By positioning youth as “other,” adults fail to recognize or appreciate the ways in which youth use technology to connect with others, learn, and participate in public life.
I think this is a pivotal idea here ... this division of youth from adults, and casting them as some strange animal that uses technology in ways unimaginable ... as if it was learned through osmosis.
Our team has also found important gaps in access and participation, but the differences are quite nuanced and aren’t about a straightforward “digital divide.”
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Is there no comment opportunity on this blog? Am I missing it?
I feel like in different ways, we have each taken on the challenge of adding some texture to blanket proclamations about “kids these days.”
I appreciate adding texture and nuance to these conversations, and know I need to do a better job avoiding generalizations.
Everyone can be a maker, but not many are. The vast majority of children’s engagement with media consists of consuming media, with only a small portion devoted to creating content
Terry, this is what I referenced in a blog post some time ago and which you had some thoughts about the word choices being used, if I remember correctly.
enthusiastically received
Well, a friend, so not really a neutral reviewer ...
brainjamming
I like this word: brainjamming. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcBCh2tulkA
we did so, we solicited questions through various social media, and we made sure to address as many of them as we could. And then, we worked through the transcripts, again and again, clarifying our concepts, refining our arguments, shuffling the pieces to insure greater clarity and accessibility
I appreciate this "explaining how we did this" as a process statement.
They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.
very poetic
I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
Yes
I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know.
A powerful lesson .. a truth in America ... and a gift from a father to a son that all that comes before leads to ...
Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
I saw this reference in a review of the book ... amazing to think about ...
I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past.
A great lesson ...
I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one.
How did we all get hooked into that show and its underlying narrative?
But my history professors thought nothing of telling me that my search for myth was doomed, that the stories I wanted to tell myself could not be matched to truths.
What? Is that true? or perception of the past?
Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent?
Interesting ... and this is what we show and explain in school today, too, right? Peaceful protest ...
I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach.
This seems to be the center of this whole piece, in my opinion.
To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us.
This was the reality of despair. Or is the reality of despair. How do we fix this? How?
There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers
I don't agree. Maybe not uniquely. But evil, nonetheless.
What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.
Man. Powerful moment. I can see him. I can see his son. I see the shadows of history. And even in the sadness, I see something .. a glimmer. Perhaps, as a father, I am projecting. So be it. This is one of those moments, the lesson that will linger.
I was sad for you
This phrase makes the political so personal, as he intends. It really hits the heartstrings .. and I feel like I am intruding here, don't you? As if I shouldn't be reading this talk between father and son ... as if annotating in the margins is infringing on that bond that the writing is creating. Or is that me?
And I remembered that I had expected to fail.
This is a sad commentary on our times, when such an articulate man either can't find the words, or has the words but know they won't matter. Or something else I am not privy to.
everything is in the middle and nowhere simultaneously
A poem in the making here ....
Content is a shifty word. It can mean different things to different people."
Yep. And that's what has made these discussions so interesting ....
content can be the human element that enables students to see themselves in their learning and to imagine their own possibilities
I really like this point ....
the specific content you use is less important than whether it can be useful
Good point here, about the ideal of porous lines between disciplines (or that is how I interpret this). Learning in isolation has limited value. Making connections across content is "sticky learning."
content is political.
It comes with baggage and perspective and power ... and noticing all of those things is part of our own learning experience in the world.
"The holes are vital to the whole. "
Sarah's comment there at Wendy's blog has lingered for days with me .... Something about the gaps in between as the space where the learning really happens, and is hard to assess.
We've been filling this space with content, but how it connects and how it all moves us through our learning paths and root systems, is not content but the result of the content and the curriculum moving in orchestra
Here is that line between what something is (or might be) and how it impacts us (and whom we might become). Plus, using the orchestra metaphor really works for me, personally.
for me the content emerges in the conversation itself
Interesting, and brings to mind the power of writing and of talking through issues for understanding ...
Content is how we conjure and trigger our stories, in ourselves, and each other.
I love this statement, as it creates a powerful means of agency over content -- we make, and remix, the stories that make us who we are, and how we connect to others in the world.
You have caused me to spend a good few hours thinking about all this... and it's probably done me and my students some good!
I agree, and that is what sparks change and consideration -- a solid question along an interesting track ... and what is also interesting is how it make take time for it to sink in. Mulling it over ... that's part of the learning ...
the transfer of knowledge from one to another
Made easier by social spaces? Maybe.
find those conversations and resources that keep me engaged
and what matters here is that we have a choice ... we can leave, we can return, we can skip, we can jump .. but many students do not have that possibility in their classrooms (meaning: my classroom).
