Filed under: Reflections
Project update:
This is the last week of Aprendamos, and the projects are pretty much done! Right now the students are taking cameras home to take pictures of the aspects of their community that they discussed in class, and hopefully they’ll relate it to the posters they drew:
I wish we got to use MapLib in the classroom or at least a desktop program to let them annotate their maps, but we didn’t have time. So instead, we did the project in pieces:
- drawing the posters
- writing descriptions of them on notecards
- typing up the descriptions on the computer
- taking pictures of the parts of their communities that are represented in the posters
And then we can put those pieces together and still put it on MapLib for the students and their parents to see.
Mobile Activism Research
Ubiquitous Information – Mobile Phones in the Classroom
This research studied mobile phone use in primary and secondary school classrooms in New Zealand, and the key finding was that students enjoyed using the phones and thought they could be useful, but only if used in a very structured way.
Here’s something that reminded me of the elementary school we’ve been going to:
“Students saw the biggest advantage in using the internet via the mobile phone being that sites were not blocked by the school system. One of the features most appreciated by Year 12 was the ability to view YouTube videos” (33).
The complete lack of internet access in my class was definitely a problem, but even Jason’s class had difficulty using the internet just because of all the blocked websites, YouTube in particular.
I wonder if using cell phones would solve any of those problems. There are some major roadblocks for us, though. I doubt the parents and teachers would approve of using cell phones in class.
The study found that even a lot of the students themselves didn’t think cell phones could be useful for education, and that they were just for text messaging. That was a surprise to me! In fact, the older students in the study all decided they preferred not to use the cell phones by the end of their semester. The younger students all loved using the cell phones, on the other hand — perhaps because they didn’t have as many preconceptions about what cell phones are useful for?
I defnitely think IDEPSCA can get more use out of cell phones, though. They’re already using Mobile Voices (which we all got to learn about last week!), but I know they want to find more uses for it in more of their programs. For Aprendamos, at least, I think using cell phones could be interesting if used sparingly, or maybe just as a way for students to engage in learning after class is over.
Filed under: Reflections
Updated Timeline
Note: the in-class tasks are specific to the class I’m working with, and Jason has seperate tasks in his timeline for his class projects.
| Deadline | Task/Deliverable |
| Thursday April 7th |
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| Monday April 11th |
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| Tuesday April 12th |
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| Thursday April 14th |
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| Tuesday April 19th |
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| Thursday April 21th |
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| Friday April 29th |
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| May 4th |
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Reflection on Yesterday
In my class yesterday, as soon as I took out my laptop I was surrounded by a mob of students trying to guess my Windows password! They were so into it, too! They asked me for hints, so I told them it was 8 characters (letters or numbers) long. One of the students even went so far as to write down a list of random combinations and kept asking me if each one was my password, lol. Leave it to an elementary school student to try brute forcing on paper. That would’ve been a perfect opportunity for a little math lesson on permutations, but I didn’t remember enough about it. 
But I was surprised at just how engaged the students were. They even asked me about it an hour later during their recess!
During the second half of our class, Jason came by and we split the students up into groups, each supervised by one of us and each sharing a laptop. The students started to type up descriptions of the parts of their posters and how they represented aspects of their communities. That went pretty well, except for one student in my group who kept trying to find the keyboard shortcut to close the program. But they were all pretty interested in using my laptop, and actually fought over who got the next turn to type. Some of the students said they had a computer at home, while others didn’t. The difference was very clear. One girl was typing fairly quickly using both hands, while two of the other students, who didn’t have computers at home, typed using one index finger, hunting for each key.
That got me wondering… if their school doesn’t really have a computer lab, when will the students learn typing techniques? When will they learn all the basics of using a computer? And what about ergonomics, like how to sit at the computer and how often to take breaks? That’s something that even my private elementary school with multiple computer labs didn’t teach. I really wish it had.
I wish I could just buy a bunch of laptops and give them to every student there! I wish I could just fix everything! I’d really like to at least get the chance to share more computer tips with the students, though. Like a fun Computers 101 mini-class. 
Maybe over the summer, when Jason and I continue working with Aprendamos.
