Jaws Trailer

Strangers on a Train Trailer

Faithful Elephants

Visual Essay on Literacy

This collection of images depicts mediums, other than personal communication, by which information seeps into my life and therefore require literacy to decode and translate into something meaningful. The visual impact that I hope to achieve is a connection to the reader/viewer by virtue of shared experience with these mediums. An attempt at visual coherence is through colors of the images and also vintage of the mediums. I specifically chose older versions (except for the computer because an old computer didn't have internet capabilities) because I wanted to make the point that these mediums have been around for awhile, even if they have not been studied in secondary classrooms focused on literacy before (as Selfe points out). No image has prominence over the others because the messages of the mediums they depict are all influential in my life and I don't know how to rank their importance without untangling that collective knowledge web. The order of images is roughly the order in my life in which the mediums became influential: I learned to read first, then discovered television, music, magazines, radio, and finally the internet. One note/question on citation: Selfe's directions on documenting images was completely new to me, and I've been using images from the internet for awhile without documenting them. Is Selfe's method common practice that should be emphasized and enforced with students? I've avoided the issue in this post by linking each image to the Flickr page where I found it. Is that sufficient?

Skinning, Modding, and Mashing Potatoes

Beach's statement about not pretending that we are technology experts in the classroom was comforting as I read the Jenkins piece and did not understand all of the technology terms. I decided to turn to an old reliable (the original wiki-- I think), Wikipedia, to discover the meanings of skinning, modding, and mashup. It turns out that skinning can mean changing the appearance (or "skin") of a computer program -- or drawing a character in a computer program. It can also be a new activity combining skipping and running -- or a controversial wrestling move involving "the placement of pressure on an opponent's rectum," also known as the "butt drag." Modding is a slang term for "modify," usually in reference to hardware or software. Mashup has subcategories, as in digital mashup (text, graphics, audio, video, animation), music mashup, video mashup, and web application hybrid mashup -- all related to combining (or mashing together) pieces of different things to create a new thing. I believe that Steve talked about mashups for a music presentation in Beach's class.

All of these terms are listed under the "expression" category that Jenkins describes as a form of participatory culture. These are ways of expressing new things by using parts of things that are already in existence. Jenkins writes, while on the subject of appropriation, that "all artists work within traditions; they all also violate conventions" (32). This statement and Jenkins' methods of expression listed above mean that creativity is accessible. Especially if the new model of knowledge is as a collective intelligence, a good artist, through a dialogic process, will take the knowledge that we have and show it to us in a different way in order to expand that knowledge.

The Standard of Standardized Tests

As a possible aid in dissecting dialects, I like the Urban Dictionary. There's quite a debate going on there about the term "Ebonics."

Smells Like Your Voice

Twice now "Smells Like Teen Spirit" has crept into our cohort's discussion of educational methodology. The first was during Maggie and Meaghan's music presentation (in December?) on cover songs for Rick Beach's class. The second was on Tuesday when Ms. Haug enlightened us on using the famous Nirvana song to teach tone and style. I think Ruth Culham would agree that Kurt and crew mastered this trait and knew how to draw the listener in and create a bond between the listener and the writer (103) -- so ripe was the song for personal connection that others took it and ran, with the result being one song performed in many different voices. Below are some of those voices, courtesy of a great (albeit not very original) resource for video in the classroom, YouTube.com.

If you like one in particular, please vote for it in the poll to the right...