Final Project: Course 3 : Visual Literacy: Effective Communicators and Creators
(SUNY: EDC 6054 Authoring for Educators)
My colleague Dana Watts and I are committed to establishing E-Portfolios as an essential element of our learning community here at International School Bangkok.
There are many utilitarian reasons to sponsor the use of E-Portfolios–not the least of which is that more universities are using them as part of their admissions policy.
Our proposition is the following: E-Portfolios are an alternative means of learning and assessment that helps develop a student’s intrinsic interest.
Carol S. Dweck, the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, says, “It matters greatly what students believe about their intelligence” (Dweck 2007; http://www.isacs.org/misc_files/EducationCanada.pdf).
Traditional grading practices (A, B ,C, D, F) are based on extrinsic motivation, a system that seeks to motivate as a function of reward and punishment. Developing students into self-directed, independent, lifelong learners “will not happen if educators rely on extrinsic motivation” (Principal’s Research Review January 2009).
Many student’s view their intelligence as it is tethered to this traditional and seriously flawed system.
E-Portfolios help foster a student’s intrinsic motivation. “The ePortfolio project team shows how we believe the portfolio can stimulate learning and a move away from extrinsic towards intrinsic motivation through a cycle of goal-setting, action and reflection” (INTERACT, INTEGRATE, IMPACT; Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ASCILITE) Adelaide, Australia 7–10 December 2003; Editors: Geoffrey Crisp, Di Thiele, Ingrid Scholten, Sandra Barker, Judi Baron (http://74.125.153.132/search?q=cache:9RrtzfXG5-EJ:www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/adelaide03/docs/pdf/601.pdf+%28INTERACT,+INTEGRATE,+IMPACT&cd=1&hl=th&ct=clnk).
As Manitoba Education (2006) stated, “According to current cognitive research, people are motivated to learn by success and competence. Assessment can be a motivator, not through reward and punishment, but by stimulating student’s intrinsic interest.” Student motivation can be intrinsically enhanced by “Reinforcing the idea that students have control over, and responsibility for, their own learning” (Manitoba 2006).
Teachers will provide appropriate lessons for the skills needed for Web publishing; however, many if not most students already possess internet based technological skills and a certain comfort level in utilizing those skills.
All students would benefit from a scaffolding approach to mastering these skills.
“Scaffolding instruction as a teaching strategy originates from Lev Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory and his concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD). “The zone of proximal development is the distance between what children can do by themselves and the next learning that they can be helped to achieve with competent assistance.” The scaffolding teaching strategy provides individualized support based on the learner’s ZPD. In scaffolding instruction a more knowledgeable other provides scaffolds or supports to facilitate the learner’s development. The scaffolds facilitate a student’s ability to build on prior knowledge and internalize new information. The activities provided in scaffolding instruction are just beyond the level of what the learner can do alone. The more capable other provides the scaffolds so that the learner can accomplish (with assistance) the tasks that he or she could otherwise not complete, thus helping the learner through the ZPD”
Student e-portfolios that exhibit “a purposeful collection of artifacts that characterize learning experiences of the portfolio owner” will become a vehicle for intrinsic student motivation.
Self-directed, intrinsically motivated students become life-long learners.
CoETaIL assignment: Upload your group’s completed digital story & embed into your blog post. Reflect on the process of creating the digital story. How could digital storytelling be used in your classroom/subject area?
In a recent Face2Face Certificate of Educational Technology and Information Literacy class we were having this on-going discussion about learning the skills of educational technology “just in case” or “just in time.” The question that seemed to me to go a’begging is, “Does learning these skills have any intrinsic value?”
So I made a little video about Marshall McLuhan.
The study of literature on a very basic level is the study of communication. A place to begin this study might be the question, “Why does this composition exist? What made the author break her or his silence, as it were?” A subsequent question could be, “How, in what way(s) is this author communicating?” A third question insinuates itself, “To whom is this act of communication intended?”
“Semiotics differs from linguistics in that it generalizes the definition of a sign to encompass signs in any medium or sensory modality. Thus it broadens the range of sign systems and sign relations, and extends the definition of language in what amounts to its widest analogical or metaphorical sense” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics).
The use of digital story telling, communicating, in a literature class is only limited by the imagination of the instructor.
The above video “tells” as much about me ( “the storyteller, sender”) as it does the content ( “the signs” ). At least, that’s what Marshall McLuhan might say.
CoETaIL Assignment: Use Creative Commons image search to find an appropriate image to use in at least one of the classes you teach. Include this image in a blog post and share how you plan to use it in the classroom. How can visual imagery support your curricular content?
An issue that I often encounter when I teach literature I associate with building bridges. Many of my students see the relationship between the shoreline of the “real world,” that world wherein they live, and, say, the shoreline of biology or economics. They can imagine that someday, somehow those academic subjects might play a role in their future careers.
