Here we are at the end of week 3. Almost halfway through! Almost. This week, I've found a good rhythm for this class. Usually, when I get up, I go and check what the Daily Create challenge is for the day. I think about it, look at what others have done so far as a source of inspiration and ideas, and then decide whether or not I will tackle it. In this course, we are required to do 1 challenge a week, but to make that challenge really count. For me, I recognize that I am still unfamiliar and uncomfortable making media, and as with most things I've tried to get better at, what really helps me is to practice. Practice leads to familiarity and proficiency. What was once frustrating slowly but surely becomes fun because I've forced myself to keep trying, even if the result isn't as impressive as what others are posting on Twitter. This reminds me of when I was a kid, and I was forced to practice playing the piano every day. At the time, I hated being forced to practice. I am by no means a natural pianist, nor do I consider myself a talented musician in any way. But I've learned that because of this forced practice with the unfamiliar, I learned a new "language". And after years of forced practice, I was able to play the piano pretty decently. I was able to read sheet music, take what can look like hieroglyphics and translate it to emotive sound -- sound that was my personal expression and interpretation of an otherwise nonsensical series of dots on paper. And the skills I picked up along the way, I was able to transfer to other musical pursuits, such as being a part of numerous choral and acapella singing groups in high school, college and post-college. The lessons learned from "forced practice" have carried over to many non-musical aspects of my life. I see my journey in INTE 5340 in a very similar way.
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| CC0. Pexels.com |
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| CC0. Pexels.com |
Daily Create Challenges
I started the week with a Daily Create on Monday. We were asked, "What animal would you be?" I have always said that I wish I could be a house cat, just like my little guy, Oscar. I took one of his photos and gave it a fun look using Prisma.
The next Daily Create asked us, "Can you impress someone in 5 words?" I thought I would take this as an opportunity to practice making graphics. So, I first had to think of 5 words. I settled on, "Enthusiasm without purpose is fleeting." I took a photo of the table I was working at and filtered it so that it could perhaps relay the feeling of something fleeting.
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| Wood table photo before playing around with it |
The 3rd challenge I took on was, "A band without??? Let's see your band's name and an album cover." Another graphic. That's ok, I need more practice, and these are starting to become fun. I decided to go "minimalist" with my album cover.
4th Daily Create was to write a lune. A lune is sort of like an American "remix" of a Japanese haiku. For our assignment, we were to write a very short 3-line poem of 3 words, 5 words, 3 words. I know, a graphic again. But like I said, with multiple days of practice, this was starting to become fun, and I found myself wanting to take the opportunity to practice some more. We were steered towards using @johnjohnston’s Lune Maker. I had to think about something along the lines of creating and being a creatorist. This is the final result.
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| First of 3 tweets |
Then I followed the first tweet up with more information about my new planet. Because why not?
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| Tweet 2. #planetmrow |
Final tweet was a graphic. Yes, another graphic. Practicing, remember?
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| Tweet 3. #planetmrow #newlifeform |
Copyright, Fair Use and Creative Commons
Ok, so you're probably asking yourself, what happened to the theme of this week? Well, this week, we discussed Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://cmsimpact.org/code/code-best-practices-fair-use-media-literacy-education/. The initial response to this week's topic was
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But I am one to trust the process, and as I started to read and annotate this week's reading, I came to realize that I really don't know anything about copyright laws, and because of that, I have probably limited myself in what I choose to use in what I create and what I use in my classroom as a teacher. My big takeaways from this week are:
1. sharing is good
2. under the protection of fair use rights, we educators should feel empowered to use, remix and create media
3. since our students live in a media-intensive world, we educators must adapt by encouraging our students to create their own media as a part of their educational experience as well as teach our students about media literacy
Ok, so let's start with #1 - sharing is good. As we dug into our second reading, State of the Commons (2016), Creative Commons. Retrieved June 15, 2017, from https://stateof.creativecommons.org/, I was struck by many examples of how sharing doesn't just increase accessibility to information or art. Sharing goes beyond that and can have global impacts on society as a whole, helping us all advance together. I am reminded of the old proverb:
"If you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together."
