dy/dan

Frank Krasicki:

These days the technologists who remain vital are not experts and not generalists but rather techo-existentialists. The mantra is learn what you need for NOW and let it go – chances are it will change by the time you need or use it again.

Someone help me out here. How has clear, cinematic communication changed since The Jazz Singer first deployed synchronized music and dialogue in 1927? If, in fact, those conventions haven't changed appreciably in nearly a century, shouldn't the edublogosphere match its seemingly boundless enthusiasm for new media creation tools and new mechanisms for distributing those media with some reflection on the ancient, unchanged fundamentals of those media?

Case in point:

Alec Couros posted a video of an elementary school's touching, deeply heartfelt rendition of Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide." The ensuing commentary circled issues of copyright, walled gardens, global distribution, digital footprints, etc., but Darren Kuropatwa, out of all those technofuturists, hit the bullseye, noting the truly transcendental:

Darren: My favourite bit came at the very end when the teacher turned and spoke to the camera: “That was gooood!” That comment encompassed so much; about him, his students, and how they all feel for each other.

A milligram of sober deconstruction ("why do I like this?") is worth, for my money, a kilogram of exuberant, big-picture futurism ("how does this change everything?!"). It would do this old curmudgeon's heart some good to see some balanced restored to our discussions of ancient arts.

This never fails to crack me up, like the homework problem is Miley Cyrus and the whiteboard is our Pacific Garden Mall. Or something.

Other classes are even savvier, with smaller groups of friends rotating to one student the responsibility of sending the photo to the others. Digital natives, 21^st-century skills, etc.

This is one of the most thought-provoking comments this blog has ever seen, one which was posted weeks ago but which still messes with me:

David Cox: What percentage of the population do you think has the eyes and/or ears to know the difference [between soundtracks done well and done poorly]? When I watch a movie or listen to a song, I don’t see the things that you see. I try, but I don’t understand why certain shots are done certain ways or why a particular piece of music was or wasn’t used. Can I learn that? I don’t know. But if my audience won’t know the difference, should I take the time to learn it?

Two incomplete thoughts:

1. The software programmer should not write your lesson plan.

The programmer cares about consumers, not students. The programmer's job is to make as many features accessible to as many consumers as easily as possible, without glutting the program. Your job is to challenge your students. Your job is very, very different. So don't feel weird telling kids not to use a) bullet points in PowerPoint, b) filters in Audacity, and c) the "Add Track From iTunes" button in iMovie. The existence of the button does not make good pedagogy out of the button.

2. To put students in a place to care about the difference between good and bad production and not to equip them is wrong.

Which is to say, if you don't know why those closing montages at the end of Grey's Anatomy and Lost are insipid shortcuts to genuine emotional interaction with a story, then you should have the humility to recuse yourself and say, "Maybe I'm the wrong person to teach students to make movies."

This isn't about amateurs and experts. That fight is over. The amateurs have won and I wouldn't reverse that ruling if I could. But it's extremely important to understand where teachers fit into the new creative structure, a structure which has seen the quantity of published media increase at the same pace as its median quality has declined.

We must act as bulwarks against that decline, not accelerants of it.

I'm mixed. On the one hand, YouCube is a pretty interesting way to compare remixes of a thing (ie. David After Dentist) to the thing itself.

On the other hand, this strikes me as just another one of those tool that depends entirely on a teacher's pre-existing digital storytelling skills but which also distracts her from developing those skills. (ie. Why learn how to make one video really well when you can put six average videos on a cube!)

This is a classic game. It's been around in various forms longer than I've been alive. Choose your velocity, choose your angle, cross your fingers, and fire. Discovery has simplified the game nicely, removing some noisy variables like wind speed, which you'll find in other versions.

I first saw Discovery's incarnation several weeks ago and have been on-and-off obsessed ever since by the question: what can I do with this? The point of this post is to throw up my hands and report: nearly nothing. I have no idea what the students do here.

I mean, it's far from worthless. If a student can get past level ten, then she clearly has some understanding of angle and velocity and the dialog between the two. She might even ask herself some interesting questions, like, which angle gives you the longest range? But I won't drag the laptop cart across school for those small potatoes, for that two-step lesson plan of 1) guess and 2) check.

Here is the most rigorous, reasonable question this game can ask, a question which it is fundamentally incapable of answering: can you develop a method for hitting any target in one shot? This is a question either a) Discovery didn't think of or b) Discovery thought of but, for whatever reason, didn't make accessible to students.

Either way, it's frustrating. It's frustrating that:

• there isn't a grid for determining coordinates;
• the units aren't defined;
• there isn't a timer for determining parametrized equations;
• banner advertising reloads in the middle of the projectile's flight, making a mess of my makeshift timer.
  
• you're firing from the tip of the cannon, not the base of it, which adds mathematical noise;
• the layouts change at random (ie. my level three isn't the same as your level three) which crushes my one workaround here, copying level screenshots into Geogebra.
• I think, though I can't be sure, that you're blowing up huts and tents in some levels, which, gross. Seriously.

All of which is frustrating. The game uses mathematical notation for angle and initial velocity. It comes packaged with its own assessment system¹. This thing is so close to being useful.

Which makes it an interesting answer to Scott McLeod's question, where are the Internet resources for your subject area? Because this game isn't from some arcade site which I'm hopelessly trying to bang into a lesson plan. It's from Discovery, which isn't exactly apathetic to the needs of educators. Why didn't the thing come with a lesson plan?

My takeaway here is that the people who know the Internet and the people who know instructional design aren't the same people and they aren't talking to each other enough. We are left to our own devices.

BTW: Just a little over a year later and Colleen King comes through for the team: Tactical Rescue Missions for Intergalactic Good. Great work.

1. You get 100 points for each unused shell. The student with the most points (likely) has the best algorithm and calculations. [back]