Filed under: Reflections
So on Tuesday (the 29th), Jason and I were co-teachers with Aprendamos again. Jason’s class seems to be going much better, which I’m very happy about! My class, on the other hand, was particularly hyper that day. O_O And I mean hyper. Kids were hiding from the teacher, poking each other with pointing sticks, shouting profanities, and screaming “Be quiet!” at the top of their lungs (as if that really worked).
But the good news is they have started on a project, which consisted of drawing posters about the topic of community using metaphors of plants, the human body, and the solar system. So next Tuesday, my plan A is to upload those posters to MapLib and have the students annotate them. Plan B is to annotate them in a desktop image editor like MS Paint or Paint.NET.
The reason I need a Plan B is because the class I’m with doesn’t have any computers, unlike Jason’s class. And according to someone at the school, we may or may not be able to use their wireless internet if we bring laptops, and even if we manage to get that working, a lot of websites are blocked and we wouldn’t be able to get them unblocked! I was very sad to hear that all the public schools in LA block YouTube and basically all social media websites. Oh well.
Based on the feedback we got in class yesterday, Jason and I are going to start making tutorials on how to use the websites for our lesson plans, so we can give it to the other teachers in case they want to use it during this session — and so the teachers we’re working with have an easy reference for using it on the days we can’t be there!
Thanks to everybody for the feedback on our project. It was fun seeing how everyone’s projects have developed so much! (And it makes me feel a bit better to know that our project isn’t the only one that changed a lot from our original plan.)
Filed under: Reflections
April 1st: submit grant proposal
before April 4th: Liz: scan student posters
** start making how-to document of lesson plan aimed at Aprendamos teachers
April 4th: Liz: uploading posters to maplib (if internet available) OR: image editing with posters
Jason: work on Voicethread project
April 11th (last week of project): Liz: annotating the maps on maplib OR continue work with image editing
Jason: work on Dipity timeline project
April 12th: update Aprendamos website (small changes only)
April 15th: present website changes at staff meeting
by April 18th: upload example project pictures / descriptions to Aprendamos site
April 18th: wrap-up week, have students discuss projects
Jason: work on and wrap up Dipity timeline project
by May 4th: make class presentation, plan for summer with Aprendamos
deliverables:
- Grant proposal
- how-to for lesson plans
- examples of student work on Aprendamos website
Filed under: Reflections
The Readings and the Class
The Digital Youth Project White Paper highlights one of the things that irks me about education in the traditional classroom. Learning online, “the outcome emerges through exploration, in contrast to classroom learning that is oriented toward set, predefined goals” (2). I never liked having goals set for me. I wanted to learn what I needed to learn, but not always how or when I was supposed to. I get the feeling that a lot of the students at Aprendamos feel more or less the same way. When I interviewed a few of them, they all understood the importance of education and they all wanted to do well in school. But most of them also said they didn’t like school.
The open-endedness of learning online is probably what I find most exciting about it, because engagement is almost guranteed when you have the chance to set your own goals and then meet them, and when you can let those goals evolve based on what you learn from random exploration. Like Tina pointed out in class last Wednesday, if you forced students to write fan fictions isntead of essays, they probably wouldn’t be much happier. So it’s not the content that makes learning online more engaging, it’s the freedom that comes with it.
Hackasaurus is a good example of learning through exploration and just messing around. It seems like a potentially useful tool once they work out some of the bugs. When I first started messing around with making websites, I would just right-click every page I liked and go to “View Source” and figure things out from there.
It was a pretty geeky activity, but like the white paper pointed out, it was also a social activity because I had to ask questions on forums, which meant interacting with people who shared an interest. And of course I shared my websites with all my friends.
The Project
Working with Aprendamos has been fun, though sometimes challenging, especially when co-teaching the 5th grade class on Tuesdays. Sometimes the students don’t want to be there or don’t want to particiapte, and sometimes they just want to run around screaming! But since starting some group work last week, the class has reportedly become a bit more focused. Giving them something to do with their hands seems to help a lot, rather than having them sit still and just discuss topics. Most of the students really like drawing and coloring, so their teacher has incorporated more of that into the class.
