It was great to have some comments from my classmates and Dr Nelson regarding my digital story. The sharing that Dr Towndrow had with Siti, which I "tuned in" to was helpful as well. At the end of the day, I came home and made some changes according to those comments. Some of the changes I made include change in font type as suggested by Dr Nelson, slowing down some of the scenes as suggested by Joshua, making the background music softer at some parts as suggested by Eula, and use only meaningful transitions as suggested Dr Towndrow.
Thank you so much, professors and friends :)
I think I have my final product and am now gearing up to the presentation next week. But I must say that it is so hard to concentrate with all the deadlines and a pending quiz creeping up on me. I am telling myself to stay focused and hang in there. I remember that my PE teacher used to say to me that the last two rounds of the 2.4km run is really all in the mind. I think it is the same here. It is all in the mind.
All the best to you too, my friends!
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Friday, March 26, 2010
Neomillennial Learning Styles
As I was reading the article assigned for this week, I was thinking to myself that the learning styles sounded familiar. I believe some schools, including the one that I teach at is trying to achieve the learning styles described in the article. However, I am not sure if there are schools that have witnessed the emergence of these learning styles in their students.
I think I have had the privilege to witness a few students who displayed one or two of the learning styles. One common trait that I see among these few students are motivation to learn and keen interest in their work. Most of my other students are either not used to the lack of spoon feeding, looking for short cuts, or are distracted with games, having fun and so on. So, agency is one of the key contributing factors here.
I agree with that which was raised in class about scaffolding as well. The success of this lies in well designed tasks as well as teachers with the relevant skills and experience.
So, to me, it is a great idea but not an easy one to achieve at all. Besides the above,it would also need full support from all involved, including the management, teachers, parents, students, and the policy makers too.
I think I have had the privilege to witness a few students who displayed one or two of the learning styles. One common trait that I see among these few students are motivation to learn and keen interest in their work. Most of my other students are either not used to the lack of spoon feeding, looking for short cuts, or are distracted with games, having fun and so on. So, agency is one of the key contributing factors here.
I agree with that which was raised in class about scaffolding as well. The success of this lies in well designed tasks as well as teachers with the relevant skills and experience.
So, to me, it is a great idea but not an easy one to achieve at all. Besides the above,it would also need full support from all involved, including the management, teachers, parents, students, and the policy makers too.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
E learning
The story that I have in mind is a reflection of how parents are so busy today that they tend to neglect their children. The story is mainly directed at mothers to serve as a form of reminder rather than to reprimand or to lay blame.
Basically, I wish to use mainly pictures to invoke memories of one's child from the day they were a foetus and through the years that they grow. I am using Rod Stewart's song, "Have I told you lately" to put my main message across - that is, to get mothers to ask themselves if they have been so busy that they have neglected their children, so much so that they have not told them lately that they love their children.
On its own, the pictures should be invoke nostalgia while the song may be one sung to a spouse or girlfriend/boyfriend. Put them together and they would bring the meaning I intend across.
Throughout the story, I will intentionally not include voice or subjects' direct eye contact with the audience until the end when a child will be seen asking his mother if she would play with him. In doing so, I hope to make this scene the most powerful and strong in that it represents a need for the viewer to take a stand on the issue that I have been trying to bring across.
So here's my attempt at putting it all in a time structure. The double vertical line is a transition effect of flipping the page which is used to signify a new "chapter."
Basically, I wish to use mainly pictures to invoke memories of one's child from the day they were a foetus and through the years that they grow. I am using Rod Stewart's song, "Have I told you lately" to put my main message across - that is, to get mothers to ask themselves if they have been so busy that they have neglected their children, so much so that they have not told them lately that they love their children.
On its own, the pictures should be invoke nostalgia while the song may be one sung to a spouse or girlfriend/boyfriend. Put them together and they would bring the meaning I intend across.
Throughout the story, I will intentionally not include voice or subjects' direct eye contact with the audience until the end when a child will be seen asking his mother if she would play with him. In doing so, I hope to make this scene the most powerful and strong in that it represents a need for the viewer to take a stand on the issue that I have been trying to bring across.
So here's my attempt at putting it all in a time structure. The double vertical line is a transition effect of flipping the page which is used to signify a new "chapter."
Thursday, March 11, 2010
equity and equality- is it possible?
"...technology does not transform learning and literacy by itself, but only in conjunction with other social and economic factors." (Warschauer, 2007)
With issues that stem from social and economic factors, coupled with its' rippling effect on access to and acquisition of multiliteracies that may lead to a perpetuation and extension of digital divide, implementing multiliteracies in the classroom seem so daunting.
