Orwell Comes to America

Haven't been here in a while. Things come up every day that I think, "I should write a post about that!" But then time passes, and I get distracted and it doesn't happen. But today, as I was watching C-Span with one eye and trying to read a book on French cooking with the other, I saw this great panel on the future of journalism, so I thought I would post the link.

Apparently, there was a conference in November called "Orwell Comes to America," which included a panel made up of representatives from NPR, the NY Times, and the FCC. The panel was called, "Solutions: The Future Political Landscape" and was the portion of the program I saw. The program can be viewed on the New York Public Library website (another reason to love libraries).

Highlights included a discussion of language and journalism and what the concept of "objectivity" really means (and if it is even an obtainable standard to set).

It is worth watching, if you are interested in this discussion. And/or if you care about the future of democracy.

As a side note, C-Span is still on and that guy Tom Casey (State Dept Spokesman) seems like a bit of a jerk. Just saying.

Back to Croque-Monsieur...

online portfolio

I have created a couple of online portfolios through catalyst, a program through the UW. The layout is boring, which I guess means professional. I have not added much yet, but hope to keep it up to date with writing and work projects...

academic portfolio
professional portfolio

The Katha School

So I just read an interesting article in the latest Educational Leadership journal (this month's issue is devoted to Educating the Whole Child). It is about the Katha school in New Delhi and the work they do with kids to strengthen the community through sharing and writing their stories. The Katha website is massive, and it seems like there are a lot of different projects going on related to creativity in the classroom, community and civic engagement, problem-posing education, and storytelling as liberation. I think I am going to contact this school and research some possible project ideas...

google pages

SO. I created a web page (for people who actually develop web pages, I am sure they do not consider mine an actual web page, since google pages did all of the work, but I was very excited). I wanted a place where I could post about stuff (gasp!) unrelated to New Literacy Studies...you know, like recipes and Lost conspiracy theories and my attempts to learn needlepoint. So, if anyone is interested...visit my google page. There is actually almost nothing there right now, but I am sure I will find something to say soon...and for now this page will remain a New Literacy Studies exclusive blog-o-log.

on the flip side

The Seattle Weekly's blog (far inferior to the SLOG, but I still read it) has an interesting post up about print news and the move to online news and Microsoft's role/interest in the switch. I think it zeros in on exactly why this move has the potential to really destroy ethical journalism if we are not careful. This move is already kind of happening in print journalism--in some newsrooms (usually those owned by the larger media conglomerates, but to some degree all over) the lines between advertising and news content have become very blurry and news has become really watered down (if not totally bastardized) as a result. April's Mother Jones has a great story that touches on this as well--I meant to write something about it, but haven't yet. The most resonant point for me can be summarized with this quote from the article:

"What's really at risk here is not the future of newspapers but of the news itself. While our democratic culture could survive the loss of the daily paper as we know it, it would be endangered without the kinds of reporting that it provides. It's the journalism, not the newsprint, that matters."

To read The Weekly's blog post, click this link and scroll down (their website is stupid that way).

For the Mother Jones article, click here.

For a cute picture of meerkats, click HERE.

changes in the air

So, my advisor is leaving the U of Wa to teach rhetoric in Alaska, which leaves me in a bit of a pickle. I have been going over many plans/capers in my head over the past few weeks since learning this information. These include: transferring schools, leaving the country immediately, quitting my job, applying for a Fulbright, completing a certificate in non-profit management, and generally...(re-)finding my bliss, which may involve joining some kind of art collective and selling all of my worldly possessions or may just mean focusing down more on what I want out of school and continuing to complete my PhD and eventually working, as I have been intending, in academia--which, to me, translates to never having to feel guilty about lingering over my morning coffee if I so choose. (that was a long sentence)

The Fulbright idea appeals to me, as does the non-profit certificate, in a different way than the degree...I kind of feel like doing something a little more hands-on right now, if that makes any sense. I spend so much time reading, thinking and writing, but so little time actually acting on the ideas I have about education. But I guess in some ways that is what I signed up for...

On a related note, I have been looking for organizations world-wide that I may be able to partner with somehow (whether through a grant-related project or who knows what). Here are a couple that look interesting:

Center for the Study of Social and Global Justice

Alliance for a Media Literate America

That last one is holding a conference in June that I may attend...in St. Louis, where my dad is from...I hear the ambrosia salad is to die for.

That is all for now.

empathy education

my mom was on kplu this week talking about empathy education in relation to the VA Tech shootings: listen here

new colors!

just for fun.



and...this

Net Native in the P-I

Today's Net Native addresses an issue that we seem to dance around quite a bit in the newspaper industry--the fact that we are quickly moving into a paperless future...I have been reading and thinking about this quite a bit since it relates both to my day-to-day work and my interest in Digital Literacies. The Atlantic Monthly also ran a story about this last December. This change is exciting for those of us who don't like newsprint on our fingers and more recycling to deal with in a small one-bedroom apartment...less so for the traditionalists who seem to think there is something inherently better about reading the daily news in paper form than online. Online news is cheaper, more current, and more convenient than the paper form...newsrooms will adapt to the change and those that don't will die off. This is an exciting time to work in this otherwise stogy industry, in my opinion.

switching gears

Hi. Elizabeth here again.

