Code-Switching in the Digital Age

I've always been fascinated by code-switching in language, particularly since taking History of the English Language as an undergraduate Literature major. I recognize that as someone born and raised in the Appalachian mountains that I code-switch between the Standard English I learned in school and a Southern Appalachian dialect I grew up hearing and using around my friends and family. As I've grown up, I've begun to understand more concretely when and why I code-switch though I do not feel I have a solid mastery of intentionally switching. I know that when speaking with my mother and grandmother I use my dialect register almost exclusively. I am so conversant in this way that I can even articulate a definition for abstract phrases and vocabulary such as "all ya'll" as it differs from "ya'll," "y'uns," and " I know I am likely to slide into this dialect when I am in agitated emotional states, and I speak faster and louder in this register (contrary to popular beliefs about Southerners and their drawl.) I am also well aware that I have fewer vowel sounds than many Americans (I can neither hear nor pronounce a distinction between pin and pen no matter how much I try).

It had not previously occurred to me that I code-switch into digital speak as well. I am fluent in a digital dialect as well (perhaps more than one). I have personal accounts on a variety of social sites and understand that different sites have different codes. I can converse fluently with my father on subjects of web design with abbreviations like SEO and CSS amongst others. Another instance, the world of tumblr blogs has it's own subset of digital language. Many areas of the site are driven by fans of various things that discuss "fics," "ship wars," and "cons" with ease while mediating an abbreviated language of simplicity and emotion using things like:
rn - right now
atm - at the moment
s/t - something
gpoy - genuine portrait of yourself (referring to something that describes your behavior or personality very well)
Users make liberal use of emoticons and "speak" with gifs, the "keymash" is an accepted response that coincides with exaggerated emotions in which "sobbing uncontrollably" or "i'm dying" refer to feeling emotionally overwhelmed or laughing at something.

All of this is just a basic example of digital fluency, video game and virtual world users have still different codes, while frequent texters have another. Language growth is moving continuously, giving "communication skills" teachers whole new worlds to handle in the classroom. What do we accept from students? When is it acceptable to speak in a digital dialect? Should we teach these dialects alongside Standard English? Is digital speak becoming a new form of Standard English?

Safari

Starting to realize just how much I've been missing out on using Firefox exclusively for the last six years or so. I needed to run updates on some of my software and decided to allow Apple to install Safari 5 at the same time. I feel like I've been doing so many things the hard way for so long. The Reader function is quickly revolutionizing the way I interact with the internet.

File under: moments when trying new things pays off.

Four Ages of Thinking Technology

What percentage of today's curriculum and classroom time fosters each generation thinking skills?Should this change? Why?

I think at the current moment, that the greatest percentage of our time in class and the curriculum focuses on 3rd generation skills followed by 2nd and 4th tied for time and 1st lingering around the edges of the others. This definitely needs to change. The greatest percentage needs to be on 4th generation technical and digital skills that scaffold, support, and expand upon the first three generations of thinking skills. There should be an equality and a balance to our learning in which each part compliments and aids the other parts.

Problem Areas in Breakaway Digital Literacies

Several of the problem areas mentioned in a discussion of the breakaway literacies of the digital palette are complaints that have plagued me continually as I've grown into an educator. I see the variations in skills my students have in the digital realm daily. I know that they know how to navigate social media, online or integrated gaming systems, smart phones, and ereaders, but they struggle with the most basic of web 2.0 tasks.

As an education system, we are wholly failing our students by barricading technology at the door. When we set up firewalls and blocking technologies to prevent them from accessing certain materials without teaching them why we do it, without teaching them how to safeguard themselves at home or in public, when we tell them no phones allowed in schools and ban social networking broadly, we are failing them. I have sixth graders in my tutor group that can't type in a web address and go directly to it. They have to hunt and peck type some part of the address into a bing bar and hope the search result they click is the right one. They can't navigate site menus or search for quality information. The extent of the skills they display on a computer are to use them for overly simple web games and to make powerpoints with information they copied and pasted directly from a website without citing anything.

Our students desperately need to be taught how to function in a digital world. We are doing them more harm than good by banning and limiting the ways they can interact with technology. I have hope that the problems will begin to resolve as more and more young, millennial, web-era teachers graduate and enter the field. The improvement is happening, but it is still happening too slowly.

