Seeing Citation

For our screencasting assignment, I thought that I would use this opportunity to address a problem that many of my students have: accurately formatting their works cited page. Normally, I would teach this using a projector in the classroom and allow my students to watch as I walked through the same process. However, I never know for sure if each individual student will have access to a computer in my classroom and, without being able to follow along, these steps can often be hard to remember. By creating a screencast video using Jing, I could avoid wasting class-time but also help my students retain a useful understanding by making this walkthrough available to them when they would actually need it, wherever and whenever they are formatting their papers.  To watch my video at screencast.com, please click here: Works Cited Formatting Tutorial -- How to Create a Hanging Indent .

Review as Re -- Viewing

For this assignment I decided to review Google Documents, which seems part and parcel of Google Drive, and FotoFlexer. While this was not my first time using Google Docs, it was the first time I really took a critical look of its abilities and was happy to find new uses and a broader understanding of it as a tool. I was also happy to find a free web-based photo editor that was easy to use without losing too much efficacy, in FotoFlexer.

Google Documents (and Google Drive): I'm happy to have the opportunity to write a review for Google's collaborative word processor and the file sharing space associated with it. Like many web-based document editing tools, it's easy to use and mirrors the Microsoft Office suite enough that your pre-existing skills are easily transferable. In other words, there's not too much new to learn. However, it has the added perk of having features that more recent versions of Office have, that my version doesn't. My favorite is the "Research" tool that allows you to look up articles and insert their citations in the margin of your page. Despite this, I think it would be hard for me to begin a document in this space because it places my prime distraction (the internet) directly in sight while I write. As a revision tool, and a tool for sharing work for either peer-review or collaborative creation, I really do see a way I could make meaningful use of this in the future: both in and outside of the classroom.

FotoFlexer: At first click, I was greeted by a pop-up advertisement and I was immediately reminded of how certain products remain free. However, after the first pop-up, I found a lot of reason to like this site. It allows a wide range of easy to use photo-editing ability for the kind of person (like me) who is looking for simple and quick editing ability. Under it's "Geek" tab, it also allows for some more complicated photo-editing that I didn't expect to see. It took a little bit of searching but I was also able to find not only their own posted demos of the photo-editing tools but also quite a few sites that had more help for this site. While it might not be able to do complicated photo-editing, it does seem like it could do just about anything the average person would want to do with their photos.

Concept Map: Brainstorming with bubbl.us

For this concept map, I decided to take advantage of the format to create a brainstorming map for the hypothetical essay referenced in my last post. While I used to hate creating brainstorming maps, I find them continually more useful to my writing process as well as for teaching. I use them in class often to help students learn how to generate content before they begin to write. I've often been surprised when students who are initially discouraged by an assignment's topic, will quickly build self-confidence when they realize they've been able to brainstorm more than enough to write about.

After using bubbl.us, I could easily see myself allowing my students to use it to create their own brainstorming maps and creative outlines for their projects. I think it would be interesting to see how people could take advantage of it's ability to incorporate images but it's also nice as a simple way to create clean and legible brainstorming maps for typical essay writing.

Mapping Memories

As a writer and a teacher who teaches writing, I wanted to imagine a way to take advantage of Google's My Maps by using it to tell an interactive story. I decided to imagine it as a facet of a common project of mine, the memoir. The map I created would work as a modeling example for my students.

Imagine I were writing a memoir about five of my favorite places, associated with five of my favorite memories. While the memoir would rely, typically, on a standard essay format, "illustrating" the story with this map can add depth to that memoir. It becomes a map-story, a secondary storytelling device. My assignment for my students would then be to write their essay and then use the map to illustrate the key points of that essay, however they would decide.

My hypothetical memoir essay is about how most of my favorite memories are outdoors at a park, even though these days I'm a homebody. In my map below (you may have to zoom out so that you can see the whole of the U.S.), you can start at the green push pin to see why Disneyland is important to me, then click on the park table in Del Mar, the comedy and tragedy masks in El Paso, the pine tree in Huntsville, and finally the fork and knife in Chattanooga. However, for my story, I would not include a line to give a "path," allowing my reader to have some freedom. Ideally, the map and the essay will compliment each other. Each should be able to tell a story, even if that is a collection of descriptions instead of a linear plot.