My students have constructed a bridge between themselves and those disciplines.
My subject does not offer them the ground of cause and effect or demand and production. I offer them a world founded upon mere imagination where almost any argument is as good as the next, a world that in comparison appears groundless, and any bridge under construction seems but a “ghostly paradigm of things” (“Among School Children,” 43, Y.B.Yeats).
My students often ask the pertinent question, “Why should I study literature; why should I spend time on a subject which is a place where there are few, if any, absolutes, where rights and wrongs are relative?”
Any honest consideration of these questions beg another question even more basic, one with significant ramifications: why art?
In his book, The Educated Imagination, Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye says, “There are two main kinds of association, analogy and identity, two things that are like each other and two things that are each other. One produces the figure of speech called simile: the other produces the figure called metaphor” (Frye, 32).
To paraphrase Frye, suppose we go on a trip to a distant planet, but it’s a planet like our own, one that will sustain human life. The first thing we notice is that this is a place that is not “us.” We see this planet’s mountains and valleys and oceans and sky. But we realize that they are not a part of us. Two things happen: we become curious about this world, and we have feelings about it. Our curiosity leads us to explore and measure and weigh and make distinctions: this thing is heavy; this thing is wet; this thing is green.
Eventually our emotions run the gamut from curiosity and wonder to anxiety and fear. But regardless of our itinerant emotions, our habitual state of mind is one of separation; this place is not a part of us.
Soon we realize that there’s a difference between this world we see and the world in which we want to live. We begin to realize that we have needs and desires: when it rains we want to be dry; when it is cold we want to be warm. We want to live not in the world we see, but in a world that we build out of what we see. We want to build and live in a world that is human/humane; we want to build a home. Art is born.
Northrop Frye says, “Art begins as soon as [the idea] ’I don’t like this’ turns into [the idea] ‘this is not the way I could imagine it’” (28). In our imaginations anything can happen that can be imagined, and “the limit of the imagination is a totally human world” (Frye, 29).
The imagination is the place where we can create the sense of identity with our surroundings. The poet doesn’t write a poem because he wants to simply describe nature, he wants to create a world that is totally absorbed and possessed by the human mind, and we’ve come round to an answer to the question about why we should study literature. Two of the tools that the poet uses are simile and metaphor; tools, as mentioned earlier, of association. “The motive for metaphor,” according to Frye, “is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know” (33).
Back to Picasso and his masterpiece, Guernica. I plan to use this image as a starting point for a Socratic Seminar.
A tapestry copy of Guernica hangs on a wall inside the United Nations building in New York city; it is located at the entrance of the Security Council. While interpretations of Picasso’s image vary, Picasso said as he worked on the mural: “The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. How could anybody think for a moment that I could be in agreement with reaction and death? … In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death” (Tóibín 2006).
Northrop Frye builds this bridge: “But the study of arts, such as painting and music, has many values for literary training apart from their value as subjects in themselves. Everything man does that’s worth doing is some kind of construction, and the imagination is the constructive power of the mind set free to work on pure construction, construction for its own sake. The units don’t have to be words; they can be numbers or tones or colors or bricks or pieces of marble. It is hardly possible to understand what the imagination is doing with words without seeing how it operates with some of these other units” (Frye, 120).
Some elements of the compositon of Guernica for discussion (via Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia):
*The overall scene is within a room where, at an open end on the left, a wide-eyed bull stands over a woman grieving over a dead child in her arms. *The centre is occupied by a horse falling in agony as it had just been run through by a spear or javelin. It is important to note that the large gaping wound in the horse’s side is a major focus of the painting. *Two “hidden” images formed by the horse appear in Guernica (illustrated to the right): *A human skull overlays the horse’s body. *A bull appears to gore the horse from underneath. The bull’s head is formed mainly by the horse’s entire front leg which has the knee on the ground. The leg’s knee cap forms the head’s nose. A horn appears within the horse’s breast. *The bull’s tail forms the image of a flame with smoke rising from it, seemingly appearing in a window created by the lighter shade of gray surrounding it. *Under the horse is a dead, apparently dismembered soldier; his hand on a severed arm still grasps a shattered sword from which a flower grows. *On the open palm of the dead soldier is a stigma, a symbol of martyrdom derived from the stigmata of Christ. Picasso was not religious, although he was brought up in the predominantly Catholic Spain, and this symbol is not necessarily to be interpreted as Christian identification. *A light bulb blazes in the shape of an evil eye over the suffering horse’s head (the bare bulb of the torturer’s cell.) Picasso’s intended symbolism in regards to this object is related to the Spanish word for lightbulb; “bombilla”, which makes an allusion to “bomb” and therefore signifies the destructing effect which technology can have on society. *To the upper right of the horse, a frightened female figure, who seems to be witnessing the scenes before her, appears to have floated into the room through a window. Her arm, also floating in, carries a flame-lit lamp. The lamp is positioned very close to the bulb, and is a symbol of hope, clashing with the lightbulb. *From the right, an awe-struck woman staggers towards the center below the floating female figure. She looks up blankly into the blazing light bulb.
