• “emphasis on comprehensive understanding involving the whole person rather than “receiving” a body of factual knowledge about the world; on activity in and with the world; and on the view that agent, activity, and the world mutually constitute each other” (p. 33).
• “abstract representations are meaningless unless they can be made specific to the situation at hand” (p. 33).
• “any “power of abstraction” is thoroughly situated, in the lives of persons and in the culture that makes it possible.  On the other hand, the world carries its own structure so  that specificity always implies generality (and in this sense generality is not to be assimilated to abstractness): That is why stories can be so powerful in conveying ideas, often more so than an articulation of the idea itself” (p. 34).
• “All theories of learning are based on fundamental assumption about the person, the world, and their relations” (p. 47).
• “Participation is always based on situated negotiation and renegotation of meaning in the world.  This implies that understanding and experience are in constant interaction” (p. 51-2).
• “Activities, tasks, functions, and understandings do not exist in isolation; they are part of broader systems of relations in which they have meaning” (p. 53).

Several examples were discussed, including The Matrix movie and Harry Potter.  Although both have strong narrative and are clearly transmedia, as we look at any of these implementations of narrative, in respect to education, we need to make sure there is space for articulation and reflection.

The class then went on to talk about how companies, like Disney for instance, have started to actively move into the education marketplace.  Although companies have always looked to have a place in education, this has really started to accelerate recently.  Whereas before it was happening in the schools, now it is happening by going around the schools.  This is dangerous as it means the content is being determined not necessarily by education professionals but by companies that are looking to make a profit as a greater motivator than education honestly and accurately.

In great part this has happened in a more accelerated fashion because of two reasons:  our schools are failing at engaging and helping our students to learn important things and parents are allowing this to happen.  I know thats a bold thing to say, especially as someone who does not have a child in a school system, but from my perspective I see two things going on here.  First, our schools are so much more focused on having students pass a test that they are forgetting how to teach them to learn.  Learning isn’t being able to spit answers out on some standardized test.  Sure, we can drill things into students, who will most likely forget them after the test, because we have not taught them how to come up with those answers, we’ve just taught them the answers.  If our schools spend as much effort in teaching students how to think constructively, they could figure out ways to come up with the answers to those, and many other test questions.  But being “better” is so important that we test and test and test and require our teachers teach to that test, so students will pass and the school will not be seen as a failure.

The other side to this equation is that parents need to take a much more active interest in their children’s’ education.  Now, before someone jumps all over me, I’m not saying ALL parents need to do this, although my guess is that most parents could be more involved.  I’m sure there are plenty of parents who have good reasons for not being able to be as involved, such as working long hours, or multiple jobs, in order for the family to be able to eat and keep a roof over head and clothing on everyone.  I’m not critiquing that.  But I am looking squarely at the parent who has not asked their children if they’ve done their homework and looked to make sure it was done.  Or the parent who has not read to their young child.  Or the parent who finds out who is part of the Board of Education and goes to vote when the time comes.  Board of Education votes are some of the lowest voter turn out of any election.  And, I’m not sure about where you live, but where I live, the education budget is nearly 50% of our taxes!  I don’t even have kids in the school systems and I’m interested.

Anyway, I digress.  Parents need to take a more active role in their students education.  If you don’t believe me, ask anyone you know who is a grade school teacher.

Ok, time to get off my soap box.  After Alex and Meagan I presented on Second Life.  Here are the three videos:

The 3D AIDS Quilt – http://bit.ly/3daidsquilt

The Life and Times of Uncle D – http://bit.ly/sluncled

Watch the World - http://youtu.be/vV1YbWBSXS8

Here are SLURLS for the places I took, and intended to take, the class on a “field trip”  I only had time for three, but the others are worth visiting, especially with respect to how narrative can be used as a teaching tool in a virtual world.

Visited

The Theorist Project - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Montclair%20State%20CEHSADP/80/200/23

AJ’s Writing Class Student’s Final Projects “The Dorms” - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Montclair%20State%20CHSS/64/206/22

Virtual Hallucination - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sedig/26/45/22

Video (above) locations

3D AIDS Quilt - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Storybook%20Island/199/199/26

The Life and Times of Uncle D - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Story%20Quest%20Island/28/227/22

Other Locations

CHSS Quidditch Pitch - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Montclair%20State%20CHSS/100/21/22

Sistine Chapel - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Vassar/177/87/25

Svarga - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Svarga/7/124/22

Darfur - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Better%20World/176/245/21

Following my presentation on Second Life we saw a presentation on Balsamiq, which seems like an awesome tool.  I plan to contact them about a classroom copy for my lab.  A very useful outlining and wire framing tool.  During the presentation we also found out about Omnigraffle, and Hyperstudio 5, which I coincidently was considering taking advantage of a free copy I can get.  I guess now I will.

