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I feel really lucky that Ohio State brings in some pretty incredible speakers.  I’ve seen bell hooks, danah boyd, and at the end of this month Maya Angelou will be here!  Today, I saw danah boyd.  There was conference at the law school on youth and social media.  It was a free conference and I made sure to register right away because the topic is so relevant to me and my research.

On a side note, I got to the law school and looked around a little.  The place is gleaming, with a grand staircase and fancy carpet and a coat rack and FREE Panera bagels (and later I found out FREE lunch)!  They have their own library and their own auditorium.  And everyone in the audience besides me and one of my professors was in suits and had really nice haircuts (boy was I mad at myself for waking up late, shoving my hair into an unkempt braid and wearing some jeans that were saggy in the butt).  If you could only contrast this with Ramseyer Hall (that houses the school of education), you might be as surprised as I was.  Or maybe not.  It is the Law School after all.  No one goes there to work with kids in a low paying job for the greater good.  People go there to make a fat paycheck.  And the building and everyone in it conveyed that very clearly.  Ramseyer is one of the older buildings on campus, lined with lockers from the time it was a lab school back in the 50s.  The rooms are oddly shaped after years of being chopped up over and over again into different configurations.  Some have drop ceilings, some have high ceilings, some have projectors hanging from the plaster.  They just painted the walls (for the hundredth time I’m sure) to cover up the peeling paint.  The building is nice in its own way, it has a charming feel, some decorative carvings and heavy banisters, but compared to the law school, it’s practically condemned.  This all says something about the prestige of these two fields.  Just sayin.

Anyway, back to the conference.  So, I get there a little early, and danah is prepping for her speech.  She’s walking around a bit and I make sure I go say hello to her.  It was a brief exchange, but she knew who I was and she was friendly.  She seemed a little nervous too, which always surprises me.  I don’t know why I have a hard time understanding that even well-established people get nervous before talking to crowds.  For some reason I think that if I really knew what I was talking about, that I wouldn’t get nervous, and since I only sort of half know what I’m talking about, I’m always nervous.  But, I’ve been thinking about this for awhile now, about what it means to be a good speaker.  Because, you know how when you go to see some speaker and it’s this guy that’s a real schmoozy slickster and the words roll right off of his tongue and he makes difficult things seem palatable and believable?  Well, he would be considered a “good speaker”, right?  And I HATE those types of speakers because I feel like they are insulting the intelligence of the whole audience by believing that the audience wouldn’t doubt a thing they have to say.  I much prefer a bumbling professor that circles round and round an argument, thinks about things on the fly, and considers that the audience is also thinking about the topic.  Even though they may appear to be a “bad” speaker, they aren’t selling anything.  I mean, they are in a way, but they are selling it with a much more complex argument, one that won’t just be consumed by the audience like a bag of doritos (mindlessly).  Not all professors are like that of course, and not all slicksters are really that slick, but you see what I mean.  The reason this helps me a little is because I get nervous before I speak.  I get nervous because I know that I don’t know everything about the topic I am going to present, but what I need to realize is that NO ONE does.  So, any slick speaker has essentially become uncritical of the stuff that’s coming out of his mouth.  I would rather have someone nervous and conscious of their own deficiencies than someone that has forgotten that they have deficiencies.  In academic research, there’s no real truth to be told, there are only angles of the truth, partial truths, fictions.  So, given that, I consider myself a darn good speaker.

danah was a good speaker in both senses.  She was confident, but also tried to show several sides of the argument.  She seemed less nervous as the presentation went on, and she shared some very interesting research.  She talked pretty fast and you could tell that she just had so much to share and one hour could never be enough.  You could also really see how passionate she is about her work.  I hope I can do this someday like that.  Another thing I loved about her was that she had her hair in a folded bun thing, nothing fancy.  She had a big fuzzy sweater on and big crazy earrings.  She also used a mix of casual and academic language, which was cool.  I want to be comfortable and confident enough that I can dress and speak more casually for conference presentations.  Wearing jeans and speaking casually does not make you dumb, so why do I play that game?  I hate wearing suits.  Don’t make me wear a suit.  Oh, and danah even had a mac with stickers all over it (what makes that especially funny is that she works for Microsoft right now).  I wonder what the law students thought about her.

