PICK AND CHOOSE content that looks interesting to you and is appropriate for you
2. Remix
Once you’ve read or watched or listened to some content, your next step is to keep track of that somewhere. How you do this will be up to you.
Here are some suggestions:
- create a blog
- create an account with del.icio.us and create a new entry for each piece of content you access. You can access del.icio.us at http://del.icio.us
take part in a Moodle discussion.
- tweet about the item in Twitter. If you have a Twitter account, post something about the content you’ve accessed.
- anything else: you can use any other service on the internet – Flickr, Second Life, Yahoo Groups, Facebook, YouTube, anything! use your existing accounts if you want or create a new one especially for this course. The choice is completely yours.
3. Repurpose
We don’t want you simply to repeat what other people have said. We want you to create something of your own. This is probably the hardest part of the process.
What materials? Why, the materials you have aggregated and remixed online.
What thoughts? What understanding? Well – that is the subject of this course. This whole course will be about how to read or watch, understand, and work with the content other people create, and how to create your own new understanding and knowledge out of them.
the critical literacies we will describe in this course are the TOOLS you will use to create your own content.
4. Feed Forward
you don’t have to share. You can work completely in private, not showing anything to anybody. Sharing is and will always be YOUR CHOICE.
Critical Literacies 2010, the course about thinking
How this Course Works
Critical Literacies is an unusual course. It does not consist of a body of content you are supposed to remember. Rather, the learning in the course results from the activities you undertake, and will be different for each person.
In addition, this course is not conducted in a single place or environment. It is distributed across the web.
paper on tagging, clouds, reflective learning
Abstract: Tags are popular for organising information in social software based on the personal views of the participants on the information. Tags provide valuable
attention meta-data on a person's interests because the participants actively relate resources to concepts by using tags. This paper analyses three designs for tag-clouds that are integrated in the ReScope framework for reflection support. ReScope provides a widget for visualising personal tag-clouds of the tags that were
used with social bookmarking services. The presented designs focus on processing and representing attention meta-data on the levels of recency, of collaboration, and of social connectedness from the perspective of situated learning. The present paper analyses how the designs are related to the underlying presumptions for supporting reflection using the different representations of attention meta-data.
WordSift was created to help teachers manage the demands of vocabulary and academic language in their text materials. We especially hope that this tool is helpful in supporting English Language Learners.
WordSift helps anyone easily sift through texts -- just cut and paste any text into WordSift and you can engage in a verbal quick-capture! The program helps to quickly identify important words that appear in the text. This function is widely available in various Tag Cloud programs on the web, but we have added the ability to mark and sort different lists of words important to educators. We have also integrated it with a few other functions, such as visualization of word thesaurus relationships (incorporating the amazing Visual Thesaurus® that we highly recommend in its own right) and Google® searches of images and videos. With just a click on any word in the Tag Cloud, the program displays instances of sentences in which that word is used in the text.
a toy in a linguistic playground that is available to instantly capture and display the vocabulary structure of texts
Mind maps are a great tool for getting your jumbly thoughts into a framework. From there, you can work backwards and forwards on ideas without the “weight” of lots of words to slow down your thinking. Then, by the way, you can use the words you’ve put down as the titles of slides, or as the headers to paragraphs or as the notes on your note cards for your speech.
the “stuff” of the final product gets in the way of the frame of what we’re putting together.
not teaching or ESL oriented but still relevant to the task at hand. it also references yet another network to coordinate ~ on top of the tech and new tools, we all inhabit multiple networks
What if the social changes that result from
these technologies are intended , rather than unintended
Marshall McLuhan wrote a good deal about the "Gutenberg Galaxy" - the
'constellation' of changes wrought on European society after the German of that
name figured out how to turn a winepress into a holder for movable type - in
other words, a printing press - in the 15th century.
changes in the political, religious, and
social landscape.
Gutenberg's press also made possible the
Protestant Reformation - because, as Martin Luther came to realize, the wide
translation and printing of the Bible meant "every man be a priest."
It's certainly hard to see how any of the changes which followed
could have
occurred without the widespread literacy and education that the printing press
made possible
what is now happening
to our society in our second "Gutenberg revolution" - namely, the rise of
electronic media
But what if there were a hidden center to the "Gutenberg Galaxy?"
fostering our
current phase of technological change
cultural determinism of
technology
And then, the Renaissance
The Dawn of Writing
obvious changes made possible by writing
technology of writing was ascribed
to some mythic "culture-bringer" - Ogham, Thoth, Quetzelcoatl, etc
Most people are not aware, however, what writing had undone.
writing may have
destroyed man's own prodigious mnemonic talents
Art of Memory also involved using tools and images
earlier technological revolution - one that occurred perhaps five
millenia ago - the birth of writing
The spoken word is intimate
writing is impersonal, does not
carry emotional intonations
The written word makes possible the autonomous survival of knowledge -
with an oral tradition, it disappears when the oralists have all been killed
throughout the great breadth
of the Dark and Middle Ages, literacy was not very widespread.
Was the printing press purely serendipitous? It does seem to have
arrived at the right place at the right time.
mysterious traditions of the printers' and papermillers'
guilds
heretical content of many of these watermarks
Bayley suggests it was Huguenot refugees that brought papermaking and
the printing art into England
"Gutenberg revolution" as quite a Gnostic coup - destroying the
literacy monopoly of both the Catholic Church and the feudal state
Today, the Arrival of the Electronic Word
any people are openly saying it: print is dead,
the era of the printed word and the book is fading, and thus a new kind of
literacy - "teleliteracy," ("the grammatology of video,") the reading of the
moving image and multimedia barrage before us - is being propagated
death of civilization itself, since in their eyes we seem to
be leaving the printed text behind and returning to the moving image or
fetish
immediacy, presence, and participation lost through writing
and print
whether some of the changes
electronic media will bring were not intended,
would not think for you, but would help you
think better and function as a "Knowledge (gnosis? ) Machine."
hypertext meant that the world's knowledge
could be seamlessly woven together, much like the integrated unified system of
knowledge imagined by the mystic Ramon Lull.
could
be used to facilitate "Community memory" and community activism. It meant
access to information
For conference presentations or article submissions there is no substitute for invested time in reflection, writing, and re-writing. For blogging - well it goes on the page as it goes through the brain.The best preparation I received for blogging was teaching online. One of the most important elements for running a successful online course involves presence. The instructor must be "present" in the course discussion boards and blogs. Teaching online gave me tons of practice in writing rapid, hopefully thought provoking, discussion and blog posts around the curriculum and the student's work