Hacking and making your own safety
Monday, February 7th, 2011
The video Hacking Human featuring Michelle Levesque is really really great. And so is the Stranger Danger article. They intersect for me in thinking about the policing of thinking, and cultural policing in general. We all buy into the dominant culture to a certain extent and work within it’s restrictions to get that thing called life done, and so to a certain extent participate in a form of cultural policing – this is cool, that is not, this is popular now, I make my decisions based on these ideas that I heard about…it’s kind of the way that cultural cohesiveness is maintained.
However, what we don’t want is our tools policed in a non-transparent way. I really like the emphasis Levesque put on transparency in her lecture. If we are going to have institutions creating structures within which we construct our meaning (and we are, there just isn’t much of an escape from that) we need to make sure that those structures are built right, with as open and honest policy as possible. We need to know what is being blocked/censored/monitored for us, and we need to agree to it. Transparency is key.
Thinking about transparency on a larger scale makes, in terms of large cultural systems of value and information sharing and education and political ideologies etc etc etc gets me thinking about transparency on a more personal scale – parents and kids and families. I’m doing a lot of reading and thinking about safety for my Major Research Project, and so I see how all this stuff applies. The more we box things in for our kids, and for ourselves – the more restrictions we build into our systems – the less empowered we are to make our own decisions, or have conversations with our children, or do things and our thinking for ourselves.
Which then brings me to hacking culture, and forgive me for rambling all over the map with this one but the goal is to tie it all up together by the end – when we feel empowered to do things for ourselves, and learn the skills we need to know to be able to do what we want, we are participating in the broadly defined hacking culture that Levesque spoke about in her lecture, and that Nolan, Raines-Goldie and McBride (2011) talk about in their paper. When we have a conversation with our children about how to take care of themselves when navigating the Internet sea in their awesome little submarines (it’s back!), we aren’t only helping them to learn and empower themselves and encourage them to stand on their own two feet and live their own lives, but we are also deflating the ideas that skulk around in the shadows of culture that tell us that it’s just so unsafe out there.
The statistics are down. The climate has changed. Things are actually way more safe than even when I was a kid, not so long ago but longer than for a lot of my cohort participating in this blog. Yet, our cultural policing, and those shadowy fearful ideas are constantly whispering to us that there is danger everywhere, that our kids are at risk and incapable, and that we need to protect and be vigilant and relay on others to create our own safety.
When instead we should be working to make our own culture of safety, ourselves
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Children and Tech Series - Post #4
WORLD . OF . GOO !!!…and can you speak-ah the lingo?
Monday, January 31st, 2011
Oh my goo-d. I can’t believe how much fun World of Goo has been.
I have to limit myself folks – seriously. I could play on and on and on…I have to admit that I had so much fun that I went on to purchase the rest of the game, so that I could take a look at what the rest of the world looked like.
That is a big component of games for me – exploring the world. I was talking to a novelist friend yesterday who was telling me about how writing a novel can be like holding something very large and alive, something with a lot of surface tension and viscosity and solidity, and I started thinking about games in the same way. The way the creators make a whole world, and then release it to the masses. And this is some of the important discourse happening around games right now (and probably always) – the made worlds’ confines as opposed the the open-source, co-created worlds’ diffuseness. The container of the made world allows for only certain things to happen – like not being able to scale certain terrain, steer certain things but not others, or interacting in prescriptive ways (hello drop down menu!). However, on the other side we have the intimidatingly openness of co-creative projects that sometimes seem like they have no limits, and things just get lost in the Twisting Nether. I don’t have any answers about this by the way, just observations and wondering.
But it leads me to think about communication, and communication through technology. The fears society has eloquently and excitingly (and hilariously, gorily) expressed in Terminator films and Technozombie cults of Borg may be a bit overwrought. I have faith in the body, in the hand, and I think we may be experiencing the rush of excitement that ALWAYS happens when something novel enters society. Technology may not be replacing face-to-face. It may only be changing it for a bit.
Communication in the 21st century looks like it’s going to be about literacy, and a broadening of that term (and of the term language) to encompass a lot more than we may be able to express right now. What if novels become multi-sensory collages of written text, holographic adventure, audio-video clips and visual material? What if letters shift from written to a mix of written, recorded, transmitted and visual snapshots or vid clips?Are we on the cusp of something giant and new, or are we expanding with the surface of the bubble of novelty til it pops?