However, all is not lost, it seems.
"Competence in traditional literacies is often a gateway to successful entry into new literacies." (Dr Towndrow's slides) I would like to stretch this a little further - if good readers and writers have a better foundation to multiliteracies, then factors and actions that lead to good readers and writers are also the same factors and actions that lead to successful acquisition of multiliteracies.
Here's how I look at it-"students with high SES gain more from at-home computer use." Likewise, studies in traditional literacies have also shown that children from higher SES backgrounds tend to be better prepared and more school-ready when they enter kindergarten, and subsequently performed better academically and socially.
So does that mean that fate is sealed for those who come from low SES families? The good news is that researchers have also shown through their studies that parent involvement and attitude may be a stronger predictor of a child's academic and social performance in school than SES. That is to say that if we compare a child from a high SES family who is mostly left to the care of a grandparent, nanny, or maid, and has little or just some engagement with parents in terms of guidance, discipline, and coaching in terms acquisition of literacy skills with a child from a low SES family with at least one parent who is actively involved in these areas, the child from low SES family may be in a better position to do well academically and socially.
Hence, is parent involvement can have positive influence on traditional literacies, it could have similar positive influence on mulitliteracies.
With that in mind, I think that educators and policy-makers need to influence parent involvement. Parents must see the need for quantity and quality engagement with their children as a key to successful acquiistion of traditional literacies and entry into new literacies.
On top of that, we need to pitch lessons at students' needs, ability, and context. In fact, today's news about Chinese lessons to be tailored to ability is on a similar track. And I understand that many schools in Singapore already group students according to their abilities in different areas so as to pace the teaching based on the students' ability.
With issues that stem from social and economic factors, coupled with its' rippling effect on access to and acquisition of multiliteracies that may lead to a perpetuation and extension of digital divide, implementing multiliteracies in the classroom seem so daunting.
However, all is not lost, it seems.
"Competence in traditional literacies is often a gateway to successful entry into new literacies." (Dr Towndrow's slides) I would like to stretch this a little further - if good readers and writers have a better foundation to multiliteracies, then factors and actions that lead to good readers and writers are also the same factors and actions that lead to successful acquisition of multiliteracies.
Here's how I look at it-"students with high SES gain more from at-home computer use." Likewise, studies in traditional literacies have also shown that children from higher SES backgrounds tend to be better prepared and more school-ready when they enter kindergarten, and subsequently performed better academically and socially.
So does that mean that fate is sealed for those who come from low SES families? The good news is that researchers have also shown through their studies that parent involvement and attitude may be a stronger predictor of a child's academic and social performance in school than SES. That is to say that if we compare a child from a high SES family who is mostly left to the care of a grandparent, nanny, or maid, and has little or just some engagement with parents in terms of guidance, discipline, and coaching in terms acquisition of literacy skills with a child from a low SES family with at least one parent who is actively involved in these areas, the child from low SES family may be in a better position to do well academically and socially.
Hence, is parent involvement can have positive influence on traditional literacies, it could have similar positive influence on mulitliteracies.
With that in mind, I think that educators and policy-makers need to influence parent involvement. Parents must see the need for quantity and quality engagement with their children as a key to successful acquiistion of traditional literacies and entry into new literacies.
On top of that, we need to pitch lessons at students' needs, ability, and context. In fact, today's news about Chinese lessons to be tailored to ability is on a similar track. And I understand that many schools in Singapore already group students according to their abilities in different areas so as to pace the teaching based on the students' ability.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
The picture is starting to take shape
Reading the two articles assigned for this week, I am beginning to see digital literacy and its relevance taking shape in my mind. I recall having so many questions some weeks back and I am glad that I am starting to find answers to those questions.
With the use of actual examples in both articles, the concepts, such as how resemiotization is played out in the example of parents moving from iconic to symbolic significance, become easy to understand. Indeed, with the aid of both images and text, the concepts come across clearer than if it had been explained in words alone.
I also noticed that some of the earlier discussions we had in class are presented in the readings this week. Some of which are as follow;
Paige Ware's article
- she said, "...individuals must be able to do much more than decode and encode language..." (p.39) Decode and encode are what I had learnt in my Uni days and it is also what we still teach! It's time to change.
- we did an article about powerpoint at the beginning of this course but the drawback presented here is slightly different and it is definitely something that I see in my students' work. They are doing mere cut and paste, sometimes to the extent that there is a lack of good organisation of thoughts between slides. In Ware's words, this is "information-retrieval learning." I recall sharing this observation in my students previously too.
