tengrrl’s thoughts & news on teaching writing, literacy, and literature
March 13, 2006
Chicago Tribune | Blogs taking a seat in, out of classrooms—basic info on blogs in the classroom. The piece explores the educational value of the tools, but I wish it would more specifically talk about the many horrors of the fearmongers. Ignoring the obvious arguments about security and safety lessens the impact of the pedagogical issues in the article.
March 13, 2006
Online Auteurs Hardly Need to Be Famous – New York Times—back in the day (a phrase which really only makes the writer look old), folks talked with wonderment of the great abilities of the Web to democratize publishing, given that even a dog can compose a Web site. This article is in many ways the modern revision of that old observation: anyone, it seems, can make a film nowadays.
As articles like this one make broad claims on anyone’s ability to be a filmmaker, we need to continue to interrogate how “anyone” is defined. What socio-economic groups are included and excluded? How is age represented? Who creates which kinds of resources? While “online auteurs hardly need to be famous,” there are still many other things an auteur needs to compose and share works online.
March 10, 2006
Students Remember More Ads Than News—Didn’t we know that kids paid attention to the ads back in the days of Schoolhouse Rock? The question that the article raises for me is what did the researchers ask them. Did they ask them questions that would tell us whether they were paying any attention to the other information on the channel? And as the Channel One CEO Judy Harris points out, the kids weren’t isolated. Did the researchers ask questions to determine other places that they were exposed to the products or services that were purchased?
Regardless the article raises important issues on how we pay attention to what students engage with and why. We need to think more about the literacy skills that students are choosing to engage and how we can harness that power in the classroom.
March 10, 2006
The FEMA Coloring Book: Funny, In a Stabbing Yourself in the Eyes Sort of Way – Wonkette—I don’t even know what to say about this, and I can’t look at it any longer to try to decide.
March 10, 2006
Cartoon Violence Thinks of the Children—This Wonkette piece reminded me of my tech analysis of New Yorker cartoons. There’s not much in the PowerPoint, but I asked students the same sorts of questions as they looked at how children interact with technologies in the cartoons. The same assignment could be done looking at gender, age, and race (though that will be a short study). I have a PowerPoint of the cartoons that I use, but since they’re copyrighted, I can’t post it. You could easily do the assignment with the book however: The New Yorker Book of Technology Cartoons.
March 10, 2006
UNESCO | Education – Grassroots Women Gaining a Voice
talks about ways that technology increases literacy . . . and not in the way we usually talk about it:
“The UNESCO teams introduced workload-lightening technologies such as water pumps that eliminated the need for women and girls to plod miles for water, millet grinding mills that replaced tedious hand grinding, and donkey carts that substituted for hauling heavy loads on their heads. Functional literacy activities conveyed health advice and tips on hygiene, such as how to filter swamp water, that dramatically lowered infant mortality.”
March 10, 2006
Machina Memorialis: Vitanza Quote Found While Marking Time in the Archive—clipping this quotation because it may be useful for my C&W paper.
March 10, 2006
Girl in a Cage: Importance of Being Earnest—I gush over Donorboy and then the author of the book writes a blog entry questioning the value of authenticity and earnestness. Now what am I supposed to do? Granted he finally decides that sometimes earnestness is okay, but I just couldn’t help but feel that the author is just out to make me sad. I so loved that book for its authenticity, and here the author is telling me that authenticity isn’t where it’s at. Brendan, can’t you rethink? Please?
March 10, 2006
Learning in the Classroom by Reaching Out to Others—description of a 3rd grade social action project, making books for younger children. The article describes the purpose of the activity: “Making the books is part of a literacy project designed not only to teach lessons about reading and writing to third-graders, but also to forge a connection with their community.”
March 9, 2006
How to bind a book – Lifehacker—okay, so I may not have a really good excuse to bind my own book, but at least I have the instructions should it become necessary.