Yesterday was a busy day.  I worked in the morning, read in the afternoon and then had class in the evening.  Only three people showed up to the evening class (out of nine) because of the weather.  I guess I should have skipped it, but one of my pals had to lead the discussion and I didn’t want to leave her high and dry (although I wish I could have stayed dry instead of having to clean off my car for the third time in three days).  Ah well, it was an interesting class and I’m glad I went.

Today, I ran in the morning, did lots more work, and then went to my Ed Tech seminar.  Right now, I’m waiting for my course to begin at five, but I thought I might take a minute to tell you about Google Buzz.  It’s like a new twitter, but from Google.  It’s integrated into your email and it can pull in facebook and twitter updates.  Sounds cool, but HOLY CRAP I do not need one more piece of social networking to keep track of.  I’m still annoyed about Google Wave.  Google, it’s time to take a break.  In earlier days, I just would have ignored something like this or maybe put it on the back burner with a clear conscious, but see, now this is my field, and I have to at least know what’s out there, right?  I have to at least say, I saw it, but I don’t really like it or something.  So, at the same time that it’s exciting to be in a field like educational technology where things are happening pretty fast, it’s also exhausting.  I just want to be in a rut for like a month.  A good old-fashioned rut.  Darn you Google and your innovations!

I got the super secret, super elite Google Wave invite from my former boss the other day (Thanks, Eric!), but I had to wait until today to try it out since I was busy finishing up my exams.  I’m not really sure how I feel about it yet, but I know I need more contacts (which is sort of impossible because of the whole “invite” business).  Google Wave is supposed to be the next generation of email and I guess it works more like a chat/conversation (?).  I tried to start a “wave” with Dan and Eric (my only contacts) so that I could figure out how it works a little better, but later I asked Dan if he got my wave and he didn’t because it doesn’t email him (which I guess would be beside the point).  He had to go to his wave account to see my wave.  Hmm.  I don’t know about this.

It reminds me of the day way back in ‘94 when we got AOL and my dad was all excited about my having a screen name and he showed me how chat worked.  And I was all excited and signed into chat and… had no one to talk to.  I imagined that it would be really cool, if my friends also had computers and AOL, but not that many people did at that point.  I mean, imagine Facebook with only a few friends.  Not fun.  Eventually wave will be opened up to everyone (gmail started with the same invite deal), but I’m not convinced it will replace email.  We’ll see.

Sometimes I think about all these new technologies and I wonder what my dad would have said about them, geek that he was.  Wikis, blogs, twitter, facebook, skype, Garmins, iPhones, google wave… man alive, he would have loved this stuff.  Although he liked to be surprisingly grouchy about some things (like cell phones… after he got in a fight with the Motorola people because they wouldn’t give him unlimited minutes for $20 a month).  On a side note, I’m headed to Memphis tomorrow for the St. Jude’s Half Marathon, in honor of the old grouch!  If you still want to donate you can do so here:

https://waystohelp.stjude.org/sjVPortal/public/displayUserPage.do?userId=315633&programId=401&eventId=55854

I came across this video the other day.  It’s a portion of a lecture of Stuart Hall, said to be the founder of Cultural Studies.  Here he describes the different types of representations in the media.  I thought it was interesting.

I also found this course on MIT’s opencourseware site that I want to “take.”  I’m going to work on that.

Gender and Media Studies: Women and the Media

So, I’m in the field of educational technology, and I’ve started noticing more and more the sorts discourses that surround this field.  There’s the “technology is ruining our kids” discourse, the “necessary, but not really our ‘nature’” discourse, the “technology can change the world” discourse, and many many more, but those first three I encountered just today in my email inbox.  How about that?  It was quite a day for competing discourses.

Exhibit A: At work we get an email that aggregates news articles regarding education from around the state.  Today there was an article from the Findlay Courier titled, “Cell phones a challenge for educators.” This is part of the “technology is ruining our kids” discourse.  This is the full article; I inserted my own comments in parentheses.