There is no question that technology has changed communication – I can now skype with my parents in Nova Scotia every day, for free if I want to. However, I love what the text said about illiteracy in the 21st century – being not about not being able to read and write, but about learning, unlearning and relearning (Toffler, as cited in Jonassen, Howland, Marra & Crismond, 2008).
Monday, January 31st, 2011
Oh my goo-d. I can’t believe how much fun World of Goo has been.
I have to limit myself folks – seriously. I could play on and on and on…I have to admit that I had so much fun that I went on to purchase the rest of the game, so that I could take a look at what the rest of the world looked like.
That is a big component of games for me – exploring the world. I was talking to a novelist friend yesterday who was telling me about how writing a novel can be like holding something very large and alive, something with a lot of surface tension and viscosity and solidity, and I started thinking about games in the same way. The way the creators make a whole world, and then release it to the masses. And this is some of the important discourse happening around games right now (and probably always) – the made worlds’ confines as opposed the the open-source, co-created worlds’ diffuseness. The container of the made world allows for only certain things to happen – like not being able to scale certain terrain, steer certain things but not others, or interacting in prescriptive ways (hello drop down menu!). However, on the other side we have the intimidatingly openness of co-creative projects that sometimes seem like they have no limits, and things just get lost in the Twisting Nether. I don’t have any answers about this by the way, just observations and wondering.
But it leads me to think about communication, and communication through technology. The fears society has eloquently and excitingly (and hilariously, gorily) expressed in Terminator films and Technozombie cults of Borg may be a bit overwrought. I have faith in the body, in the hand, and I think we may be experiencing the rush of excitement that ALWAYS happens when something novel enters society. Technology may not be replacing face-to-face. It may only be changing it for a bit.
Communication in the 21st century looks like it’s going to be about literacy, and a broadening of that term (and of the term language) to encompass a lot more than we may be able to express right now. What if novels become multi-sensory collages of written text, holographic adventure, audio-video clips and visual material? What if letters shift from written to a mix of written, recorded, transmitted and visual snapshots or vid clips?Are we on the cusp of something giant and new, or are we expanding with the surface of the bubble of novelty til it pops?
There is no question that technology has changed communication – I can now skype with my parents in Nova Scotia every day, for free if I want to. However, I love what the text said about illiteracy in the 21st century – being not about not being able to read and write, but about learning, unlearning and relearning (Toffler, as cited in Jonassen, Howland, Marra & Crismond, 2008).
Children and Tech Series - Post #3
Continuing on with the posts (ages later) from my Children and Technology" Course. Want to get it all up before school starts!
Internet submarines and coherence in writing
Monday, January 24th, 2011
Chapters 2 and 4 of Meaningful Learning with Technology by Jonassen, Howland, Marra & Crismond (2008) focused on the issues of information literacy and production. Technology offers us many ways to amass and interact with information, and also to produce works that are hopefully informed, creative and relevant.
The Internet is a vast sea of information, and you really have to be intentional about how you navigate it’s waters. An image of some kind of exploratory vessel, like an amazing submarine kept coming to mind as I read through Chapter 2, which is basically about learning effective ways of exploring the Internet and how to use it as a learning tool. Key to this is the basic premise of having clear ideas of what you’re looking for, why you are looking for it, and how you’ll use it to create deeper understanding for yourself and others. This demands real critical thinking, a hot topic these days and for a very good reason. Critical thinking is a learned skill that we aren’t really helping children learn – and Chapter 2 highlights why critical thinking and engaged learning are critical issues that need to be supported starting as early as possible.
While the Internet can provide an amazing and interesting arena for critical thinking and engaged learning to happen, it takes some pretty involved and skillful scaffolding on the part of teachers and educators to make sure that learners develop the basic tools so that they can make their own submarines to help them navigate their way through the endless Internet soup. I wonder about what shapes this could take in early learning environments – with and without computers – and I’m excited to think more about this and hear what people have to say.
Chapter 4 is really about writing, and how technology can support developing good writing. I believe that it can, but again it’s something that necessarily requires skillful scaffolding on the part of the educator to help hone learners skills and get the rules of good writing down into practice. The ease with which online web publishing makes it for people to get their writing out there for an audience (myself included) doesn’t guarantee that good writing is a given. Quantity is not quality, and practice doesn’t make perfect – you could just be practicing bad writing over and over again.
