pick up wrongly so the digitization movement can move more productively forward. When you buy tickets from Ticketmaster now you are helping this new wave of digitization, that's pretty incredible to me.

But thinking about that idea even further, the idea of making a game on the internet that allows for the human input that many of these new technological tools are missing could be an enormous industry and would allow for more time to be spent with family and those that perhaps could not find a job elsewhere have a little money come in.

This perhaps is the next step after Gee's understanding of interactive learning and could be a small part of the future career options for the video game generation... I'm not sure of course its all reading a crystal ball but it's rather exciting to begin to think about the possibilities.

Play some of the Games With a Purpose here: http://www.gwap.com/gwap/

Are we at the World Wide Web?

2009-04-12T10:31:00.000-07:00

So I used to work for Careerbuilder.com and one of the things they were quite proud of at the time was establishing a relationship with google which lended them to be at the top of the google search, I am unsure as to what they mean by establishing a relationship with google, but I know that that did happen.

I've also heard similar things about wikipedia, how google was fond of their idea and promoted them and pushed them to the top of many of their searches before anyone had even begun to start hearing of wikipedia. Again there are times when wikipedia is not at the top, but something definitely occurred and has been spoke of on both ends as to the "sweetheart" relationship between google and wikipedia. Here's a link to another blurb by Nicholas Carr on the topic: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/01/all_hail_the_in.php

Also recently doing a name search for me brings up some results that I think must have paid to come to the top of name searching: classmates.com (upon seeing this I deleted every piece of me from their site) and linkedIn, which I have a profile on, but I don't understand why it is the top hit for my name... something about these seem fishy to me.

Thinking about the things that are given priority towards the top it makes me wonder what we are missing on the web, what doesn't fall into the web that google collects...

I'll end this post with the podcast list that I subscribe to and listen to very regularly (I have quite the commute):

ALSC Blog Podcast

Comedy Central Stand Up (Video)

Delicious TV Veg

KEXP Song of the Day

KEXP Video of the Week

MoMa, The Museum of Modern Art New York

The Moth Podcast

MPR: The Current Song of the Day

The New Yorker Animated Cartoons

NPR: All Songs Considered Podcast

NPR: Car Talk

NPR: Driveway Moments

NPR: Live Concerts from All Songs Considered

NPR: Second Stage Podcast

NPR: Story of the Day

NPR: StoryCorps

NPR: Wait Wait Don't Tell Me

Onion News Network

The Sarah Silverman Program

Sesame Street Podcast

Stand Up Comedy

TEDTalks (Video)

This American Life

That's a much longer list than I anticipated when starting this, but I highly recommend almost all of those.

bugle.

2009-04-03T19:49:00.000-07:00

I guess a first note on wikis. I knew of the background area of wikis prior to the class and I had a respect for them and I also dismiss them in a sense as well... There's something silly that I've been trying to do on wikipedia for some time. The actor Peter Saarsgard, he's dating or married to Maggie Gyllenhall, he is from my hometown and I've been trying to put his name on the list of famous people from my city, and everytime I have tried this over the past few months it is deleted in an hour or two after I put it up, I put the source of imdb stating he's from the city and I link his name to his page within wikipedia, still no dice. It's seems like a really small thing to do, but yet it doesn't fly, I don't know how you can get something successfully published on wikipedia these days, its seems to have too many watchdogs almost. However, I do when I see a spelling or grammatical error I fix it, and that always stands, so I'm not sure what's going on...

So that's my bit about wikis, moving into google which is exciting, and also podcasting (whoa!) totally excited about that.
Google is a very interesting business model they have developed marketing in a way that is similar to apple and yet dissimilar. And overall google is by far more innovative than any web company that I can think of there is always something new and their stunt with CADIE this week for April Fools has kept me entertained endlessly. I suppose they can keep this up, there's really no one that is trying to be as hip and yet user friendly its a balance they've maintained and they also have a geeky streak which drives even more people that may be skeptical in, there are many fronts that I think are impeccable about their practices. I use many of the tools and there are some that i've played with but can't seem to find a use for yet.