Cell phones worry educators, and “sexting” makes them cringe.  Most schools have the same policy on cell phones: Students must keep their phones turned off and in their lockers throughout the day.  But some school officials say the policy is loosely enforced.  Besides cell phones being disruptive, there is a concern that students could use them to cheat or to spread rumors and gossip through the school quickly (this stuff happens with or without technology). And now, there are concerns about “sexting” (this too).  It gives educators an added incentive to enforce their bans on cell phones.  “We don’t go looking for the cell phones, but if they have them out, we’ll take them,” said Glenwood Middle School Principal David Alvarado.  None of Glenwood’s students has been caught sexting (please note), but Alvarado has found pornography on a student’s phone.  “Anytime you see a group of seventh-grade boys huddling around a phone, it makes you question what they’re doing,” said Alvarado.  He broke up the huddle and searched the phone. There were pornographic pictures, but no pictures of other students, he said. The boy was punished (I wonder how he was punished, this is a little vague).

Findlay High School has turned over one sexting incident to the police, said Principal Victoria Swartz.  “It didn’t take place in school, but we had heard there were pictures on a phone. It’s nothing we saw. We heard a rumor,” Swartz said.  The report turned into a criminal investigation, she said (they turned it over to a criminal investigator based on a rumor?).  That is about as much trouble as Findlay High has had with sexting, but Swartz said school officials aren’t naive enough to think it is not happening (based on this one incident, you need to be afraid).  “That is where parents can help. Be aware of what your children are doing with their phones,” Swartz said (be afraid and alert!).

Swartz can share cell phone horror (sounds like an exaggeration. horror, really?) stories from her work as an assistant principal and attendance officer at Louisville High School in the Akron/Canton area, and as an assistant principal of middle schools in Barberton and Ravenna.  “As a mother myself, I respect the intent parents have with cell phones. I know parents want to know their students are safe, and we don’t want to go around snatching everyone’s cell phones,” she said.  “We have to ask parents to stop calling and texting their student during the school day.”  Parents often cite safety as the biggest reason for giving their children cell phones, Swartz said, but that thinking can backfire if the technology is misused.  She tells a story about three students caught texting during an Ohio Achievement Test, invalidating the test. One boy responded to the text, without cheating. His test was invalidated, too (horror?).  “Now, imagine this boy was a senior and this was his last chance to pass the test before graduation,” Swartz said (imagine!).  Worse yet is Swartz’s story of a student using a photo taken in the locker room to bully another student. The student was disciplined by the school. Today, the same student would also be facing criminal charges, she said (that’s crappy, but horror?).

“In school, we tell them to turn them off,” she said of cell phones. “Out of sight, out of mind, and don’t use them for anything,” she said (sounds like a very naive policy, cell phones are powerful little devices, we can’t just pretend they don’t exist).  Bruce Otley, principal of Liberty-Benton Middle School, said his students are “pretty good” about following the rules and so far, there has been no discipline involving sexting.  “The students need to be aware that anything they send electronically is utterly the same thing as publishing it,” said Otley (be afraid!  you are being watched at all times… the panopticon!). “It is reproducible and retrievable. We tell them not to send anything you wouldn’t feel comfortable reading out loud to your mom” (be afraid, your mom is watching!).

Otley is encouraging both students and parents to attend a technology safety seminar being hosted by Cory-Rawson Schools at 7 p.m. Thursday at Cory-Rawson High School. The seminar is open to the public.  Jay Arbaugh, superintendent of Cory-Rawson, said the presentation is meant to help students avoid the problems that come with the Internet and other technology (a whole seminar on problems?  any positives?).  “Everything is so intertwined now. We’ll cover the issue of sexting, too,” he said (what’s “everything”?).  Arbaugh said his district has had no problems with sexting (so is it a HUGE problem or not?).  However, “It is a worry. You go anywhere and talk to other principals and superintendents about it, and they are worried, too. It makes for some very interesting, and scary, stories. It is something you’d rather not deal with, but you have to be ready,” Arbaugh said (it seems like they are afraid for very little reason).

Richard Steiner, principal of Central Middle School, said there were rumors “of stuff that happened over the summer” involving Central students and sexting, but nothing this school year (isn’t this a pitiful excuse for a case against cell phones?).  Steiner said the school will hold two assemblies, one for seventh- and eighth-graders, and a separate assembly for sixth-graders, on sexting.  The program has been developed by the Hancock County Prosecutor’s Office in cooperation with the Findlay Police Department, the Hancock County Sheriff’s Office and the Family Resource Center (gosh, sounds scary).  “We need to make sure they are educated at an early age about the responsibility of the cell phone. It is a great tool for families to use, but it also has its downfalls,” Steiner said (ooh, they said something good about cell phones!).