The great thing about web publishing, and the chapter talks about this, is the ease with which writers can now share with peers. This is awesome, as it allows writers to work in a collaborative way not really experienced before in history. Writing has been predominantly seen as a solitary craft – but sharing your work on the web for intentional collaborative editing is an amazing opportunity to draw the author out of their silo and hopefully find a supportive community with which to develop their work. This relies on the quality of the interactions with peers, and is again something that needs skillful facilitation.
I need to research Poetry Forge more, cuz it kinda scares me.
Internet submarines and coherence in writing
Monday, January 24th, 2011
Chapters 2 and 4 of Meaningful Learning with Technology by Jonassen, Howland, Marra & Crismond (2008) focused on the issues of information literacy and production. Technology offers us many ways to amass and interact with information, and also to produce works that are hopefully informed, creative and relevant.
The Internet is a vast sea of information, and you really have to be intentional about how you navigate it’s waters. An image of some kind of exploratory vessel, like an amazing submarine kept coming to mind as I read through Chapter 2, which is basically about learning effective ways of exploring the Internet and how to use it as a learning tool. Key to this is the basic premise of having clear ideas of what you’re looking for, why you are looking for it, and how you’ll use it to create deeper understanding for yourself and others. This demands real critical thinking, a hot topic these days and for a very good reason. Critical thinking is a learned skill that we aren’t really helping children learn – and Chapter 2 highlights why critical thinking and engaged learning are critical issues that need to be supported starting as early as possible.
While the Internet can provide an amazing and interesting arena for critical thinking and engaged learning to happen, it takes some pretty involved and skillful scaffolding on the part of teachers and educators to make sure that learners develop the basic tools so that they can make their own submarines to help them navigate their way through the endless Internet soup. I wonder about what shapes this could take in early learning environments – with and without computers – and I’m excited to think more about this and hear what people have to say.
Chapter 4 is really about writing, and how technology can support developing good writing. I believe that it can, but again it’s something that necessarily requires skillful scaffolding on the part of the educator to help hone learners skills and get the rules of good writing down into practice. The ease with which online web publishing makes it for people to get their writing out there for an audience (myself included) doesn’t guarantee that good writing is a given. Quantity is not quality, and practice doesn’t make perfect – you could just be practicing bad writing over and over again.
The great thing about web publishing, and the chapter talks about this, is the ease with which writers can now share with peers. This is awesome, as it allows writers to work in a collaborative way not really experienced before in history. Writing has been predominantly seen as a solitary craft – but sharing your work on the web for intentional collaborative editing is an amazing opportunity to draw the author out of their silo and hopefully find a supportive community with which to develop their work. This relies on the quality of the interactions with peers, and is again something that needs skillful facilitation.
I need to research Poetry Forge more, cuz it kinda scares me.
Friday, August 12, 2011
oh wow!!!
2 kids and a nanny review every park in Manhattan - this is so wonderful - want to do it in Toronto!!!! yippee!
Check out NYC Park Hopper - so great!!
Plus - here comes school again - with the hope of slightly less sporadic blogging. Will finish the things I started.
soon again - nerd out!
Check out NYC Park Hopper - so great!!
Plus - here comes school again - with the hope of slightly less sporadic blogging. Will finish the things I started.
soon again - nerd out!
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Children and Tech series - Post # 2
a brief history of tech and noah
Monday, January 17th, 2011
My own experiences with technology began early – when I was little I wanted to be a “scientist”. Not that I actually had a good handle on what a scientist did, but I was informed by cartoons, Star Wars and comic books – where “scientists” used technology to save the world multiple times on a daily basis. I wanted to go into space, meet aliens and fly around with robots.
My dad worked as an aircraft technician for Air Canada for 27 years, and was a carpenter and builder in his spare time. Technology as tools, and as something you work with were present through him throughout my childhood. My mother went back to school and also entered a technological field by the time my sister and I were in middle school. She studied robotics at a local technical college, and became one of Ontario’s first women industrial robotics technicians. They would have conversations at the dinner table that would totally mystify my sister and I.
Computers were a bit different. I was in Grade 5 when the first PCs were introduced to schools – we had two boxy Macintoshes in the school library, that got used for games and “educational purposes” but were mostly ignored. Friends had Atari systems, and we would play with them sometimes. My real introduction to the home computer happened through my grandfather, who gave me his old Commodore 64 when he upgraded to something else, and now I could write things, play arcade games and most awesomely print things out at home. I played a few games for a while, but found that I mostly got overstimulated from them and pretty well stopped playing them.
