Posted on 5th June 2009 by Judy Breck in Literature and Networks
defoe, digital, mirrored_knowledge, network
A distinguished new offering in the digital humanities, Digital Defoe was reported on by Wired Campus yesterday in a review titled 18th-Century Literature Gets a Makeover on the Web. We learn in the report that: “The site was created by the Defoe Society, an international group that studies the work of Daniel Defoe, an 18th-century English writer most famous for his story of Robinson Crusoe, a man shipwrecked on an island. Defoe is considered by some to be the founder of the English novel.”
My contention that the internet can showcase educational content in powerful new ways, by mirroring the inherent network structure of learning, is directly confirmed by the approach the scholars have taken in building Digital Defoe. (more…)
Posted on 8th May 2009 by Judy Breck in Golden Age of Learning and Schools We Have Now
digital, education, learning, star_trek
In 1966, when I saw the first episode of Star Trek, I was an advertising copywriter in El Paso, Texas. In that fairly small market, I was present at the local television studios when we taped the spots I wrote for clients. Production was visually analog. The insert above from the first episode of Star Trek gives you the idea. The stars were walking on a stage with rocks undoubtedly made out of cardboard. The cliffs and sky was surely painted props too. Nothing was digital.
The larger picture above is from a trailer for the new Star Trek movie that opens today in theaters. We see the silhouette of a young James Tibernius Kirk against a gorgeously complex digital depiction of the future.
When I got to thinking about the contrast between how the Star Trek story was conveyed by media 40 years ago to what we have now, it struck me how little the presentation of subjects they are supposed to learn in schools has changed for students during that same period.
Having completed high school in the 1950s, I found the 1966 Star Trek production compelling. Times, however, have changed. The television ads I created back then with a few analog props have been replaced by dazzling digital commercials. Millions of school kids who will enjoy the new digital extravaganza of this year’s Star Trek movie — and are accustomed to the dazzle of digital ads – will return in the fall to essentially analog classrooms.
For educators to take on this Starship Education challenge would be a lot better than throwing huge amounts of money once again at the analog education methods our children endure:
Learning… the Final Digital Frontier. This is the voyage of the Starship Education. Its five-year mission: to explore the strange new worlds of the internet and mobiles, to seek out new ways to teach ideas and new access to knowledge, to boldly go where where our youngsters already are.
Posted on 6th July 2008 by Judy Breck in Golden Age of Learning and Schools We Have Now
digital, Frank_Rich, future, learning, Wall-e
The new movie “Wall-E” is getting lots of rave reviews. Here’s mine:
The movie reminds us what fools we are to settle for how things are – that we are just not bothering to think about doing something different. Below is a section from a column by Frank Rich in the New York Times. He uses the “Wall-E” story to compare the U.S. Presidential campaigns to the people in the movie who are blissfully oblivious to their inexcusable lethargy. Rich’s column seems to have struck a cord because it is number 5 today on the list of stories most often emailed from the NY Times.
When I read the excerpt from the column quoted below I thought that what caused the children to clap their small hands was a hope they sense that adults will break through to a future children already understand. As readers of this blog know, my purpose in writing it is to propose that we can and should move education into a learning environment not trashed by mouldering theories and artifacts from the pre-digital, unconnected world. Our children already know that such a future-engaged world is a few clicks away in the billowing digital commons of knowledge and learning. The kids are tugged by an unmistakable summons to remake the world of learning. We adults can take part now in that remaking, and like the movie ending, can expect future generations to learn happily ever after .
From Frank Rich’s column:
One of the great things about art, including popular art, is that it can hit audiences at a profound level beyond words. That includes children. The kids at “Wall-E” [in the audience when Rich saw the movie] were never restless, despite the movie’s often melancholy mood and few belly laughs. They seemed to instinctually understand what “Wall-E” was saying; they didn’t pepper their chaperones with questions along the way. At the end they clapped their small hands. What they applauded was not some banal cartoonish triumph of good over evil but a gentle, if unmistakable, summons to remake the world before time runs out.
