Despite the perception that today’s college students are digital natives, individuals of this generation typically lack the media creation competencies that are an important dimension of overall media literacy. Additionally, data suggest that, despite the perception that students should be learning about media creation, they currently rarely learn about this aspect of media literacy at the college level.” (Schmidt, H. 2010)

A year or so ago, I remember discussing this very phenomenon with Michael Wesch and we both agreed that it’s a mistake to assume that all young people are competent communicators in digital media. The ones that we take note of are indeed adept in their media savviness, but they are outliers, not truly representative of the entire population of the millenial or net-generation. Some young people are doing amazing things with technology, but most are picking the low-hanging fruit of social media tools like Facebook.

I remember Mike emphasizing how important these digital media skills are to people living immersed in a digital environment, yet we continue leaving them to specialists. We don’t teach video-making as a necessary skill to all college students. Only certain majors are likely to ever have a video project required, yet digital online video is a huge part of almost every college student’s life.

I’m sure that our conversation came shortly on the heels of my first reading Elizabeth Daley’s paper on Expanding the Concept of Literacy, and I suddenly realized how these new media tools that I’ve long been fascinated with are actually the new tools of literacy. I was glad to see in this dissertation that Schmidt agrees with us.

Competencies associated with media literacy need to be possessed by everyone today, just as competencies associated with print literacy should be held, not just by professional writers and editors, but rather by the entire population. (Schmidt, H. 2010)

I decided to take a little break and jot down this blog post while I’m thinking about these things. Also during my break, I found this little animation, obviously made by a “digital native” who does have some skill in video-making through animation. I had to watch it several times, it made me laugh so hard.

So are the majority of your students making videos? Are they skillful at photography, graphics software, or other digital media? Or are they like what others and myself have experienced, with a few being extremely talented but the majority limited in what they can do? I think it’s really critical that we teach this stuff to all students, so I have digital media projects in all of my classes, including the non-digital media courses I teach.

***Edit*** Not two minutes after I posted this, a google alert came in telling me about a new HuffPo article entitled, “College Students and the Cacophony of Noise“.

Media and Technology Literacy must become a major part of every, single elementary-age curriculum. Teachers, parents, and politicians have to make an extra effort to explain that these machines are supposed to clarify information and not act as the prime movers and shakers for critical thinking.

I sense a new movement for media literacy forming!

As it turns out, the story was incredible, because large parts of it was untrue, as revealed in this week’s retraction aired by This American Life.

My students are on spring break this week, but we will be sure to listen and discuss upon our return next week. It will be interesting to get their perspective on this story.

I have a few predictions, although I could be mistaken. If you read the literature about the millennial generation, there is evidence to suggest that they are quick to forgive when an apology is made. I’m still processing the story, but it seems that the radio program, but not the creator of the story Mike Daisey are apologetic at this point. I don’t know how this will play out with my students.

Another point I hope to drive home is that in a digital world, whatever you put out there is permanent. These accusations against Apple and the other companies whose products are made in China will remain forever. There has been a media firestorm since this story was originally aired, it will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

A final point I hope to make is how “digital media technologies are biased towards the truth”. (Rushkoff, 2011). While everyone likes a good story, with the immediacy of information access, and the ability to quickly fact-check, it is counter-productive to fabricate a story and hope that it sticks in the digital age. It is always best to behave in a way that can withstand the strongest scrutiny, because that is what you will always get in our connected world.

Reference
Rushkoff, D. (2011). Program or Be Programmed. Ten Commands for a Digital Age. Berkely, Soft Skull Press.

My digital media class is working on this idea and we plan to put many of these up around our campus as a fun campus community art project. It would be fun to have others from around the internet join us in coming up with these. For an added challenge, try to incorporate a double gang switch into your design.

This idea comes from the book by Stephan Mumaw, “Caffeine for the Creative Team.” I highly recommend it along with “Caffeine for the Creative Mind,” for excellent creativity exercises.

My process for this example was to first locate a cartoon image I could work from. I’m not that great of an artist, so I found this one by Thomas Jahn.

Using this cartoon as a guide, I drew my own freehand version. I snapped a photo of it with my iTouch and imported it into Illustrator. There I added a template for the switch cover, so I could know where to place the opening for the switch in relationship to the artwork. I then drew in the wire from the switch with Illustrator.

I printed it out on heavy stock paper and then cut it out as you see in my example.

