Final!

Wow.

This has been tough for me in a lot of ways. I remember when I was a kid in elementary school--and to be honest, high school as well--and there were things I just could not do. Math. Language. Nowadays one might say, "Oh, if you only had the right teacher!" It wouldn't have made a difference. My mind could not wrap itself around certain concepts and tasks. Luckily, I went to college in a time when I was able to skip math and language (and science), and concentrate on what I loved and could do--lit, history, the social sciences like political science and into psych. I hate the feeling of being unable to do something--the feeling of being incapable and helpless. Of being a failure. And to a great degree that's how I often feel when working with technology. The last part of the course, particularly the portion on delicious, made me feel like I was doing a task with my thumbs amputated and the directions written in Sanskrit. I was lost beyond lost. Thankfully, Anna Watkins helped me out, guided me through this section. And for me, for the kind of learner I am, that was essential. I really couldn't have done this part without her. I felt that need only a couple times this summer, and the times I did, there was Brandon, Tami, and Amy to walk me through the task, and, honestly, pushing the right buttons for me. I've done that with my students. I don't know if it's ethical or acceptable, but it's kind, and I appreciate it.

I was talking about this course with Jack Bross today. He struggled with it, too, but certainly not as much as I did; but also, he saw ways he could use this in class. And I'm thinking about that too, not just because the course expects me too, but because all this...stuff is out there for me as a teacher. Honestly, much of what I've touched on during this course I wouldn't use in my class. I'm old school: at the end of the day, it's still the book and the student. Not even much secondary material. Certainly not at the freshman and sophomore levels. But at the same time, as I write this, I realize that with something like Delicious could use more secondary material for a class like my War and Peace seminar: it would be a practical way to incorporate much of the secondary material I do use in that particular class. As I wrote on an earlier blog, I could see using a Wiki with my younger students as a way to work on writing, particularly with revision and editing. I am, as I wrote many times, much taken with the blog and the way it has allowed me to link to material, visual and written, that allows for lots of discussion and questioning. I really enjoyed putting together and learning to use my War and Peace blog this past year, with lots of encouragement and help from, as always, Brandon, Tami, and Amy. I will keep using the blog.

Not surprisingly, the early part of the course was the easiest for me: as it went on, with the Wiki and that !@#$%%^ Delicious, it got much harder. None of this is instinctual nor natural for me. I am, I discovered, like many of my students, a hands on learner with material I don't understand. The directions to Delicious didn't work for me. I missed point B, which then made doing C,D, F, and G impossible. And then there was the signing up for Yahoo, which wasn't in the directions. A suggestion? Update the course to reflect the changes that have occurred since it was first designed and implemented.

I still am a Luddite. But I am a much more open minded one for taking this course. And the best part of this was working with Tami, Brandon, Amy, and Anna. As Bruce Springtseen once wrote, "I need that human touch." I am not as frightened by the web and technology as I was. I am possibly one of the most advanced, technologically speaking, in my department. That's a scary thought. Who'd a ever thunk it?

Task 12. What I plan to do.

Now remember: I exist in a department where one member only recently--in the last five years--began typing his evaluations and another recoils at the word "blog". At the same time we have a couple of younger members who are I'm sure well versed in the world of the web and another, a veteran even, who shows no fear of it. And there's me, who some in my department think has gone over the edge into techno-land. And as this course has shown me, I am so far from techno-land that it's ridiculous. Yet given that, I still will push what I know and have learned to use successfully.

What I have done in short term classes I have taught with two separate colleagues this past year is use the blog. And both Clark Cloyd and Rick Goldstein with appreciated its usefulness in the classroom. Not that either of them is about to begin using it on their own, but they know that when we teach a class together again, we will probably continue to use the blog. I will have no problem talking this up for the rest of the department, and I will, if not this year, but certainly next year, continue to use it in my own upper level classes and in short term film and literature classes.

Task 9: Delicious

Delicious it is not.

This is the first task I have really had a struggle with. In theory I can see how this could work -- thanks to the help of Anna Watkins, bless her heart. As a storing house my students could use, yes, this makes sense. But the mechanics of this system have left me absolutely befuddled. I don't get it. Again, as so often happens in these situations, I have a glimpse into the befuddlement some of my students have when I explain to them, for example, the MLA system of quoting.

