Week 7- This is how we dream

Richard Miller: This Is How We Dream Parts 1 and 2
I’m not going to lie, this video was a lot for me to take in and comprehend, and I’m not very good at that. He was talking about incremental changes and fundamental changes. As he was talking, images and words were popping up on the screen. Some of it, I could do on my Mac and I don’t even know how. Richard E. Miller shows what can be done to change the “reading and writing with products” people to “multimedia” people.

An incremental change is how we have taken writing with pen and paper and going to the library, and we are now doing virtually everything without having to touch paper or step foot into a library book. As he was talking about this, a Mac laptop came up and showed someone with two Word documents and one Safari page open at the same time, and he could see all three. It showed him simply research what he needed and copy and pasting it into the document. He then went on to talk about collaborating.

In the second part, he talks about how he can compose writing on the web, and he shows his colleague’s tool, and it is an application on a Mac that searches blogs as they are written moment by moment. It looked really cool and pretty with all the colors and visual effects. But then he says we don’t have the way to teach what he just described to us in that video. He says “technology articulates our dreams and allows us to shares them with others.”

I think I am prepared to write with multimedia to an extent. I already do it for my schoolwork and papers. I have not had to use a library book yet for any project or paper in college. I do everything online. I don’t think I am going to make my students do quite as much as he mentioned. After all, I want to teach little kids. But if we do have a project, I will encourage them to use the Internet.

The Networked Student by Wendy Drexler
This video is a true story about a student with a teacher who is a student of connectivism, which is a theory that learning is through a social network of many diverse connections and ties.

The video said that we make connections with other people in those networks. It showed the cartoon character using Google. He then post bookmarks on Delicious and Digio. This video is actually very much like our EDM class. We are using all of these websites.

So why have a teacher? A teacher can offer guidance when we are stuck; they are “learning architect”. I don’t think that I am ready to be a teacher of a network student, but the idea kind of sounds nice. Middle School students I do not think I could handle by any means, but I think I could do this with high schoolers.

Michael Wesch
He started off talking about the book “1984” by George Orwell, which is quite political. But at the beginning he showed a picture of his classroom of about 200 and said they are not socially and politically engaged, they just aren’t there. He then flipped to a picture of “American Idol” auditions, which showed the exact opposite attitude than the class picture. There is something in the atmosphere or structure that makes us feel the way we do. There is a quote that he said by someone, “in the midst of a fabulous array of historically unprecedented and utterly mind-boggling stimuli…whatever”. He then gave the history of “whatever”, which I thought was funny. I definitely say “whatever” a lot. That is usually what I say when I am mad because the other person isn’t listening or something.

He says we are moving toward disengagement and only thinking about ourselves, and we are moving toward fragmentation. I do think people are becoming like that, and most already are. I am not going to lie; I didn’t understand some of this video. It went together but at the same time it didn’t. Maybe I didn’t see what I was suppose to. I do agree though with the social aspects he was talking about and what we are moving towards.