My Words

I believe the quotes I picked tell a good story of these two articles. These two articles make a whole of “Decoding Digital Pedagogy”. The reason I picked these two as a whole is that these two articles make me rethink the LMS (learning management System) and relate the discussion to 21st century literacy and digital storytelling.

LMS is a mistake and limits teaching and learning. The reason I like LMS is that this kind of system provides a space for the materials and make all the materials digital and keep these materials in the space for a significant long time. In this sense, LMS is much better than notes-taking only classroom. However, I have to admit that LMS JUST relocate the materials used for instruction like articles, quizzes, etc., and interaction and collaboration are only achieved in real classroom setting. So, does this mean that it is not the time for us to apply digital pedagogy? I don’t think so.

Digital teaching and learning are not about the form or the tool we take for teaching. The use of digital tools is not to set up once and use forever without changes. How these technologies changed the way we interpret and communicate should be paid attention. About digital teaching and learning, the workshop done by 21st century literacy group provides several good sources (Good Job!), and digital storytelling is also a good way.

There are some overlapping between 21st century literacy and digital storytelling. The similarity about these two concepts is that students can gain authority and express themselves by using the technology in digital forms. Creativity is seen from the product and the process of producing involves collaboration, inquiry and writing and so on. Students, seen as agent in the creation, have their own voice to say something. Like digital storytelling, students can tell their own stories in the ways they like. This type of storytelling allow sorts of methods, models, genres and voices to involve.

Digital tools are functioning as powerful sponsors and provide more accesses for people to the resources and know more about literacy.

One impressive thing I got from Words at Work and Play is that the different effects brought by different playing. In the first generation, children played with their hands touching and got better performance on subjects learning when they went to school; however, when coming to the third generation in the book, children played more with technology and digital tools and were good at technology using and collaboration. These examples are also the evidence that people would develop literate ability with different focus when the sponsors are different.

The use of digital tools is to have more possibilities rather than relocation of materials and the center of the use of digital tools are students. I like a question asked in part 2 most: “Where is my authority now that all authority is a Google search away?” And the most important question that Morris thinks, which the most interesting question I think is: “What happens when learning is removed from the classroom and exposed to the entirety of the digital landscape?”

Beautiful exact quotes from the article:

• Decoding Digital Pedagogy, pt. 1: Beyond the LMS By Sean Michael Morris

http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/Journal/files/Beyond_the_LMS.html

Not all teaching happens like this. Not all teachers are pedagogues, nor need they be. There is a place for all styles of classroom practice, I think, just as there is a place for learners of all capabilities and approaches.

The invention of the LMS (Learning Management System) was a mistake.

No matter how creative and inspired the teacher or pedagogue behind the wheel, the LMS is no match for the wideness of the Internet. It was born a relic — at its launch utterly irrelevant to its environment and its user.

And worse, the LMS convinced us that teaching online was not only possible, it was easy — that digital pedagogy was a mere work of relocation.

The LMS largely erased mindfully aware teaching, and made excuses for unconscionable practice.

The persistence of the onerous LMS, and the ways learners have already adopted the patterns and habits of the learning within it, indicates that we are not ready to teach online

But just as the pedagogue will enter a room and rearrange the tables and chairs to suit his purpose, so too will the digital pedagogue happily hack the LMS, opening it to the wider web, or using it as a portal to a more expanded learning environment.

The digital pedagogue looks at the options, refuses the limitations of the LMS, invites her students to participate in — indeed, create — networked learning.

For some, teaching begins with authority and expertise. For the digital pedagogy, teaching begins with inquiry.

Pedagogy has at its core timeliness, mindfulness, and improvisation. Pedagogy concerns itself with the instantaneous, momentary, vital exchange that takes place in order for learning to happen.

• Decoding Digital Pedagogy, pt. 2: (Un)Mapping the Terrain By Jesse Stommel

http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/Journal/files/Unmapping_the_Terrain_of_Digital_Pedagogy.html

You can’t outsource digital pedagogy, because it is inextricably bound up in the work of teaching and learning. Digital pedagogy is not a path through the woods. It’s a compass (one that often takes several people working in concert to use).

Digital pedagogy demands that we rethink power relations between students and teachers — demands we create more collaborative and less hierarchical institutions for learning — lest we use computers to replicate the vestigial structures of industrial-era education.

The digital pedagogue teaches her (teacher) tools, doesn’t let them teach her(teacher).

“We must develop a participative pedagogy,” writes Howard Rheingold, “assisted by digital media and networked publics, that focuses on catalyzing, inspiring, nourishing, facilitating, and guiding literacies essential to individual and collective life in the 21st century.”

Our group is digital storytelling. The sources I picked up are two videos: a digital storytelling done by a student and a talk by Glynda Hull. In the video, Hull thinks that “… literacy is being considered as social practice, consists different sets of skills, knowledge and technologies”. From the storytelling history from Wikipedia, storytelling has developed for a long time, from information convey to a new type of literacy. Digital storytelling makes any people can be the storyteller and the new form of storytelling allows more people engage in the storytelling process. Also, what I see from the DS106 class, for me as a future teacher, storytelling can be a good way to integrate researches and re-organize the information in certain way. To know more about Glynda Hull, I found case studies done by Glynda Hull “Crafting an Agentive Self: Case Studies on Digital Storytelling”. Interesting, one case is the student video that I watched. The video can be considered as a digital storytelling product and helps foster agency. From the case study, the student gained his own agency and said something about his life in his own voice.