I don't see myself using this. I am metaphorically tearing my hair out at this moment.

Task #7: Wiki Me?

Ah, the Wiki. Who'd a thunk it came from a Hawaiian word? Is there one in my future? I'm not discounting one. I looked at how Jennifer used one in her jr. high lit class; I looked at how Carl used it in his class. I've seen how Martin has used one in his class. There is something exciting about the way it is such a lively forum and so immediate: blog at warp speed. So part of my mind is thinking about how I could do what I do on my blogs on a wiki, which would make the students, I think, more responsible to each other and more active in their own learning. I'm also thinking how I could use a wiki in my ninth and possibly tenth grade classes to deal with writing itself: with paragraph and essay construction. I don't have an active board, though I do have the mini-Death Star, but making it work like an active board has been problematic. So the idea of getting students to do editing for themselves and others and have me be able to do editing on some piece of writing on a wiki has some potential in my mind. Now how I carry this out, the planning itself, is another story, one where I would have to reach out to my betters in Tech and others who have used a wiki. But I'm actually willing to and thinking about exploring this.

Tech: a tie.

Task # 6: The Groovy Stuff

This is the part of technology where I definitely need a "buddy": this is the techo stuff that I actually could get into. For example, this. I played around with this for about 15 minutes, thinking on some level this would kind of neat, to make a cartoon. I'm not sure how I would use it, but it was fun. But my knowledge--and the help the site gave--made this a pretty rudimentary experience. I looked at this as well. The artist in me, the guy who draws pictures throughout Warning-Probation meetings, one of which ended up in P.H.'s office once (thanks Paul!), the guy who made a 16mm movie in high school, loves all this. Again, I don't know how I would use them in an educational setting, but if I could learn them--and that would be a big "If" given my learning curve--I could I'm sure find a way to use them. They really are groovy, in the best sense of the word.

Tech: score again!

Task#5: Treme, George Pelecanos, and The Awakening

How opportune: one of my favorite present television shows, one of my favorite authors, and a book I've continued to teach to 10th graders for going on 10 years or more, and still can call the most hated book in the 10th grade curriculum, all coming together in one place.

George Pelecanos is a Washington DC based crime novelist who wrote for "The Wire" and now for "Treme". "Treme" is a little watched show--compared to things like "America's Got Talent" an "Sponge Bob Square Pants"--on HBO, created by David Simon (creator of "The Wire") and about life in post-Katrina New Orleans. "The Awakening" is a short 19th century novel by Kate Chopin about a young bourgeois woman in New Orleans who arguably awakens to her place in the world and then, definitely, kills herself with this knowledge. I teach a Pelecanos novel, "Drama City", which one student said was the only book in high school he looked forward to reading at home, and another student said was a book that shouldn't be taught, since it was a white writer writing about black characters. I teach "The Wire" also, in particular the Pelecanos penned episode that comes at the end of the first season: students want to see more of this show. I can see using "Treme" in a class once it comes out on DVD. And "The Awakening"...well, sophomores aren't on the fence about this one: they love it or hate it. And the ending is what always causes the most argument. So it was fascinating--and useful for me as a teacher--to read this blog which addresses that ending in a way I can use in class.

So: Technology wins this round. Go technology!

Task # 4: Thinking About Dan

So I'm scrolling through these two blogs, and I'm thinking about how my first reaction is that what they comment on is so far from what I do. Part of this is because, I think, much of the material is geared toward younger students and does not immediately address a high school English class (remember, Luddite and all that). At the same time I know how others, Ryan Martin for instance, has incorporated tech into his classes,skyping to be specific. And yes, I blog. But still, I wasn't drawn to what I was reading and skimming.

This got me though. The blogger talks about the real life application of technology in Dan Woodhouse's case, and this is what I responded to. I am not convinced that tech helps my students -- and me -- as much as someone like Bob October or September claims it does. His presentation in my mind proved it -- a whole bunch of people looking at laptops..and if you didn't have one, as I don't, well, you're just an out-of-time stick-in-the-mud and the world is leaving you behind in its rear view mirror. Which it probably is in my case, and I'm not losing much sleep over it -- though a flat screen television might make me feel better about being left behind.