Even though my parents were technological at work, my sister and I could program the VCR far better than them. We were adolescents and teenagers in the time before cellphones, but we would’ve been ahead of them on that curve as well. It’s funny how the tech generation gap was so present, even in my very technological family.
In middle school, I realized that the more interesting aliens were here on planet earth – namely other people – and became less focused on being a “scientist” and started seeing art as the outlet for my creativity. In high school, I specialized in theatre, and learned a battery of technology specific to that discipline. A lot of what we had in school was dinosaur material (even at that time) and we were well aware that we were learning techniques on machines that were obsolete in the field.
Before I came to Ryerson, I worked as a professional artist for 14 years. Technology was even more important, as a means of documentation through photos, video and audio data; word processing and editing for grant writing, archiving and evaluation; flexible ways to save and present previous work and projects in progress; networking and collaborating with artists in other places – and a gazillion more. Technology just keeps on growing into my life. I bought my first computer (a Mac) and won’t look back.
Monday, January 17th, 2011
My own experiences with technology began early – when I was little I wanted to be a “scientist”. Not that I actually had a good handle on what a scientist did, but I was informed by cartoons, Star Wars and comic books – where “scientists” used technology to save the world multiple times on a daily basis. I wanted to go into space, meet aliens and fly around with robots.
My dad worked as an aircraft technician for Air Canada for 27 years, and was a carpenter and builder in his spare time. Technology as tools, and as something you work with were present through him throughout my childhood. My mother went back to school and also entered a technological field by the time my sister and I were in middle school. She studied robotics at a local technical college, and became one of Ontario’s first women industrial robotics technicians. They would have conversations at the dinner table that would totally mystify my sister and I.
Computers were a bit different. I was in Grade 5 when the first PCs were introduced to schools – we had two boxy Macintoshes in the school library, that got used for games and “educational purposes” but were mostly ignored. Friends had Atari systems, and we would play with them sometimes. My real introduction to the home computer happened through my grandfather, who gave me his old Commodore 64 when he upgraded to something else, and now I could write things, play arcade games and most awesomely print things out at home. I played a few games for a while, but found that I mostly got overstimulated from them and pretty well stopped playing them.
Even though my parents were technological at work, my sister and I could program the VCR far better than them. We were adolescents and teenagers in the time before cellphones, but we would’ve been ahead of them on that curve as well. It’s funny how the tech generation gap was so present, even in my very technological family.
In middle school, I realized that the more interesting aliens were here on planet earth – namely other people – and became less focused on being a “scientist” and started seeing art as the outlet for my creativity. In high school, I specialized in theatre, and learned a battery of technology specific to that discipline. A lot of what we had in school was dinosaur material (even at that time) and we were well aware that we were learning techniques on machines that were obsolete in the field.
Before I came to Ryerson, I worked as a professional artist for 14 years. Technology was even more important, as a means of documentation through photos, video and audio data; word processing and editing for grant writing, archiving and evaluation; flexible ways to save and present previous work and projects in progress; networking and collaborating with artists in other places – and a gazillion more. Technology just keeps on growing into my life. I bought my first computer (a Mac) and won’t look back.
Children and Tech series - Post # 1
Learning like knitting – blogging, self-reflection and making meaning together
Saturday, January 15th, 2011
In reading Alex Halavais’ (2006) article assigned to us this week, several wonderful things jumped out at me. In clear, readable prose, Halavais outlines the development of online publishing and weblogging, and the potential blogging has to create flexible learning spaces.
Now, this is really exciting. I have maintained blogs for several years – mostly to keep records and to reach out to others about the work that I’d been doing. My latest blog has mostly been a way to document my development as an early childhood educator. It has also become a place of learning as I connected with other early childhood educators blogging all over the world. Not that I’ve actually updated it in a while…What Halavais is talking about in much of his paper is a much more immediate version of this – students expanding and enhancing their learning through the use of open, online publishing as part of coursework they share.
The self-reflective aspect of blogs is I think enhanced by the fact that you’re writing for an audience – you write for yourself, but/and you become part of that audience. That is a really interesting notion – that in your self-reflection you take yourself out of yourself to watch what you’re doing. Now, some may argue that this is a less authentic experience, but I think as long as it’s articulated and conscious (the way it is and is formalized through the structure of blogging) it avoids becoming navel-gazing, especially when open to an audience. That constant integration, back-and-forthing over your ideas, behaviours and practices moves away from the “disposability” of our school-type learning – it’s gone after the exam and no longer relevant to our lives. When that self-reflection gets shared, especially in visually documented formats such as online web publishing, the potential for discussion and self-reflection is even greater and learning is bound to increase exponentially.