This week I had a fascinating conversation with Kathy Ireland about the realistic portrayal of women in the media. Ok, well it wasn’t exactly a conversation. It was more like Kathy Ireland replied to my tweet.

I had almost forgotten about that amazing Jamie Lee Curtis “True Thighs” story in More magazine in which she showed the world herself before and after the makeup, lighting and photo manipulations were applied. Thanks to Kathy Ireland for that reminder.

But as I tweeted to Kathy Ireland (did I mention that I had a twitter conversation with Kathy Ireland?) I do show my students the fascinating video, “The Photoshop Effect” in which a young lady, with an already fit and youthful body, undergoes a full Photoshop makeover.

I think it is important, particularly since my students and I regularly use Photoshop as a digital media tool, that we understand the impact of this technology on our society. The film drives the point home that nearly all commercial photographs of celebrities are edited with Photoshop to remove any “imperfections.”

I recently found this spoof of a beauty product commercial,  Fotoshop by Adobé, which explores a similar theme. I think it is extremely well done and worth taking a look. It is particularly interesting if you know how to use some of Photoshop’s manipulation tools.

Howard Rheingold says that we need to use our built-in crap detector. I think it is an essential part of media literacy, but it seems that many people are unaware that the photos we see in magazines, in advertisements, honestly everywhere we look are “doctored” to make the models look better. One company even used real model faces on computer generated bodies to achieve that “perfect” look. Isn’t it time for greater awareness in this area?

What are the implications for young, impressionable girls who compare themselves to these impossible to attain standards? Do they get in on the action and do Photoshop makeovers on their Facebook profile pictures? Do they turn to YouTube asking that community, Am I Pretty? Do they starve themselves to try to be as thin as computer software can make models?

I’m not by any means an expert on these questions I’ve raised here, but I do intend to continue raising the issue with my students since we are learning about this technology. I’m a big fan and a long time user of Photoshop. Heck, I wouldn’t have chatted with Kathy Ireland on Twitter without Photoshop! I just really think we need to be aware of what the implications of using it are, and do our best to increase awareness.

I love how he starts with a simple drawing of a salamander, then invites the kids to draw the same creature, knowing there will be small differences, just as they occur in the theory of evolution. You can read a full account of his design process in thisScientific American article.

I especially liked the simulated 3-D in the evolution video. I first encountered this technique last summer when I finally took some time to learn Adobe AfterEffects. I can’t believe I waited so long to dive into this software, having used Photoshop for many years. AfterEffects is something like a Photoshop for video, and I love using it!

I made this video from still pictures I took when we were on vacation in Colorado. You too can learn the technique in this Video Copilot tutorial about creating a simulated 3-D picture with AfterEffects.

I am really amazed at the stunning visual effects in the Evolution video. I have a long way to go before I can tell a digital story on this level, but at least now I have an idea of what is possible.

To me, the idea is to make something new on the day that the challenge is issued. It is the “create” in “Daily Create.” So don’t get me wrong, I’m really not bashing anyone here, but I really don’t get it if a photography assignment is given and people turn to their archive of past photos, or even worse, to the internet’s vast archive of photos, to find a suitable picture instead of grappling with how to do the assignment on that particular day. (I showed my students how I can verify if their photography is an original with Google Image Search. You can supply a photo URL and it will pull up visually similar photos that tell right away if you’re playing fair or not!)

For example, this past weekend the assignment was to “Take a photo depicting your favorite kind of weather.” Ok, cool, I thought. How can I express this idea in a photograph? It’s sunny and 65 degrees outside. My favorite kind of day is a cold, wintery day. One of those days it’s so cold that the inside of your nostrils freeze up. Yeah, it’s sick, I know. It probably comes from my having a cold, cold heart.

But we haven’t had more than an inch of snow all winter, and none is in the forecast. What to do? Well, there’s always the deep freeze that needs defrosting. Perhaps that could provide the wintery mix I need for my photograph. Well, what do you know?

 If I put a shoe in there, it’s almost like I’m walking in a winter wonderland. Well, except for those yummy sugar cookies in the background. Hmm, I wonder. Maybe if I try a different angle, this picture would be a little more convincing?

Once I uploaded the image to Flickr and tagged it with tdc049 I could see it along with all of the other images made for that particular assignment.