Now that my digital literacies class is over, I am trying to decide what to do with this blog. Because it is titled "New Literacy Studies" I feel it would be wrong to change the topic to something I spend my day thinking more about like, say, doilies or cats. So I will stick to education. One can't exactly do a PhD in doilies, now, can one? Though if any discipline could include a study on doilies it may actually be New Literacy Studies. But I digress...my point was that I may end up writing more broadly about issues of education that I encounter in my classes...this quarter I am taking a history of educational philosophy course that will probably provide some good food for thought.

Another goal of mine is to participate in posting more on other education-related blogs. What is the point in putting this online if no one is really reading it? And it seems the best way to make friends online is to be a friend. Speaking of friends, my good friend Elizabeth Stohr just invited me to be on facebook. Against my better judgment, I joined. Now I am completely obsessed with the fact that I feel I am too old to have a profile and someone is going to call me out on that any day...I feel like such a 31-year-old poser.

In other news, I am picking up my papers from last quarter today. Once I read and revise them, I *may* post them here for feedback. It depends on how awful I realize they really are upon reading them weeks later with more sleep the night before.

I may also turn my attention toward figuring out exactly why I am in school and what I am here to study. It turns out that no one else is going to figure that out for me--damnit.

More soon.
ecd.

PS--This photo doesn't have doilies in it, but one gets the feeling that they are not far out of the picture...

goals of literacy education...

Came upon this great quote by The New London Group. It sums up a lot of what I have been thinking about literacy education, especially with regard to digital literacies, this quarter:

"An authentically democratic view of schools must include a vision of meaningful success for all, a vision of success that is not defined exclusively in economic terms and that has embedded within it a critique of hierarchy and economic injustice"
(New London Group, 1996, p.67).

This is an issue I often run up against in education classes, particularly in recent discussions about technology in education. Why do we want to teach our students these literacies? We may agree that the fundamental purpose of education is “to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, and economic life” (New London Group, 1996, p.60), but there is a wide area of grey space around how we choose to define “participation.” I love delving into this murky territory and wish we would do it more in our classroom discussions—this is one reason why this blog has and will hopefully continue to be a good outlet for me to process and refine my thoughts on this topic.

In my opinion, giving students the tools to participate in an "Attention Economy" without engaging in a critical discussion of who benefits and who doesn't from these structures is worse than not teaching them at all...

...how to be a man.

I stumbled upon this interesting article about how we construct gender through our interaction with media.

Could be a good jumping-off place for a discussion about teaching students how to deconstruct and understand what the media is telling them about how to be a man or woman in our society today (and why). It is so confusing for kids (and some adults), and I believe these images are some of the most powerful forces acting in how we construct identity.

No wonder growing up is so hard.

the generation gap

The Seattle P-I ran what I thought was a pretty cute article today about a young person whose parents signed up for Facebook. This is a new column called "Net Native", written by a young woman--I am excited to see where it goes. The website for the P-I is really great--almost every article has a forum to post comments--but this one got some harsh reviews. Apparently young people's digital literacies are not considered "news"...I am actually considering posting a comment (in the spirit of trying out these "new literacies" myself), but it would probably take me a day to compose it and I still have a paper to write...sigh.

On that note, sorry I haven't replied to comments yet. It is on my to-do list, the second this quarter is truly over.

ecd

unrelated to anything

SO I am thinking about creating a haiku blog. This is unrelated (mostly) to new literacy studies, so I think it deserves a new blog entirely. But I don't want to spread myself too thin. But I just remembered how much I love haiku! Does anyone know of any good haiku sites? I will keep thinking about this before I commit to a new blog.

Blogging Code of Ethics?

Pamela from class sent me a link to an article about blogging, which led me to another article about a proposed code of blogging ethics. It is worth checking out. I have to admit I haven't read the whole thing yet; however, I think that as the face of journalism changes, this is a really important topic to discuss.

Three Things

A) of all: We watched this You Tube Video in class tonight.
It made me think about the flexibility of digital text and makes a nice simple statement about how the web is changing us (especially web 2.0, but I don't think you have to know much about that to appreciate the video). It is changing how we read and how we interact with text. It gives authorship and agency to people who have never had it in the past. Is this inherently a good thing? Does it change how we evaluate authenticity of a piece of text? On that note, someone in class mentioned that the NY times recently reported on the use of Wikipedia as a reference in academic work--here is the link to that article. I thought it raised a lot of interesting questions about authorship, attention and authenticity.

B) of all: I think I have a title for my paper (which is due in a little over a week). Yes, that is right--just a title, but it is a start. I wrote it down on real paper, then lost the piece of paper. So much for paper. It was something like: Attention and Authenticity: Critical Literacy in the Age of Digital Media. Great title, don't you think? Now I just have to write it (thank goodness the hard part is over though).