This Tuesday I’m going to bring my laptop and try to find out if I can access the internet there. Then I’ll make plans to check out a few laptops from USC to bring the following Tuesday, so they can play around with MapLib if that’s what their teacher still wants to do. I need to figure out a way to discuss the lesson plans with him some more, but I know he’s really busy. Maybe I’ll get a chance to talk to him after his class on Tuesday if he doesn’t get back to me before then. Hmmm… Just wingin’ it. But some sort of project will definitely be done, one way or another!
Filed under: Reflections
I also commented on Making the Case for Fan Fiction on the Civics, Popular Media, & Participatory Culture blog. The gist of my comment: a rant about why fanfiction is not a waste of time and how fanfiction is more than nerdy ramblings posted on the internet.
Filed under: Reflections
I think it was Stasi who asked about the involvement of the parents at Aprendamos, and her question made me realize that we really have no idea how involved the parents are going to be for this program! I guess it just depends on the school and the parents themselves.
Actually, there are a lot of things up in the air right now regarding our project, because we don’t yet have many details about our true audience: the students! And because the curriculum evolves as the program goes on to meet the needs of the particular students of each class, our project will have to be flexible. So I guess that’s our challenge right now: making a plan that’s detailed enough to ensure a successful outcome, but still flexible enough to meet the program’s changing demands.
Sasha had some great suggestions that I think we’re going to incorporate right away. One important suggestion was to actually try out the platforms we’re thinking of using, and I plan to start on that this week. Jason has already used Dipity with a group of elementary school students, but I’m going to try it out for myself to get a feel for it. And we’ll both try the other platforms like MapLib and the VozMob photo-uploading tool that can tag your location on a map.
Sasha also suggested that instead of making a video about Aprendamos (since they already have one – a really cute one!), we could make a video that explains how to do the same project, so other teachers and other schools can use the project lesson plans we create. So that got Jason and I thinking… maybe a video wouldn’t be right for our project, after all. It would be very difficult to lead a workshop with a group of elementary school students and film it at the same time, especially considering that Aprendamos seems a bit understaffed, and they asked Jason and I to each lead a class for 30 minutes on Tuesdays before the other teachers get there.
So instead of a video, we could share our lesson plan as an online document or a printed document, or maybe a slide show or even a website. Come to think of it, I don’t think Aprendamos has a standalone website and I saw in their meeting minutes that they discussed a website… So maybe we can incorporate that into our project. We’ll see how it all unfolds.
I really appreciated all the questions and comments on our project and of course I can’t wait to see how everyone’s projects evolve over the next few weeks!
Filed under: Reflections
The Reading
I suppose I could say that new media literacy is one of my hobbies, because it encompasses a lot of them; I’ve enjoyed dabbling in making websites, image editing, audio and video editing, blogging, and communicating online using everything from instant messaging to virtual worlds.
I definitely think these new media literacies need to be part of traditional education. Or rather, I think we need to move beyond traditional education. Today we need to teach students more than just the three R’s (reading, writing, and arithmetic). Those are no less important than they used to be, but they’ve evolved!
I loved reading the stories of how students developed a hobby into an amazing project, like the school newspaper for Hogwarts and the making of the Firefox web browser. Some of the best things students do are outside of the classroom, unfortunately.
Like I mentioned in class, one of my personal projects in elementary school was playing the games “Catz” and “Dogz” and hex editing, which involved opening the game’s source files and changing the numbers that controlled the appearance of the virtual pets. So I made green alien dogs, bunny rabbit dogs, and all sorts of ridiculous things. The game’s fan community is very imaginative; people host virtual dog shows and adoption agencies. It’s game modding, but for little girls who like cute animals!
Links if you’re curious:
- The RKC Petz Forum – This community is still very active!
- Raven’s Petz Place – Tutorials on “hexing”, very in-depth, complete with pictures.
The informal learning environment of the web is all about creating things and experimenting, as Jenkins’ paper points out. Schools focus more on memorizing and testing knowledge, and learning is motivated by habit and a fear of failure. In an informal learning environment, failure is expected and not a big deal because the activities are new and experimental, and the way that a participant’s work is graded is purely subjective. On a message forum where people share creative writing or artwork, it’s not uncommon for a work to receive several reviews, which often offer very different opinions. In school, work is usually graded by a single teacher, and school grades are viewed as objective and set in stone. Like Tina said in class last week, having stories reviewed on FanFiction.net isn’t anything like having a story graded by a teacher.