To close out our demonstrations, Meagan showed us what iMovie can do.  I am still so unhappy with Apple for what they did to iMovie after v6.  Once they took out the time line, the made it much more difficult for the average user like me to easily use the software.

To close out the class, and voluntarily heading into overtime, we chatted with Francine about the final projects, which we’ll start presenting on next week.

Jan and Jon talked about games in education.  They started with discussing how naratology says games should be looked at like anything else, researched in the same terms, whereas ludology says games should be looked at on their own terms.  During the presentation, a question came up about the difference between a taxonomy and heuristics.  Heuristics is a set of rules that are somewhat unconnected and based on experience. A taxonomy is a categorizing framework that is theory based

We looked at several games and discussed the importance of a cut scene, which is where the game play stops and you watch something – it is literally a cut in the scene.  This is where much of the back story, or information that is important to the game but not part of the game play, can be provided to the player or learner.  In serious gaming, cut scenes can also alleviate player fatigue, which would happen when a player is at a high level of intensity for along period of times.

One of the things that Jan brought up is that games in education are a great measure of learning because they have embedded assessment.

Following Jan and Jon’s presentation, Adam Rodriquez and I made our presentation on games and narrative as a pedagogical tool.  A copy of our slide presentation you’ll find here.

As the Freud quote at the beginning articulates, the first distinction we make about someone is gender-based, everything else from that point on is biased by our own worldview.  Clearly our worldview did not form in a vacuum, so it goes without saying that this view is colored by a vast variety of things.  It is impossible to escape making a judgment (of some kind) from the moment we are introduced to someone (either in person or virtually).

In all my time in higher education (over a dozen years) I have served on many search committees and have occasionally seen committee members struggle with an application where it is not clear what the gender (or race) of a particular candidate is.  Clearly the committee member, consciously or not, was looking for a lens through which to see the candidate.  We do not like the absence of a category in which to file things, mentally.

It has always bothered and baffled me that women seem to be their own worst enemy sometimes.  I don’t mean that a woman is her own worst enemy, I’m referring to the issue of how women treat other women.  I have worked for some amazingly talented women, and watched others as they struggle with issues of leadership, and it never ceases to astound me how other women seem to be the harshest critics of women leaders.

I believe that each candidate should be judged by their qualifications.  One qualification it is more difficult to judge at the onset, or from a resume, is how effective they are going to be.  Personally, it’s not a matter of whether a woman is more capable than a man to lead, its whether the woman will be more effective in that specific role of leadership.  Could a woman lead a truckers union, of course.  I don’t believe for a second that a man has more skill to run any specific organization that a woman.   The issue here may transcend whether one has the requisite skill set to lead, but how effective will they be in that execution.

Personally I see it as very disheartening that women represent the majority in our country and yet in our government they are a striving to even be a minority.  I also find it interesting that, when faced with the question of electing a man of color or a woman as President, our country choose race over gender.  Now, I’m not naïve enough to think that this was the only issue involved; however, there were still many who decided they would rather have a man as president, irrespective of his race, and even though he may have appeared less “qualified” on paper, than the women who, again, on paper, would have seemed infinitely more qualified.

As important as the issue of Gender Studies is, just by bringing it up we find ourselves in the paradox of promulgating it.  Although not related to gender directly, I once heard someone say that their parents had raised them color blind to the racial difference between people.  Someone else responded that by even saying that one was color-blind was giving power to the concept that there is something to be blind to.

She started off, however, by telling us about an assignment she did with her students.  I will definitely try this at some point with students and may even have my student workers try it in order to test some of the software/freeware we’ve been testing in the lab.

She had students identify three images that were about them, but not with them in it, and then three images of themselves.  She had them put these images together into a narrative that could only be a couple of minutes long.  Each student shared their creation with the class. Dr. Rock finished up by telling them that if they could capture from those they film/interview what they captures in those short clips, they would be successful journalists.  This is the power of narrative.