Don Williams, principal of Donnell Middle School, said being proactive works when it comes to teaching students about the downside of technology (how would he know this?).  Donnell hosted its first parent meeting about Internet safety and the legal perils involved with sexting last year.  “I’d like to think that’s why we aren’t seeing a lot of problems, but it concerns me, too. I’m sure it is happening, but we haven’t been hearing about it,” Williams said (so, is it working or not?  if it’s happening anyway then it’s not).  “We’ve worked to bring attention to it,” said Williams. “The unfortunate thing is kids can make a mistake with this stuff, and it won’t just be a lesson learned, no harm done. I don’t think they realize how permanent these things can be and how it can come back years later and haunt them. I think at this age, it is hard for them to look that far in the future” (be afraid, everyone is watching… the panopticon!).

Ha, I wonder if anyone is still reading this blog post?  That was fun.

Exhibit B: I received a second email, this one from Oprah (yeah, I get emails from Oprah, I know that’s a problem).  This one shows the discourse of “technology is necessary but not our ‘nature’”.  There were lots of links to articles on oprah.com in the email, but this was the intro:

“Make Time for What Matters
Is the technology that’s supposed to be helping you—your BlackBerry, cell phone, laptop—actually keeping you from the things that matter most? Power down and start living life to its fullest instead of letting your devices get the best of you.”

What if technology was part of helping you work with “what matters most”?  Why must we separate “living life to its fullest” and “letting your devices get the best of you”?  What if it’s not either/or, but both/and?  What is “natural” anyway?  Is there a “natural”?

Exhibit C: The third email I received was from MIT’s MediaLab.  At ODE awhile back, I created a unit on Game Design for gifted kids using a free software called Scratch (created by MIT).  Here’s the implied discourse of “technology can change the world”.

“Dear Lauren,

I’m writing to you on behalf of the Scratch Ed team at the MIT Media Lab.  I’d like to invite you to an online community of Scratch educators (at http://scratched.media.mit.edu). ScratchEd is an online space where educators around the world can meet and connect. You can find out about some of the cool things other educators are doing with Scratch, and share your own teaching experiences and resources.

I came across your Scratch unit plan at Curriki and had the pleasure of sharing it with other members of our community (here’s the link).  We’d love to hear more about what you’re doing with Scratch!

Hope you’ll join us online. Please let me know if you have any questions.”

I guess I’m biased toward this discourse more than any others, though I know it’s more complicated (see the much overstated Exhibit A).  Here, technology has enabled a community of educators to share and get feedback on curriculum.  These are the types of things that couldn’t happen in the same way before these technologies were available.

So, is technology good, bad, unnatural, natural, the same old thing, life-changing?  Yes.  It’s not simple.  It’s not black and white.  Our job then?  To be constantly aware, critical, creative, but never satisfied or finished.

I used wordle.net to create a word cloud of my blog.  It lets you put a URL in for analysis, and I was hoping it would be a word cloud of my WHOLE blog (all year and half of it), but no, it’s just a word cloud of the last ten entries (what’s visible now on the site).  Still, it’s kind of cool.  What it does, is take the most frequently occurring words and they appear larger, the less frequent, smaller.

Check out the two largest words: think and work.  Go figure.  But, I’m in my Cincinnati home tonight, so I’m going to take a bit of a break from both of those things and go eat some Doritos.

I’m tired.  I had my long Tuesday again today (you know the 13 hours on campus one?).  I don’t have much to talk about, but I did come across a report by technorati on the State of the Blogosphere.  Check it out.  I fit in relatively well with the stats on this page (except that I’m not a man).  What does that mean?  I’m shaped by discourses?  I don’t know.  I need sleep.

