“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” ~Noam Chomsky

Although the movie “Supersize Me” does show Morgan Spurlock’s own opinion on the subject and so it is swayed in his direction, what opinion piece doesn’t?  Many people might not agree with the ideas presented by Spurlock, and then there are others who might take what Spurlock says as the be-all-end-all because their opinions on the fast-food industry are similar.  One article I found on Tech Central Station called “Dishing It Out, But Not Taking It” by James K. Glassman says “Supersize Me” is

 ”a repulsive and dishonest piece of puerile entertainment — vomit and rectal exams tarted up with sociology and politics.”

Another comment was posted about the movie on the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) by a man who’s screen name is “bob the moo” that took the movie more as I believe it was intended.  He said,

“True, very few people eat McDonalds every day but many, many people do eat foods high in saturated fats everyday even if they are not all happy meals and, in this way, maybe Spurlock’s experiment wasn’t so far-fetched and, lets be honest, like their own lobbyist said – McDonalds are part of the problem.”

The point is, we all know that there is some truth connecting what we eat, how often we eat it, the amount of exercize we get, and how much weight we gain.  Because it is a topic that is debated and argued over a million different ways, why wouldn’t it be a perfect topic to bring into a classroom?

 The movie spurs opinions and makes you think.  How much of it is purposely portrayed the way it is because that is what Spurlock wants us to see, and how much of it can be taken as factual?  Why not let the kids decide?  Education plays an enormous role in having kids decide what is right for them.  And, they are bombarded everyday by countless advertisements for things that aren’t healthy for them, so a movie like “Supersize Me” might do some good in reinforcing the idea of advertising and the power it holds in helping children and teens make decisions about what they eat, drink, wear, drive, and so on.

The point of critical pedagogy is to challenge and question things the students see and experience everyday.  A movie like “Supersize Me” may in fact only show one side of an argument, it may be swayed a certain direction, but if something is presented by a teacher in the right way, then it gets the students to think about all sides of the issue.  What a teacher says to her class, what she feels about a subject becomes a part of the students’  that she teaches.  So, what we have to remember in critical pedagogy is not to get students to believe what we believe, but to get students to think critically about the world around them and their place in it.  Question authority and all of that.  A movie like “Supersize Me” or “Bowling for Columbine” or “An Inconvenient Truth” show students ways they can question what they have always been told by the media, government, parents, etc.  They are useful tools in a critical pedagogy as long as the teacher helps the students to begin questionin in the right ways.

“Dishing It Out, But Not Taking It” Full Article

Comment by “bob the moo” Full Comment

We have already gone over this idea a lot in class, but it’s of such relevance in today’s classrooms that I can’t help but bring it up in my blog as well.  It has to do with students writing for the internet and how it is different from writing on paper just for the classroom and teacher.

 I found a blog on Blogs for Learning called “The Technology of Reading and Writing in the Digital Space: Why RSS is crucial for a Blogging Classroom.”  This is a blog headed by Dr. Nicole Ellison and Dr. Ethan Watrall from Michigan State University and it was created for “students and instructors who are interested in the theory and practice of blogging within an educational setting.”  Well, I guess it is right on track for my interests, then.  What I found in the article mentioned above by David Parry are his views and ideas on the importance of blogging and of student knowledge of RSS.  He is disappointed to know that only one in ten of students (who are supposed to be the most “tech-savvy” generation) have heard of RSS feeds and would know what to do with them.  I am afraid that until I took this class, I was one of those disappointing students…but I am well on my way to becoming much more literate when it comes to reading and writing for the internet.

 When I first started to make my RSS notebook, I have to say that I was not sure what I was doing.  I still have trouble going through all of the articles that come up in my notebook because it seems that some of my feeds get so many at once that I cannot keep track.  But luckily, with practice, finding the articles that are relevant to my blog is slowly becoming less and less of a burden and waste of time.  Parry makes this point in his article when he says,

 ”RSS helps to give students control over content on the web, reducing time spent navigating from site to site to see what has changed, and instead allowing them to receive updates about the content they are interested in tracking or material that is relevant to class.”

“The speed of reading in the age of the digital has changed, and we need to help students navigate this. Being able to “surf” around countless webpages, scanning information, might be a good practice for cursory knowledge acquisition, but it does not lend itself to in-depth reading. In fact, I would argue that these are almost two separate mental practices. And it is important to teach students to distinguish between these two. Reading on the internet requires two separate skills: one, the quick analysis to find what is worth reading, and the second, a switch to slow analysis to carefully consider what has been found.”