Posted on 15th January 2008 by Judy Breck in Mobile Learning
college, digital, digitization, library, research, tech, university
Adrift. Dysfunctional. Desperately needing a change. These words begin a Chronicle of Higher Education report called “Strains and Joys Color Mergers Between Libraries and Tech Units.” The article describes merging library and tech as the fix toward the desperately need change. From the perspective of the new information swamp, research needs to be served by connecting the nodes of pertinent information (gold) to each other and to the individual doing the research. The article describes what seems to be a big step in that direction. Here is some of what it says, describing what is being done at Xavier University in Cincinnati:
The solution was to scrap traditional library and technology units in favor of one with librarians and technology experts working side by side, responding to students’ needs for immediate, round-the-clock access to electronic data and interactive Web applications.
A $28-million building called the Learning Commons will be erected to house the organization and serve as a center for various educational programs. Users will be able to get technical help, use multimedia software at any one of a bank of computers, view the library’s online holdings, and have their reference questions answered.
The library, which will be attached to the new building, is being refashioned as simply a warehouse for books.
Xavier is among at least three dozen colleges that have taken the drastic step of merging their library and technology departments. The mergers are happening at small liberal-arts colleges after take-charge leaders — usually CIO’s — arrive and see traditional boundaries between library and technology work blurring. Those leaders observe increasing amounts of scholarship being digitized, students doing research online, library books sitting unused, and a constant stream of requests for computer and Web support. They want the flexibility to allocate funds where they are most needed, be it hiring an instructional technologist or purchasing an e-book collection.
Posted on 9th June 2007 by Judy Breck in Schools We Have Now
diana, digital, future, learning, past, princess
I hope so. The future of our children continues to be at stake as the pre-digital dominance in education continues to cope with the growing intrusion of the digital, virtual, connecting world. From a completely irrelevant source comes an insightful statement of the problem in this struggle. New York Times book reviewer Caroline Weber writes today about The Diana Chronicles, Tina Browns new book about the saga of Princess Diana. Weber writes:
After Dianas death in August 1997, Brown again placed the magazine over which she presided this time, The New Yorker in the middle of what was still the biggest tabloid story in the world, by publishing a special issue devoted to the princess memory. Brown stressed the dramatic difference between the Windsors self-styled identity (local, modest, unsurprising guarantors of British tradition) and Dianas (global superstar, unapologetically shrewd … at press relations). The conflicted relationship between the two had been, the historian Simon Schama noted in the same issue, a wedding of the past and the future: the Radetzky March meets the Tatler cover girl. … But, as it turned out, the past and the future couldnt get along. Whats more as Browns book demonstrates, and as the recent film The Queen has also made clear the future was bound to win, even if it claimed its own leading avatar in the process.
Posted on 14th February 2006 by Judy Breck in Emerging Online Knowledge
digital, game, video, war
The article today here in the Washington Post delves into the way soldiers are affected and the effects on war itself of virtual war games. One day these affects and effects will be a major player in pedagogy of many subjects. We are overdue in simulating the interplay of the mechanisms of biology, physics, history and one supposes the plots of literature and other arts. The delay is not on the students’ side. They are raring to go into the virtual game of learning. For now virtuality is mainly done for war, not for enlightenment.
Posted on 29th January 2006 by Judy Breck in Emerging Online Knowledge
digital, education, pedagogy
The Public Library of Science journal Computational Biology has just announced a new column on “education.” In doing so, the journal’s editors have truly turned a corner into the future. For years now, educators have striven mightily to shoehorn pre-digital pedagogy into the radically new venue of virtual information. The biologists here are looking at new evolution of methods, open source, techniques, algorithms and more for education. Here’s some flavor:
Tutorials and reviews are only the beginning. Over time, we will explore ways to present educational information in this digital age that can take advantage of technological innovation. In addition to text-based information, we are considering multimedia presentations and other media to enhance the written word. On this front, in particular, we welcome any comments and suggestions from the community.
