research paper proposal

I may be way off base in this, but I'm thinking I would like to explore how multimedia interacts with issues of identity and authority. In particular, I am thinking of either blogs or wikis (supported by flickr and Photoshop) as a means personal storytelling. Kathleen Welch suggests that encouraging a student's "interior discourse," something in which they are "automatically accorded authority," can be considerably empowering for students. Telling their own stories increases their "writerly authority" and enables the students to present a believable self, an ethos that contributes to the success of the presentation. Further, she suggests, such an approach shifts the writer's focus from establishing authority to other writing issues. Once the students recognize the empowerment of encoding, they also begin to understand that the process (or "how") is at least equally as important as content (or "what"). Of course, the use of multimedia further increases the students' sense of understanding process over content.

An entire multi-modal presentation for the story-telling project would entail scripting on the blog or wiki, storage of photos on flickr, and culminate in producing an audio and visual Photoshop presentation stored on the wiki or blog. What do you think?

Web 2.0 - posting for 10/13

(I am posting early since I will not be in class on October 8 and 13. Jen and Mais, I will try to respond to your postings later.)

For my use as a high school teacher, the greatest tool in the Web 2.0 category would be Moodle, a very simple form of webCT. As Trent Batson says, "Seat time is being recognized as less and less relevant as a measure of learning. " Moodle enables an instructor to post assignments, resources, and calendars, which students can access and respond to in their own postings. Thus, it has the capability of freeing student and teacher from the tyranny of "seat time" and offers the potential of much greater flexibility, ranging from online classes to a resource for students to catch up on missed work while absent. Unfortunately, although I have a Moodle site for each of my classes through online.lcps.k12.nm.us, it is not supported officially by the LCPS district administration, and my students are not able to access it (LCPS bureaucracy in action).

Another Web 2.0 tool that will be helpful to me is del.ici.ous, specifically because through it, I can access texts that can be annotated. A student's ability to annotate a text is recognized as an important, higher level skill, which I have been doing with my Pre-AP students for 10 years (because the program requires that they purchase their own books). My other students can't practice that skill directly since they can't write in state text books. With increasing pressure to make "adequate yearly progress" (impossible yearly progress), and with the superintendent threatening to prevent us from requiring purchased texts in the AP sequence, access to texts that can be annotated is becoming increasingly important.

I always offer podcasting as an option for creative activities associated with readings in my classes.

TiVo and iTunes have multiple potentials. I like the idea of phones being used to monitor traffic and for "citizen journalism." Another fun thing I have discovered in Web 2.0 is Wordle, but I haven't found a use for it yet, beyond making word clouds.

I like the empowering sort of words given to Web 2.0 in these articles: "services, not packaged software," participation, collective intelligence, and "an attitude, not a technology."
Hasta la vista!
Judy

Podcast topics

Three topics that are of interest to me are as follows:
-- Stories about misinformation we accumulate in our youths that cause us problems either then or later in life (similar to the segment of This American Life we listened to)
-- This year I'm teaching freshmen who have failed English 9 at least once. They are all affected in some way by gang violence (such as the killing this past weekend of the Zertuche boy). It would be interesting to hear some of their stories.
-- I have a collection of poems (and prose), called "Hunting Sacred," by an Acoma poet who recounts the ritual of hunting and seeking forgiveness of the prey. I also have several CDs of Native American drumming, chanting, and singing. Together, I think, these elements (along with others) could make an interesting multi-modal construction.

Podcasts

I grew up in what I now know was a magical time, although I then thought it was senseless cruelty. We were the only family in the neighborhood that did not own a television, and I was forced by default to get my media fixes by listening. I had an entire set of LPs (long-playing records) produced for radio by an organization named "Let's Pretend." These records, using only voice, Foley, and occasionally music, drew the listener actively into whatever story was being told. If the listener demanded a visual image of the story, he/she had to create it mentally. My father was a big radio fan, and whenever we drove anywhere with him, the family had to (or got to) listen to his favorite radio shows, Amos and Andy and Fibber McGee and Molly. Every episode of Fibber McGee and Molly (as far as I could tell) entailed one of them opening a closet in which, apparently, all of this couple's worldly goods were stored, followed by about five minutes of sound effects of stuff crashing, clanging, banging, plopping, and bouncing out of the closet. My father loved that moment and waited for it, and it never failed to disappoint him. I do not know if there was a name for this kind of humor -- perhaps sound gags -- what we now would call sight gags. These shows took full advantage of their auditory medium, as did the local radio of that day. For instance, a local radio station had a contest named something like 'name that sound' in which they would create some Foley effect such as slicing a watermelon or ripping wax paper and award cash prizes for identifying the sound.

