Skill, Digital Creation and memory

 

I have always thought digital creation as a potential shortcut to help creators leapfrog traditional barriers created by skill. The core idea is that software, such as iMovie, Adobe apps, can help individuals be creative with a low skill threshold. I am attempting to do exactly that on my iPad. However, I am still struggling with results finding myself repeatedly reaching out to physical materials and their subsequent digital manipulation with existing media. 

This idea of new boundaries of creativity allows me to rethink about affordances of the latest technologies and my skills within them. The images I collect and create are reorganized and even layered in ways that rephrase the bluntness of my message. For example, in the image to the right, I started reflecting in writing about my relationship with scraps of paper as ephemeral representations of my life. Messages to self, lists of steps, ideas, doodles, and even notes about what I will say next in my meeting. All of these I throw away with glee once I dem them unuseful or past expiration date. For the first time, I tried to reflect on why I may feel this way? I have so much joy in presenting a clean slate and reinventing myself. One of the reviewers for my promotion file asked (and I am paraphrasing), "Who is this Guy?" 

For someone who has stayed put for 20 years in the same place and job, I seem to be constantly reinventing myself, perhaps pathologically so. Maybe that is why I find the internet's inability to forget us and the things we have done so frightening. My current interpretation is that it links up with the multigenerational experiences of repeated migration. And as usual still processing. 

Personal Reflection on Cultural Appropriation and Cowboy Hats

This reflection is in no way an attempt to define or argue the boundaries of cultural appropriation. Instead, I am attempting to think about what cultural appropriation means to me as a Jewish/ Israeli immigrant to the United States, who is nonetheless white, educated, abled, and doing well for myself.

When I started wearing cowboy boots a few years ago, I was not confident about my ability to "pull it off" and I was worried about appearing to be appropriating a culture that I did not belong to. One afternoon I brought that up with Al Steckelberg, a native Nebraskan, and a friend, he waved me off and said: "we all used to wear western gear, we were all pretending". I love my cowboy boots and recently added a hat (at least in the sun). As I sat in my backyard in my hat I was intrigued by the shadow my hat made. The shadow created a distance and felt like it was not me but some other. It led me to a new journal page that became a collage. To the collage, I added detail from a painting by Eakins c. 1888 and a Jewish Gaucho in Sante Fe Argentina. 

As an immigrant to the US, I am always in the process of figuring out how I belong. I live in the liminal space between my past culture in Israel and the culture I live in now. As a result, I often find myself appropriating language, expression, and communication styles in an effort to find a place. The process itself is inherently flawed and often I find myself trying out patterns that cause the people I am interacting with to give me a second and third look. I have a sense that I crossed some boundaries but since most of the boundaries are not articulated clearly and never spoken out I am not always sure what caused the reaction. 

In some ways, I wear cowboy boots and hat as a way of defying expectations. In Nebraska, I am often the first Israeli ex-pat people have ever met, doubly so when it is cowboy boots wearing Isareli. At the same time, the cowboy image in popular culture and in real life is linked to masculinity and freedom. Finally, I believe that the cowboy image connects me to a sense of place (the great plains are the birthplace of the classic cowboy boot), and at the same time allows me to connect to Jewish cowboys and Gauchos- a pocket culture that nevertheless existed.

Clean Your Windows so you can see the fireflies

 I am continuing my journaling journey. This week I started thinking about my learning for the week while cleaning the windows in my living room. One of my sons came in and asked: Don't you have people that do that? Yes, I answered: but I love cleaning the windows occasionally. I get so used to the dirty-ish window that I stop noticing it. I sit in the chair and look outside, accepting the dirty window as part of the view. I literally forget that it is just a distortion that I have some power over and that I can remove. 

As I was cleaning, I realized that it was an interesting metaphor that calls on me as a researcher to stop, slow down, and examine what in my process of looking at the world needs cleaning. Is the distortion I see a result of dirt/noise in my control? This can go to weak beliefs and theories that stop me from seeing clearly. It can be unrelated (yet powerful) emotion or just constant activity that prevents me from realizing what I need to be paying attention to.

This may also be true of the devices and apps we use to see the world, algorithms, scanning, and attentional processes obscure what there is to see. Once in a while, we need to stop and clean our windows making sure that we are doing our best to see what is out there. Making what we are seeing is not just the distortion on our window.

This is my Journal page, I noticed that my processing has many more questions than answers or solutions. It could very well be that many of the questions are the ways I am scaffolding my process, or it could be that this early in the research into Art TEAMS, there are questions with answers pending. Leading to one of the only declarations: I have more questions than answers.

I am still leaning on the firefly metaphor. Systemic change is tough, and most of the time, efforts to innovate and make change are limited to our immediate environment. The light fireflies make is the light of individual change agents. While making the world better for others (very few for a short time), we are also looking for others like us to collaborate with us. 

In many ways, the grant is trying to help new fireflies increase their signal, find their light, and join the other fireflies. Yes, there is a slight chance of systemic change, but even if that does not happen, we change ourselves and the lives of our students. The role of projects and universities is to create communities of fireflies. Places where they are safe, cherished and supported, so they can continue.