A Nifty Audio Tool I Found Today

I was contemplating how I could record a quick snippet of audio on my Windows computer without using my webcam or a great deal of resources and decided to check around on the internet and found this:
http://vocaroo.com/

It is incredibly easy to use, free, quick, no account required. It's awesome. You just record and then share or download the file.
You can also download or embed a vocaroo widgit. Like so:



Powered by Vocaroo Voice Recorder

Pretty awesome, yes?
Does not provide storage at the site. So, if you want your recording forever, download it and store it elsewhere.

Questions for Digital Education

Answering and contemplating a few questions from the first chapter of my digital textbook.

Can we say with confidence which [educational operating] system is the most effective? 
  I don't think we can, at least, not at the time in which it is operating, not with the efficiency necessary to choose preemptively. I think at our current point in time, most people have to have experience with a system before they can offer any real feedback to it. I see this with the system we've created with NCLB. I think many people (most people?) thought the system would be effective, but the longer we've stuck with the system, the more flaws we have discovered. Effectiveness takes time to discover and evaluate, and that limits the levels of confidence we can maintain.

Can you think of other "educational operating systems" with which you are already familiar?
 I think most of us are intimately familiar with far too many systems. There are the classroom operating systems we ourselves put into play, the systems of the classes we attend, the systems for working with administrators and colleagues, government systems, secondary government systems put in place by funding initiatives (I'm thinking particularly of the operating system that controls the grant-funded YMCA program I work for).

 Do some work better for beginning teachers or experienced teachers? 
  I think so. I know many schools maintain operating systems specifically designed to aid BTs, pairing them in careful ways with mentor teachers and support staff, but I am not sure the same is true for experienced teachers. (Difficult to say without being one.)

How will a teacher communicate and lead instruction about curriculum content and the core P3 digital literacy activities? What will be the balance of instructional time between teaching solo or as part of a team? 
 I think the balance of instructional time is already shifting more heavily to focus on teaching as a part of a team and letting our students teach as part of a team. We no longer live in a society where one teacher standing at the front of a classroom imparting knowledge is logical, or even well-accepted. Teacher communication is rapidly becoming refocused from lectures and whole class instruction to small group instruction. Teachers impart instructions via websites and emails and students guide their own instruction following teacher models and structures. Students have the ability to navigate and create their own education more than ever before and teachers need to be able and willing to give them the work space to do so.

Picture Vocabulary!

This is an example of your Tuesday night homework assignment.
Choose 3 of your vocabulary words and illustrate them.
Be sure to break down the word parts into a literal definition on the back.

For this example:
EXCLUDE.
EX means "out"
CLUDE means "to close"
EXCLUDE literally means "to close out"

Stop Motion Using Windows Live Movie Maker and a Nikon D700

Had some new pens I wanted to try out and thought this was a nifty Emerson quote that deserved some art. Stop motion offers kids a lot of options for culminating projects in the Language Arts and Social Studies curriculum. A teacher in TCS that I'm observing with has her students making claymation versions of scenes from the Alchemist; the kids are loving it. They then have to write up the significance of the scene and why they made some of the choices they did in bringing it to life. I also think videos like these could be good discussion starters or journal prompts: What does the quote mean to you? Do the images support that meaning, why or why not? What about the music? If you were to illustrate this quote how would you do it differently? Would you make an actual video or stay with stop motion? Does your choice of media make a difference? Why?

In short, Michelle has a lot of fun with stop motion.