On a different topic, I think computer programming and scripting should be included as a multimedia literacy. We all use computers so much, it’s a shame that so few people understand how they work and how to customize them to suit their needs better. Kids needs to learn at a young age how to effectively use computers, and that includes everything from ergonomics to internet security. The digital divide is not just about who has a computer, but how well they can make it work for them.
Computers are tools, after all. And I think they’re the most underutilized tool. Yes, many people do use computers, but too many still use them in a way that’s equivalent to hitting a nail with a screwdriver. For example, it always irks me when I see someone using the mouse to slowly click through a bunch of menus when a single keyboard shortcut would suffice. But that rant is for another day. 
IDEPSCA Project
We didn’t get to meet with Pedro Jaul this week yet, but we’ll go over project ideas very soon. Plus, this Friday we’re going to meet the Aprendamos staff at their weekly meeting to discuss our ideas with them. So, no major updates this week. Just some brainstorming.
Filed under: Reflections
The Readings:
In class we spoke about how technology can unwittingly (or sometimes, perhaps purposefully) reinforce cultural and institutional divides. But my reflection for this week is about how technology has broken down some barriers, thanks to the shrinking down of market segments.
The reading mentions market segments becoming so small that an individual person will soon be his own market segment. I find that idea fascinating, if not a little scary. Facebook has been creating all sorts of buzz over that, with the way it uses our personal information to show us personalized ads.
But an early example of market segmentation is the niche magazine business. Some other amusing magazine niches:
- Clocks Magazine – A clock collecter’s dream come true.
- Pizza Today – This one has 40,000 monthly readers.
- Goat Magazine – Their slogan: “Dedicated to goats and the people who raise them.”
- Potato Grower Magazine – For people who grow potatoes.
- Convenience Store News – Exactly what it says.
- Chile Pepper Magazine – All about spicy food.
When I was around 12 or so, I subscribed to Reptiles Magazine. (My hobby at the time was selectively breeding leopard geckos, lol.) In the 90′s, when Reptiles Magazine started, the internet was still pretty young and blogs were just beginning to pop up. Fast forward to now, and blogs are completely and unmistakenly mainstream, starting to replace magazines because they can reach more people, cost less, and still target a niche audience. Just take a look at these blog niches: Strange Maps and Cute Things Falling Asleep . This is a perfect example of how technology revolutionized our culture, allowing what’s popularly referred to as “the long tail” to flourish.
The Long Tail
The long tail refers to the endless number of less popular hobbies, products, cultural icons, etc. that are not very popular, not mainstream. But because of modern information technology, the long tail, or “the 80% of stuff that didn’t used to be worth selling” (source), is more available than ever before – and it’s changing our culture, (hopefully) making us less focused on appealing to the lowest common denominator. Chris Anderson explains the idea in this famous article:
“Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want…. [T]heir taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture)…. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching — a market response to inefficient distribution. ”
The entire article is definitely worth reading. Anyway, the explosion of the long tail also accounts for the growing capabilities of grassroots/alternative media and new media activism. Now those smaller groups have a much wider reach, by the same principle that Amazon.com can say, “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday” (Josh Petersen). Makes your head spin, doesn’t it?
I hope that this cultural and technological shift continues to allow smaller organizations and marginalized groups to have a little more reach and a little more power. The technology has made it possible, but now it’s up to the people themselves to use it as effectively as they can.
Meeting with IDEPSCA
On Friday, Jason and I met with Pedro Jaul from IDEPSCA to get an introduction to the organization. It was very interesting to get a glimpse of some of the work they do! We sat in on a presentation/discussion about how 287 g and the Secure Communities program (more info here) affects local workers. I wasn’t able to follow everything that was said (the meeting was 90% Spanish), but I did pick up the gist of it. There was quite a heated discussion, in which many of the participants shared personal accounts of racial profiling. I wish I could’ve understood more of the conversation, but it was good to just see how IDEPSCA works with the community to inform people and discuss important issues.
We also met again today to brainstorm about project ideas, and it looks like we’ll probably be working with their Aprendamos after-school program and/or Mobile Voices, because Jason and I are both excited about working with kids and sharing the fun that is media production!