I met someone just before Christmas who was vacationing here from California who worked for Google and had been working the past year on Google Health, and to me Google Health seems really out of the box for them and really trying to shake things up, and this man had made it his life for so long he was really into the possibilities of having people being able to keep track of their medical data online, but to me it just didn't seem like a easily accessible idea. I haven't heard much about it since it has launched, so I'm thinking my hunch is right, but maybe one day Google Health will be all we're talking about. They seem to have more hits than misses.

I keep ending with videos, this is a great one about twittering everyone's newest passion/pet peeve:

honolulu

2009-03-24T19:35:00.000-07:00

wikis. oh to wiki.

To me wikis are probably not used too often by teens other than inside of classroom settings and perhaps to edit a few of their interests on wikipedia. Wikis generally are a little bit dorkier and solitary than the other tools we've been discussing. It involves understanding and creating code and also delving behind the scenes in the case of wikipedia and feeling a bit like a "know-it-all" or at least that you know more than the people who wrote the page.

It's a very empowering tool, you can see other people's typos and fix them you can research something more completely than another and have instant gratification. They are great for connect as well as we've seen through class and i still go to this blog by first going to the wiki to click the link i posted. Basically wikis are a great way to have a group of minds come together and combine.

Teens or young children, I guess I don't see them using a wiki as often as they possibly could be, this may be a bias in my mind, but it seems more like something you would do in college when your bored and beyond that point to be a bit of an intellectual show-off. Perhaps someone will prove me wrong. When I think of wikis I subscribe to the TED conference video podcasts and this one was very enlightening about the mindset and world of wikipedia.

2009-03-24T05:39:00.000-07:00

Taking a pass on the previous week of SNS blogging, I think I was thrown off on the wiki. Coincidentally wikis are up next! More on that later this week.

flickr!

2009-03-09T19:56:00.001-07:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nycsignstory/

lesson planning

2009-03-06T17:15:00.000-08:00

For the final project I'm having a few ideas and about what to do with a group (pick me pick me)

I've never made a lesson plan, so I should definitely be in a group with someone(s) that have had experience doing such things.
I have planned things before events, talks, conferences, etc... so I think I can bring some "planning" to the table.

Now that those two points are out of the way more about what I'm actually thinking

I would like to focus the lesson perhaps on 4th-6th graders.
I would like the lesson to involve a lot of hands-on learning, more physically then moving into using more technology as the lesson progresses.
The focus that I am leaning towards for the lesson itself is teaching about sources of medias, having a find/seek different entities that own the local newspaper, who owns the company of their favorite movie, who is the CEO of Twitter.com... learning more about these I feel would be a fun and enriching lesson that will leave them to start feeling savvy about the media.
Hands-on - Bringing in newspapers, books, etc... Using resources in the library (maybe at a public level an open learning session or in a school where other reference tools are available)
Tech - going to maybe the same newspapers website and seeing the newspaper's history listed there or on the more fun side: video games and determining the different categories that video games and the large company behind these categories. It seems that most video game companies always release the same sort of categorical material (movie/tv show promos, serious game, games targeted at girls, sports, etc...)

Well those are my initial thoughts I hope I can find a little niche of people who would like to incorporate a little of this or all of this into what we do at the end.

social clique - cliche

2009-02-27T17:51:00.000-08:00

It's somewhat funny how close the two words clique and cliche are, I know they aren't actually that close, but I wouldn't be surprised if the same person thought them up and perhaps at the same time. Although this is all very unlikely. Well they probably are both french.

I was thinking about the convergence of media/cultures and media cultures for that matter, and how so many things and places want to be connected now more than ever to tap into all of these different cliques and cliches. For example the new cable ad that appears that a guy wrote a song a taped it for youtube that utilizes many of the common themes from music videos and youtube in one and sneaks in some video game themes, to sell cable tv. That definitely seems like a convergence right there.

Here's that video:

So why cliche, cliques... I know that most mediums are trying to focus their focus on one group of people in order to create a hype within that community and this seems to be working really well, and because of this many people can see that media is actually getting better. Television shows aren't boiler plate specials anymore throwing in the kooky neighbors, they are focused and try to create an interactive fan base. This is making more money for the industries and also keeping the market happy, we all win right?

spoiler on spoiler

2009-02-21T18:12:00.000-08:00

Interview with Chillone by Reality News Online

In doing a bit of research after reading the first chapter, led me to this interview, which is pretty interesting.
but could be a spoiler for those who haven't read it, so wait! or don't. that's the beauty of it all.

consider the source.

