Week Six Reflection; Social and Emotional Exhaustion

Truth be told, I am glad week six is behind us.  I know that life happens--but I cannot remember a week in my life when it has been more trying to be a human being.

Even as I write this reflection, three police officers are dead in Baton Rouge.  We are gearing up for some of the strangest political party conventions held in my lifetime.  Turkey is about 12 hours post-coup attempt.  There is a heat dome headed for most of the Western US.  There are still people missing in Nice, France.

This feels like humanity is converging upon sure disaster.

Then, I think, does all of this seem connected simply because we are all so connected to it.  I can turn on the news--broadcast 24 hours/7 days a week and get the latest details.  I can take a quick glance at any number of my social media connections and get a quick read on what is happening and how my circles are responding to it.

Has the world always been this chaotic?  Or, have our connections just brought the chaos into full, focused view for all to see?

And, I am trying to think about how we can guide our students through all of this information to productive conversations.  I wonder how we are going to do that when some of our best universities are encouraging us to moderate the tone of our social media usage.  Our students have their voices too--voices which need to be heard and voices which often contain more reason than those of the adults around them.  I am loathe to ask them to moderate their voices when, to the depth of my core, outrage does seem appropriate.

However, it is not enough to feel outrage.  Collectively, we have powerful tools in digital media that allow us to create communities of understanding.  We can learn from experience and move forward in a way that is productive.  I am convinced that humanity has the capacity to create collapsed digital spaces where perspectives and solutions to our shared issues can germinate, pollinate and grow.  Can we use what we are learning here to create narratives which can move us in a different direction.  Can those same ideas be used to move our politicians and leaders in a direction which serves all humanity?

Perhaps I am an idealist--still.  Converging upon sure disaster is not a place which is comfortable for me--and the question becomes, how can we help ourselves and our students become change agents working against this madness?  Can we equip them with digital literacies which give them a powerful voice to become catalysts for change?  I believe we can--and I believe we have an ethical and moral responsibility to help them move in that direction.

Tough week for our planet.

Week 5: Reflection--From Practice to Practicality!

It's hard to believe Week Five is over!  With each passing week ing ILT 5340, I feel like I have developed more skills and a better understanding of the theory and the mechanics of digital storytelling.

I was particularly able to connect this week's readings to practice this week.  In my work life, I am busy developing a program for a brand new school which will open in a few short weeks.  Launch High School has been specifically chartered as a blended learning program with a focus on entrepreneurship.  It is one of many of the opportunities I have had professionally in my career that just leaves me wondering at the serendipity that is my life. I have been trying throughout the semester to think about what group annotation might look like in a high school environment.  By the time I completed reading and annotating this week's required readings I had ideas for every member of my new staff about how they could implement hypothesis in their classes and how they could inspire students to read more closely and more thoughtfully--but more importantly more collaboratively in the classroom.

The two readings on the letters to the next president put some flesh on those ideas which made it possible for me to send them out to my staff.  I truly believe this is the most contentious presidential election in my lifetime and having tools our students can use to tweet, blog and message the candidates is an empowering element that we have not had in previous election cycles.  Using this in our Social Studies classes will give our students a whole new perspective on the process.

The highlight of the reading week was truly the annotation flash mob.  I had honestly never thought about this--but am now envisioning doing this as a collaborative exercise in a classroom--either as a pre-reading exercise or as a way of starting a collaborative discussion.  The 30 minutes I was able to spend in the flash mom was incredibly illuminating--and provided a lot of inspiration.

So in terms of my professional practice--this is a week of transference for me.  I'm much more able to transfer this week's readings to our school's practice in the coming weeks.  Most of all, my horizons are a bit wider.

On the artistic/creative side, I have LOVED this week's daily creates.  The mashup became a group project in our household which means that my daughters have learned how to use transparent images to create mixes of their own.  It is the ultimate in DIY when my kids join in and muck around with me as we figure out new programs and see what we can do.  There are so many great ways to complete the daily creates and I am learning to just sit back and have fun with each one as it comes up.

Bring on Week Six!