I was so enthralled with the videos that I neglected to take notes on them.  The first was about two women in Ireland, one Catholic and one Protestant, and was called Daughters of the Troubles: Belfast Stories.  The second one was about Dr. Rock and her life, called Dancing With My Father.  The third one was called Service: When Women Come Marching Home.

The only note I took was about a Marine who had been injured and the others in her company “had her back”, which many women in the military say they don’t get.  She almost died but her company leader went to dramatic means to keep her alive, driving from hospital to hospital (they could not get a medevac or ambulance).  In the interview, Dr. Rock says the marine commented on how  she “made sure the ‘boys’ had food”.

I thought to myself that this seemed to go against what these women were trying to accomplish by playing into the stereotype that the women will make food, etc…  I thought that this action, albeit one of kindness, was in some ways destructive.  Dr. Rock mentioned that the marine thought of herself first and foremost as a mother and that’s what she does, it’s an honest role.

One other interesting point Dr. Rock raised what the tendency of novice filmmakers to go to black between shots.  She stresses to them that they need to think about embedded transitions, which is true of any well crafted communication, whether its film, writing, etc.

We were supposed to get to three pedagogical models but we only managed to get to one and that was Digital Storytelling.  Digital storytelling, as originally conceived, was intended to enable people to tell their own stories, understand themselves, and an experience of their own. Most are short, included digital media, sometimes included a live performance as well.

It is considered an interactive medium that is a personal story, told in first person, always a POV, truthful, emotional, conversation tone (triggers interactivity).  Digital storytelling is both situated and constructive.

This week’s readings were from the James R. Davis book titled “Learning To Lead: A Handbook for Postsecondary Administrators”.  I’ve really enjoyed reading from this book as it seems to apply more to my own circumstances.  The Northouse book is very good, very interesting, but also much more general and not focused specifically on education.  It is perfect for presenting us with the overarching theories and concepts, but Davis focuses very specifically on our industry.

The three readings came from Part II: Building the Skills for Leadership, and the first chapter, Chapter 3, looks at “Program Planning and Review: Exerting Influence and Maintaining Accountability”.  This is a critical aspect of leadership and there is no class one gets to take when working their way up the ranks.  Most institutions suffer from too many great ideas and not nearly enough resources (p. 43).  Davis talks about the need for a good leader to help people not only expand their good ideas appropriately (or scale them back), but to also connect people across the institution, or even outside it, who can be helpful.

The problem with most program planning is that the academy, like most other organizations, is a political beast.  There are those who are overly political, have sacred cows, or others who use whatever means necessary to accomplish what they want.  This last item is not, in and of itself, a bad thing, except when the “whatever means necessary” includes doing things that have moral implications, those that violate the spirit of the law, so to speak, rather than the letter of it.  The entire process is all about the power and interests of individuals. Tied to all of this, as Davis points out, is  that the planning and review process is less effective without appropriate assessment.

In Chapter 4, Davis looks at “Meetings, Groups, and Teams: Learning to Collaborate”, a critical aspect of any functioning institution.  My Grandfather used to say that meetings were where minutes were taken and hours were lost (and he didn’t work in education!).  If he only knew! Knowing when to accept a meeting, how long to allocate for it, whether it’s in your own office, someone else’s, or a conference room or other facility, who should be at the meeting, who runs the meeting, all of these things are critical for productive meetings, a sign of effective leadership.

Finally, in Chapter 5, Davis reviews “Communication and Conflict Resolution: Finding Agreement”.  In an ironic twist, the Penn State child sex abuse scandal was breaking at the same time as our reading these chapters.  Two articles from main stream media were added to our reading, both about the firing of famous football couch Joe Paterno and the University President, Graham Spanier.  The chapter discussed building effective relationships, keeping lines of communication open (and honest) and dealing appropriately with conflict, whether as a mediator or involved party.  All of these things were transgressed in the Penn State case.

Even in the face of, what could end up being a violation of federal law, as in the Clery Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clery_Act), these two leaders were still beloved by their followers.  In the case of Paterno, even though he knowingly withheld information about a child molester, the students at Penn State nearly rioted when the Board announced his firing.  They do not want to believe that their beloved leader was capable of doing such a hideous thing when he had done so much good prior to that.  We develop an image of our leaders and, even in the face of seemingly irrefutable facts, we are unwilling to accept anything that flies in the face of the schema we’ve developed.  This speaks to the effectiveness of a very powerful leader and demonstrates a great deal about the leader/follower paradigm.

