Typing Out Loud

Every spring semester I teach a soup-to-nuts ePortfolio development class to graduate students in FIT’s Art Market Program, and every spring the word, reflection, assumes a more prominent role in my vocabulary. According to a paper by Neil Haigh from the University of Waikato in New Zealand, “reflection” is one of those words that is used, for the most part, pretty non-reflectively - which strikes a little too close to home. Drawing from Donald Schon’s concept of the “reflective practitioner”, Haigh develops a definition of reflection that is concise and all his own: thinking about an experience with the intention of deciding what it means, how it can be explained and what the meaning and explanations might imply for the future.
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Education is never neutral. It is never neutral because our philosophers, from Jefferson to Dewey to Giroux, have always connected it to our ability to perpetuate and participate in a democratic society. Our pedagogies, therefore - or how we go about educating - are necessarily embedded with ideologies that are attached to our definitions of participation and our capacity to participate in that society. The value or meaning of participation coupled with our ability to participate is what determines, in any given era, notions of literacy.
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It is helpful, when attempting to understand literacy, to differentiate between having specific literacies and being literate. Literacy, for example, has extrinsic, not intrinsic value that accumulates only as a companion to the process of becoming literate. Being literate is the result of what one does with the literacies that one has, and this in turn reflects value back onto literacy. As an analogy, if I learn five languages but have nothing interesting to express (write, speak) or do (think, translate, travel) with any one of them, then the value of that language acquisition is nil. The value increases, though, alongside my application of the languages. Literacy has reflected value.
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807 images and counting . . . http://flickr.com/photos/tags/christo/

This contemporaneous flickr image homage to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s artistic whimsy reminds me of two other stunning collective “knowledge building” events - both from Wikipedia (The Gates also has a Wikipedia entry). On March 11, 2004 I searched Wikipedia for “madrid bombings” and saw a single paragraph entry. As the day progressed, and then the weeks, the entry ballooned into many pages that contextualized the bombings with information about al-Qaida, ETA, 9/11, the history of the Moors in Spain, national and international political reactions, and on and on. It was amazing, actually, quite moving to see these pages evolve so quickly and deeply in such a telescoped time frame. I witnessed the same process beginning October 8, 2004 with Jacques Derrida’s death. What began as a simple 2 paragraph post developed instantly into a major appreciation of his life and work and influence. Both instances, and now flickr’s collective The Gates photos (and probably the Wikipedia entry for The Gates as well) were/are views onto the potency and efficiency of collaborative tasking. Models for the classroom.

I know of relatively few descriptions of innovative blended teaching coming from Art & Design programs. Examples may exist, but they are dwarfed by the case histories emerging from Liberal Arts or Business School courses. And then I stumbled upon this:
http://research.the-bac.edu/sva/index.htm - Sally Levine and Warren Wake’s 2000 presentation to the National Conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists. They titled their presentation, Education of Artists, Hybrid Teaching: Design Studios in Virtual Space, and delivered it on October 20, 2000 at the School of Visual Arts in New York City – about 5 blocks away from where I live.

They begin their paper with an appreciation of hybrid teaching and an acknowledgement that it is poised to become the standard for future college education - the classroom remaining, however, the strategic site for teaching and learning. (Justifying this statement, they pull a 1998 quote from Saskia Sassen, the University of Chicago Professor of Sociology and globalization theorist: “there is no fully virtualized enterprise nor fully (digitized industry,” that even “sectors that are highly digitized require strategic sites.”)

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What is it about this image, other than the fact that it is a visual representation of my del.icio.us tags, that is so compelling to me? Imagine each of these tags as an active link that connects me to my bookmarks and the bookmarks of others using the same tag. Imagine that this is not a series of tags at all, but a clickable navigational map of course content in a course entitled Ideas & Methods in Education, and that the words assume their hierarchical presence according to students’ contributions to the “discussion/conversations.”

New tools resemble old tools - not necessarily in design or purpose or function - but in how we use them. And how we use them is more often than not determined by our comfort with custom and our need to maintain predictable levels of control in our lives and our work. So we use word processors like typewriters, eschewing their unfamiliar and complicated attributes.

Some tools appear to be new, but in practice replicate the paradigms of the tools they were designed to replace. Antonio Dias de Figuereido, Professor of Informatics Engineering and Information Systems at the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Coimbra, Portugal put this forcefully in a 2003 call for chapters of a book he was editing, MANAGING LEARNING IN VIRTUAL SETTINGS: THE ROLE OF CONTEXT.
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Rigid notions of literacy are hinged to a straightforward encoding and decoding of print: can I read, do I understand what I’m reading, can I write? Can I process this calculation, can I summon pertinent others as needed? . . . Thinking about the nature of text today and where it fits within our understanding of literacy. Text that moves, that incorporates video and sound and simulations - that is not simply text, but intertextual. In George Landow’s words, "virtual, fluid, adaptable, open, capable of being processed, capable of being moved about rapidly, capable, finally of being networkable - of being joined with other texts." What skills should contemporary literacy measurements be assessing? How do technologies (because we are speaking of technologies) and cultures interact to change ideas about the nature of literacy?

What is, apart from the obvious time and space conveniences, so instantly appealing about a blended learning environment?
What does this question assume? What are its underpinnings?

• familiarity with face-to-face and online instruction (synchronous and asynchronous), and belief in the legitimacy (though not necessarily equal legitimacy) of both
• learning goals differ in kind and require different approaches to instruction
• learning is multimodal - it occurs within and on many fronts - and is enhanced as access to those fronts expand
• true assessment of learning requires that students be given multiple opportunities and venues to express what they’ve learned
• instructional theories are not religions, and a versatile environment(s) can accommodate their amalgam
• teaching requires bridging subject matter and student
• learning is most effective with that bridge in tact as well as others that connect student to teacher, student to student and student to community
• interconnections are more valuable than exclusivity
• tailoring instruction is beneficial
• synergies between the ways students live and the ways they can learn are worth exploiting