The immersive, engaged vision of learning presented by Halavais in using blogging as a collaborative tool is really great. As he states in his paper “…to learn by becoming a member of that community rather than by learning about that community.” (p. 8) reminds me of debates in Research Methodology class about compete participant and participant-as-observer methods of data collection. The difference here is the transparency, and how exciting is it to watch the development of your own mind, growing with others.
Halavais also raises an interesting point about the mentor/apprenticeship form of learning. I really like thinking about learning about anything as learning a craft – coming from my arts background this isn’t so surprising. But the way that we argue about the “dehumanizing” aspects of technology could be reframed using a “crafting” lens. Looking at using technology as a collaborative learning tool as a craft could reintroduce a “done by hand” aspect to our technologically mediated education. Equally interesting would be a reframing of ECE as a craft – how cool would that be?!
Saturday, January 15th, 2011
In reading Alex Halavais’ (2006) article assigned to us this week, several wonderful things jumped out at me. In clear, readable prose, Halavais outlines the development of online publishing and weblogging, and the potential blogging has to create flexible learning spaces.
Now, this is really exciting. I have maintained blogs for several years – mostly to keep records and to reach out to others about the work that I’d been doing. My latest blog has mostly been a way to document my development as an early childhood educator. It has also become a place of learning as I connected with other early childhood educators blogging all over the world. Not that I’ve actually updated it in a while…What Halavais is talking about in much of his paper is a much more immediate version of this – students expanding and enhancing their learning through the use of open, online publishing as part of coursework they share.
The self-reflective aspect of blogs is I think enhanced by the fact that you’re writing for an audience – you write for yourself, but/and you become part of that audience. That is a really interesting notion – that in your self-reflection you take yourself out of yourself to watch what you’re doing. Now, some may argue that this is a less authentic experience, but I think as long as it’s articulated and conscious (the way it is and is formalized through the structure of blogging) it avoids becoming navel-gazing, especially when open to an audience. That constant integration, back-and-forthing over your ideas, behaviours and practices moves away from the “disposability” of our school-type learning – it’s gone after the exam and no longer relevant to our lives. When that self-reflection gets shared, especially in visually documented formats such as online web publishing, the potential for discussion and self-reflection is even greater and learning is bound to increase exponentially.
The immersive, engaged vision of learning presented by Halavais in using blogging as a collaborative tool is really great. As he states in his paper “…to learn by becoming a member of that community rather than by learning about that community.” (p. 8) reminds me of debates in Research Methodology class about compete participant and participant-as-observer methods of data collection. The difference here is the transparency, and how exciting is it to watch the development of your own mind, growing with others.
Halavais also raises an interesting point about the mentor/apprenticeship form of learning. I really like thinking about learning about anything as learning a craft – coming from my arts background this isn’t so surprising. But the way that we argue about the “dehumanizing” aspects of technology could be reframed using a “crafting” lens. Looking at using technology as a collaborative learning tool as a craft could reintroduce a “done by hand” aspect to our technologically mediated education. Equally interesting would be a reframing of ECE as a craft – how cool would that be?!
lax lax lax!!
I have been so bad at posting - even tho I really wanted to get the bloggyblog up and rolling again.
I took a really interesting course last semester that sucked up some of my blogging juices because we had to post to a class blog. The course was Children and Technology and opened my eyes and brain and was a great, thought-provoking learning. I'm going to transfer those posts on to this one, and that way will transfer some of that thinking into a more public sphere.
My colleague at the EDGE Lab also suggested that I blog about the great books and things that I've been reading - such a great idea so I'm going to try to do that too.
Here goes - back at it.
Nerd out!
I took a really interesting course last semester that sucked up some of my blogging juices because we had to post to a class blog. The course was Children and Technology and opened my eyes and brain and was a great, thought-provoking learning. I'm going to transfer those posts on to this one, and that way will transfer some of that thinking into a more public sphere.
My colleague at the EDGE Lab also suggested that I blog about the great books and things that I've been reading - such a great idea so I'm going to try to do that too.
Here goes - back at it.
Nerd out!
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