In fact, I specifically like how each student as cultural cartographer could choose to indicate a path or direction for their map-story or not. This could lead to interesting conversations about plot, storytelling, and memory.



View My favorite places in a larger map

Podcasts and Social Bookmarking

My delicious page: delicious.com/shana.wolstein

My podcast: http://75842.podomatic.com/entry/2013-07-28T15_43_20-07_00

Sharing Photos

I forgot to do this for homework but here's the link to my photobucket: http://smg.photobucket.com/user/stevesbluegirl/slideshow/

For posterity...

Photobucket
While I haven't used it in years, I activated an old Photobucket account for this assignment. I don't know what I was expecting but I was genuinely surprised by how much has changed. When I first used Photobucket, it was a necessity to have the account in order to share pictures with my friends, probably through my Livejournal account that I had at the same time. This was probably around 2002-2005. And I stopped using it when it was no longer a necessity, largely because of Facebook. However, going back to it now I'm happy to say it has evolved from when I first uploaded the picture below.

What else is there for an 18/19/20-something to upload?

If someone knows the source of this picture, please let me know!

I'm happy to see that Photobucket has added so many new user options during my years of neglect, especially in terms of syncing with Facebook, that make it useable again for me. (I'm currently uploading my Facebook photos to have them backed up to another place!)

YouTube
If you go looking for it, you can find my own personal YouTube channel (that notes I was most recently active three years ago). On my channel you can watch a mediocre taping (thanks to a mediocre camera not a mediocre cameraman, thanks hubby!) of a profanity laden play I wrote a few years back called, "Hunger." Instead, I'll leave this video for you here.

John Green, a fabulous YA author, and his brother Hank (along with a crew of others that includes some of their high schools teachers), have created a few different veins of this series. All of them are combined under the umbrella of "Crash Course" videos. I recommend watching all of them! I especially love their chemistry videos, as they help me understand what my husband is doing for a living.

Google Maps
What I love about being able to add media to blog posts is our ability to use them as conversation points, whether they are markers of memory, creating a shared experience, or revisiting something we may have forgotten some details about. So, for this I decided just to add a map of something that I looked up recently, one of my favorite parks in El Paso, TX. An old high school haunt, Madeline Park.


View Larger Map
  

Wikis and Blogs and Feedly, Oh My!

A link to my new wiki: shanawolstein.pbworks.com.

     I’ve used blogs before and though blogger isn’t my favorite site (I love Wordpress!), I still love the format of blogging in general. As a creative writer though, I was nervous about creating a new blog. I find it hard to explain exactly what happened but I noticed that in writing my post for this first week, I approached it differently than the average discussion board post. Even though I don’t think people will be seeking out this blog, the lurking eyes of the internet have made me more aware of my audience. I was also excited we were assigned to create an RSS because I was an active user of Google Reader and had not found a new RSS since Reader’s demise. I found Feedly very easy to use although I miss the visual layout of the Google Reader (a static list of blogs on the side in addition to the previews in the center) whereas Feedly only seems to have a side pop-up menu. However, I’m sure this is something I can get used to as the rest of the feed is very similar.

     I really like the idea of wikis but I’ve found in my usage of them for this class so far, I’ve only used it as a kind of interlinking blog post. However, for my job I’m working on up-dating a wiki of office knowledge. I think using a wiki like this in the classroom, where students are pooling information about subject matter and in glossaries, a wiki could be extremely useful. It can also be useful in terms of solidifying a sense of community outside the classroom that encourages more meaningful interactions in the classroom.