2009-02-17T20:41:00.000-08:00

To begin to think of the implications of teaching media literacy in a library, my first thought is to educate those who come into any library setting about the sources of the books or media they are wanting to check out. The source for any media is many of things, for books it is the author of the book, but beyond that it is also the publisher and anyone else who may have funding production of the book...

Doing this I believe immediately can open the eyes of patrons to understanding the value of the messages of what they are reading. If a health/diet book is funded by McDonald's you can immediately tell that something fishy is going on with that book.

But other media can be broken down this way as well... for example, many local papers are funded by the grocery store advertising, and with equally less frequency there is not discussion of grocery stores/food safety in many papers because they do not want to lose this crucial funding. There seem to be a great load of articles on this topic at this website I was going to specifically link to this piece, but think it may be a bit to research/science based to prove the point I was looking for but I suppose I am doing it anyway: http://www.medialit.org/pdf/ADAmedialiteracy.pdf

Thinking about education of media sources, I think this starts to get the discussion going, determining who publishes certain video games or romance novels or whatever it may be is a great way to get people to start thinking about the media they are consuming, similar to the nutrition fact labels on food product, many disregard them and don't realize what goes into food anymore... the same is happening with our media sources.

Oh this reminds me of this commercial that i'm unsure if anyone who grew up outside of st. louis ever got to watch, but it was on the christian public station, 24. They showed sort of PSA announcements in between their shows, and they had a commercial (that i can't find anywhere online) that showed two kids laughing and enjoying tv and having some junk food, then this garbage man walks into the home and the mom says hello and the kids say hello, and then he dumps a garbage can full of garbage into the television, as if that was the food on which the television relied on to be able to work... and the kids were extremely happy to have this deposit and the garbage man leaves and they get to watch tv some more. Its a pretty strong message and it has stuck with me for quite some time, my BA is actually in media studies, and its interesting how things can stick with you. As in McLuhan he describes with music and hearing, "The ear favors no particular 'point of view.' We are enveloped by sound. Certain ways of learning are stronger through these media and it is important to recognize that as educators, and if we can somehow figure out a way to implement these stronger learning methods than we can perhaps really change and progress the way that people use their minds.

Medium-Media-Me

2009-02-11T07:37:00.000-08:00

A medium is a tool that connects people together. I think that this definition can apply well to anything that can be defined as a medium.

A medium can and will be replaced by something that can connect people more quickly or more reliably.

The only instance of a medium going backwards is text messaging through cell phones. It seems that that is a bit of a reversal of technology, when you can call someone and have a direct conversation versus having a conversation that you must wait for the text for does not seem like a logical leap, but it is wildly popular.

I think Postman believes with every step that the medium goes forward through is degrading our society one step further. Almost everything has two sides though on which you can see the positive and negative possibilities. There are many many possible ways to communicate and connect with people now and that ultimately has to be much better for all of us as a whole. I remember waiting for my mom in high school to pick me up after I would call her collect and do that "we-had-a-baby-its-a-boy" thing during the state your name "i'm-out-of-school-come-get-me" etc... and now that's not something anyone would think of as a solution... it's fun.

Computers are made for printing.

2009-02-09T19:26:00.000-08:00

Something To Write Home About.

2009-02-03T17:24:00.000-08:00

So Critical Literacy... this is the discussion topic after a wonderful class discussion on which to focus here. Critical Literacy in many ways it seems as a way to have an equal balance of listening, learning, knowledge, and growth... and being constantly proactive in creating a means to have this happen. Looking at my current library role there is not much of an expansion of other people's minds based on the material I produce or anyone else does for that matter. Mostly I do a lot of web management of an extensive art collection and in my mind I like to dream that I am adding all of these pages to add to the collective world of art and hopefully someone will find the artist they've always been searching for on our site and be fulfilled. In a sense that is how I see my critical literacy playing out, I try to organize the digital art collection in a way that others may be able to find the information they are seeking. However, I am reminded daily in my office that although its pretty straightforward in organization, generally by the artist's last name and also the same within categories, that many people struggle with the content no matter how obvious I try to make it. Its difficult to make a website have this balance between the creator and also the user, and probably most who observe websites do not see that someone has planned the content to make it easier for them. In attempts to make the relationship between myself and the user I have implemented surveys of the site and occasionally beyond that I am open to feedback when I rarely answer the phones I try to sneak in any customer opinions of the site. It is frustrating to see people struggle with knowledge, and as Freire discusses the best way to make content is to make it of direct personal interest of those who are experiencing it, so that is something that I should try to incorporate perhaps to have people feel more comfortable with the information.