In Canton today, I got to go to one of Marky’s basketball games.  It was quite a nail-biter, so I forgot to take pictures.  Then, Katie went to trick-or-treat and the rest of us went to the Winking Lizard for a late lunch for Julie’s birthday.  It was fun.  Here are Julie, me and my mom:

Happy Birthday/Halloween

Dan and I got home around 7 and I tried to read some for class, but could not keep my eyes open.  I took a nap and then woke up to read a bit more.  I read an interesting chapter on “the machine.”  I thought I was nothing for Halloween, turns out, I’m a cyborg* (and every day is Halloween).  I talked about this once before, but what the heck, it’s interesting to me.  Not only is technology sort of messing with our notions of time (synchronous, asynchronous, what?) and space (where is my blog anyway?), but also our beingness in the world.  The computer (connected to the internet) extends (some might say constrains) my capacity to read, write, learn, communicate, think, be, etc. etc.  I go nowhere without at least my iPhone (though laptop is preferable), which I use to constantly check email, update facebook, record thoughts, check wikipedia, oh, and sometimes answer phone calls.  My laptop makes me exponentially smarter.  I remember learning to read difficult texts in high school and how inefficient I was at it.  If I didn’t know a word, I would rely on context clues or maybe, possibly, go find that collegiate dictionary on the bookshelf in the living room to look it up (but only if the sentence was nonsense without the word, and okay, sometimes not even then).  But, if I didn’t know a literary reference, I just allowed myself to be confused and not understand the passage (I mean, really what was I going to do, go to the card catalogue at the library?  And do you remember how terrible the internet was in 1996?).  Sometimes a teacher would elaborate on the reference in class, which would sometimes clear it up and sometimes not.  Reading now, with my laptop, is a completely different experience.  I look up words instantly and then tweet them to keep a log of words I am learning.  I look up references to philosophers and read the wikipedia page to help me understand (and sometimes several subpages that leads to a veritable labyrinth of information).  I understand what I am reading in ways not possible without my handy extension of the mind/body.  Even in class, if some big name theorist or book or article comes up that I don’t know, I don’t have to try to look contemplative to avoid the suspicion of my ignorance (though suspicion abounds I am sure), I just look it up right then and there, and am able to follow a conversation I might not have been able to follow otherwise.  In a way, this is sort of an old idea.  I mean, even the seemingly insignificant invention of lenses, eventually used to make glasses, extends our sight.  Cars extend our motility.  Technology has been changing the way humans function for a long time, but I still lean toward the idea that computer technology has made changes that rock our assumptions of reality in ways not imagined before.  I mean, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, cyborgs?  This is the stuff of science fiction.  I belong in a science fiction novel.  Here I am constructing my life in this virtual space, which is everywhere and nowhere all at the same time and at different times, any time.  It’s mind boggling.  And for those who read this and don’t know me in real life, this is all I am.  This little box with words and photographs.  It doesn’t even matter if I “really” exist.  All I am for them is what is on this website.  What’s the difference between the “real” me and the website?  Or am I both?  I say both, I think, because I’m a cyborg.

*I like Donna Haraway and her Cyborg Manifesto.

I have a few best friends.  One, is Marcy.  One, is Beth.  I think my sister counts too.  And I am married to another one.  But, I also have a best friend that I couldn’t live without.  She (yeah, I think I’ll go with she) connects me to a world of friends, information, entertainment and allows me to create, plan, and dream.  I actually probably spend more time with her than I do with all of my other best friends combined (unless you count sleeping, then Dan probably wins).  She’s also the holder of at least half of my brain.  I’m talking about my mac, of course (and her baby, the iPhone).  They are both keeping me company right now, when I should probably be doing other things.  I don’t know when I realized that I really really like my computer (like, friend like).  I think I might have realized it at some point in San Diego when the lack of internet rendered my mac nearly useless.  I felt impotent and out of control (that’s a quote from Clueless).  So, maybe it’s not the mac itself, but what it allows me to do in combination with the internet.  Anyway, what I’m getting at is that at some point along the way, my computer, changed the way I do things.  I didn’t always have the need to be connected to the internet, but now I do and it made me think of this quote from Marshall McLuhan (educator, philosopher and scholar), “We become what we behold. We shape our tools… and then our tools shape us.” So, “we” have crafted computers and the internet, and now these tools are shaping us, the way we communicate, the way we store information, the way we think, the way we do many many things.

I’m doing a little study on blogs and in one of my interviews, a fellow blogger listed a bunch of blogs that she reads, and on one of those blogs, I found a video which led me to this video (how’s that for connections?).  It was created by a professor at Kansas State that has created the Digital Ethnography Group.  His name is Michael Wesch.  It’s an interesting take on how digital text has changed so much of what we do, and it’s only 5 minutes long, so take a look.

