Brain Rules 5 (Heather)-Piktochart
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Comment on Kim NL5-Mindomo- I love what you did with Mindomo! I have never used anything like that before and I love that you can take something like popplet and add graphics. It is a beautiful presentation of your notes and I, too, would be excited by the prezi-like presentation option. One of my other favorite parts, is that when I click on your link to your mindomo, it takes me to your mindomo (not to a screen that forces me to create an account to view your product).
Comment on Amy Reading/Note Challenge BR 5 & Prezi- Amy, I really enjoyed your prezi. I have used prezi once, but not in that sophisticated of a capacity. More importantly, I want to thank you for sharing the videos! They were interesting and I can definitely see how they would relate if you were teaching this chapter to a class. Also, thank you for sharing that you can embed videos within your prezi; I did not know that, but that would be hugely helpful!!!
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This week I used Piktochart for my learning technology. I picked this technology because I wanted to find a program that allows me to create my own Infographic (because a couple of weeks ago in class, I learned the term "Infographic"). After reading a web article about Infographic programs (linked here), I chose Piktochart because it was reviewed as being very customizable. Caution: It appears as though Infographics certainly make any information seem more legitimate.
Let's start by saying this: it is a super fun program! It is free unless you want to "go pro" for $29/month to unlock more functions. The free version still has plenty of beautiful templates and even within a template, you can customize fonts and colors to your liking. There is a limited bank of icons and photos, but you can upload your own if you are a pro member. Obviously, various templates lend themselves better to different types of presentations, so you can easily make one work for your project. I tried to keep mine clean and simple, but if you have an artistic eye I'm sure you could do really cool things in this program. One of my favorite things about this program as that it auto-saves as you are working! Once I was finished, piktochart allows you to download it as a PDF, JPEG, or PNG formats. It also lets you share it via social media, or, once you publish it and make it public, it provides you the code (which is how I'm sharing it below).
Here is my piktochart:
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Discussion of "Brain Rules 5 (Heather)-Piktochart"
Lovin' the Infographic!
I'm really excited about trying this program in a classroom. There's a really interesting link on using infographics to help students create their own research projects AND assessment tips! http://www.schrockguide.net/infographics-as-an-assessment.htmlPosted on 30 September 2014, 11:16 am by Amy Locklear | Permalink
<3 autosave
This really makes me ask "what is the equation editor like?" I'm sure math/sciences instructors would want to use it too.Posted on 1 October 2014, 12:56 pm by Shelley Rodrigo | Permalink
Shantal Week 6 Reading Notes/Note Taking Challenge
"Infrastructure and Composing: The When of New-Media Writing" by Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Ellen Cushman, and Jeffrey T. Grabill
An infrastructural framework is a tool that could help writing teachers analyze the instances in which they work and write. It can create reflection on institutions and standard practices (14). This article focuses on the when. The Selfe and Selfe Article “The Politics of Interface: Power and its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones” deals with the technological interface as a space that demonstrates power and cultural values.”Infrastructure and Composing: The When of New-Media Writing” mentions the article and how infrastructure similarly shows power structures in any given instance. Infrastructure extends beyond the technological interface to examine infrastructure, which can be the hardware, the policies, the way the writing in a class is graded, etc. It’s all the choices a rhetor may have to navigate in creating a new media text.
To my understanding, when the authors say the when of new media composing, they mean that in any certain instance that someone is composing in a new media space, they are being influenced by rules. From institutional policies, to the technological possibilities of the hardware they are working with, infrastructure affects their choices. For example, I am right now sitting in Perry Library at ODU composing my notes on a dual-monitor screen. Institutional policy is that students can use the computers in the library. The technology allows me to take notes in a quicker way since I can use two screens. Google Drive allows my work to be saved onto a network- if I need to switch computers suddenly, for whatever reason, I don’t have to worry about switching. In this case, infrastructure allows me to do my work in more timely and efficient manner. I probably wouldn’t have thought about it without reading this article. I definitely would notice the infrastructure if it had broken down, however.
