The Assignment

Have you seen this video of Gardner Campbell’s “No Digital Face-Lifts: notes toward a personal cyberinfrastructure” ?

I watched it shortly after it was assigned for Week 2 of ds106 but that was so long ago that I can’t even find where our instructions were posted any more!

Great Quotes

I had many thoughts about the content:

  • “We are entering the new age of education that is programmed for discovery rather than instruction.” – Gardner Campbell and Jim Groom: What We Believe That’s very exciting to me. I believe that we learn best when we can construct our own meaning. But, what does this say about the quantity of standardized testing we do in schools? Is it improving learning?
  • I love that the printing press was considered a “Distruptive technology… any fool could say anything and how would you know?”
  • “As the means of input increase, so does the need for insight or pattern recognition.” This has many implications for education that I have not seen referenced before.
  • As Gerome Brunner suggested, “there is an authentic version of any concept that can be taught to any child that can read and write. You pitch it to the appropriate level of development and then you keep coming back to it… until that magic hand-off moment (end of high school/ early college)…[when you get to be] your own coach through your own zone of proximal development.” I have taught the same topics in grade 3 and grade 10 – just differently.
  • Clay Shirky coined the term the “digital face-lift“ We just do what we did before but we’ll put it on the web…How does that make anything better? How does it improve learning?
  • Instead of the digital face-lift, we should teach people to be the architects of their digital lives using these “three recursive practices that we already do but can be amplified with ICT”:
  1. Narrating: tell the story of the process of the learning
  2. Curating: take care of your stuff – arrangement rather than simply  transcoding
  3. Sharing: because it might be valuable to someone/ allow me to meet a friend

Master of My Domain?

It really reminded me of the 51st Seinfeld episode, “The Conetst” and the phrase “master of my domain”. It seemed to fit perfectly with Gardner’s notion that we should each be in control of our online personas. Incidentally, that made me feel quite guilty for sticking with WordPress for this blog and I can already see another project coming to become my own cyber-curator…

I decided to avoid looking at any of the ds106 responses before doing my own this time – that just scared me last time. Instead, I found this animated text version of The Contest:

That gave me an idea…

I could respond to Gardner Campbell’s Bag of Gold story using kinetic text. Little did I know that it would require several hours to learn a not-so-user/beginner-friendly programme. After Effects is pretty spectacular! But after far too much time, I still haven’t produced exactly what I wanted…  However, here it is:

As I went to post this, I see that others have been trying out After Effects as well. Mine might not do everything I had originally hoped but, I’m happy to have started to figure it out. Timmmmyboy,  I need your help. Yours does what I wanted to do. Nice work!

“We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.” – Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

So why are so many teachers hesitant to use new technologies? That might be a topic for a future blog post…