-on pg 38, she said that "..not all youth participate in the types of literacy-rich, out-of school digital worlds documented in current research, and they therefore have not yet developed a rich base of experience with digital literacy." Some of my classmates raised this point several times in the past weeks.
- on pg 42, she said, "Values in these in-class uses of multimedia presentations were completion, correctness, and coherence. For a typical assessment rubric,..." and on pg 47, "...there is a great deal of pressure to move students through the curriculum swiftly enough to leave time to practice for high-stakes exam." This is about assessment and the society's perception which were raised by Joshua and team during their presentation
Paige Ware's article confirmed the concerns and reservations that I have about ICT as I have experienced it myself in my teaching. At the same time, it sheds lights on how these challenges may be overcome(Discussion and conclusion in the article). "Multimedia exploration does not have to be mutually exclusive with activities that draw explicit attention to linguistics aspects of texts." (p. 49)
Dr Nelson's article
It was a good thing that we discussed some of the terms and concepts raised in this article before the break. Without it, words like heterogeneity, hybridity, transformation, transduction, synaesthesia, and epistomological commitments would have been difficult for me to understand.
- the first line in the introduction reminds me of the outdated encode-decode concept
- on pg 57, Dr Nelson said, "...we do speak and write in re-combinations of the words and ideas of others." This reminds me of Leo Burnett, an advertiser who started his advertising agency in the 60s and whose agency is now one of the largest in the world, said, "The secret of all effective originality in advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships." Perhaps this new relationship in today's context lies in multimodality.
- on the same pg, Dr Nelson shared "...the growing salience of non-linguistic forms of communication...is perhaps best exemplified by the ubiquity of the Internet..." This same point was raised when we discussed the New London Group article
- on pg 59, Dr Nelson shared that synaesthesia "refers to a process of emergence, where meanings presented in two or more co-present semiotic modes, e.g. visual/pictorial and oral/linguistics, combine in such as way that new forms of meaning may obtain, in the (loosely) gestalt sense of a whole that is irreducible to and represents more than the sum of its parts." I recall this was pointed out to us when Su and team showed a collage that had a sun and accompanying text
- through the example of Emma and Bonnie, I can now see how transduction helped authors to make certain realisations and understanding, and how students may benefit through the use of ICT in their learning (pg 66 and 67). I also see the possible benefits of "noticeability factor." I am now much more convinced that "...our students and ourselves, need the highest level of understanding of the semiotic workings and affordances of language, as well as of other modes, in order to enact and facilitate powerful personal expression."(p 72)
However, I wonder if I could be as conscious and intentional in creating my own digital story. Can I "recombine these communication resources so as to bend them to her/his expressive will" as Dr Nelson puts it on pg 72?
Was it Ohler who shared that we as educators need to support and facilitate this learning through the use of ICT? Now that I am convinced of this need, my next question is how do I play this role within the limitations that have been raised?
With the use of actual examples in both articles, the concepts, such as how resemiotization is played out in the example of parents moving from iconic to symbolic significance, become easy to understand. Indeed, with the aid of both images and text, the concepts come across clearer than if it had been explained in words alone.
I also noticed that some of the earlier discussions we had in class are presented in the readings this week. Some of which are as follow;
Paige Ware's article
- she said, "...individuals must be able to do much more than decode and encode language..." (p.39) Decode and encode are what I had learnt in my Uni days and it is also what we still teach! It's time to change.
- we did an article about powerpoint at the beginning of this course but the drawback presented here is slightly different and it is definitely something that I see in my students' work. They are doing mere cut and paste, sometimes to the extent that there is a lack of good organisation of thoughts between slides. In Ware's words, this is "information-retrieval learning." I recall sharing this observation in my students previously too.
-on pg 38, she said that "..not all youth participate in the types of literacy-rich, out-of school digital worlds documented in current research, and they therefore have not yet developed a rich base of experience with digital literacy." Some of my classmates raised this point several times in the past weeks.
- on pg 42, she said, "Values in these in-class uses of multimedia presentations were completion, correctness, and coherence. For a typical assessment rubric,..." and on pg 47, "...there is a great deal of pressure to move students through the curriculum swiftly enough to leave time to practice for high-stakes exam." This is about assessment and the society's perception which were raised by Joshua and team during their presentation
Paige Ware's article confirmed the concerns and reservations that I have about ICT as I have experienced it myself in my teaching. At the same time, it sheds lights on how these challenges may be overcome(Discussion and conclusion in the article). "Multimedia exploration does not have to be mutually exclusive with activities that draw explicit attention to linguistics aspects of texts." (p. 49)
Dr Nelson's article
It was a good thing that we discussed some of the terms and concepts raised in this article before the break. Without it, words like heterogeneity, hybridity, transformation, transduction, synaesthesia, and epistomological commitments would have been difficult for me to understand.
