One-Trick Pony

One-Trick Pony - "Thing 2":

500 blogs a day? Why?

Why would I want to read 500 personal diaries of anything, even if they were "filtered" for content, until I had the reading skills to isolate what mattered, or unless I were doing specialized research?

Who and what does the filtering? Am I the only one troubled by the illusion of "open" information that this creates and the potential for mind- and content-control on a massive scale? Science fiction will surely catch up with this eventually...

Our students are not "there" yet--they just get the illusion that they are from this type of superficial experience (see the recent Atlantic Monthly article about why Google is distorting reading habits). Reading pedagogy will also have to evolve to accommodate the addiction to self-revelation at any cost.

I assigned a Spanish "Wordle" for the first time, at the suggestion of a MILI Blogger colleague. It appears to be a "one-trick pony"--amusing but quickly exhausted, even by my lower-level students, who were already asking the following: "How do I do accents?" and "How come I can't put in pictures?" and "Is that ALL there is to it?"

Indeed.

This suggests that "Wordle" is a self-limited tool--a one-bite experience, a one-trick pony, however entertaining it maybe.

Blogging applications? More to come...

Ambient "Intimacy"

The September 7, 2008 New York Times magazine section offered an article by Clive Thompson (http://nytimes.com/magazine) about how Twitter and other communication based on a continuous stream of "bit" entries is creating a "brave new world of ambient intimacy." I am both fascinated and repelled by the further fragmentation of message composition into miniscule units of self-reportage. The appeal of such media appear to be that they offer a lifestyle extension of the "helicopter parent"/"self-esteem boosting at any cost" formative years of many young people today. Does imagining a pedagogical application for these media give them tacit endorsement? Or is it just being realisitic about the realities of modern attention spans? The direct application to my field would be for students to "twitter" in Spanish rather than English.

Applications of Blogging and Google Docs

Following a MILI presentation on blogging and Google docs, I am still looking for a concise summary of efficient ways to constructively use these tools in the context of second-language learning with large classes and unequal student access to e-resources.
So far, I can clearly see the wisdom of my colleagues' ideas for applications:
- group work, such as collaborative science projects where ongoing dialogue from multiple unconnected sites is a critical part of the process (Rozeboom and others);
- community projects, such as student council communications (Hodge);
- adult and student book club dialogues (Blohm and Snell).
These text-based tools are fine for communicating in a common language, but less applicable to students in the process of acquiring written language, when the emphasis in high school second-language instruction is on oral proficiency.
Another concern is the trivialization of written production and the need for guidelines regarding intellectual property. With plagiarism already rampant, "group" authorship blurs the borders of
intellectual propriety even further. It is not by chance that many colleges have banned citations of Wikipedia in term papers. Out in the real world, the law is running far behind the technology.
I welcome feedback on these points!

New Beginnings

More talk does not necessarily mean better talk. In starting this blog as part of a course, I am hoping to learn how to use this medium efficiently. Time-efficient blogging appears to be a global challenge, as it was the topic of a BBC broadcast this morning. Academics from several countries who maintain blogs for the benefit of their university students were interviewed about the challenges they face in managing blogging time well. The old programming adage "Garbage in, garbage out" still seems to appply to some of the commercially popular blogs that I have visited, but I will try to keep an open mind as I explore.

The ACRL Guidelines are an excellent foundation for both beginners and those skilled in the applications of the newer technologies.