Daggers that suggest screaming replace the tongues of the bull, grieving woman, and horse. *A bird, possibly a dove, stands on a shelf behind the bull in panic.
On the far right, a figure with arms raised in terror is entrapped by fire from above and below. *A dark wall with an open door defines the right end of the mural.
As I noted above, I am a literature teacher: I teach International Baccalaureate (IB) Higher and Standard Level A1 English. The core of our IB curriculum is a class called Theory of Knowledge (TOK). The following excerpt is part of the IB Syllabus:
“The TOK course . . . encourages critical thinking about knowledge itself, to try to help young people make sense of what they encounter.”
CoETaIL Assignment: How has the explosion of web based video changed the teaching and learning landscape?
This semester I am teaching Hamlet. Because of the treasure-trove of video on You Tube, I was able to show my students four different performances of Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy (Act 3, Scene 1). The actors we viewed/studied were Richard Burton, Kevin Kline, Mel Gibson and Kenneth Branaugh.
By viewing this variety of interpretations my students were able to see/judge for themselves the choices made by these actors (and their directors) concerning pace, blocking and intonation.
The world (context) of The Melancholy Dane became alive:
CoETaIL Assignment: How could screencasts be used in your classroom/department?
On the evening of Sunday, November 1–between the hours of 18:00 and 19:00 my students and I will be engaged in a “chat.” My students have a formal essay due on Monday, November 2, and I’ve asked them to join me on Sunday evening to discuss any issues they might have before they turn in their compositions.
I’ve told them (and they already know) that once the last person leaves our chat room there will be no “record” of what we’ve said. I’ve asked them to make screen casts of any part of our chat that they think they would like to “keep.” With the push of a button our temporal act becomes artifact.
CoETaIL Assignment: Reflect on a presentation you have created in the past looking at how you would implement new visual presentations techniques to better communicate your message to your audience.
Below I have a series of Jing screen casts. The first is a very boring page full of text that I have been subjecting parents to on “Open House.” Following that page are screen casts of power point pages with pictures.
Next year at “Open House” I will substitute the picture pages for the single text page. As each author’s page/picture is shown I will explain how that writier’s work is instumental in our semester’s curriculum.
CoETaIL Assignment: Write a reflective blog post on how the courses to date in this program have changed your teaching for the new year.
Before taking course work in International School Bangkok’s (ISB’s) Certificate of Educational Technology and Information Literacy (CoETaIL) class, to say that my use of technology in the classroom was limited is a gross understatement.
Like all of my colleagues here at ISB I’d been using a web-based grade reporting software program, and I used e-mail. That was it, pretty much.
Now, I will shamelessly claim the dramatic, if not histrionic, statement of Biblical origin–that after a couple of CoETaIL courses, scales fell from my eyes. It was seeing for the first time.
Last summer was the first chance I had to incorporate technology into my curriculum. My students and I worked together on class and individual blogs. My students developed personal E-Folios.
I’ll be using E-Folios with all of my International Baccalaureate Higher Level students this year, and we’ll see where that takes us.
I had to see what a powerful educational tool that technology was before I believed it.
Now, I believe that the limit of the practical application of technology in the classroom is the collective imagination of the teacher and the students.
English summer school for juniors and seniors here at International School Bangkok finished recently (10 July 2009). In addition to what English teachers might call “regular” elements of curriculum (vocabulary acquistion, writing, classroom discussions and reading writers from “the cannon” such as Plato, William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Flannery O’Connor, Pablo Neruda, Seamus Heaney, etc.), I asked my students to expand the dimensions of our classroom.
Each student was asked to develop a Blog/E-folio: “. . . a purposeful collection of artifacts that characterize learning experiences of the portfolio owner” (http://scil.stanford.edu/research/efolios/). This a “first” for all of us. Using Edublogs, we had a class blog where students would find bloggong “assignments.” All of their individual blogs are linked to our class blog.
All of the students in our class this summer are English Second Language learners. I note this, not as some kind of caveat or excuse, but because our blogging emphasis is on creativity (see: Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy) and not conventional “correctness.”
My students express their wonderful, individual visions and voices.
For a final assignment students created videos using Movie Maker addressing the question, “Who Are You?” Some were successful in uploading those videos to You Tube, and they have provided links on their blogs.
