And lest that sound way too oblique and mysterious, I’ll share this clip from Jib Jab on other issues dominating our discourse at home. This tickles me mightily on a multitude of levels– Dylan would be turning over in his grave (if he were in his grave). Leno debuted it and thus I’m probably late on the popular media bandwagon here (as usual), but I think it deserves a little more publicity in the blog’s “maybe not up at 12:30 AM digital immigrant” demographic.

It had me at the unicorn.

03-john_doe-the_golden_state

And the appropriate closing poem, below.

Have a wonderful summer, everyone.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A Place With Promise

Sometimes my affection for this place wavers.
I am poised between a vague ambition
and loyalty to what I’ve always loved,
kedged along inside my slow boat
by warp and anchor drag. But if I imagine

seeing this for the last time…
then I think I could not bear to go,
would grab any stump or tree limb
and hold on for dear life…

Why can’t we hold this landscape in our arms?
The nettle-tangled orchards given up on,
the broken fence posts with their tags
of wire, burdock taking over uncut fields,
the rusted tipples and the mills.
Sometimes I think it’s possible
to wash the slag dust from the leaves
of sycamores and make them green, the way
as a child, after lesson and punishment,
I used to begin my life again.
I’d say a little “start” to myself
like the referees at races, then
on the same old scratchy car seat,
with the same parents on the same road,
I could live beyond damage and reproach,
in a place with such promise,
like any of the small farms among the wooded hills,
like any of the small towns starting up along the rivers.

~ Maggie Anderson

Or humor me. The mysterious commenter Dave (at dave@dave.dave, apparently) kindly provides this fast and super fun article at Slate from just last week, on the actual means by which we read on line differently from paper text. Michael Agger, who has won my heart with his snarky use of Net-bold type alone:

Humans are informavores. On the Internet, we hunt for facts. In earlier days, when switching between sites was time-consuming, we tended to stay in one place and dig. Now we assess a site quickly, looking for an “information scent.” We move on if there doesn’t seem to be any food around.

Sorry about the long paragraph. (Eye-tracking studies show that online readers tend to skip large blocks of text.)

Also, I’m probably forcing you to scroll at this point. Losing some incredible percentage of readers. Bye. Have fun on Facebook.

Take or leave his wordplay, but I’m going to be be thinking all summer about the ramifications of the Net reading meta-approach this discusses. Could it be– could it– treated as a new genre of reading, unto itself?

I think there’s three issues in intertwining, simultaneous play here, particularly when it comes to our kids.

One: How Web 2.0 changes the way we actually process information.

I mean, yeah, I can accept the idea that Google isn’t actually making us dumber, per se, particularly if you’re feeling weird about the elitist feel of Carr’s judging the Internet by Socrates. But I don’t think anyone can argue with the article’s thesis on its bare bones: we are reading differently– judging the truth, falsity, and relation of information differently– because of Web 2.0.

Are we simply teaching kids how to use Voicethread and Facebook and Skype? Or are we talking in equal measure about (for only one example) how the increasing loss of face to face contact changes how we judge another person in our very consciousness? How much more fundamental can the evaluation of information get?

Two: How Web 2.0 increases the amount of information to which we have access.

We’re talking about 1:1 laptops for third world countries in Africa, and yet not giving kids solid tools to whittle down an information load which is completely unmanageable to adults. I’ve yet to see a rubric, flowchart, or set of guidelines for tech “sifting” which receives a fifth of the attention the two mobile labs do in my building.

Three: How Web 2.0 changes the quality of the information itself.

The democratization of the Internet may be a glorious thing, and yet bloggers on Crooked Timber are also bemoaning the loss of a sense of authority in the world of ideas. Who is trained? Who can be an expert? Who can we trust to guide us through the Web 2.0 thicket, where, as Joe says in the comments, because everything is important, nothing is important?

Andrew Sullivan solves this problem by invoking the Greeks, the bread and butter rules of logic and rhetoric which, while time-tested and true, are no longer standard fare in our schools—if they ever were.

Similarly, folks I know and trust rely on the scientific method, but I know of few educators, if any, who meaningfully extrapolate its rigor beyond the lab.

Additionally the rules of slide and web design may be Dan’s bailiwick, but who’s teaching our kids why Comic Sans makes users judge its content differently than Times New Roman, except in some AP Art class in suburban Connecticut?

And I know of virtually no one who gives any kind of airtime in their classrooms to the ideas of David Abram and Chet Bowers—that there is also useful, personal, powerful knowledge which is neither Western, scientific, nor rational.

What’s the larger point here?

To me—and perhaps this is my ten-ton, wicked, white-elephant problem with tech in the classroom— we simply don’t have the right metaphor in place for Web 2.0 . Our narrative— the story we tell in our classrooms about technology, the story which makes it navigable, meaningful, and useful to kids— is ridiculously weak. And it’s going to get us in trouble.

Most educators and ed tech specialists tell the story of Web 2.0 as if it is nothing more than another version of a bookbag. An amazing, engaging, bottomless, world-holding, lightning-fast bookbag, to be sure, and one that has a ton of fancy buckles, buttons, and combination locks that require some significant (and fun! and well paying!) training.

But the thing about a bookbag is that, in the end, it just holds things. That’s all it does.

It does not fundamentally metamorphosize either what’s inside it— or who’s looking into it.

Who’s talking about the Internet like that?

Think about it. Think about the conversations you’ve had recently about technology. Just this week. Are they bookbag conversations?

Think about how cautiously you would approach a bookbag, if you knew that opening it would change its books into fruit bats.

And then rearrange your face.

Authored by Dina. Hosted by Edublogs.]]> http://theline.edublogs.org/2008/06/16/the-skeptic-redux/feed/ http://theline.edublogs.org/2008/06/13/is-google-making-you-stupid/ http://theline.edublogs.org/2008/06/13/is-google-making-you-stupid/#comments Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:53:21 +0000 Dina http://theline.edublogs.org/?p=153 Yeah, Stephen Krashen says in our Web 2.0 world we’re actually reading more than ever, and so does Bill. Can’t argue with that. But what kind of reading is it?

Check this out for an intriguing and disturbing take. I’ll be thinking hard about its questions this summer, as as I mull over when, where, and how to incorporate more– or less?– technology into my classroom next year. As a lowly public servant I can’t always afford a hard copy of The Atlantic, but luckily I saw this one in my doctor’s office, where at least they don’t have tabletops full of Kindles. Yet.