- the first line in the introduction reminds me of the outdated encode-decode concept
- on pg 57, Dr Nelson said, "...we do speak and write in re-combinations of the words and ideas of others." This reminds me of Leo Burnett, an advertiser who started his advertising agency in the 60s and whose agency is now one of the largest in the world, said, "The secret of all effective originality in advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships." Perhaps this new relationship in today's context lies in multimodality.
- on the same pg, Dr Nelson shared "...the growing salience of non-linguistic forms of communication...is perhaps best exemplified by the ubiquity of the Internet..." This same point was raised when we discussed the New London Group article
- on pg 59, Dr Nelson shared that synaesthesia "refers to a process of emergence, where meanings presented in two or more co-present semiotic modes, e.g. visual/pictorial and oral/linguistics, combine in such as way that new forms of meaning may obtain, in the (loosely) gestalt sense of a whole that is irreducible to and represents more than the sum of its parts." I recall this was pointed out to us when Su and team showed a collage that had a sun and accompanying text
- through the example of Emma and Bonnie, I can now see how transduction helped authors to make certain realisations and understanding, and how students may benefit through the use of ICT in their learning (pg 66 and 67). I also see the possible benefits of "noticeability factor." I am now much more convinced that "...our students and ourselves, need the highest level of understanding of the semiotic workings and affordances of language, as well as of other modes, in order to enact and facilitate powerful personal expression."(p 72)
However, I wonder if I could be as conscious and intentional in creating my own digital story. Can I "recombine these communication resources so as to bend them to her/his expressive will" as Dr Nelson puts it on pg 72?
Was it Ohler who shared that we as educators need to support and facilitate this learning through the use of ICT? Now that I am convinced of this need, my next question is how do I play this role within the limitations that have been raised?
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Looking at digital stories - continued
As you may have noticed, I did not have a graphical representation of the patterns although I did discuss it in my last blog entry. I tried that yesterday but it is a really hard nut to crack.
So, I tried to do it again this morning. Sadly, I did not manage to do so but gladly, I have discovered a few new points in the process of trying to create my graphical representation that I would like to share.
Images:
- The first two images index friendship or the lack of while the third image(Tanya) index true friend. This part, together with the voice over serves as the Abstract(Labov).
- The graphic that contains skeleton index death but together with the words No Fear superimposed on the graphics, this transforms the meaning to what the voice over says "facing death give her more strength to live." This part, together with the voice over serves as the Orientation(Labov).
-image of two garden chairs index lack of friendship
- multiple images of Tanya's work which changes the pace of the stroytelling via images collectively indexes the determination, strength and Tanya's cause.
I believe he CODA is the drawing at the end, which unfortunately, I do not understand....
So, I tried to do it again this morning. Sadly, I did not manage to do so but gladly, I have discovered a few new points in the process of trying to create my graphical representation that I would like to share.
Images:
- The first two images index friendship or the lack of while the third image(Tanya) index true friend. This part, together with the voice over serves as the Abstract(Labov).
- The graphic that contains skeleton index death but together with the words No Fear superimposed on the graphics, this transforms the meaning to what the voice over says "facing death give her more strength to live." This part, together with the voice over serves as the Orientation(Labov).
-image of two garden chairs index lack of friendship
- multiple images of Tanya's work which changes the pace of the stroytelling via images collectively indexes the determination, strength and Tanya's cause.
I believe he CODA is the drawing at the end, which unfortunately, I do not understand....
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Looking at digital stories
The digital story that I have picked is Tanya by Monte Hallis http://www.storycenter.org/stories/index.php?cat=2
The author grabbed my attention with her opening line that she never had a lot of friends. As she said this, the viewer sees a picture of an empty swing. The swing reminds me of childhood, a time when friends are made easily, and friendships are innocently genuine and unpretentious. An empty swing is hence a simple and yet powerful picture that symbolises the lack of true friends, which unfortunately seems to become a fact of life as one grows older. This clever combination of verbal words and image, which I have come to know as synaesthesia, had me hooked on the story immediately. There were several instances of this clever combination throughout the story. To name another one - the following picture of a central frame that is surrounded by many smaller repeated pictures as she spoke about being shy and confusing friendship with popularity. How apt!
However, I did not finish watching it the first time round even though it was only one-and-a-half minutes long. I think I lost interest because I had to put some effort to listen to the voice over in order to follow the story. The storytelling relied rather greatly on the voice over, which were difficult to hear at times with the loud background music. So I gave up midway through the story.
