Chapter 1 Reading Notes on Glogster

Medina, John. Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Seattle, WA: Pear Press, 2014.

First, using the technology selected. I opted to try out Glogster for this first outing (despite Dr. Shelley’s cautionary  comments during our first class). I initially browsed through the web site’s GUIDE features, and found this to be  profoundly limited. So, I opted to simply begin working in the program, planning to adapt as I went along. I found that by choosing the tech first BEFORE considering how I planned to emphasize key elements in the act of note taking might have been an error, although I must confess that once I looked into the program and realized it was akin to a visual  bulletin board / poster sort of layout I decided that it offered a lot of flexibility in terms of how I wanted to illustrate my notes’ highlights.

The visual key to the book itself suggested to me early on that a visual-friendly program might be most suitable as a note-taking illustration. The Table of Contents nicely lays out the subtitles of each chapter, which for the Introduction includes a linear progression of “Dumb things we do” to “The grump factor,” to “getting you in the loop, to “A brilliant survival strategy,” and finally “Your amazing brain.” As I reread the chapter’s contents, I found myself thinking in terms of what the program layout would allow me to do – specifically, create headings for spaces of text. In other words, the  program choice itself determined how I would emphasize what was important. Normally, when I take reading notes, I  create a bullet point list of what stands out to me as key terms, principles, and questions. This type of organization  followed me into Glogster. (And made me recall a quote I presented to my iPad ENGL 1020 students by Marshall  McLuhan: “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”)

Ironically, one of the first phrases I highlighted in my book reads that the brain is” the most sophisticated information transfer system on Earth,” which helps us “deriv[e] meaning from” our sensory input (1). Learning to transfer a system of glyphs to a system of visual representations wasn’t the issue – the platform itself was glitchy, forcing me to limit my selections to what the software allowed me to represent. In essence, what took me 15 minutes to represent in an off-line
bullet point list took me 3 hours to recreate using Glogster’s platform. Then there was the issue of transferring to other platforms (our site)… When considering this for classroom use, I imagine considerable time would need to be spent in class on operationalizing it. However, with time & practice, that could change, and many of the cues and commands, once defined, might prove intuitive. (I’d need to create a cheat-sheet of commands for students as the interface doesn’t make these explanations visible…a flaw in the system that presupposes a familiarity with such icons and their implied meaning.)

I reviewed Kim's post on NL1 and Coggle and K.C.'s (Kelly's) work with Brain Rules and Stormboard. I found that Kim's visual note taking to be quite helpful to me as the image highlighted key terms and classifications that I imagine will prove immensely helpful in the coming weeks.  This could certainly serve as a reading outline / terminology cheat sheet! As I mentioned in my response to her post, I could see how the linearity / hierarchical structure imposed upon the writer / reader might force us into a certain pattern of perception and thinking. However, I could also see this as an opportunity in the classroom for critical assessment, asking students to alter the hierarchy by superimposing an additional, hand-drawn structure of alternative connections. Thus, I see that just because I use one technology for an activity does not mean it has to be the
"right" one -- instead I can use that selection to ask students to think critically about that choice, and extend beyond it according to what's still needed.