     While I think that Dale’s Cone can be used to evaluate the use of Feedly, in terms of it’s ability to create an easily accessible pathway to resources of limitless potential, it’s easier to speak in more direct terms about it’s application in terms of blogging. Blogging allows for a variety of levels of the Cone based on the content of the post. Text posts, that use abstract verbal symbols and higher learning levels, can be combines with video demonstrations or videos of dramatized experiences. As I wrote about on my wiki, sharing blogs can lead to direct purposeful experiences by allowing for conversations and interaction with other bloggers.

     As far as “computer imagination” is concerned, I think that Feedly is still more limited in it’s use. Feedly offers a service that allows you to stay up-dated to other data-delivering services (whether they be blog or website) but doesn’t allow for user-created content outside of creating tiers of organization. However, I could see how an instructor could use this as a tool to understand those sources. Keeping track of websites that up-date on basis of quantity as opposed to on the basis of quality of the content, may allow for an English teacher to question the proposed audience of those articles in order to understand their reliability as a source. They then would answer the question of how knowledge changes over time and what kind of information may be over-produced. However, blogging is a tool this is hard to limit in terms of imaginative uses. One of my favorite blogs that have transformed how I view the genre, are those that act as experience. Many artists are able to use their blog space to create a controlled delivery system for art that takes advantage of multiple media, whether they be video, audio, or text-based, as long as they can be posted into a straightforward digital space. Blogs, as classroom tools, thus allow for a wide variety of uses with the emphasis on the ability to continue conversations outside of the classroom and to allow for a wide variety of supporting media. For me, this would be the essence of the problem that blogging answers.

Response to “Beyond Technology Integration: The Case for Technology Transformation” by Charles M. Reigeluth and Roberto Joseph and “Of Luddites, Learning, and Life” by Neil Postman

     These two articles stand in opposition to each other but, because of that, are clear counterpoints to each other’s arguments. Having spent a large part of my life in English departments hanging out with writers, medievalists, and a wide variety of bibliophiles in general, I found the Postman article relevant to a degree I wish I didn’t, especially considering it’s a decade old at this point.  The points he presents, specifically saying that technology will do away with school and that our problems are “social and moral” problems that technology can’t solve, are not only frustrating but also familiar. This fear and distrust of technology is pervasive even today. However, when reading as a counter-point, Reigeluth and Joseph’s article, acts as a kind of diagnosis for Postman’s problem. While Postman expects technology to solve a problem that can easily identified as already existing, Reigeluth and Joseph suggest that the key point to understanding technology is finding ways to use it that we haven’t even thought of as problematic yet.
     Postman begins my using a metaphor that is innately problematic for considering the larger ramifications of technological evolution, his preferences for his car. He says ultimately, that technology has limited his options by discontinuing the use of older technology. However, living a decade in the future, we can see where technology has also lived to answer Postman’s own problem. While the desire for newer technology may eliminate some older technologies, it has also created new ways to search and find your older technologies that are being produced less. In other words, Postman may say that you can’t buy a record anymore but (in addition to the record store down the street from me) a quick Google search shows otherwise. Again, if Postman is disappointed he has less options easily available to him, he now has more options in how to find his own solution for his own unique need. The problems being solved may not appear to be problematic to him because he is focusing on a problem particular to himself.
     In addition to this, technology is helping to support a vast community of those who are returning to hand-crafted objects. Websites like Etsy allow for people all around the world to sell their products, whether they’re handmade, vintage, or some re-purposed combination of both. More important though that the commodities and products we can find online are the people themselves. Online geek communities allow for people who might be embarrassed of their interests to connect with others across the world who care about the same things they do.  So, arguments that criticize the desire or necessity for technology often feel short-sighted, in the way that Reigeluth and Joseph describe they feel as though they can’t see out of their own paradigm. It’s not just that people have a wealth of quickly available resources it’s that we become each other’s resources.
     No matter how amazing a computer is, we all know that it has yet to reach comparability to the human brain. However, when computers are used to crowdsource, to combine the efforts of hundreds, thousands, or maybe millions of people, we have the ability to think beyond what are the problems we are inventing solutions for. Instead, we can foster a sense of discovery for the sake of discovery, which is priceless.