I went on to look at other stories but somehow, I decided to give Tanya another chance. I looked at it again. This time, I made an effort to try to make out what Monte Hallis said from beginning to the end.
Now, besides the first part that was well executed as shared earlier, Monte Hallis made clever use of silence in her storytelling. The silence is almost like the silence of her disbelief that Tanya knows her middle name. To me, it is also a revelation of the true friendship that they had.
While I did find the music a little too loud, I found that the timing for the line, “Ooh I hate to see her go” when she stopped speaking. That tells me that Tanya had passed away when Monte Hallis put this story together.
I did a search and found that Los Angeles Times carried the story about Tanya Shaw who first tried to find adoption for her two daughters. When that failed, she decided to set up Tanya’s Children, an agency top help single mothers with AIDS find adoptive parents. So I think Monte Hallis could possibly have created this story to recover emotionally from the loss of her friend, to remember the true friend she had, and to help her friend to continue her work in setting up Tanya’s Children.
I could not understand the meaning behind the drawing that ended the story and the one shown when she spoke about Tanya’s dream. Perhaps she could have added a subtitle or text over the drawing so clueless people like me could have some leads to draw conclusions from. Contrasting this with “Lyfe-N-Rhyme,” I see how useful the subtitles are and how they can serve as “visual boundary signals” that “marks the plot.”
With regards to larger semiotic patterns, I think the author used images to anchor every main point that she wants to put across. This is consistent throughout the story except the part when the author spoke about Tanya telling her story. Here, the change in images took a faster pace. I also believe that the length of the voice over and the number of pictures were decided upon based on a key criterion that both should stop as the singer sings the line, “Ooh I hate to see her go.” So, graphically, we can almost look at each picture, and one key point that is put across using one or two lines through the voice over, with the music running along until that crucial line, as shared earlier, during when everything fades out into a white screen.
The author grabbed my attention with her opening line that she never had a lot of friends. As she said this, the viewer sees a picture of an empty swing. The swing reminds me of childhood, a time when friends are made easily, and friendships are innocently genuine and unpretentious. An empty swing is hence a simple and yet powerful picture that symbolises the lack of true friends, which unfortunately seems to become a fact of life as one grows older. This clever combination of verbal words and image, which I have come to know as synaesthesia, had me hooked on the story immediately. There were several instances of this clever combination throughout the story. To name another one - the following picture of a central frame that is surrounded by many smaller repeated pictures as she spoke about being shy and confusing friendship with popularity. How apt!
However, I did not finish watching it the first time round even though it was only one-and-a-half minutes long. I think I lost interest because I had to put some effort to listen to the voice over in order to follow the story. The storytelling relied rather greatly on the voice over, which were difficult to hear at times with the loud background music. So I gave up midway through the story.
I went on to look at other stories but somehow, I decided to give Tanya another chance. I looked at it again. This time, I made an effort to try to make out what Monte Hallis said from beginning to the end.
Now, besides the first part that was well executed as shared earlier, Monte Hallis made clever use of silence in her storytelling. The silence is almost like the silence of her disbelief that Tanya knows her middle name. To me, it is also a revelation of the true friendship that they had.
While I did find the music a little too loud, I found that the timing for the line, “Ooh I hate to see her go” when she stopped speaking. That tells me that Tanya had passed away when Monte Hallis put this story together.
I did a search and found that Los Angeles Times carried the story about Tanya Shaw who first tried to find adoption for her two daughters. When that failed, she decided to set up Tanya’s Children, an agency top help single mothers with AIDS find adoptive parents. So I think Monte Hallis could possibly have created this story to recover emotionally from the loss of her friend, to remember the true friend she had, and to help her friend to continue her work in setting up Tanya’s Children.
I could not understand the meaning behind the drawing that ended the story and the one shown when she spoke about Tanya’s dream. Perhaps she could have added a subtitle or text over the drawing so clueless people like me could have some leads to draw conclusions from. Contrasting this with “Lyfe-N-Rhyme,” I see how useful the subtitles are and how they can serve as “visual boundary signals” that “marks the plot.”
With regards to larger semiotic patterns, I think the author used images to anchor every main point that she wants to put across. This is consistent throughout the story except the part when the author spoke about Tanya telling her story. Here, the change in images took a faster pace. I also believe that the length of the voice over and the number of pictures were decided upon based on a key criterion that both should stop as the singer sings the line, “Ooh I hate to see her go.” So, graphically, we can almost look at each picture, and one key point that is put across using one or two lines through the voice over, with the music running along until that crucial line, as shared earlier, during when everything fades out into a white screen.
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