Furthermore, inside of the office on a more direct level with both the digital and extensive book/catalog collection we have it would be of use to have the critical literacy in this sense be more balanced by having a more direct selection for those who are seeking the information. My boss wants to keep every book that ever comes in, and that is overwhelming to everyone and I end up being the one who organizes it all and also then has to find it when someone is looking for it, if they had a more active role in the material then it would be of more use to everyone in the long run. Having a more balanced and direct collection would probably be much more useful to everyone and would create a much more respectful atmosphere in general.

However, my current work is not in my interest group per se... I enjoy the art world and do feel that I could continue within it, my deeper interest lies within children's museums and the education possibilities held within that realm. Currently, from some of my observational study of children's museums, I have found that more often than not the museum let's the child take over the museum, be king/queen of the day and climb on everything and just have a fantastic time. Doing this though shifts the balance of education so far towards the child that there is not a direct connection in many people's minds that the children's museum is actually of any educational value to children, and this definitely needs to be shifted. There has to be a way of creating a children's museum in which children can be hands on and also learn about while they are having fun. I am reminded actually of an exhibit at the Minnesota Minneapolis/St. Paul Science Museum, within which they had a very small exhibit that was a big hit actually where the child got to weave wool. There were four looming stations set up with recycled wool ropes, that you could weave between the loom and learn the basics of how textiles are created. This exhibit had an enormous line, it was incredible actually to see the interest in weaving amongst all of these children, both boys and girls to create something that was just going to be demolished by the next user... This exhibit I feel is almost perfect in creating the relationship that Freire would want in a children's museum between the exhibit being very focused on one task and teaching many different aspects of the process in a very hands-on way. This exhibit taught the hard work, the struggles with wool, the beauty of a finished product, and the actual craft of weaving. To me it seems there is rarely a good balance in active more hands-on museums such as the science or children's museum that creates something that drives interest and also teaches through the exhibit... ultimately this would be the critical literacy required for a successful museum environment.

Also, if you've made it this far down, somehow Amazon sent me two copies of the Postman book and I do not see a need of having two, I did pay for both and don't feel like hassling them to send it back for a refund. If you would like it, comment and I don't know maybe five dollars? best offer really.

Strike that... Reverse it...

2009-01-31T10:28:00.000-08:00

This blog will be focused on the discussion and readings from the LIS 680 course taught at Pratt during the Spring 2009 semester. The course is focusing on technology and construction of a new definition of literacy based on the new developments of our culture. It seems as if there is a big gap in place in our culture with those who have grown up with computers and those who have not. Also the academic response to new technology also seems to be dependent on this age difference. As one of the people who have always had computers, it appears that those who have not are very frightened and confused about how to address and educate those who are more techno-literate. From the readings it seems as if many of the techno-illiterate academics want to throw out all education models and create a new one that will address the new techno-literate generation. However, to me it seems as if it should be more of a melding of both, you can't possibly know how to type if you don't first learn the alphabet and if you can't type you will struggle using a computer. If you don't understand common board games you perhaps would not understand a video game, although that's not as clear of a connection now with the leap frog technologies. The world has changed, but I feel that a lot of what we've developed for models of education have lots of value and should perhaps adapt to new technologies, but it is definitely not the end of the print world. The world did not crumble when the overhead projector was invented, nor should it fall apart when facebook or googledocs does, it all should be seen as a new tool that aids in learning rather than detracting from it.

Anyway these are just a few of my initial ponderings about this topic and I hope to understand more of both sides positions on this issue and I am looking forward to the class discussions and readings for this course.