Composing Spaces

I have been helping a colleague design her first Voicethread, and while I was on the site I came across a series of book reports by children that seem to be in the fourth grade. I have embedded one below and I don’t think I need to write why, though I will. Many of my students have been posting on their blogs about reading, my undergrads (who are primarily elementary education majors) most likely because March 2 was Read Across American Day and Dr. Suess’ birthday. Two posts were on the subject of reading difficulties. One student points to a very cool program called Reading Assistance Education Dogs, or R.E.A.D., in which dogs are trained to sit and listen to children with reading difficulties read aloud. Another describes, with great hilarity, what she calls "blue addiction"—the uncontrollable urge to click on blue links in hypertext fiction without care for the text in which a link appears.

The beauty of the below Voicethread is how wonderful it is to see an elementary school teacher use a multimodal social technology to provide a space for her students to articulate what they have read, what they think about it, and how it impacted their learning. They even composed their own avatars. Spectacular, really.

The March 2008 edition of Harper’s arrived today, and in it is a wonderful example of how internet technologies are not value neutral. Ginger Strand’s annotation "Keyword: Evil" (which Harper’s has made available for free online) spans two pages as she uses call-outs connected to an architectural schematic to dissect the energy-use implications of Google’s planned server farm site, The Dallas, which rests on the Columbia River in Oregon. Two screenshots of the article:

Read the rest of this entry »

Via Geoff Carter on the techrhet list, Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose talking about the Kindle:

The device is getting the full media blitz, most notably the cover story in Newsweek, claiming that it is The Future of Reading and that the Book Isn’t Dead. I wasn’t aware that the book was in critical care.I haven’t used the Kindle yet, though I would obviously like to get my hands on one and see what its all about. I had the same initial reaction as Clay—that the lack of unlimited internet access is a serious drawback. Clay likes to check blogs in his phone; I like to do the same through my RSS reader.At Thanksgiving the family got into a discussion about the Kindle and I opined that I thought it would be another neat toy that some readers buy, just as some people bought the Sony Reader—the technology from which the Kindle heavily borrows (especially the liquid text screen). The only reason the Kindle is getting such buzz, I suspect, is because it is Bezos. But, we shall see.

Update 11/24, 9:27pm: Wired has a table that compares 8 categories among 9 ebook readers.

Update 12/2/07, 11:13am: I can’t resist pointing to Chip Kidd’s response to the Kindle at A Brief Message:

On Monday November 19th, Amazon released something called Kindle, the latest “e-book” reading device. I’ve been asked to comment on what effect I think this will have, if any, on book design as we know it. Here goes.

None.

Sincerely,
Chip Kidd

In response to my post about WetPaint videos, Jim Brown suggested that the casting of a black woman as the savvy tech person is consistent with Martin Kevorkian’s observations in Color Monitors: The Black Face of Technology in America. I just picked it up from my library today and couldn’t put it down. It is smart, pointed, witty when it needs to be, and extremely readable:

My research has uncovered a peculiar pattern: race comes into sharp relief when computer use is depicted as difficult labor requiring special expertise. Time and again, in such scenarios, the helpful person of color is there to take the call—to provide technical support, to deal with machines. In interpreting such images, Color Monitors analyzes the computer-fearing strain in American whiteness, as aspect of white identity that defines itself against information technology and the racial other imagined to love it and excel atit. The computer expert most disproportionately projected by this cyberphobic whiteness is the black male. I argue that fears about the dehumanizing, disembodying effects of information technology and fears of the black male body work as mutually reinforcing impulses behind popular depictions of black males as computer experts. (p. 2)

I have only gotten through the Prologue and a bit of Chapter 1 (which begins with a discussion of the brilliant moment when Oliver Wendell Jones—of Berkeley Breathed’s Outland—has had a color monitor surgically implanted into his face) and in that short space, Kevorkian makes observations of the black tech expert in Die Hard 2: Die Harder, Office Space, The Matrix, Mission: Impossible, and Minority Report—and also exposes movie reviewers’ penchant to question the casting of the white male actor stud in the role of a tech expert, but say nothing of equally studly black men in such roles. It looks to be a fascinating read.