But in the case of Dan, tech makes sense. As it does for students for whom the normal ways of teaching don't make sense. At the same time, as I confront students more and more who cannot spell and haven't figured out that pressing spellcheck is not the end all answer, I come back to my original worries. Kids can zip use tech in ways I can't and never will, but has that made them better writers or better readers? Better thinkers? Aware of their own history? More able to understand people not like them?

Of course, an argument can be made, and has been made, that technology has made us all less different than we used to be. Unless you're the child starving in Darfur or holding a gun in the Sudanese army, funded by the way by the US (which along with Somalia is the only country to not sign off on a UNICEF declaration against the use of child soldiers). Of course, those child soldiers might have learned some moves from a a bootlegged Bruce Willis DVD...and maybe if they have access to You Tube, can become Justin Beiber fans.

But that's not Dan Woodhouse's story, Which is a good one.

Task#3: Blogging Itself (And All That...)

So many questions...

Having used a blog for a whole year (anyone interested in what I did, go here) and being a regular reader of several blogs (my favorites: Alan Sepinwall who writes about TV; a lawyer out of Philly who goes by the named The Field Negro and writes about race in America; and my favorite cranky middle-aged white guy Joe Bageant who writes about class in America: the three topics besides baseball and music I think most about other than school), and, last but not least, being an English teacher, I have actually thought about some of the questions about blog writing.

To be pedantic for a sec: good writing is good writing. The blogs I like I think are written well--as was Martin's (ah, that Paideia education paid off). The power of the blog, to me, is its immediacy: the reader wants to get to the meat fast and skip the appetizers. And the blogs I know I like generally get to the point pretty quickly. But not always: Joe Bageant is as discursive as I am when I write (read my blog questions--read this entry--: it takes me forever to get to the point, not something I'm proud of). That said, I think the blogger has to address a wide audience, even given that the blogs I read are pretty niche driven. Still, not everyone was a lit major in college, and the good blogger, I think, has to keep that in mind. Write forcefully, clearly: make the point understandable.

I understand that there is a difference between what I as a teacher use a blog for and what the bloggers I read use their blogs for. I require something specific in response to my queries and postings, unlike, it seems, Martin does on his. My blogs are mandatory. FN, Alan Sepinwall, Joe B., they're just giving their opinion, and as such, there is a conversational tone to their writing, a kind of writing that is not the kind I generally teach. It's clearly not formal. But again, that's its power too. As such, I don't require a formal voice on my blogs; and the results are for the most part fine. Some responses are better than others: some more thoughtful than others; some better written than others. But the point for me, on the blog, is not as much the writing as the response to whatever the question is I posed, or the response, honest, immediate, to whatever we read or watched.

The pitfall here, in using the blog for class, is that the form lends itself to sloppiness. The writing may not be formal: but the mechanics, spelling, don't suddenly not matter. So sometimes an entry can read like something just this side of a text message. I get sloppy too (thank goodness this thing spellchecks). In the future I am going to be more stringent about the composition and writing of the blogs themselves.

Thoughts on Tech Today. Post #1

I'm a luddite. Computers scare the @#$$!! out of me. Not as much as they do some other people I know, but nonetheless, anything beyond word processing, going to the internet, and emailing (which I have managed to mess up on more than one occasion), leaves me with a feeling of dread. How many ways can I screw up what I am doing, and then have no idea what I've done and how to undo it. I'm the guy who refers to the finder as the two little faces.

This said, I have, however reluctantly, stepped into the 21st century. I have a rudimentary web page for my long term classes, which I can and need to do more on. I have been using a blog for my seminar class and for two of my short term classes. I know how to create links to articles on the web and to videos on You Tube. And I've been very happy with this. In the past I have used journals for classes, which led to my taking home boxes of notebooks. Now I use the blog as a journal on which students very publicly react and respond to the texts and discussions in the class. This is immediate: it's easy to see who has done what and when. And it allows for furthering of discussion and the creation of new discussions that can be taken up in class.

I'm not convinced yet about the other uses of the technology I've just read about. A wicki? Maybe as I find out about it more I can see using one. I'm a luddite, remember? I didn't buy a CD player for years. The text is still the thing in my class -- the book, the movie. I'm open to being shown ways I can grapple with these through technology.