Week Four Reflection: Blogging as an Act of Community

I have been mulling over this week's reflection for a couple of days now.  As I think back on the week's reading and activities, it all boils down to creating communities of practice.  I found it useful to go back and read through my annotations from the entire week and look back at my daily creates and consider how the different pieces all fit together.  It was easier this week to see those connections after I went back and read my work with intention--looking for threads of commonality.

It is interesting in the small groups to see how we are coming together in our posting.  I have responded to most of the members of my small group over the past couple of weeks.  While each one of my group members has a unique perspective, as we bounce our ideas around, it is clear that a sense of shared learning is coming together.  At first, I was not sure about posting to the private group because it felt small and limiting.  Now, I see the purpose in that.  In our very large class group it would have been much more difficult to create those shared learning spaces and a shared understanding of our different perspectives.  So, this is a shout out to Group A -- because as colleagues, you all rock!  You have broadened my thinking in many ways.

I have come away from the readings this week with new ideas about blogging.  I never really thought about blogs as anything but a singular experience.  Even in my own blogging experiences which can be distilled into two purposes: I blog to inform far-flung family of our activities; or, I blog as a visual journal for myself.  The first blog is open to comments because we have family members who really like to comment on how fast the kids are growing or how great the music recital video was.  The visual journal is not open to comments because it is definitely more personal--and while I know that others read it, I am not particularly open to being vulnerable enough to want more than a one way shared space with them.  

Affinity spaces are interesting that way.  As I look for digital stories, because of my interest in personal narratives, I often stumble upon very personal stories.  I shared one of those this week--about life, living and dying.  The author/creator of that story chose to remain anonymous, as I do in my journal blog.  Yet, he shared his thoughts in a very public space where people like me would have no difficulty finding his story.  It is one thing to share the story.  It is an entirely another to dialog about it.  In fact, it occurs to me that a story like this which does not allow for comments is a bit like one of the rules in a twelve step program.  You can share your story and you are encouraged to do so. However, the group norm is that you cannot engage in cross-talk.  Participants cannot ask clarifying questions or make comments.  The story is shared for the purpose of creating community--and creating relationship, or becoming a part of the affinity group.  It is not necessarily about creating a shared dialog.  Some blogs are like participating in twelve step.  You share.  That's it.

All of this serious stuff aside, my favorite part of this week was the 2nd daily create.  I stumbled upon it late Saturday night.  I actually dreamed about it.  Sunday morning, Ro-Po came alive in just a few minutes.  There is something inspirational about working in digital spaces for me which allows for really creative thinking which I have only experienced within this space.  Until I spent a lot of time working within this space, I never considered myself to be very creative.  I usually fall on the analytical side of things.  I am linear to a fault.  So, the daily creates have been somewhat of a challenge--and I have not particularly challenged myself mostly due to fear and some uncertainty about my ability to actually create something!  This week, it all came together and I just let go and had some fun with it.  I need to remember that I have that within me--and capitalize on it when it happens.  That being said, I think I'll keep Ro-Po to myself and not share it on the neighborhood FaceBook page where I am guessing they would not share my irreverent sense of humor!

Carry On--Week Five, here we come!

Week Three: Reflective Summary or Difficulty Building Bridges

I always feel like I am in a confessional when I write my reflective summary.  For those of you who read these, my apologies in advance!  This week, I felt like I was traversing a huge cultural divide between what I believe about information and knowledge and the practices that occur in many school districts.  We have tremendous power as educators to change our world for the better and yet there is a parochialism that is so invasive within the system which undermines the free exchange of information and the development of collaboration which has the potential to create new channels of understanding.

I believe more than anything else, this stifles human growth and keeps information in a very few hands rather than distributed in collaborative environments where change is truly possible.  I do not believe information should be a commodity.

On a more micro level, this week, I had some difficulty building bridges between the information I am working on for ILT5340.  I do not know if it was just me or if others experienced this week the same way I did.  The daily creates felt disjointed from the readings for the first time in the course.  I spent a lot of time thinking them through and working out the technical details.  In particular the plotagon was time consuming.  I felt the outcome was worth it simply because it is something I can use with my students and which is very engaging.  The video was easier to produce--but if I had to be honest, my children probably got more out of that experience than I did as they acted as my camera operators and technical support.  In retrospect, I would have used them as actors and done more of the technical work myself.

