I'm only three sessions in (at the time of writing) but already we've had Megan Heyward delve into the world of emerging digital media narratives, a poetry session that repositions well-known poems as part of a lively dramatic performance, and Karen Yager exploring the myriad ways of unlocking student creativity through multimodality and other lateral means.
It's an ongoing dialogue.
Will technology blanch out the creativity of our children? Or will it elevate the creativity of the next generation into an entirely new realm that will eventually be beyond the rest of us?
Will technology blanch out the creativity of our children? Or will it elevate the creativity of the next generation into an entirely new realm that will eventually be beyond the rest of us?
What can we, the English teacher, do to maintain relevance in the face of so many reflective surfaces? The black screens of smart phones and associated devices offer a literal reflection as well as a figurative one; a feedback loop of social media-enabled naval-gazing and validation-seeking that cuts our fingertips off. In a way, social media is an externalised extension of an internalised space - a world in which we swim against irresistable currents of conformity that stifle the bravery and experimentalism of a pen and paper in a finite room.
It's a world that is changing in rapid and unfathomable ways. The word 'navigate' couldn't be more apt - because that's what teachers need to do. We need to observe the 'stars' and plot a course through these emergent technologies that will allow a meeting ground between the content we teach and the app-heavy sedation of our screen-scrolling students.
Students have moved into a space where they are neither (and paradoxically both) producer and/or user - leading to the academic portmanteau 'produser'. This is a great term for describing that state of being both passive/active in relation to digital text-making. Students can create in contexts such as mindcraft, wiki sites, and social media apps; but their production of 'text' in this mode is also a result of their participation as a consumer. Check out this produsage site for a more in-depth explanation, courtesy of the work of Dr Axel Bruns.
If you're a kid of the 1980s or earlier, like me, you won't necessarily be a natural produser. But, rather than tell students how to use technology they've already deemed passe or irrelevant, we can make a venn diagram of sorts with them. They know the tech, we know the English/communication stuff, and in combining these two domains we can form a crossover space (that little oval in the middle of the venn diagram) where students can begin using digital arenas in increasingly sophisticated ways.
You may not know how to use an iPad to make a movie, but what you do know is how that movie should look when it's shown to an audience. Students, on the other hand, will have less of a problem operating MovieMaker on the iPad, but the products they inevitably create are not likely to reflect the filmmaking acumen of the cinematically-literate.Teacher and student can collaborate together here to forge a way ahead, and this is why technology will never make the knowledge held by the previous generation irrelevant.
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| Image from Wikipedia (also a great example of a prodused text). Thanks Wikipedia. |
Students have moved into a space where they are neither (and paradoxically both) producer and/or user - leading to the academic portmanteau 'produser'. This is a great term for describing that state of being both passive/active in relation to digital text-making. Students can create in contexts such as mindcraft, wiki sites, and social media apps; but their production of 'text' in this mode is also a result of their participation as a consumer. Check out this produsage site for a more in-depth explanation, courtesy of the work of Dr Axel Bruns.
If you're a kid of the 1980s or earlier, like me, you won't necessarily be a natural produser. But, rather than tell students how to use technology they've already deemed passe or irrelevant, we can make a venn diagram of sorts with them. They know the tech, we know the English/communication stuff, and in combining these two domains we can form a crossover space (that little oval in the middle of the venn diagram) where students can begin using digital arenas in increasingly sophisticated ways.
You may not know how to use an iPad to make a movie, but what you do know is how that movie should look when it's shown to an audience. Students, on the other hand, will have less of a problem operating MovieMaker on the iPad, but the products they inevitably create are not likely to reflect the filmmaking acumen of the cinematically-literate.Teacher and student can collaborate together here to forge a way ahead, and this is why technology will never make the knowledge held by the previous generation irrelevant.