I really admire this article and what it does conceptually. If one of my instructor friends were to tell me about a class in which only one student completed the final assignment, I would probably think that it was a catastrophic failure. The authors of this article do not treat it that way. Instead, they treat it as a research opportunity.It’s an example of what to do when something doesn’t go as expected. I can only imagine the stress of being a student in this class or instructor in this course. I admire the instructor for her ability to advocate for the needs of her class and the fact that the provost and the system managers worked with the class in order to intervene and see what the problem was. I am sure Ellen also had to spend a lot of time managing student concerns. The fact that this article deals with technological and institutional breakdowns is really useful because other works on new media often don’t. Other works on new media often focus on the possibilities or what has already succeeded in new media spaces. They often don’t talk about the technology breaking down, and technology breaks down on a daily basis.
I got a taste of the technological breakdown in English 866: New Media Practice and Theory, another class I take with Dr. Rodrigo. As has been mentioned in class before, Scalar decided to stop letting anyone create new pages and we could not post the assignments we had. Luckily, there are other technologies that allow students to share their work. In this class, our class switched over to blogs. If we think about this moment infrastructurally, it was the technology that broke down. Institutional policy didn’t really hinder our class the same way institution did in the article. There are several free blogging services available on the internet that students were either familiar with already or were willing to learn in a short amount of time. If these technologies were available or if for some reason there were institutional policies against them, it wouldn’t be a problem.
"A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures" by the New London Group
This article is a text written in 1994 and is the result of a long conversation about changes in education. The authors include experts on education and different disciplines in English from several English-speaking countries. Their main concern was that education was not as pluralistic as the societies surrounding them and that educational gaps were present and growing. In order to address the changes in technology, culture, and the economy, the New London group came up with a framework for thinking about multiliteracy. They wanted students to be able to participate in society and to be able to advocate for themselves and others. In order to do that, students must learn to use technology, and they must be able to think critically about their practices and their culture. The article talks about design as the “what” of multimodal literacy pedagogy. The three dimension of design mentioned are available designs, designing, and the redesigned. Available designs consists of the ways of making-meaning in a given community, from the basic grammar rules of the language to the types of discourse. Designing is the process in which the resources from available designs are used and made new again, which then turn into the redesigned. There is also a need for terms to discuss multiliteracies critically. The how of multi literacy pedagogy involves situated practice, over instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice.
This article was written twenty years ago but still feels very relevant today. I can definitely appreciate the need for multi literacy pedagogy that is well thought out and well-taught. In connecting this article to my own experiences, I thought about a Spanish class I took in my undergraduate degree. It was an experimental course that was for native Spanish speakers. In a way, this course was about multiliteracy. It was designed for the unique problems that Native Spanish speakers face- creating a professional identity being able to speak a more formal discourse in Spanish. We did not just learn to some of the grammar rules that can trip Native Spanish speakers up (where the accents go, spelling rules, false cognates), we also learned how to do research and how to present it. It was multimodal in that we had to interview Spanish speakers in our community and present it in the form of a powerpoint and a poster. As far as technology goes, it was nothing too experimental, but looking back I am pretty impressed that we did all that as undergraduates.
One of the concerns in the article is the changing social and cultural forces that students face, including students who are taking classes in an non-native language. I can say that I have been on the other side, though in a milder form than most students must face. Although I speak Spanish at home, basic Spanish literacy is actually really hard for me at times. I took the class when I was a junior. By that time, I had spent three years at Texas A&M. For ten months out of the year, I rarely spoke any Spanish, much less wrote in Spanish. I knew I was taking a risk by taking this course as I was not as immersed in Spanish communities as the peers in my class were. Still, I ended up being a valuable experienced for me.
Posted on 5 October 2014, 7:34 pm by ShantalFigueroa | Permalink
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