These activities felt a bit disjointed from the required readings WHICH I LOVED!  As a former homeschooler and someone who supports alternative education, the whole notion of DIY completely resonated with me.  I have watched so much of the backlash against the DIY movement play out as the professionals clamor to hold tightly to their proprietary knowledge.  The collaborative nature of building understanding through communities of practice is something that just rings so true to me and frankly, is something we should embrace across fields.  We need to build bridges and create on ramps for participation in these communities.  On this level, I was able to create some continuity between my own belief and practice.

I spent a good time this week on an outside reading, The Story Factor by Annette Simmons.  I was struck by a particular quote:  "People don't want more information. They are up to their eyeball in information. They want faith...Faith needs a story to sustain it - a meaningful story that inspires belief in you and renews hope that your ideas indeed offer what you promise...Story is your path to creating faith. Telling a meaningful story means inspiring your listeners...to reach the same conclusions you have reached and decide for themselves to believe what you say and do what you want them to do. People value their own conclusions more highly than yours. They will only have faith in a story that has become real for them personally. Once people make your story, their story, you have tapped into the powerful force of faith. Future influence will require very little follow-up energy from you and may even expand as people recall and retell your story to others."

I have been thinking about how true this is in the digital stories I have chosen to review.  Ultimately, I am drawn to those very human stories which dig into issues of empathy.  These stories are high impact and they do create faith--faith in humanity, in the ability to change, in the power that is inherent in taking risks.  The vast majority of making meaning for me grew out of this outside reading this week.

Where I think I fell short was in building cognitive bridges for myself between the activities and the information in the course this week.  I wish I could have done this better.  I don't usually struggle with this quite as much as I did this week.

Week Two: Weekly Reflection: Life Meets ILT5340

This has been a really interesting week.  I have been playing around with a lot of ideas--starting with remixing.  The Lankshear and Knobel reading really emphasized some of the technical aspects of what exactly was happening during a remix and I felt really got into the technicalities so much that they overlooked how remixing may also change how the remix is understood and perceived by individuals who were consuming the remix.  I noticed this is several of the comments by my colleagues on the piece as well.

I also really enjoyed some of the recommended articles which I found very helpful for my own practice and understanding.  I appreciate the broad differences in the approaches of the recommended readings and the contribution they are really making to my exploration of change, transitions and risk-taking.  I am also enjoying the flexibility to explore academic, peer-reviewed articles and then juxtaposing that research oriented approach with a more experiential approach which explores how individuals are constructing their own meaning within this digital space.  I was and will continue to be fascinated by the concept of a 'collapsed context' which I discovered during my own research this week and which I referred to at length in my reading critique this week.  This is a really interesting idea which was completely new to me.  It is not often that I stumble across something new since my dissertation literature review is nearly complete.  So while I now have a very valuable addition to the literature review, I also have another way of thinking about digital spaces and creation.

Since this is my focus theme for the summer, as I am reading and exploring the various readings and daily creates, it seems that this is a theme that is pervasive.  I am not particularly having difficulty finding interesting and even provocative digital stories which easily accompany this theme.  Nearly every digital story explores this theme from multiple perspectives.

This was also an incredibly personal week.  With the events in Orlando at both Pulse and Walt Disney World, I found it difficult to distance myself from my own feelings of empathy and sympathy.  I despise the 24 hour news cycle in that it smothers us with information before the information can even be verified.  At the same time, I was moved enough by my own experiences with my own children at Walt Disney World to filter my second daily create assignment through that particular lens.  Yes, I have an interest in emotional intelligence and empathy which has worked its way into my academic research--but I chose that as an area of research because I believe there is something about empathy which is worth researching and understanding.  I was very much surprised at the sheer emotional impact the Orlando tragedies had upon me.  I was equally surprised that it filtered into this class as a means of expressing empathy and my shared feelings for the families.