Thus, it was a sort of poignant moment (well, two-plus hours) to sit and listen to these selections from This American Life. It was like being transported back in time to when people listened to (instead of watched) something -- and for a whole hour!! Although I enjoyed the two selections I chose, I realized I was able to sustain attention for an hour partly because each ("20 stories in 60 Minutes" and "A Little Bit of Knowledge") was broken up into smaller bits of stories told by various people with varying voices. However, I also listened to "Two Steps Back," because I had a great deal of inherent interest in it, as it was about a teacher who was thinking about quitting her job in frustration over meddling by bureaucrats. However, the production was too monotonous for me to sustain interest, having only two voices, a recorded news clip, and an occasional random jingle-like music bed.

Maybe it's because I am not from the northeast, but I find Ira Glass' voice curiously annoying. However, I found the segment "20 stories in 60 minutes" intriguing and amusing. It was interesting how some of the clips were designed intentionally to take advantage of the non-visual medium, such as Act Five, the sound of no hands clapping, in which all we hear are the sounds of scallops clapping. My nominations for best use of voices would have to be Act Six, the pee in the pudding clip by the two teenage boys and Act 11, etiquette, which has changed my image of unscrewing a jar lid indelibly forever.

In general, though, I felt that most of these bits did not use the full potential of the medium. Most used only voice when even a tiny punctuation, such as a few notes on a double bass or rattle of drum beats (such as in Act 19) could have made a huge difference. I felt similarly about "A Little Bit of Knowledge," but for some reason, I appreciated more the delivery of the presentations, as in the comedic pacing of, for instance, Modern Jackass. I really related to the theme of holding on to misinformation from the past, and I think I will propose something similar for the podcast I will be working on. The stories and the voices of this segment were great, but virtually bereft of, say, a music bed or any type of supporting sound effects. I remember a double bass line in Baked Chicken and a random Perry Como song after Tissue Box, but little else. On the clip And Daddy Makes three, the silence effectively underscored the gravity of the subject matter, but Sucker MC Squared could have benefited from at least some background sound. Maybe there was more audio support than I realized and it was so seamless I just missed it. Or maybe it's simply because I grew up with a wide array of purposeful sound effects.

The kairos of rap and other musings

[Edit posted at 7 a.m. Monday, September 22: Oops. I missed the "brief" in our instructions. For the brief part, skip down to the last paragraph. Sorry!]

I found these two articles to be the most engaging I have read this semester. Being sleep deprived, I hope I am able to link all my disparate thoughts about this information coherently.

Both the Selfe and Tagg articles advocate the recognition of sounds as "modes of knowledge" (Tagg) and urge the re-valuation of "aurality" (Selfe) as means of restoring power to disaffected or marginalized peoples. Selfe explores aurality in multiple forms, ranging from lecturing to story-telling and chanting, and relates the de-valuation of aurality during the 19th and 20th century to several socio-economic developments of the times. Whites were privileged, she says, by this emphasis on written composition, and marginalized groups were relegated to maintaining a more oral tradition. In speaking of Native Americans, Selfe compares the primacy of writing (as valued by Whites) to a type of colonialization.

In reading this, I was reminded of my stint as a journalist in the heart of Native American country. To the west was the Navajo Nation; to the south, the Zunis; and to the east were the Acoma, Laguna, and Cebolleta Pueblos. At the time, a group of Christian missionaries was working -- toiling, you might say, since they had been at it for many years -- on converting the Zuni language from a strictly oral to a written language. The coordinator of the program was clearly frustrated at the Zuni's resistance to her group's noble efforts. It has taken a long time to gain their trust, she said of the Zunis. I remember thinking, first, why would the white missionaries feel the need to encode someone else's language, and, second, what made them think the Zunis would want to cooperate with them in doing so? (As if the Zunis were going to hand over the last vestige of their culture to these outsiders...) The Native Americans I knew were sort of merry trickster characters who loved to put one over on Whitey. I could not help but think the Zunis were feeding them gibberish and having a big laugh about it over dinner that night. I believe the Native American oral tradition and the uniqueness of their spoken language affords them significant power (witness the importance of Navajo code talkers during WWII) that I can't imagine them relinquishing.

Through the Tagg article, I finally understand the enduring appeal of rap. Extending Tagg's argument about emergence of rock music, rap may be thought of as this generations' "appropriation of the seemingly uncontrollable forces of the environment" or "strategy for survival."