This is something that may take a bit of practice, but with RSS, the job is more than half done for you.  A student has already chosen what areas of a newspaper or blog they want as part of their RSS, and so all they have to do is skim the headlines, mark the ones that seem relevant, and discard the rest.  Then, when they have time, they can come back to those articles that hopefully had some relevance and read them in-depth.  I know for me, this all seemed overwhelming, and I am sure that a lot of students (even those who have a bit more internet experience than me) feel the same way.  It seems like a lot, but once it is started, it can change the way you use the internet.

 The importance of this to me as a future teacher is what it can mean for my students.  They will no longer be writing all of their papers to me and handing them in for a grade, but instead they will be posting up blogs with their own ideas that are relevant to society today.  When teachers asked me to collect newspapers and cut out articles and then write a short paper about the article and how it is important to me and society I thought, “Eugh…what a bunch of hassle.”  But for students now, even just a few years later, this idea is not the hassle it once was.  Everything they need is right in one place, on the internet, so they can sit down and collect articles from all over the world that interest them and then comment on their blogs–all without ever leaving their seat.

The blogs, of course, should not be understood and written in the same way that the students would write a paper to be handed in.  What blogging brings to the table is an entirely different audience for the students to write to…and so their writing gains new scope, meaning, and most importantly to me, ownership.  The idea of authorship and everything that comes along with it is one of the biggest importances to Parry.  He gives a list of different aspects to authorship and what they can mean to students:

First: “Teaching students to write blogs without at least providing the idea behind RSS is like teaching them to write papers on word processors, but never showing them how to use spell check, find and replace, italics or any of the formatting tools; it just repeats the prior technical moment of writing. In order to be successful authors in this space, students need to construct content that takes advantage of the iterability and citationality that the web offers.”

Second: “By using RSS, you can syndicate all of the students blogs…Furthermore, RSS can facilitate commenting, as most blogs will allow you to syndicate the comments to a specific post…this will help students to realize how writing for the web is a matter of continuos conversation rather than static paper design.”

Third: “…digital content is increasingly syndicated. Thus, writing without an awareness of how your writing may be syndicated can lead to addressing your audience in an ineffective way…Writing with the possibility that content will be read in syndication requires that writers recognize the different ways in which their writing is likely to become re-contextualized.”

So, what these points about authorship show is that digital writing is a different game than the traditional mode of classroom writing.  As teachers, we have to be aware of both types of writing and it is also our job to inform our students about the different avenues available to them and when they are most relevant.  It is impossible to say that one type of writing is more important than another in a classroom, and I am not trying to push in favor of one over another.  I know that both will be utilized in my classroom one day, and it is important for me (and all other teachers/future teachers) to know how to approach the subject of writing in all of its forms.

Full article

It seems to me after reading through some articles that there are still people out in the world that do not see the advantages brought about by digital writing and technology in the classroom.  It was pretty cool today when Troy Hicks came in to lecture our class because I had just been surfing around his blog the night before.  I went back to it today, and I found an article he mentioned in one of his blogs about places to start when evaluating digital technology.  The article comes from the Why Teach Digital Writing page, and it is called “How Technology Changes Writing Practices.”

As future English teachers, we all know that we will have to incorporate technology and multimedia practices into our classrooms.  And we should (not just because the content standards mandate it, either).  Digital writing plays a huge role in our world today, and we do not want our own students fall behind others because we were not sure what or how to teach them about digital writing.

“Many writing technologies have streamlined the writing process (the typewriter is one example), but only a few writing technologies have had truly dramatic social impact. The printing press is one; the networked computer is another. It is the networked computer, the spaces to which networked computers provide access, and the public ways in which individuals are writing that are together changing the cultural landscape. These elements, taken together, are truly revolutionary.”

I guess before reading this, I hadn’t really thought of the internet and the possibilities it brings to the writing table in this light.  I of course know that technology and the internet have changed our world, but I hadn’t really imagined how it has changed our writing as well.  The printing press brought literacy to the masses; it was no longer something that the privileged enjoyed alone.  It cemented word spelling, made books cheap and available to everyone.  The amazing part is that right now, the internet is re-revolutionizing writing in the same way that the printing press once did!  Who would have thought we would live to see such times!

“The way that people are using the Internet and the sheer numbers of people writing on and with the web is having significant social and cultural impact. A February 2004 Pew Internet & American Life study reported that ‘44% of U.S. Internet users have contributed their thoughts and their files to the online world’ through posting written and visual material on web sites, contributing to newsgroups, writing in blogs, conversing in chat spaces (such as instant messaging), and via other digital means.”

