Brain Gain- neuroenhancing drugs

I realize this isn't the type of technology we've been talking about in our class, but I think it brings up an important conversation for people concerned with the future of education to have. This is technology literally becoming part of us and in some ways the demand for neuroenhancing drugs comes out of the 24-hour culture create by some of the technologies we have talked about in class. In any case, I found the article on neuroenhancing drugs by Margaret Talbot extremely interesting. I hope some of you enjoy it as well.

An Online Writing Platform for Language Learners

I was really interested in this article, not only from an English Language Learners perspective, but also as a tool for teaching native English speakers to write. As I understood it, this platform goes beyond track changes and archives teacher and student comments in each draft of an essay progressively moving towards a final essay. The program correlates the number of errors, comments, and reoccurring problems. The program then automatically directs students to help pages on specific problem areas. Having graded multiple revisions of student essays, I see this tool’s ability to focus students on their own reoccurring errors (without having to rely on my memory of student’s individual trouble spots) as extremely valuable. In this way, while class time might focuses on overall class struggles, individual struggles are not left unaddressed. I also really liked the students’ ability within this program to send drafts to each other for peer-review and then archive comments from classmates. I think editing other classmates work is a great way to become a better editor of your own work and like to include as much peer editing as possible in my courses. Finally, I found the way this article broke down the platform based on the needs and uses of teachers, students, and researchers as an effective and persuasive breakdown for receiving funding and support. Wanting to know more, I went to the IWill website (http://iwillnow.org) mentioned in the article and was please to see the site has new posts made in 2009. That said, many links on the website were broken including the sign-up and contact us pages. I will try to get in touch with the web administrator to see if I can sign up and explore more.

The move from page to screen: the multimodal reshaping of school English

Just some quick thoughts on Carey Jewitt’s article:

Communication does indeed take place through the complex interplay of a range of modes. When reading some of these descriptions, I couldn’t help thinking how interesting it was that I was reading text that described the actions in a video that students used to better understand a text. What a unique space for learning! I wish the videos could have been embedded in the text and wonder if there are online journals that do that? I see this as an ultimate example of texts’ place at the top of academic discussions. It also highlights the ability of text to describe visuals as much visuals can be used to interpret text. Text can also create a viewing position for the reader. Text can describe the tone of someone’ voice. I don’t know if I’m comfortable with students being able to “by-pass the novel as a written text (i.e.they do not engage with it) and instead engage with it as a (multimodal) video text.” It's not the same type of learning experience. It’s clearly a new learning experience and it doesn’t engage in the text, although what it does do is very interesting. Given that it’s a new learning experience, I wish there was more on Bindy, the video character guide. I would be interested to know how students understood, related to, and made use of Bindy. What was Bindy’s roles and was the video guide able to achieve these goals?

Digital Literacies of the Cybergirl

On page 6 in the embodiment section, Angela Thomas mentioned two events that deal with violence in cybercommunities. I thought they both sounded interesting and searched for them online.

The first is My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World by Julian Dibbell and is available as a full copy through google books. There is a chapter on the "Rape in Cyberspace” that I am currently in the middle of. Here is the publishers blurb on the book:

“Traveling through the social networks of LambdaMOO--an electronic world where players create their own environments, where gender and identity are infinitely malleable, and where actions seductively appear to have no consequences in "real life" --Julian Dibbell discovers a cybercommunity ripped apart by such real-world issues as crime, punishment, class struggle, and sexual obsession. In "My Tiny Life, " Dibbell ventures deeply into this half-real world --exploring even the MOO's erotic demimonde--and finds that the lines between "real life" and "virtual reality" blur, leaving set notions of community, history, identity, and love transformed and the definition od "real" experience irrevocably altered.”

The second event is Rest In Peace, Bill the Bot: Death and Life in Virtual Worlds, by Mikael Jakobsson. The following links to an html version of a .pdf of the chapter. LINK to Bill the Bot.

Hope you all find these as interesting as I did!