About our group’s work so far, different thoughts are considered and we make a popcorn videos by organizing the information related to the thoughts. The interesting things about digital storytelling would be:

1. Media: people can use different platforms/medias as tools to convey themselves. The media we have known so far are Youtube videos, Porpcornjs project, Xtranormal, etc.

2. Voice: In the same storytelling, we can integrate multiple voices and retain the information in different forms.

What I am interested in is how to have interactive stories by digital storytelling. The way our group is trying to have every participant provide a keyword and we make a popcorn video based on the keyword by videos and pictures collected based on keyword. The popcorn video would tell a great story.

Shirley Brice Heath “Words at Work and Play”

When starting reading, I really liked the stories Shirley described in the book, and the stories show the society, people and American culture from another entry point— descendent families. The book is to know how people develop and learn the literacy, like the subtitle it is “Three Decades in Family and Community Life”. I read the last three chapters carefully. My feeling is that I know some social practices, however, I feel literacy and literacy learning is more complex than I thought. The most important are community and social practice.

For children, play is essential in their learning process. Before technology like videogames and internet gets into people’s life, children would draw and sketch their ideas by hand, figure, pen and paper. This would be the reason why children now have hard time outlining ideas. Oral, written and visualized drawing/symbols are the important ways for children to learn and practice. Using visualized tools like drawing wisely would help children learn and develop, and forcing children into written answers is not necessary. From Shirley’s example, to help children who are not used to written-only style, sponsors work as an important role to help children keep their interest.

Nowadays, teenagers have more interaction with friends instead of parents. In the group activities with friends and classmates, they practice and learn how to collaborative during learning process. It is interesting to read how children do the work. They are doing multimedia writing and use the language wisely depending on the audience. The language they used when they were doing collaborative work is very helpful for teachers to shorten the distance between students and teacher in the classroom, like different use of pronouns, questions, etc.

Although there are so many stories in this book, social, economic, political factors are always influencing people and their life. Again, all these stories demonstrate that literacy and literacy learning is social, and social practices, such as play, games, sports, schools, collaboration and so on, help people to learn during people’s whole life. Sponsors help people connect with access to sources, practices and influence people’s choices. Self-learning is also very important in literacy learning. It is very hard to separate all these factors to examine literacy and literacy learning, and these factors interrelate and interact with each other like nodes in a network. It would be interesting to see a curriculum or a syllabus built based on thinking of this book.

Literacy is developing and changing all the time, and the way we learn literacy is changing as well. Wesch’s video shows what and how we can do with the internet. Now, a people with a computer can do a lot more than before, sending out information and receiving feedback from anywhere. This demonstrate ideological model of literacy, the effects of different literacies and cultures are weaving, not simply dual effects. Keri’s learning experience of the new genre Tweet shows the shift from autonomous model to ideological model of literacy. When learning new knowledge, there are autonomous features embedded in the literacy learning. Eventually, the new learning requires more through the social practice, like audience, response, reaction, conversation, communication, etc. to achieve the social goal. Finally, ideological model of literacy is completed. This process is very complicated and educators try to figure it out. Lik Street says in “What’s ‘new’ in New Literacy Studies”, “a key issue is how we can characterize the shift from observing literacy events to conceptualizing literacy practices (79)”.

The interesting concepts I got from Street’s article is “social practice approach”, “local literacy”, “distance literacy”, “figured worlds”. I believe there is no doubt about the importance of “social practice approach”. To help students, after school programs can be strong support for the literacy learning and school study. However, if we focus too much on the school, the literate ability cannot be developed well as it is supposed to be. For example, the standardized tests would make students more familiar test taking skills rather than the literate ability, reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

Literacy is developing and changing all the time, and the way we learn literacy is changing as well. Wesch’s video shows what and how we can do with the internet. Now, a people with a computer can do a lot more than before, sending out information and receiving feedback from anywhere. This demonstrate ideological model of literacy, the effects of different literacies and cultures are weaving, not simply dual effects. Keri’s learning experience of the new genre Tweet shows the shift from autonomous model to ideological model of literacy. When learning new knowledge, there are autonomous features embedded in the literacy learning. To understand this, I think accumulating literacy would be helpful. Eventually, the new learning requires more through the social practice, like audience, response, reaction, conversation, communication, etc. to achieve the social goal. Finally, ideological model of literacy is completed. This process is very complicated and educators try to figure it out. Like Street says in “What’s ‘new’ in New Literacy Studies”, “a key issue is how we can characterize the shift from observing literacy events to conceptualizing literacy practices (79)”.

The interesting concepts I got from Street’s article is “social practice approach”, “local literacy”, “distance literacy”, “figured worlds”. I believe there is no doubt about the importance of “social practice approach”. To help students, after school programs can be strong support for the literacy learning and school study. However, if we focus too much on the school, the literate ability cannot be developed well as it is supposed to be. For example, the standardized tests would make students more familiar test taking skills rather than the literate ability, reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

Like Keri’s tweeter case, learning is beginning in the support around and self-motivation based, which can be considered as “local”; after obtaining certain knowledge and skills though not completely proficiently, she tries to make connection to the outside world. The relation between local and distance literacy can help understand and solve the problem how to switch from observing the literacy events to literacy practices.

The following is a quote I think maybe helpful:

The result of local-global encounters around literacy is always a new hybrid rather than a single essentialized version of either. It is these hybrid literacy practices that NLS focuses upon rather than either romanticizing the local or conceding the dominant privileging of the supposed “global”. As we shall see when we discuss practical applications of NLS across educational contexts, it is the recognition regarding the relationship between local literacy practices and those of the school. (Street 80)