Jim’s commen suggests that the casting is not unique to the black male. This panel from the comic strip Retail—posted in their blog by one of my students—follows along the same lines:

Chris Anson of North Carolina State University forwarded a link on the WPA list to a pointed and hilarious letter from Pat Conroy to the editor of the Charleston (WV) Gazette in which he lambastes the Kanawha County school board’s suspension of his books, The Prince of Tides and Beach Music. The letter begins with:

I received an urgent e-mail from a high school student named Makenzie Hatfield of Charleston, West Virginia. She informed me of a group of parents who were attempting to suppress the teaching of two of my novels, “The Prince of Tides” and “Beach Music.” I heard rumors of this controversy as I was completing my latest filthy, vomit-inducing work. These controversies are so commonplace in my life that I no longer get involved. But my knowledge of mountain lore is strong enough to know the dangers of refusing to help a Hatfield of West Virginia. I also do not mess with McCoys.

And ends with:

The school board of Charleston, West Virginia, has sullied that gift and shamed themselves and their community. You’ve now entered the ranks of censors, book-banners, and teacher-haters, and the word will spread. Good teachers will avoid you as though you had cholera. But here is my favorite thing: Because you banned my books, every kid in that county will read them, every single one of them. Because book banners are invariably idiots, they don’t know how the world works — but writers and English teachers do.

Update, 9:18pm: Video from Zack Harold who is one of three finalists in West Virginia for MTV’s Choose or Lose ‘08 election coverage. He submitted this as port of the interview process.

I am loving TextArc, though I am somewhat amazed that I have never heard of or seen it, especially since it has been around since the mid-late 1990s. The creator, Paley, tapped into Project Gutenberg to be able to TextArc thousands of works. The TextArc of The Waste Land brings a whole new dimension to the spatiality of the poem:

In the few (wonderful) chances I have had to discuss The Waste Land with students, I have brought them into it by conceiving of the poem as a series of spaces–lands that the protagonist was traversing in search of multiple meanings. The TextArc shows that landscape in a new way–as Paley puts it (.pdf; this link describes the process of designing a TextArc): they can “serve as a visual seed, evoking new insights into a text’s meaning.”

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the first post in my Recent Arrivals feature, which will highlight new books that I have purchased and/or have been published by colleagues.

The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman

From the publisher: “Alan Weisman writes about which objects from today would vanish without us; how our pipes, wires, and cables would be pulverized into an unusual (but mere) line of red rock; why some museums and churches might be the last human creations standing; how rats and roaches would struggle without us; and how plastic, cast-iron, and radio waves may be our most lasting gifts to the planet.”

Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover how the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated into What America Eats, by Steve Ettlinger

From the publisher: “From the phosphate mines in Idaho to the corn fields in Iowa, from gypsum mines in Oklahoma to the vanilla harvest in Madagascar, Twinkie, Deconstructed is a fascinating, thoroughly researched romp of a narrative that demystifies some of the most common processed food ingredients—where they come from, how they are made, how they are used—and why. Beginning at the source (hint: they’re often more closely linked to rock and petroleum than any of the four food groups), we follow each Twinkie ingredient through the process of being crushed, baked, fermented, refined, and/or reacted into a totally unrecognizable goo or powder with a strange name—all for the sake of creating a simple snack cake.”

Using Blogs to Enhance Literacy: The Next Powerful Step in 21st Century Learning, by Diane Penrod (colleague at Rowan)

From the publisher: “Beyond the mainstream media hype about the dangers of adolescents and blogs, we find that young people are developing 21st century literacies especially in information and visual literacy. In this book, Diane Penrod addresses the social, developmental, and pedagogical issues surrounding the use of blogs and the implications that blogging has for current and future students.”