This was true with the audio daily create as well.  I chose a very evocative piece of music that speaks to me in many different ways.  Is it about empathy?  I do not know--but what I do know is that the experience of listening to music is qualitatively different from listening to a lecture or a TED talk.  It takes us down a different set of neural pathways and while I am not an expert and I am certain that a significant body of research exists already, my experience with music tells me that it inspires me differently than the spoken and written word.  That takes me directly back to the idea of medieval minstrals singing the stories from one age to the next.

So often in my research, life has intersected with courses--or maybe I am more attuned to listening for that intonation.  In any case, this has been an extremely interesting and valuable week.

Week One Reflection: The Community Converges

As I complete Week One of ILT5340, one particular theme continues to emerge through the reading and participation in the various activities embedded throughout the course.  This is the idea of community.  While I have been steeped in research about digital storytelling and my own practice in this area has intuitively led me in this direction, the idea of situating learning and understanding within a community continues to repeat itself and I continue to be fascinated by how this happens and what creates the culture in which it happens with such fluidity in cyberspace.  When I first dabbled on the internet, it was 1993 or 1994.  I had young children at home and a newly found AOL account--very expensive dial-up.  I joined AOL specifically because it had a very active homeschool forum which was connecting homeschooling mothers together.  I quickly found a group and we started sharing information and learning about each other.  Twenty years later, I still enjoy close relationships with members of that group even though most of us are well past homeschooling our children who are now grown and have children of their own.  I quickly became literate in new technology which I now cannot imagine living without.  Though most of the people in this course will never know the unique sound of a modem connecting through a phone line and the expense of paying by the minute for a dial up internet connection!  

C.S. Lewis wrote, "We read to know that we are not alone."  While reading is one piece of literacy, the key to his observation is the relational element of reading another's writing and responding to it in an interpersonal or intrapersonal way.  As the authors of Chapter 1 state, "Hence, there is no reading or writing in any meaningful sense of each term outside social practices" (p. 2).  We don't create an experience which is fundamentally social in isolation.  Instead, we create shared experience-or an experience which we hope will be shared.  While I am still attempting to understand Gee's definitions of discourses, which I am finding a little convoluted, it seems to me that the essential understanding of literacy is to be able to use multiple levels of many different types of literacy and to identify "literacies as social practices is necessarily to see them as involving socially recognized ways of doing things" (p.4).  This implies more than reading, comprehending, and writing--the traditional definitions of literacy.  It  implies an application which includes interacting and understanding relational activities. 

As a secondary piece of research this week, I explored a chapter authored by Alan Davis and Daniel Weinshenker, “Digital Storytelling and Authoring Identiy.”  One of the themes of this particular chapter, in fact the stated purpose is to explore “how the processes of authoring these stories and their distribution to audiences become a resource in the authoring of identity and changing the relationship of author and audience” (p. 1).  The interesting elements of the Davis & Weinshenker explore are specifically around memory, creating identity and understanding ourselves through our own narratives and through the understanding of others.  Essentially, we solidify our identities when we tell our stories.  In my current research this extends not only to identify formation, but identity re-formation as when we work with students to understand themselves in different ways, we may be able to help them re-frame their stories  in more positives ways.  For example a student who has created a negative identify and who believes that he is a “loser” may be able to reframe that narrative and create an identity which allows him to understand that the situation of his earlier experiences make him a ‘survivor’ or even a “thriver” with the re-telling of the story. 

The work this week has allowed me to dig a little more deeply into ideas of identity, belonging, community and how digital narratives can contribute to those far beyond more simplistic ideas of literacy.  For example, how literate are we if we can read, comprehend and express ourselves but have no ability to relate to what we read, comprehend or write to the discourse around us?  Again, I am still grappling with this idea of discourse and working my way through a better understanding of that—but it seems that this work is so highly relationship oriented and situated in a social context that literacy simply must be understood in an expanded dimension given the multiplicity of ways it is expressed across many mediums. 

References

Davis, A., & Weinshenker, D. (n.d.). Digital Storytelling and Authoring Identity. Constructing the Self in a Digital World, 47-74. doi:10.1017/cbo9781139027656.005

Lankshear, C. (2007). Sampling the "new" in New Literacies. In M. Knoebel (Ed.), A New Literacies Sampler (pp. 1-24). New York, NY: Peter Lang.