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