Do not be duped into thinking that you can win a battle against the powers that be – they are the powers that be because they took action, because they created something.
I am feeling as if this is resonating in our education circles about standardized testing and the testing industry, and who is making policy that shape the lives of our students and the shape of our classrooms. Push back. Create change.
Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come. (A Thousand Plateaus 4-5)
I admit -- this appeals to me, particularly shifting the idea of inquiry into the unknown map and the ability to understand we don't always know what is coming ahead of us. Be prepared for the unsteady ground afoot. Be open to the territory just over the horizon.
A Deleuzian aesthetic is predicated, at least in part, on change, movement, transformation, repositioning, shifting, flowing, mutating, multiplying, generating, and, of course, magic.
Action words ... what's it meant by magic?
Rhizome rather than root, molecular rather than molar, dynamic rather than static
Here we go ... the rhizome takes root
Action will always prevail. Reaction will always fail.
Yet, we begin with reaction, right? If it is strong enough, we move into action. I don't see the dichotomy here.
reflect
On this side, she is beautiful, alive, curious, eyes full of the moon. She is the moonless night. On that side, she is little more than a reflection. He sees that now. He sees that he does not know what he created in the margins of the page. She will be lost to him. She will not be lost to herself, though. Somewhere, someone will find her, or she will find them, and it will be as if she never disappeared into the story.
illustrating complexity
Time went. Time passed. Time went. She disappeared. It was not what she wanted. Her reader forgot about her. Her writer no longer know what to do with her. She went. She passed. She disappeared.
I am attempting to illustrate a passage of time
She pulled out her pen. Closed her eyes. Drew the passage of time as an ellipse, folding in on itself. Pinned her words to the outer edge. Jotted Simon to the inner sphere. Reached into the drawing and pulled it out, holding it all gently in her hand. Watched as her skin got old, wrinkled, and then young, smooth. Heard his voice. Tossed him time and hoped that he knew how to catch it, too.
You will not be reading what I wrote
And yet, faint echoes remained. She thought she saw Simon in here, in these words. She knew his voice, even when his voice was merely ghosts of meaning, made flat by the lack of links. What if she could find a space on the side of the page, hide amidst the annotations. What would she see when others came calling? Perhaps the moonless night of her birth would come in handy after all. She molded her will into the shadows and waited ...
limits of static text
This morning, she pushed her fingers up against the edge and felt the limits of static text. It felt like popcorn, all soft and edgy at the same time, and it crumbled in her fingers. She watched the static text drop to the floor and imagined the janitor in the morning, cleaning up the debris. What intrigued her now, though, was what remained after the static text disintegrated ...
You are clearly fictional.
She was born in the last moonless night of October, just before the change of seasons. To think of it now, he wondered if that had anything to with whom she would later become ... the reader wandering through Simon's blog. The only blog she read. The only words she could find that would bring some lights to her nights. Yes, she was fictional. But aren't we all? That was what he often wondered, as he wrote about her as if she never existed. Perhaps, she didn't.
I wanted to document things that I found to be important..for my son.
our audience keys the decisions we make ...
I can assure that that there is no secret digital native classes that I attend. I’m just like you. I have just spent a lot (and I mean A LOT) of time building and breaking things online.
Great message here ... we're all exploring, making, tinkering, discovering ...
You may want to combine them all.
I hope folks shift into more media making ...
Who are you becoming?
And how much agency do you have in "sculpting" that identity?
Sian Bayne's article entitled Smoothness and Striation in Digital Learning Spaces
Link, brother? Where's the link?
Nomad space is ‘smooth’, or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move to any other.
Hmmm ... beyond the cultural reference now to the Avatar television show/comic (not the James Camerson blue lagoon aliens), I like this way of describing the wandering thinker ...
Look
I will. I will look. I will look beyond. I will like for us beyond ..
I am a mapping story.
We seem to often return to the metaphor of maps, don't we? Perhaps it is the landscape of the unknown, of adventure awaiting. We don't imagine that the map might be the working of some madman's mind and only a faint echo of the real world. (more twists and knots)
My point here, is that I am not here without you.
And if you never hit "publish"? Then what, I wonder. Do I still reside in your mind as the imagined reader? Or do we know enough that I become halfway between imagined and known, even if I am not the reader there? But I am the reader here. (twisting us into knots, as I am apt to do)
I am not entirely sure.
And, Simon, you're not afraid to write anyway, which is why I love to see your words spin on my page from a half a world away. You always take me to some unknown space. Unknown, but not unwelcome.
Reflective practice is at the heart of learning and teaching.