Nietzsche says, "Who defeats the power of semblance and reduces it to the status of a symbol? This power is music" (in The Dionsyiac World View). If music is "symbolized feelings," as Tagg says, rap -- even more than rock -- represents this generation's sense of "clock slavery and constant noise." Indeed, is not rap metronomic rhythm? Even the vocalists rock sideways in a metronomic fashion.

Concerning the link to the various sound sites, I was annoyed that so many of them were text-based. What's the point in that? I looked for sites that recorded Native American chanting but couldn't find one. However, I enjoyed Marcus Coates Dawn Chorus and would have liked to hear/see the entire video. I believe the Ocean Conservation Research Sound Laboratory site material related most closely to our readings. The recordings of the humpback whale and bearded seal, for instance, appear to be symbolized aurality, as Selfe might say. In the recording of the humpback whale and the LFAS sonar, I couldn't distinguish which sounds were organic and which were electronic; it seemed one cohesive symphony. The recorded cacophony of the merchant ship made me wonder if sea creatures would soon be faced with intrusive "acoustic horizons" that might influence their strategies for survival.
Cheers, Judy

politiblogs

The article/blog selections for the 9/17 post demonstrate the potential usage -- good and not so good -- for blogging in the political realm. They also demonstrate the incursion of advertising and its minion, public relations, into the field (genre?). Of course, it would seem naive not to believe that in a capitalist country advertising and PR would somehow not invade this fertile ground. The Walmart use of bloggers that Barbaro appears to be appalled about is simply a variation on an old PR practice and seems, well, inevitable. After all, Walmart knows a good, cheap deal when it sees one.

After viewing the political blogs, I would have to say that, regardless of the quality or content of the blog, we are going to seek out the political philosophy that coincides with that which is already ingrained in us, rather than approach a topic with our minds as a blank slate. Thus, the potential of blogs for political purposes would now appear to be reinforcement of existing thinking ("preaching to the choir") rather than creating converts to another way of thinking.

Some random thoughts about the political blogs we saw... McCain's blog was all about himself, compared to Obama's "here is what Obama people are doing" approach. As much as I love him, Tom Udall could use some help on his blog and on his photo in particular (he looks like he just ate a Bertie Botts booger jelly bean). I really liked David Maas' Swing State of Mind blog as a dynamic filter-type blog (I hope this designation is correct...).

blogging and community

As a regenerate blogging nay-sayer, I am discovering that blogging is (or certainly has the potential to be) much more than a forum for ranting. These five articles suggests a variety of uses of blogs for information management, self-expression, an alternative to traditional news-gathering and news-dissemination media, and community building, and social action. Of course, as in any genre the potential for the trivial also exists, as when blog celebrity Clancy Ratliff discusses her use of the Sweet Valley Twins for her masthead. Nevertheless, the potential for authentic, purposeful usage is immense.

Synthesizing (accurately or not...) the material in several of the articles, I decided the greatest potential offered by the blog is as a forum for dialectic, where two equally authoritative and informed individuals can engage in conversation (question and answer) to arrive at the "truth" or highest probability of the truth. This has important implications for both journalism and academia. In journalism, persons interested in a specific topic or issue can access entire text of speeches, position papers, or online interviews without the filter of the reporter's perceptions and biases. The ostensible result could be a better informed public (although this conclusion rests on the assumption that the public is motivated enough to actually seek out the material). Incidentally, I found it interesting that Walt Rubel, a LC Sun-News reporter, tacitly acknowledges the limitations of conventional journalism in his article in the Sunday paper (p. 1C), "Getting beyond the campaign distractions," when he steers readers to websites (albeit not blogs) for McCain, Obama, and independent views.

In addition, academic blogging seems to have huge potential for raising general awareness and understanding of critical issues. As Farrell notes, the constraints of conventional journalism have clouded the evolution/creationism ("intelligent design") debate to the point where scientists began expounding their views unmediated in blogs "that weave back and forth between the specialized language of academe and the vernacular of public debate." Such discourse cannot help, it seems, but leaven public understanding of critical issues. As Farrell states, blogging "democratizes the function of the public intellectual." Indeed, why should academic knowledge appear in papers written solely for a (relatively) tiny, elite group of scholars?

A common theme of most of these articles seems to be democratization, especially of information access and dissemination. As Farrell suggests, the time of the privileged discourse of the Forum has been replaced by the wider discourse of the Carnival (even with its potential for error and misuse).

Blog mates, what did you think about the Herring (et al.) article? Did anyone else besides me wish the guy from "Numbers" (the television show) could have been available to interpret? Also, I apologize for several typos in previous postings. I suppose I am too used to automatic spell checkers. See you Monday.