Procrastadabbler

I worked hard to keep an open mind at yesterday’s professional development program, and although there were elements of the keynote speaker’s address that I had some issues with, I did learn about a couple of promising participatory applications.

First, what I learned

1. Diigo: way cool social bookmarking site. You can post webpages, including webbased articles and embed comments and highlighting in those texts. This holds out promise for ways to interact and discuss texts online. Daniels & Zemelman talk about a literacy strategy called “Guide-a-rama” where essentially you provide students with a sheet that tells them what to look for, areas of watch out for, and so on as they move through a challenging text. Through Diigo, this can be done online and also, students can contribute to it. It is a participatory technology.
2. Second Life: I’ve known about Second Life for quite sometime, but to be honest haven’t quite gotten it. I struggle with quite understanding why I need to represent myself with an avatar. Maybe it’s from my years operating just fine within text-based online worlds. But, as a colleague pointed out, avatars allow us to experiment with identities and how people respond to those representations of self. I knew that on an intellectual level, but never really made the connection before. Part of my problem is that I’m shy in real life, and I’m also shy online. I am uncomfortable with the idea of going online just to meet people. But, I learned there are people within my institution who are talking about using SL as a way to collaborate to improve our campus. So that intrigues me and gives me an authentic purpose for investigating SL.
3. Educational uses of Twitter. The speaker mentioned this, but I actually got a better sense of how to use it from Jeremy, a comm/journalism professor and our Blackboard guru. He said you can embed your twitter into Blackboard (or anywhere) and use it to post announcements to your students. One of the most potentially useful things is that you can post via a cell phone. It’s just one more way to keep students informed. I’m not sure how often I would twitter. I certainly don’t like thoughtcasting, but I do see potential. I’m wondering how Tumblr would work. I actually like Tumblr better than Twitter because you can pop in links to multimodal texts easily.
4. Jing – this is exactly what I’ve been wanting and needing for a very long time. It’s a way to capture what you’re doing screen while providing audio narrative. The power of this is incredible and I am so looking forward to learning about it. I can create minilessons/demos for my students to get them up and going on some technology that they’re scared about using. Clear step by steps. But also, the promise for teaching writing is also wonderful. I could model my writing process – to use Nancy Atwell’s metaphor, I can record myself taking the top off my head as I write. What a metacognitive piece. I could also use it to respond to student writing. For some students it might work better than embedding comments.
5. I’ve been converted back to Blackboard. I stopped using it last year because I found it to be cumbersome and that it didn’t do many of the things I wanted it to do. However, a new version was released and it’s much more elegant. The new Gradebook is much better, so I’m going to give it a try again this year.
6. Our library has some awesome new research databases. It is going to make doing literature searches so much more enjoyable and efficacious.

My critique:

1. Her theoretical grounding: This is a consistent problem I have with IT people. Among my critiques were how she talked about the difference between pedagogy and androgogy. I had some major problems with how she positioned pedagogy. The notions she drew on were out of date. I went to her blog and diigo site and found that she actually draws on something called huetagogy. I wish she had done a better job grounding her approach in that and also making better parallels to the Web 2.0 world (a term I’m beginning to hate). I like the term participatory culture (from Henry Jenkins) better. It really bugged me that she didn’t talk about Jenkin’s work. She also critiqued (rightfully, I might add) Prensky’s notion of digital natives/immigrants. But that term is well recognized as being problematic, but she didn’t offer any alternative ways of thinking about it, or even what it means. I wish she had talked about digital newcomers and insiders. I think that might have been more useful and maybe more meaningful to the audience.
2. Her use of blogs. She really pedagogized blogging. She had set criteria as to what constituted a good blog and even had a rubric. As Knobel & Lankshear point out in a chapter in Pahl & Rowsells book , this removes blogging from it’s authentic purposes. It meets the needs of the teacher, not the need of the blogging, thus the way she is using blogging is antithetical to the premise of huetagogy that she subscribes to.
3. Her use of voicethread was pathetic. I’m sorry, I’m being harsh here, but she in no way showed the power of that application. It’s an application for responding to multimodal texts! Her use was so pedagogical and flat.
4. Her use of audacity and discussion about podcasting was unimaginative. There is so much more you can do with audacity than what she showed. If she was going to talk about audacity, she should have at least mentioned gcast or gabcast in conjunction with audacity.
5. Mile wide and inch deep: In general, I wish she had focused on just a few and shown us really powerful and multiple ways of using the ones she selected. It is a problem I worry about within myself because I love to explore and learn new ways of accomplishing things.

The bottom line is, I learned. I was cranky at times, but I got over it and I learned and I’m excited to move forward trying these things. I also learned that I have a lot to offer to my colleagues.

So, I’ve just spent the better part of an hour recapping yesterday. It has been helpful for me to think through the day’s events as well as have a place to hold those ideas. Which goes back to my commonplace book idea from last summer. I really do need to pursue that more! Later…