Ahem on that.
you want to follow Keving @Dogtrax down wormholes of meaning go right ahead
Here's one wormhole right now, as a matter of fact. Check out the charting of every joke in Arrested Development AR Info See you on the other side ...
Few of us shared and digital front doors.
Perhaps it is a reaction of what it easiest to represent through the lens of the camera. The agency of the physical object both opens up pathways and hinders exploration. How many folks used screenshots to create their doors? Or videos? Animation? Abstract art? Plus, I wonder if it depends on the first few that were shown - did those mentor doors, so to speak, inspire and inhibit people? (A perennial question in the classroom when sharing mentor texts with students, right?)
Do numbers matter? Is there a difference between being a content curator and a creator? Is one more important than the other?
Great question. Yes, on one hand, they are interesting to get a sense of things. But the numbers are merely iceberg tips, right? Who knows how many folks are checking it out, watching, weaving in and out of the content over time. Those are the unknowable numbers ...
identities shift
Here is the main theme this year, right? How digital identities and offline worlds come together, collapse unto themselves (or, maybe not?)
The Cobweb
Perfect title
Where is the Internet’s memory, the history of our time? “It’s right here!” Kahle cries.
A poetic view of the archived world, always in flux
“Every time a light blinks, someone is uploading or downloading,” Kahle explains. Six hundred thousand people use the Wayback Machine every day, conducting two thousand searches a second. “You can see it.” He smiles as he watches. “They’re glowing books!” He waves his arms. “They glow when they’re being read!”
A visual representation of use ...
he once put the entire World Wide Web into a shipping container. He just wanted to see if it would fit. How big is the Web? It turns out, he said, that it’s twenty feet by eight feet by eight feet, or, at least, it was on the day he measured it. How much did it weigh? Twenty-six thousand pounds.
When the digital is physical ... it's a strange concurrence of ideas, right?
You can’t search it the way you can search the Web, because it’s too big and what’s in there isn’t sorted, or indexed, or catalogued in any of the many ways in which a paper archive is organized; it’s not ordered in any way at all, except by URL and by date.
Will we fix this? Will the fix make things better? Maybe we need this kind of disorganized chaos in order to stumble our way into discoveries. What do we miss when everything is searchable?
Kahle put the Web into a storage container, but most people measure digital data in bytes. This essay is about two hundred thousand bytes. A book is about a megabyte. A megabyte is a million bytes. A gigabyte is a billion bytes. A terabyte is a million million bytes. A petabyte is a million gigabytes. In the lobby of the Internet Archive, you can get a free bumper sticker that says “10,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes Archived.” Ten petabytes. It’s obsolete. That figure is from 2012. Since then, it’s doubled.
And so it goes, getting larger and yet, more crammed into memory boxes
The footnote, a landmark in the history of civilization, took centuries to invent and to spread. It has taken mere years nearly to destroy. A footnote used to say, “Here is how I know this and where I found it.” A footnote that’s a link says, “Here is what I used to know and where I once found it, but chances are it’s not there anymore.” It doesn’t matter whether footnotes are your stock-in-trade. Everybody’s in a pinch. Citing a Web page as the source for something you know—using a URL as evidence—is ubiquitous. Many people find themselves doing it three or four times before breakfast and five times more before lunch. What happens when your evidence vanishes by dinnertime?
If I footnote this article, with a reference to footnote, am I then meta-footnoting?
The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is—elementally—ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable.
As such, it disappears when we blink
The average life of a Web page is about a hundred days.
That's it? Here, I often think of permanence of things. So many words are merely fleeting ...
The shared experience of sitting through an entire film with no subtitles and laughing not only at a film you can barely understand but also the absurdity of the situation was something that probably wouldn’t have happened with just a general audience. Our audience knows they are part of a group, they recognize each other from the various screenings over the years.
This is a very powerful of our identity as a community, or even an audience.
I can still remember to this day, some twenty years later, that feeling of helpless suspension on the monkey bars. It’s the same feeling I get whenever I take on a new endeavor that I am unsure of.
I think we all get this feeling from time to time, and yet we learn more about ourselves and the world by pushing up against limits and fears. I think. I may have blanked on that. Your story reminds me a similar story, but mine involved a waterfall in upper Maine, where I finally climbed to the top and froze ... and remained frozen in place (I couldn't even find the mindset to climb down the way I climbed up). Finally, after close to 30 minutes (with friends yelling at me), I jumped. Once. I jumped once. But I jumped.
I have to admit, writing and telling my story fulfills a biological need for me just as much as the next girl, and using words is just as imperative to my psyche as painting is, but it is much less work and takes less commitment in order to delete (or burn) a paragraph or two (or ten pages, as it were) than whitewashing another canvas.