Some of the others I really liked were this photo of overshoes suggesting a rainy day, peaches that hearken to warmer days, a sun dress & sandals, and a sweater with sunglasses, suggesting a sunny but cool day.

None of these required a literal scene of the concept being conveyed, but were more metaphorical in nature. Now that’s getting to the essence of creativity, don’t you think?

So, DS106ers, I’m challenging you to try a little harder, think out of the box, and don’t be so literal and concrete in your thinking. Don’t be afraid to get a little abstract, even weird when communicating ideas. Creativity beckons us to do this!  Get those creative juices flowing and show us what ya got, ok?

You can see all of the winning videos here.

Kind of cynical, isn’t it? A fundamental need of all human beings is to be needed and appreciated. (For an in-depth treatment of this idea, I recommend reading Drive by Daniel Pink.)

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen once said on his Emmy award winning television program “Life is Worth Living,” that people are becoming expendable, thanks in no small part to technology. In our technological world of machines, when a part breaks we remove the part and replace it with a new one. Sheen argues that in this world-view, people are becoming akin to these broken parts that can easily be replaced. Of course this program was recorded 40 years ago; with today’s paradigm, we don’t even replace the part, we just ditch the entire machine and get a new one, but I digress.

If a person doesn’t live up to our expectations of them in our organizations, we can simply discard them and find someone who does. Nowhere is this better modeled than in the electronics factories of China. My class has been listening to the weekly podcasts of This American Life, and we recently heard the episode Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory which is about the deplorable working conditions of the people in China who make all of our wonderful consumer electronics.

In one particularly dramatic part, Mike Daisey, the author of the piece, describes how everything made in these factories is assembled by human hands because the labor is so inexpensive:

I talk to people whose joints in their hands have disintegrated from working on the line, doing the same motion hundreds and hundreds of thousands of times. It’s like carpal tunnel on a scale we can scarcely imagine. And you need to know that this is eminently avoidable. If these people were rotated monthly on their jobs, this would not happen…

And so when you start working at 15 or 16, by the time you are 26, 27, your hands are ruined. And when they are truly ruined, once they will not do anything further, you know what we do with a defective part in a machine that makes machine. We throw it away.

Well, that is in China, you might say. We don’t treat people like that in developed countries – do we? Well, let’s consider how teachers are treated in America. It’s not too far a stretch of the imagination from the factories of Shenzhen. Our teachers are limited in how their creativity and initiative can be expressed, but they instead are prescribed what to do and how to do it, just like in factories. Even bathroom breaks are scheduled and of limited availability, just like in the factories. And in America, our teachers have quotas they must meet, where they can lose their jobs if they don’t measure up, just like the factory workers.

Isn’t it true that so often we view people in our every day life as things and not as human beings? The person at the drive-thru is there to give us food. We behave as though a machine could do (or is doing) the job. At the bank, there are tellers at drive-thru windows, but very often we opt for the ATM, or treat the living, breathing teller as an ATM. How many times a day do we treat people like they are invisible? As Brené Brown says,

When we treat people as objects, we dehumanize them. We do something really terrible to their souls and to our own.

Fulton Sheen argues that people are people, not objects we can use and discard when their utility is gone. He believes we should treat people as being made in, “the image and likeness of God,” as every human life having great dignity, as something sacred.

It seems to me that every year our teachers are becoming more and more objectified. What they say, think or feel doesn’t matter. Their expertise doesn’t matter. In Philadelphia, a “walk-through team” removed a teacher’s reading area from her elementary classroom deeming it as “clutter.” When teachers feel their ideas don’t count and that they have no autonomy, it must follow that their motivation and ultimately their teaching will suffer. Incredibly, in New York City, the mayor would like to cut half of the teachers and double the size of classrooms. What message does that send to the teachers who work in that city? In Los Angeles, teacher effectiveness is measured by a quantitative value-added analysis of before and after student test scores and the score is published in a public database. For the moment, this kind of value-added scores will be not be made public in my home state of Kansas, but the idea was supported by our governor earlier this year. This ham-fisted attempt at improving education in the L.A. school district was a direct motivation for a teacher’s suicide. Do you really need more evidence that we view teachers as replaceable component parts, not as human beings?

It’s no wonder that half of all new teachers quit the profession within the first five years. What I find even more incredible is that they can even find young people to sign up for this career path. These soon-to-be teachers cannot truly know what is in store for them. When veteran educators are telling would-be teachers to rethink their career paths, you know something is wildly amiss.