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So I went to NAEA for the first time

The National Art Education Association meeting was in New York City this spring. Despite many years of being involved in arts integration, I have never had the opportunity to go. This year after our grant application for Art TEAMS was funded Was a great opportunity to go.

Wikipedia First: New Rules for Online Research

A recent article in Wired revisited how attitudes toward Wikipedia come face to face with the reality of Wikipedia. It is the world's eighth most visited site, it is free, it is not monetized. Students still recite that you cannot get information from Wikipedia- that it is not a reliable site.
In short, there is a gap between what we say "Wikipedia is unreliable, and the information on it cannot be trusted" and the reality that we all use Wikipedia and often for all the right reasons.

One of the common critiques about Wikipedia is that consensus might not be the best method to determine what is "true." That is a compelling argument and not without merit. It is, however, precisely what researchers do. Send papers to scrutiny "peer review" and research results become "true" when most of the research community thinks they converge, and we reach consensus until new information disrupts it.
In fact, a whole section of the Conceptual map about the Nature of Science (bottom right in the figure). Has to do with the community.

I will not repeat all the support and critiques of Wikipedia - you can read those on Wired in the original. I would like to instead suggest an addendum to how we treat Wikipedia when we teach students about Information Technology.
Let's make it Wikipedia first, never Wikipedia only. We always need to corroborate any information, but Wikipedia, with its basic information and the next set of links, can launch a search that is not guided just by the commercial and parochial interests of the monetized search engines only.
Wikipedia first

Why Silent Reading Rates and Stamina are More Important than Ever!

Freddy Hiebert currently of TextProject, Emily Hayden of Iowa State and I recently published an empirical paper about patterns of silent reading. This is the work we have been pursuing for quite a while. Studies of silent reading in the context of reading development is a crucial element in expanding our understanding of reading in the context of new literacies. Reading in the 21st century is quickly becoming a substantially different task than before- a task that, as educators and researchers, we need to explore. The reading task in the age of new literacies combines much of the old skills (e.g. decoding, word knowledge, fluency)  with newer challenges emerging from distractions, nonlinear texts, and the richness of multimodal texts.

I believe that one of the least understood elements of reading in the 21st century is persistence. This is inherently a different challenge than it was as little as twenty years ago. Modern readers seem to be almost assaulted by distractions and behaviors that challenge their attention to a continuous text. At the same time, comprehension of complex texts can emerge only from sustained close reading. In this, I go back to the notion of motivation as the ability to sustain attention to a specific task- reading.

The results of the study show that many students do not persist in reading even when they comprehend well. At the same time, it is clear that students that do persist in reading with comprehension adjust their reading rate after one text section and then slowly increase their reading rate. These patterns show the benefits of persistence and highlight the challenges of distraction. If students are distracted they will attempt each piece of the text as if new, unable to use the feedback from the previous section to adjust their reading rate to ensure comprehension. It is very likely that such behaviors make reading considerably less efficient and thus increase the odds that readers will not persist reading longer texts with comprehension.

I believe we have two challenges, the first is to research reading in modern contexts and the second to develop a framework for instructing silent reading with persistence and comprehension. From our conclusion:

"...we believe that the most pressing issue within reading instruction at present pertains to instructional tasks and interventions that support silent reading proficiency. One of the few projects on supporting silent reading within classroom settings in the archival literature is that of Reutzel, Fawson, and Smith (2008). This study, conducted with third graders, showed that a treatment of silent reading produced similar results on assessments of ORF as oral reading practice... To date, we have been unable to find a framework for designing tier-one, classroom instruction that begins in the early grades and ensures that students develop strong patterns of silent reading. If we are to prepare students for the tasks of the twenty-first century, such frameworks for instruction are urgently needed." (Hayden, Hiebert, & Trainin, 2019)

Teaching as a Craft

Occasionally I browse the books available on audio from the library through my app and listen to an almost random pick. This is how I came by Eric Gorges’ A Craftsman Legacy. It turns out that the book emerged from a TV show with the same name. Eric reads a string of interactions with craftsman  while telling his personal story in a reflective measured voice. The result is almost hypnotic. What I found magical in the way Eric read his book was that it provided space to think. Eric who is a craftsman himself visits exceptional craftsman interviews them while learning to create in their medium. This allows for a conversation and a juxtaposition of a master, a novice, and the learning process.

I remember grappling with the conflicting ideas of teaching as an art or as a science. Following Eric’s argument I believe it is a craft and that the metaphors and rumination that emerge from the book can be useful when thinking about teaching. For example, Teaching curiously enough relies quite heavily on an apprenticeship model that Gorges sees disappearing in the physical crafts.

One strand that Gorges pulls as the book evolves is the notion of play. His interviewees often describe a path that starts in childhood, constructing a bow, taking a clock apart. But for them play never stops and the hours they put in make them an expert while keeping the element of play. As we recognize the role of play in encouraging curiosity and discovery I believe that exposing kids to physical crafts can be magical.

I have had the chance to visit with Justin Olmanson discussing his efforts to include Making in our teacher education programs. It seems like our students initially resist the effort required to actually iterate and make. The demand forces them to slow down and make time. What Justin says has helped is describing the emotional journey that accompanies making. In the same vain I wonder if we used craft of teaching as a guiding metaphor it would make it easier for our students to understand the iterative nature of learning to teach.