This is such a powerful quote here, as she thinks of the visual vs the word, and all I can think is: I am exactly the opposite, and how interesting it is that we all view how we express ourselves in such different ways -- depending on background, comfort and trying to say what we need to say ...
We are using the term phygital as a way of emphasizing that these are a class of objects that have not simply had some digital functionality embedded within then but are connected devices whose functionality and operation is designed to exist simultaneously in both virtual and physical space.
defining "phygital"
this paper is speculating on a future in which creating game objects that link the physical and the digital presents an exciting and practical opportunity for game designers. However, such objects require interaction design approaches that not only utilise understandings from product design and graphical user interface but also how they might effectively be combined dynamically.
Yep
Example Game/Interaction Spaces for Game Objects used with Screens.
This diagram showing interface interaction between screen space, player space and 3D space is intriguing
Dan Saffer suggests hidden affordances may actually be regarded as ‘discoverable’ (Saffer 2013) in recognition that designers may deliberately allow them to be revealed through accidental use or deliberate exploration. This is similar to the practice of game designers leaving hidden elements, or ‘easter eggs’, within their games that are discovered by accident, this practice hints at a possible interesting opportunity yet to be applied to game objects.
The use of 'easter eggs' inside game design -- purposeful hidden objects and pathways that fall outside the common map of the game - is fascinating. I have students who say they play games in order to find these elements.
the interaction design of phygital objects for games requires games designers to not only fully understand the virtual aspects the affordances they are perhaps used to, but also to extend these to include the affordances we associate with physical objects to ensure their overall game design does not cause confusion for the player.
agency considerations in design planning
Interaction Design as defined by Verplank
Interesting sketch here of equating emotions to our view of the world, and how we interact with information.
mimetic interfaces
When the virtual (game play) action is analogous to physical action .. ie, guitar hero: You play a guitar, not a joystick ..
phygita
Now, there's a word I have not seen before.
Internet of Things
I hate this term ... more marketing for businesses than reality in our lives.
games that use objects as physical game pieces to enhance the players’ interaction with virtual games.
Intriguing .. pushing the boundaries between the tangible and the virtual ...
identities emerge and collapse as we transverse different places and spaces
Ooooh. That sounds cool.
we will no longer focus on poetry
What? Dang.
Kayla
Just followed her, expanding her network ...
Connections ARE the content
yes! Thank you. love that.
real soft launch
I am a big fan of these kinds of slow launches, inviting folks in to tinker around. Good plan!
common definition
Perhaps we need new definitions ... get rid of the whole MOOC baggage ... I don't think of Walk My World as a MOOC, or didn't, until you mentioned it (guilt trip!)
public
Here is the #walkmyworld stream of annotations (if I am doing this right) WalkMyWorld Eh, what is link to all Hypothesis annotations? Is that handy?
Click on Share
I sort of wish the share option opened up either twitter or G+ for me (lazy bones) instead of kicking out just a link ... but still worked fine.
"#" sign is not necessary
That's good. I was wondering about that.
link text
Trying this out, sort of a meta-link ...
Copy your image url into the code.
How's this?
Highlight Text
highlighted ...
Chrome Extension*
I like the use of extensions in browsers. Makes the act of annotation easy.
all the idiosyncratic jargon
Good band name ...
Italics are a good way for a writer to telegraph what he means by telling you how to say it in your head, but they seem informal to use. Are they?
That's what I said! See earlier annotation. Citing myself here. ChaChing!
Nathan Heller’s an ignoramus. He really does not know what he’s talking about. He said that in the sentence “It is I” that “I” is the subject of the sentence, which is just a howler. Sentences don’t have two subjects. He is doing exactly what I said one should not do, which is to confuse meaning, case, and grammatical relations, which is what he does in that preposterous claim. If you were to say, “I think we should break up, but it’s not you; it’s
Whoah. Thems fighting words. (no doubt, they would argue that thems is not a real world. But I stake my ground in this annotation!). <- do I need this period if I already used punctuation inside of the parenthesis?
Hyperbole has probably been around as long as language has been around.
he exaggerates .... :)
how a transcript of a talk given extemporaneously does not read well on the printed page
I was thinking of this the other day, as I was working on a podcast. Winging it came out messy. Writing it first and then reading it was neater (in sound) but came out sort of stilted and formal. Worked to find the balance between ... did not quite succeed
italics
Aha!
Steven Pinker thinks about writing. As a linguist, he thinks about writing.
Interesting use of emphasis by the writer here, writing about someone writing about writing. This simple observation reminds me of the complexity of translating our written text, as we hear it in our heads, to someone else reading, outside of the context of what we write. I wonder if Pinker ever thinks about this ... probably