My understanding from the class presentation is that CBR is a problem solving approach that is based on past similar cases.  It integrates memory, learning, and reasoning and that reflection supports CBR.  The heart of CBR are the case libraries that act as a resource.  A paper by Ferguson, which is uploaded into Blackboard, details what makes a good case.

To try to get a better understanding, I decided to turn to Wikipedia, the friend or nemesis of academics, depending on who you ask.  According to the Wikipedia entry on Case-Based Reasoning, it is:

the process of solving new problems based on the solutions of similar past problems. An auto mechanic who fixes an engine by recalling another car that exhibited similar symptoms is using case-based reasoning. A lawyer who advocates a particular outcome in a trial based on legal precedents or a judge who creates case law is using case-based reasoning. So, too, an engineer copying working elements of nature (practicing biomimicry), is treating nature as a database of solutions to problems. Case-based reasoning is a prominent kind of analogy making.

It has been argued that case-based reasoning is not only a powerful method for computer reasoning, but also a pervasive behavior in everyday human problem solving; or, more radically, that all reasoning is based on past cases personally experienced. This view is related to prototype theory, which is most deeply explored in cognitive science

The lawyer/judge example drove it home for me.

Following this review of CBR we had two guests.  The first was Janelle Boucher from Kognito Interactive.  She spoke to use about storytelling and simulations.  She showed us more of a military reintegration simulation that Karisma has spoken in class about previously.

Our next guest was the creator of the PBS series “In the Mix” (I’m afraid her name escapes me, a problem with waiting too long to do these entires, I’ll add it her later on, once I find it out).  In the Mix is a show geared to teens and it covers a wide range of issues.  Our discussion was on storytelling and narrative as presented in a 30 minute television show.  We talked about what makes a compelling story and determined, for young people (in this specific case, the age of those who follow the show), it need to be both articulate and engaging.

Anchored instruction is a story based model of learning constructed specifically for designing live action motion picture.  Through this model, knowledge remains inert and every theory we’ve study is implicated in anchored instruction.  According to Wikipedia, anchored instruction is

“grounded in a story or narrative that presents a realistic (but fictional) situation and raises an over-arching question or problem (compare with an essential question posed by a teacher). This approach is designed to 1) engage the learner with a problem or series of related problems, 2) require the learner to develop goals and discover subgoals related to solving the problem(s), and 3) provide the learner with extensive and diverse opportunities to explore the problem(s) in a shared context with classmates.”

To illustrate anchored instruction we watched one of the Jasper Woodbury Series videos

Our first visitor was Cath Milne, whose area of focus is science education.  She talked about argument and how it is the key claim for knowledge making.  She noted that how we learn to make arguments and what structure they should have is the genre of choice, especially in science education.  Another key component is explanation.

She talked about event tokens, selecting the events, and how her science narratives are like applets, there are not the lesson, they are embedded in the lesson.  She also talked about “problematizing”, which she described at ”you think you know the answer, but…not so fast” and she believes that problematizing made a huge difference in her treatment group.

Our second guest was Leonard Majzlin, who focused on the narrative media in museums and public spaces.  He talked about installation media – a context in which the media is being encountered, only working in a specific context, such ast The Gates, which was installed in NYC in February of 2005.

He talked about 1980 (ish) being a transition time for museums, at time when they realized that, in my words not his, that they were no longer a “build it and they will come” experience.  They needed to find ways to engage people beyond just putting content out there.  He indicated that the prevailing thinking was, if museums could wrap their collections in a narrative they would be able to attract more visitors.  That narrative involved how the visitors interacted with the content that created a narrative for them to experience.

1. random – the teacher arbitrarily assigns the groups, there is no specific order or method.
2. self-assign – student pick their own group members.
3. proximity – the teach clumps students based on where they are sitting – “you five sitting (next near each other) are one group, you five…” etc…
4. Count off – students count off…all the ones go to this corner, all the twos over there, etc…
5. Course list – this is done alphabetically based on the course list.
6. Progress – student who are doing well / students who are not doing well.