Digital Texts in and Out of School

“. . . the everyday lives of students in our classrooms are inflected by a range of digital technologies that allow and encourage the production and use of an expanding palette of digital texts.” (Carrington & Robinson, 4)

The range and variety of software engines available for creating digital texts has expanded to offer a means of scaffold development for students with a number of diverse learning styles and preferences.

A few posts ago I spoke/wrote about designing a classroom with the goal of a shared digital learning experience in mind. It is a challenge I find at the heart of all the articles for this week's assignment.

The text we are currently using was published in 2009. In the six years between it is probably difficult to assess changes in public perception regarding the place of digital technology in education. I imagine that it is becoming less and less a dark place full of terrors and much more an obvious choice (I binge watched the first season of Game of Thrones a few days ago).

Perhaps it is also a good time to discuss and share our observations and perceptions regarding our shared on-line learning experience in terms of the challenges we have encountered and the strategies we have used to meet those challenges.

I met with the Dean of the Education Dept. this morning. We discussed the reasoning behind FSU's on-line course availability. She told me that the course offerings were an answer to the growing number of on-line universities created to make education available to a wider range of students.

While that may be true, I do not believe it should be considered a stand-alone reason; rather, as financial motivation seems now to always be the strongest prompt for change, the competition argument provided the best opportunity to start a program aligned with the current direction of the pedagogical compass.

“How do we ensure that every child has the ability to articulate his or her understanding of how media shapes perceptions of the world?” (Willet, 16)

If young students aren't being educated as critical media consumers in school, it is likely most of their choices are modeled for them at home where critical education is not always a priority.

As an avid media observer, researcher and consumer I must say that my current perception of media's impact on the way people see themselves and the world in which they live is in free-fall.

So many people constrict their on-line consumption only to sites and programming with opinions and observations that agree with their own already developed ideologies and world views, it has promoted a corrosive and dangerous digital divide that is currently playing itself out in the streets and on our media delivery systems.

I was 5 years old when John Kennedy was assassinated. The period we refer to as the civil rights era (an unfortunate and misleading description; the African American struggle to gain equal rights has been a constant endeavor since the country's inception) was already 6 years old.

Watching violent events play out on the relatively new medium of television, especially the assassinations of three iconic public figures, riots in major cities and an unnecessary war more than half a world away, frightened me and shaped many of my world perceptions. 

I can only imagine how the world view of pre-teen and teenage children today are impacted by watching, often in real-time, people like themselves-- not soldiers and politicians--being killed violently for reasons no one seems able to explain.

As teachers, do we shield them as much as possible or do we teach them how to use information technologies to expand their knowledge base and assure them that periods of great change are historically often accompanied by violent acts perpetrated most often by people who fear change and pass with time?

“The creation of a profile page depends on the rapidly evolving affordances of the digital media involved.” (Dowdall, 43)

Sharing identity with one's community of involvement is among the most important elements necessary for exploring the sharer's own identity. Just as meeting with friends for parties, communal sporting events, etc., represent opportunities for us to create and refresh our own evolving stories. There is a constant negotiation between what we believe about our identities at a given moment and the changes in our perception of our own identities based on reflective thought and evolving level of maturity; in other words, our identities are in a constant state of change. We don't believe the same things about ourselves or the world at the ages of 15 0r 20 or 30 that we believed at the ages of 6 or 8 or 12. Profile pages represent a pragmatic cognitive tool for creating and re-creating identity.