The news reports of the working conditions of Chinese factory workers are deplorable. I’m beginning to think that the working conditions of American educators in many ways aren’t that far from deplorable as well. It’s sad that teaching, what is in essence an art-form, is being reduced to paint by numbers. How long until we start viewing the people who teach our country’s kids as people and not as replaceable commodities? Please, please bring back the autonomy, bring back the importance of creativity and innovation in teaching.

A while ago, I introduced readers of this blog to the concept of “Ed Parkour” and today I wanted to share a little bit about what I think makes me a “traceur” or “Ed Parkour” practitioner.

I’ve always been a little bit out of the mainstream when it comes to my approach to teaching. I think it stems from my lifelong struggles as a student. That’s why I think that the concept of “Ed Parkour” is so amazing. It really gives educators support for the notion of teaching from our strengths. Just find what you are good at and go with it! It doesn’t really matter what other folks are doing if you are doing something different and it is working for you.

A few years ago, I attended a Love and Logic teaching conference primarily aimed at K-12 educators, but I learned a great deal that I could use a college educator. (I also had to endure a few painful barbs aimed at college profs, but that’s for another time!)  Sometimes I think we in higher education are much too arrogant to think that we could learn anything useful from our brother & sister educators in K-12. Personally, I try to be open to learning anytime, anywhere from anyone.

It was at that particular conference where I first heard of “brain-based education.” I was introduced to the work of Eric Jensen, and his classic book Teaching with the Brain in Mind. There were several examples of active, brain-based learning activities and I brought one activity in particular home with me to try out.

In my computer networking course, a potentially dry subject to be sure, I am careful to vary my techniques and teaching styles because I have such a wide array of knowledge and interest levels in the course. Some students are keenly interested in the topic, hoping to someday be full-time network administrators, while other students fit squarely in the camp of “wouldn’t be taking this if it weren’t required.” The following game is perfect for my class.

One of the brain-based activities I picked up at the K-12 conference was a “Musical Match” game where students are given cards with 3-4 vocabulary words from the course. When the music starts, they walk around the room, dancing if they dare, until the music stops. Then, they must quickly find a partner, and compare the words in their hand to the words in their partner’s hand, looking for a connection between the two words. For example, one student might be holding the word “switch” and another might be holding the word “router” and they could note that both words are examples of networking hardware.

Sometimes it is really challenging to find a connection, but usually at least one exists, even if it is a rather tenuous relationship. This game is a great way to break up a long lecture class, giving the body a break from sitting and the mind a chance to kick into high gear.

When the music resumes, they start moving around the room again until the music stops, when they will find a new partner. It’s no fair going to the same person over and over!

What is really Ed Parkour about this activity, in my mind though, is a recent modification I made to how we play. I have always been frustrated by the long rows of tables and limited space for play in the classroom. I took a drama class during the last intersession to work on my storytelling skills, and commented to the instructor Randy Mulder that I wished my networking classroom had folding tables like we had in our drama class, so we could create a large play space for the matching game. That’s not a problem, says Mulder, just push the tables to the side, and flip some upside down & set them on the others. It was like a bolt of lightning! Of course that will work! So here is a brief clip of what the game with the re-arranged room looked like:

Sorry, I should have recorded longer, but it’s really tough trying to both teach and document teaching. Usually I don’t remember to take any pictures or anything until it is too late.

Keep in mind, these are not drama students, they are technology students. They aren’t normally exposed to kinesthetic activities as a part of their college experience. I think this simple activity makes a huge impact on a class. It shows students that they can be active rather than passive participants in their learning. That they can make modifications to their learning space. That they can take a chance and actually talk and learn with to someone they don’t know. There are many things that are going on, probably many I haven’t even considered.

So this is how I do “Ed Parkour.” I am open to ideas from outside of my field of expertise, from unexpected sources, and am unabashed about trying them out. Computer students don’t expect to be asked to get up out of their seats and move around a classroom. It is a surprise to them, and I think it creates a moment that stands out in their memories. So tell me, how do you do “Ed Parkour?”

I think this airport composite image is stunning. It is a work by Korean artist Ryu HoYeol entitled “Flughafen.”

I think this can be a great assignment for digital media students: Make a composite image that demonstrates motion and the passage of time with all of the people, creatures or vehicles passing through a single area by cutting and pasting multiple images into a main photograph using photo editing software.