Reflection
My first idea after reading the requirement of this task, I wanted to make a video and introduce the items. However, I was too busy these weeks I had to break down my process into small pieces. Therefore, all the pieces are taken at different times and mostly spontaneous without an overall idea of what to do with them. Somehow, I get this somewhat multimodal project at the end.
Instead of a simple picture like Task 1, I want to show you that I actually carry this bag and how it looks on me to give it a sense of reality. Also, compares to what I had in my bag one month ago, there are changes to the items in my bag. I chose to label them out and use Genial.ly to make it a somewhat interactive item with audio.
McLuhan (1960) mentioned technology changes education institutes which reminds me of a documentary “Most Likely to Succeed (2015)”. The director tracked the progress of students in High Tech High, a public charter school in San Diego, California. Two groups of ninth graders are followed over the course of a year in the movie, which mixes commentary from a variety of people. The movie focuses on the individual school experiences of a number of different students. And how the school integrated different subjects and have students to present what they’ve learned through a big final project.
We are not training workers for factories anymore, instead educate or, not even, encourage self-motivated, creative learners are the main and right goals for us-educators. The social development requires different sets of skills. Technologies are merely tools.
Though I will not call my work digital literacy but what we are doing is the prove of the convenience and ownership of information literacy. As what has been pointed out in the Digital Literacy, the social software changed the way we approach literacy comparing to printed work, also the ways of how people interact with each other has changed. The different mediums I used for this task is a collection of what I got familiar with through social software updates and that’s my “taking in” and “giving back” (Dobson and Willinsky, 2009, p.21).
There are 6 design elements mentioned in the New London Group (1996) article. They are: Linguistic, Meaning, Visual, Audio, Gestural, Spatial and Multimodal. That can also be translated into “hybrid”, which is a word they use in their article as well. I tried to integrate as many as I can for this task. This is the trend and reality. However, another reality is that Educational Technology requires support from professionals. Many teachers are happy to see that new technology can be transferred into productivity, but they don’t have the time and energy to learn. Sometimes just because “teachers are the worst students”. And that’s why Ed-Tech needs to be its own field.
References:
Cazden, C., Cope, B., Fairclough, N., Gee, J., Kalantzis, M., Kress, G., … & Nakata, M. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard educational review, 66(1), 60-92.
Dobson, T., & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital literacy. The Cambridge handbook of literacy, 286-312.
McLuhan, M. (1960). Classroom without walls. Explorations in communication, 4.
Hi Jane!
I like your doodles over the image — I feel like those make your task feel more personal.
I also really liked that you shared stories about your items instead of simply describing them, and how you leveraged interactivity to allow the viewer to choose which one to learn about next.
You mentioned in your reflection that you worked on this in pieces — I wouldn’t have been able to tell had you not mentioned it! It looks very cohesive to me.
P.S. Will you get to put stickers over your new MacBook Air?
Hey Jocelyn,
Thank you for your kind words. I didn’t plan to have the doodles included as part of the project, however, like you said I do think it is a somewhat special way to show it since I don’t plan to introduce what’s in my bag like it was the first time. I wanted to emphasize the change of mode.
I have covered the new laptop with new stickers, haha, some of them might not be work appropriate. LOL