Image and Sound Overview Reflections

I think the internet definitely increases the need for visual literacy in the curriculum. In the "old" standard course of study (not sure about Common Core) for ELA, visual literacy rarely shows up. I know there is some limited standards for visual literacy in English 3 because I've taught a lesson set based on understanding the differences between texts and images using graphic novels, but it was just a tiny sub-set of the curriculum.
I like the idea of changing the focus of media literacy from protection to preparation. That's something I've really begun to notice in the schools I work in and something I suspect I will be advocating for for a long time.
A question I would add to the comparison section, particularly for students just beginning to explore images (that are used to a text based curriculum) would be to compare how image and text convey the same ideas in different ways. How does this image convey mood compared to how this text conveys mood?
I think that schools currently are doing a disservice to our children by being so logocentric and technology avoidant. We are no longer preparing them for the real world with our text based curriculum. We're not teaching them how to find problems, or safely navigate the maze of the digital world, or create very much at all.
I also feel as though we, as teachers, are not using nearly enough sound in the classroom. If the music habits of our kids are anything to go by, sound is potentially one of the best ways to reach them, but we don't make use of it. Occasionally teachers will play music in the background, but it doesn't relate to the activity. Sometimes we encourage kids to write songs for projects, but we don't give them the resources to put sound to the words. Students connect so well through sound and music and we just aren't using it.

My Teacher Websites

My graduate level teacher website can be found at Web Class - Ms. Rice
This one is in the early stages of development.

My undergraduate teacher website can be found at UNCA Student Teaching Website
Could use some updates with content from my student teaching experience but is generally up to date.

Elements of the Digital Palette

Though images, video, and sound are the most common forms on the palette, I find myself continually surprised at how many students do not have a good conceptual understanding of how to find, use, or create in this media form. I offered an enrichment course at the afterschool I work at on stop motion animation and photography, and I was really surprised at how few of the kids understood more than the most basic, "Push this button something happens and I get a picture." I think teachers have a responsibility to emphasize a deeper form of learning in this media than we have previously. Some of that also includes teaching more specifically on copyright laws.

The idea of the Gutenberg parenthesis is one I was unfamiliar with but that makes perfect sense. I write in the margins of my books all the time, but it never occurred to me that in another setting those annotations would be a conversation rather than stray thoughts. I suppose that's something I am used to though because when I purchase used books I leaf through them to check for pages that are generally free from the thoughts and notes of other people. I think reader input is one of the aspects of the digital literacy that requires adjustment for individuals who have not grown up using the web. It is a unique and sometimes disconcerting feeling to think about how many people can see, edit, or discuss everything you post, whether it is something trivial like a facebook status or something significant like an essay. I am really interested in continuing to explore the idea of second life as an educational tool with its variety of interactive opportunities.

Linking

The introduction to the chapter on web design is one I find fascinating. Linking has always been something I'm interested in, though previously it has manifested in my researching habits and reading more than in my web habits. My bachelor's degree is in Literature and nearly all of my professors were intent upon teaching us to build connections not only between works as we explored allusions, but also between writing and the author, between a text and ourselves, between history and literature. That aspect of my degree was and is one of my favorite parts. I love being able to read a book and say "oh! The author is referring to a book by this other author!" It helps me to feel more connected to what I'm reading. I thinking that is the true nature of linking, it's the emphasis on connectivity, on demonstrating how the world and the individual fit together.

I was really intrigued by the biological linking, particularly those discussing the brain linking to technology in the literal sense. I am continually reminded of a young adult fiction novel I read titled The Feed by M.T. Anderson in which humans are bodily connected to technology through a consistent feed of information. Everything we have externally now on our computers, phones, and the like is internalized. It strikes me as being the kind of book that is more predictive than imaginative. I feel as though the links we have now are merely the beginning and quotes such as "Some reports have indicated that the quantity of data flowing through the 'Net doubles about every 100 days" serve to emphasize that train of thought.

Exploring Chapter One - The concept of pages in literacy

I noticed a lot of interesting things in chapter one, one of the things I found most concerning was the idea that we are skipping over problem finding and framing in education and opting to only prepare our students for problem solving. I am curious to learn ways to help students work on those skills in the language arts classroom.


The thing I found most fascinating was the discussion of the changing nature of "pages" in literacy. I was amused because right as I read that section I realized I wasn't sure what was meant in our assignments tab by read the first 11 pages of a scrolling web page. I actually engaged several of my co-workers, and anyone willing to listen really, over the course of the week in conversations about pages and defining digital literacy and really enjoyed that. Personally, I think the idea of a page is much broader and more significant than we are currently defining it as, and I'm continually frustrated by the way so many teachers and administrators would rather ignore the digital world than teach our kids to be safe, responsible, digital citizens.

Blogging for Digital Literacy Class

Cool grad school things will follow.