C) and finally: Is anyone reading this?

teaching kids to cut through the BS

So I am in Los Angeles this weekend, and something about this place has gotten me thinking quite a bit about our super-saturated media culture, and how we deal with it in the classroom. Teaching kids to cut through the bullshit (I don't think this is a technical term, but it is a blog, after all) is not really in the best interests of those who hold positions of power in our society. A public that cares more about Anna Nicole Smith than they do about the 1900 people who died in Iraq last month is easier to control than one who thinks critically about political policy and popular culture. It makes me think about how popular culture can be used in the classroom to achive a couple of pedagogical goals; not only can bringing popular cultural resources into our classrooms help to bridge the gap between out-of-school and in-school literacies by connecting to students' background knowledge, but it can also help to engage them in a critical analysis that may then be applied more globally to larger issues of political and economic power. If kids are consuming this type of media at home, then the best thing we can do as educators is to help them to understand and think critically about the images and messages that are flying at them on a daily basis.

This post is just a spewing of random thoughts for now, but I hope to launch in to a larger discussion of social semiotics and critical media literacy soon.

Also just picked up the new issue of New York magazine this week--the cover article is about the "largest generation gap since rock and roll"--the internet and how it is being used by today's youth and where the lines between public and private lives have become blurred for these young people and how the older generation (anyone over 30--yikes!) is having trouble relating to this new paradigm. More on this later.

E

The subject of blogging as a form of new media provokes strong responses from many, particularly those who work in the newspaper industry. David Horsey, a columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, posed this question to his readers on December 30, 2007, and (perhaps ironically, perhaps not) asked them to post their responses to the online forum:

“Unquestionably, there are good things resulting from the democratization of the media. The best bloggers are delving into issues and information that may be bypassed by professional journalists. But with everyone holding a virtual megaphone, will we be able to hear the wiser voices amid the din of full-throated free expression?”

His question goes to the heart of what I believe is an exciting new territory for media and education—the posts held by the gatekeepers of traditional print-based media have been knocked down and the result—the democratization of media—causes many people to shift uncomfortably in their chairs. Should everyone really have a voice? Does every opinion on local politics, climate change, government conspiracy, popular culture, and practically anything else you can imagine really warrant a forum for expression? And (the question which most interests me) what are the implications of these practices on teaching media literacy?

To explore these and other questions, I have created a blog. In creating this blog, I hope to engage in a meta-analysis of blogging as a cultural phenomenon and reflect and explore the theory and practice of this emerging new digital literacy. My blog will also include reflections on new literacy studies and educational theory and practice. I will explore the resources available on the internet for teachers to engage with digital literacies, especially blogging, and will include links to other blogs and websites that help to support or complicate my own theories on the topic.

The process of creating a blog and linking to other websites has already activated a new literacy for me—the intertextual and multi-modal nature of this practice is different from any literacy practice I have engaged in before, yet requires a competence in the skills found in the traditional, print-based literacy practices of the classroom in order to deliver my message effectively. Intertextuality and multi-modality are two terms that are discussed at length in the current research digital literacy that I hope to explore even further throughout the course of this project. My project will involve tying the practice of blogging and my personal experience with it to the conceptual frameworks posed by digital literacy theorists such as: Gee, Oravec, Lewis and Fabos, Stone, Knobel and Lankshear, Luke, the New London Group, and other yet-to-be-read theorists from our Digital Literacies seminar.

This project is particularly relevant for me because I work as an educational curriculum specialist for two Seattle newspapers, and am constantly exploring new ways to engage students with media literacy. I see blogging as a tool that is ripe with potential for activating students’ prior knowledge and engaging them with the practice of journaling and writing for different audiences. I also believe that it is a practice that is becoming more and more common in the digital age and that is—for better or for worse—changing the face of journalism as we know it. Our students will someday be the future taste-makers, meme-warriors, culture-jammers, or gatekeepers of our media landscape; teaching them to think critically about democracy, media and messaging today is the most important step we can make towards helping them navigate a future that is certain to be as complicated, intertextual, shifting and exciting as our present.

so it begins...

Ok, I have about five minutes to write my first post since creating this site was way more fun than I expected it to be.

Since I don't have much time, I think I will just make a list (see my list of interests and you will understand why) of things that I hope to achieve/explore through this "new literacy studies" blog.

Thing 1: an exploration of "new literacy studies": what is it, why do we care.
Thing 2: blogging as a "new literacy" (where digital literacy meets media literacy)
Thing 3: blogging as an educational tool
Thing 4: rants and raves about the state of education
Thing 5: my thoughts, questions and discoveries about education--specifically critical literacy, media literacy, digital literacy...in essence, "new literacies" (see Thing 1)
Thing 6: links to articles and other blogs that explore these topics online

That is all for now. I will be back soon!

ecd