Social Networking, Avatars and Child Development

A few more peices fell into place today. I finally had some time to sit down and begin the awesome task of finding the budding research about child development, specifically identity issues, and online avatars/social networking. It's time-consuming work because there is no definitive text. Marshall McLuhan started thinking about these issues in the 1970s, and of course Piaget and Erikson both performed copious research on identity in general. However, I have not come across anything substantial. Today, I learned about Dr. Marina Bers from an article in the Boston Globe. She has created a social networking space for children suffering from serious medical conditions. That's not really what's interesting, though. She's interesting because she has done research on identity and computer technology. I emailed her. I've got my fingers crossed. I also read a blog post by Larry Johnson about Avatars and identity. One of the folks who posted a response was a technology teacher in Florida. She's supposedly conducting research AS WE SPEAK on the very issue. I emailed her too.

Maybe they can help me figure out if I need to be more than lightly concerned about the students at my school having two (sometimes three or four) such disparate identities. Maybe they just learn to juggle identities like they juggle tasks. Maybe their brain really is able to separate out what is real and what is online. Maybe.

Multifunction Digital Video Cameras

We purchased a new $100 multifunction digital video camera for one of the teachers at my school this weekend. She wanted an inexpensive video camera, and knew the videos would be posted mainly online, so quality wasn't a huge concern. She settled on an Aiptek. In addition to recording videos, it's also an MP3 player and digital still camera with USB connectivity. We don't yet know how the quality is. Will report back soon, but that $100 could go a LOOOOONG way in my classrooms if it works smoothly.

Using a Wiki for Grad School

Using a tool for my own personal uses has certainly been enlightening. I've created a 1980s Art and Artists Wiki instead of a PowerPoint presentation for my Fiction and Film of the 1980s class (yes, it's a real class). I've learned that it works pretty well if you want to embed youtube movies or even a few widgets or songs files. However, WHY oh WHY can you not center text? Why can't you change the font color and font?? Those are such basics these days? But then, it's free. I shouldn't really complain.

(Cindy Sherman, Photographer)

Joining Technorati

I don't exactly know why I am doing this, but I am joining technorati.
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Google Lit Trips

Yeah, we all talk big about how kids need to stop plagiarizing. The copy and paste mentality is ruining intellectual rights. We don't talk enough about how we, as teachers, need to change our own assignments and evaluation tools so that higher-order analysis isn't optional, but required. This new tool I found today makes that possible. Google Lit Trips is the new book report. It's a "mashup", I think. That's a fancy word that just means more than one tool is combined into a new form. Now, a student can open Google Earth and placemark all the stops the character makes along the way in the book, the birthplaces and homesteads for all the characters, the main event locations. The student leaves a running commentary as the "character" traverses the world, offering potential discussion questions or things to consider. There are a lot created for high school books and not so many for the younger grades, but it's just a matter of time. Now THAT's a book report for 21st Century Learners.

Raising Children in a Digital Village

We had our first Parent Forum of the year this Tuesday night at my school, and I spoke to about 25 parents (all aged children) about how Raising Children in a Global Village differs from the "Gutenberg Era" in which they all were raised. I'm experimenting with Voicethread , so I uploaded my PowerPoint, and then tried to comment, but I think our own Firewall settings at school are preventing me from doing so. I did embed the powerpoint onto a school Web page and uploaded the sound recording I made using a digital voice recorder--Olympus brand VN-480PC. I have to admit, the sound isn't great. I also provided links to most of the handouts I provided. Feel free to copy and use anything you'd like.

Is There Such a Thing As A Better Wiki?

WikiMatrix can be used to determine what kind of wiki best suits your needs. They have a cool Choice Wizard that will narrow down the field of available wikis to "free" and "WYSIWYG" (pronounced wizzywig, means What You See Is What You Get). Also allows you to choose the kinds of features you want. Instead of handing in a standard presentation for one of my grad classes, I'm gonna make a wiki instead. I've been irritated by wikispaces lately, mostly because it's not very seamless, lots of glitches. So, I thought I'd try out some other services. I made new wikis on the following sites:
http://atwiki.com/
- Luminotes
- Scribblewiki
- Seedwiki
- Stikipad
- Wetpaint
I have to be honest, there were other choices, but I went with these because I liked the names. There were some other choices like CentralDesktop, Netcipia and Cospire but I didn't think I'd remember those urls!

End results: I liked Wetpaint's "theme" choices. They look less like a wiki and more like a Web site, but their ads were just too prominent and the resulting page was overly busy. Seedwiki, @wiki, Scribblewiki and Stikipad had the same ease of use issues as wikispaces. Luminotes didn't appear to be operational at all. After all that, I didn't really come across any wikis that I thought offered a better service. Have any of you found a better wiki?

Yack Pack Begone! Voicethread, hello!

My inbox hosted a dastardly email this morning: Kim Cofino told me that Yack Pack has decided to go all capitalist on us and start charging for their service. Everyone has to eat, I guess. I was pretty bummed out, since a big part of one of my global collaborations projects was based upon the tool. But in the same day, I also learned from Kevin Jarrett that there's a new tool that could easily take its' place called VoiceThread. The demo is pretty exciting, but what's more exciting is that it's a lot like teaching class using a slide presentation. It integrates the sound and allows folks to comment on each page.
Imagine this: You post a slide presentation for the parents in your community about an Internet safety issue, like Facebook. You record your presentation material and parents can access it whenever they'd like. They may also post a comment or question for each slide and you can respond next time you log in. It's basically distance education. I like it. I like what it can do. I don't so much like that the world we live in requires/allows us to distance ourselves from one another. But I'll stop whining. This is GOOD NEWS.

Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink

For my "Fiction and Film of the 1980s" graduate class at Loyola, I am reading a book called Amusing Oursevles to Death by Neil Postman. It's from the 80s (duh), and mostly focused on how the shift from a literary culture to a visual (tv) culture has degraded our public conversation. He speaks about how the information glut has decreased our "information-action ratio".

Here's how it works: the more information we have about the world that is irrelevant to our lives, the less action we can take in response to it. For instance, we learn that there are Buddhist monks protesting in Burma. What can we, here in America, as regular folks, really DO about that situation? Our options are limited. Back in the day, when all news was relevant to our geographic locale (like with regional newspapers) we felt less impotent, felt a sense of more control over our lives. Postman's theory states that we are left asking ourselves: "What I am I to do with all of this irrelevant, decontextualized information?" Make it into a diversion, an amusement, like crossword puzzles, Trivial Pursuit, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? This creates a pseudo-context, a "last refuge of a culture overwhelmed by irrelevance, incoherence and impotence." (p. 76)

So what's the answer? I dunno. I'm only half way through the book. I can hazard a guess. Follow folk-singer John Prine's advice in his song "Spanish Pipedream": "Blow up your T.V., throw away your paper, move to the country and build you a home, plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches, and you'll find Jesus on your own." The more I learn about my job, the more I realize I'm teaching children how to wield a sword. It's still a weapon made for a war they will inevitably face; my only recourse is to teach them how to use it with honor.

Image credit: www.methuen.co.uk