44%.  In 2004!  With each passing year, the number of people joining the writing revolution brought to us via the internet grows.  How can it not be seen that the children in our school systems have a right and need to be a part of this?  Somehow, there are still arguments against it.  Continuing in the article “How Technology Changes Writing Practices,” the authors state all of the arguments brought to them as professors at Michigan State University against digital writing and then they supply their arguments against the resistance.  One example,

“‘We shouldn’t be teaching technology in a writing class. That’s not part of the art of writing. Back in the old days we didn’t teach TYPING in writing classes. Why should we teach computing now?’”

Their response:

“We are not ‘teaching computing.’ We are teaching writing-with-the-technology, because the technology fundamentally changes how writing is produced, delivered, and received. Some of us do remember the old days, thank you very much. We didn’t teach typing back in the old days because typing was a supplement to print culture: we were typing ON PAPER. However, we did teach students how to write for print distribution — that is, all our pedagogies for arrangement, our focus on modes, unity, and coherence, all of those principles presuppose print delivery. Now, in the digital era, we have vastly different technologies for production and distribution — and we have to teach our students the rhetoric for a new form of delivery. We didn’t ban paper and pens from our writing classrooms in the old days, why should we ban computers now?”

What I saw as one of the most frequent and important of the nine resistive arguments presented was, “Computer classrooms are too costly.  We can’t afford it.”  True, a computer classroom complete with all the essentials (software, hardware, furniture, etc.) can get very expensive…how can poverty-stricken schools, especially with the cuts-backs education has faced, afford these labs?  Well, with a little creativity and the fact that computer costs are continually going down, anything is possible.

The viewpoint held by many educators and others about the lack of need there is for digital writing in classrooms is simply misguided and false.  No ifs, ands, or buts about it, we have to find a way to bring digital writing and other uses of technology to all students in order to give them equal opportunities in the future.

“How Technology Changes Writing Practices” Full article

There has been a rising problem in schools across the United States and the world on ways to get technology integrated effectively into the curriculum.  How can technology be brought into a class and enhance the learning that would otherwise be taking place?  What new ideas and projects can be introduced that will not only engage students but also introduce new concepts and viewpoints?  What technology should be doing is creating a stronger more effective education, and some new, creative ideas have been introduced into classrooms across t he globe that do just that.

An article entitled Go National from the education blog edutopia.org talks about different capabilities that a tech circle brings to students.  Tech circles have

“students from far-flung locations collaborate using the Internet, video, and other distance-learning technologies.”

In this article, three different classrooms from schools in Oregon, Michigan, and New Jersey connect to one another in order to write, produce and share plays with each other through a program called TheatreLink.  The article goes on to say that there are only a few things that tech circles need to be effective: computers with internet capabilities and word processing, a digital camera and/or scanner, and a video camera.  Almost any school will now have those basic elements, so joining a tech circle would be easily doable and an amazing experience.

“Technology routinely opens doors for students. The tech circle leaps all remaining barriers and generates interaction among groups in various environments. Geographic, ethnic, and socioeconomic differences turn out to matter less than individual creativity and collaborative work.”

Tech circles can take place in any type of classroom, whether it be a history class, a biology class, a government class, or an English class.  What I thought was most interesting was how tech circles make it possible to connect with classrooms from around the world and bring them directly into your own classroom.  So let’s say my class were doing a project where they had to interpret Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar play (which is known to be hated amongst high school students) and they had to make a modernized version of it.  They could connect with students from other parts of the country, or even in Britain or India, and collectively analyze the text and write a version of the play together.  Or each class could write their own version and then share them with the other classes; it would bring in varying viewpoints from around the globe.  Different cultures and beliefs and ideas about the text would be shared and through this, the students are not just learning the standard version they would have learned in a traditional class.  Instead they are learning globally — which would be a completely different take on the same old thing.  The Go National article comments on this same idea as it was used in the TheatreLink collaboration:

“The outcomes of the playwriting project may not rival the work of Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller, but they are powerful nevertheless. Students from various cultures collaborate with others who have different viewpoints on common projects. Not bad for a day at school.”

Not bad indeed.  Writing and sharing information with students, teachers, and anyone else you can think of can happen at any moment.  It’s really boggling to know that these ideas are no longer for classrooms of the future, but for classrooms today.  My own classroom will have these capabilities and it will be up to me to utilize them…to get as creative as I possibly can; we really can have fun, sit in a class, and learn, all at the same time.  Who knew?

“Go National” Full article