Why blogs? Here is something Northrop Frye said in his book, The Educated Imagination,
“But the study of arts, such as painting and music [blogs], has many values for literary training apart from their value as subjects in themselves. Everything man does that’s worth doing is some kind of construction, and the imagination is the constructive power of the mind set free to work on pure construction, construction for its own sake. The units don’t have to be words; they can be numbers or tones or colors or bricks or pieces of marble. It is hardly possible to understand what the imagination is doing with words without seeing how it operates with some of these other units” (Frye, 120).
Here at International School Bangkok we are about to embark on an adventure in learning. O.K., I know that sounds self serving if not reminiscent of Pollyanna. But the truth of the matter is that Chad Bates, Dennis Harter, Jeff Utecht and Kim Cofino (our tech gurus) are quickly developing the capability for us to begin using E-Folios. Someone may be asking, “Just what is an E-Folio?” Well, I can’t think of a better answer than the one offered by The Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning:
“We define a learning portfolio as a purposeful collection of artifacts that characterize learning experiences of the portfolio owner. These artifacts may include items that were created by the student in the context of the learning experience, such as a paper or a drawing, or the artifacts may otherwise represent the student’s learning experience, such as a brochure or photo. Reflection, the process of thinking about something from a new perspective in order to understand that thing more deeply, is an essential part of creating a learning portfolio. The products of this higher-order thinking are also important components to be included in the portfolio. The portfolio owner might be an individual or a group of individuals–teachers, learners, a program or institution. The set of artifacts contained in a portfolio together with reflections, tell a unique story about some aspect of the owner, and can help the owner share his or her story in rich detail” (http://scil.stanford.edu/research/efolios/).
My colleague Dana Watts and I are working on the model that we hope to use in our high school English Department. The English Department blog will connect with individual English teacher blogs which in turn will link with individual student blogs: E-Folios. Our school’s mission statement, in part, reads:
“Today, our vision guides all school improvement efforts and begins with how we want every ISB student to leave us – bearing the transportable gifts of intellectual development and cross-cultural understanding.”
E-Folios are a vehicle and a home. They are the vehicle that will transport each student’s individual learning story. Wherever a student goes, their E-Folio is there already. E-Folios are a home that is always here!
In a kind of round table discussion with my teaching colleagues, the topics of honesty and internet integrity came-up. The complexity of this issue is daunting. We teachers agreed that we are responsible for teaching our students honesty. None of us allows “cheating” in our classrooms or on homework assignments. But, now, our classrooms are not restricted to those four walls located on the real estate we call campus. With the advent of the internet those four walls have dissolved. With the disappearance of our classroom’s boundaries, have our teaching responsibilities correspondingly evolved?
The University of Michigan states, “Academic integrity is the pursuit of scholarly activity in an honest and responsible manner. In the classroom, academic integrity involves a range of issues, including – but not limited to – cheating, plagiarism, and facilitating acts of academic dishonesty by others” (http://www.crlt.umich.edu/publinks/acadintegrity.php).
O.K. I’d bet most teachers would say that VirtualStudent.com and the University of Michigan offer a confirmation of what teachers already know.
But these ideas deserve to be repeated.
The Regents of The University of California make the case that, “The most important reason that each of us should strive to be a person of integrity is that all human relationships, and therefore the very fabric of society, is based on our ability to trust one another — and this, in turn, is based on honesty. Think about it: whether in personal relationships, or at work, how much do (or can) we trust people who aren’t honest with us? And how much of a relationship can we have with someone we don’t trust? It all boils down to honesty. It is therefore no coincidence that the words “honor” and “honesty”share the same root, nor that cultures throughout history and world-wide have prized honor so highly” (http://sja.ucdavis.edu/files/WhyInteg.pdf).
Our round table came up with the question, “Are we responsible for teaching honesty and integrity?” One of us answered, “That’s the parents’ responsibility!”
Hmm.
The Regents of the University of California end their article with these two statements: ‘”You must be the change you want to see in the world.”‘ –Mahatma Gandhi. That pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it? -Integrity begins with you” (http://sja.ucdavis.edu/files/WhyInteg.pdf).
Hmm.
Someone at our round table asked the questions, “How many of us sitting here haven’t done something dishonest; how many of us haven’t purchased a pirated movie or software?”
Our answers weren’t a suprise. How would you respond?
The combination of Gandhi ’s wisdom & the Internet have created a kind of mirror. What is our reflection?
I’m not really a Billy Joel fan, but he makes a point.
The photo from Ben Lawson (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ben_lawson/)at the top of this blog is used in accordance with Creative Commons Copyright. As Rick Latona notes, “Peter Steiner created this famous cartoon on July 5th, 1993 for an issue of The New Yorker. Considering that the first graphical web browser (Mosaic) was launched on April 22nd, 1993, it’s really quite amazing how quickly Mr Steiner “got it”’ (http://www.ricklatona.com/2008/12/17/on-the-internet-nobody-knows-youre-a-dog/).