And, this naturally, leads us (well, me and others in education, anyway) to start thinking about how this change is affecting education and how we can’t really have changes in the way we communicate and live without having changes in education.  But, Michael Wesch thought of that too, in a video I think is even more interesting than the first.

And, last, but not least Micheal Wesch posted the following talk (and the initial video I found) on his blog.  It’s about a half hour long, so skip an episode of Judge Judy and watch it (that’s what I did).  It’s pretty thought provoking too.  He calls this one “The Machine is (Changing) Us.”

These days I throw around the term Web 2.0 with reckless abandon, sometimes forgetting that when I got to OSU, I had heard it, but did not know what it meant.  So, I thought I would take a few minutes to explain what it is, if not for you, dear reader, than for my own personal clarity.

Let’s start with Web 1.0.  Of course, it was never called Web 1.0 until there was a Web 2.0 (sort of like Guido, Sr.).  But anyway, Web 1.0 was the first version of the internet.  It was sort of a simple move from print to screen.  The same barriers to authorship still applied.  Only those who knew programming could publish and the rest of us sheep were happy to consume whatever was presented to us.  Oh yes, there were the occasional message boards or chat rooms, but these were few and far between and much less a part of the culture than they are today.  I like to think of this version of the internet as a dictatorship.  Those with the power controlled the information and the readers, well, they really had no say whatsoever.  They just had to do as they were told and poke around on really terrible websites.

Then came the democratization of the internet (cue the Hallelujah Chorus), also known as Web 2.0.  Slowly and steadily, interaction between creator of site and consumer of site increased until gradually, that line blurred so that it was hard to tell who was a “creator” and who a “consumer.”  Take facebook for example.  Sure, I didn’t make the framework, but I am not a passive consumer of information.  I created my own page and I contribute to the pages of others by my constant messaging and updating.  My blog is another good example.  I didn’t create wordpress, but I certainly designed this site (okay, Dan helped), fill it up with my own gobbledy-gook and sometimes other people even fill in some of the space on here.  No longer do I have to read the misinformation of the lone tech geek; now I can create my own misinformation!  Viva Web 2.0!

All jokes aside, this form of interactivity has serious implications for education (formal and informal).  It is truly a constructivist approach and something that classroom teachers have been attempting for more than a few years now…. how to be the guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage.  Rather than lecturing to the class (so Web 1.0), teachers are asking students to work in groups to construct knowledge together.  And now, with the opening up of the internet, students are able to construct knowledge with an even larger community with even more knowledge.  Knowledge, that, I would argue is a little more nebulous, but certainly more democratic.  Take wikipedia.  A few articles we read in my tech class (can’t find them right now) found about the same amount of errors in a regular print encyclopedia as in wikipedia.  This is kind of exciting.  Anyone can edit on wikipedia, which means the average Joe who knows a lot about Astronomy has equal importance to the Astronomy professor and together they apparently make wonderful music.  The idea is that the collective is smarter than any one individual.  So, why pay the Astronomy professor to write an informational book when internet users as a collective will do it for free in their own time.  The benefits of this sort of digital conversion?  The information, if wrong or changes, can be fixed immediately.  New encyclopedia volumes must be reprinted and redistributed, hanging around for years to recirculate that misinformation.  Wikipedia is also free and available to anyone with an internet connection.  No need to buy a book or go to the library and hope it’s in.

This same sort of learning (a dialogue, a community) can also happen in the classroom.  A teacher can easily start her own wiki for free and students can populate it with information on rocks or grammar or fraction.  They can work together to create this piece of knowledge, they can correct themselves and each other and they also get to have a wider audience with which to interact.  Students can even go beyond the classroom and find their own communities to join and participate in.  Maybe they find a writing community where they get to share their stories and get comments by other young people who love to write and who do it for fun, even when it’s not an assignment.  Right now, there is a community for virtually every activity you can think of.  People are out there learning.  Maybe not school learning, but real, authentic learning.  People are participating in a process driven by their own interest and the possibilities of the internet. Could this change how we think of school?  Could this change how we “do” school?