Whether or not this is an old African proverb will not be debated here (for context, see this NPR article). But I will say that as we move more towards open access, we are helping each other advance. We are giving access to educational materials to populations that would not otherwise be able to use them. In science, we are making our data sets available outside of our labs so that we can "go farther together." We are sharing our designs so that others can use them for "transformative purposes."
#2 - under fair use right, we educators should feel empowered to use, remix and create media. Admittedly, in the past, my use of media has been primarily in the form of playing a YouTube video of an experiment/demonstration we can't do in the lab. Or I have my students use their laptops (in my school, every student is given a laptop to use) to look at a website or to try out a computer simulation of something we're studying. This course has opened my eyes to the many ways I could be using media in our classroom that go beyond just "consuming" media. In creating materials for my classes, I can take existing material and transform it, remix it and make something brand new with it. And this is something I can bring my students into. And this brings us to #3.
#3 - we educators must adapt to the reality that our students have been born and raised into a media-intensive world. This is our students' reality, and we should embrace it by encouraging our students to create their own media, their own "artifacts" of their learning, just as Papert proposes. I had my first opportunity to try this out this past week. Timing is everything, isn't it? In the beginning of the week, I was contacted by one of the summer school teachers at my school. I am not teaching summer school this year, but I still remain accessible to the summer staff since I am still the chemistry teacher of my students who are in the process of credit recovery. A teacher assisting 2 of my students in recovering enough credit to pass my chemistry class emailed me asking about a project they could do together as a final project of sorts. I thought about what we've been learning over the past 3 weeks, and while the "old" me would have just assigned a "cookbook-style" experiment to conduct and then a formulaic lab report to write out, the "INTE 5340" me put her foot down. I wanted to give these students a real chance to discover something for themselves, to study something they were genuinely interested in, and to create something that was an artifact of that learning, something that would allow my students to be creative. Creativity in chemistry? Sure, why not? I'm embracing the "curriculum in beta" lifestyle this summer.
I came up with the following assignment for my 2 students. My students are to choose 1 concept or phenomenon in chemistry that they would like to learn more about. Their job is to research this topic and search online for an experiment or demonstration they could conduct on their own using everyday household items. They are to each pick their own topic to examine and to each conduct their own experiment. But I didn't have them stop there. I want them to create something new -- to remix something old (like a known phenomenon) and transform it into something that is of their own. So, I am having them each make a 5-min video. The video should first explain the phenomenon/concept they are studying and give the viewer some context. Following this they are to include actual recorded footage of the experiment/demonstration they conducted. Finally, the video must relay to the viewer what each of them learned from conducting the experiment/demo. I kept my directions at a minimum and encouraged full creativity. I am hoping that by giving my students voice, choice and full creative license, my students will deepen their learning and understanding of the phenomenon each of them studied and made a video of. Their final product is to be uploaded to YouTube, and they are to submit a link to their video so that I could evaluate their work.
Assignment 2 - 30-Second Radio Commercial - Is This Legit?
My full reflection on this particular assignment can be found here. I made a 30-second commercial for a fake radio talk show titled, Is This Legit? This is purported as a show where the host and its guests examine "copyright laws and fair use rights on a case-by-case basis." I made the commercial using iMovie and couple of smartphone apps.
Case Study #2 - Signs From the Near Future
I decided to study Fernando Barbella's Signs From the Near Future. My full write-up of this case study can be found here . I found this particular project interesting as we dug into copyright laws, fair use, and creative commons licensing. Barbella takes already existing things and remixes them to include his vision of our near future that involves incorporating a new technology. His work is realistic and makes us think about how we as a society will need to adapt to new technologies as they become a part of our daily lives.
Final Thoughts
When we first started examining this week's theme, I initially felt confused. Information that was meant to empower us initially made me frustrated at all of the "gray area" with fair use.
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But as we continued to discuss these ideas and further develop them as a class using Hypothes.is and Twitter, I started to feel empowered, as I recognized that many times, our purposes for using media in the classroom would fall under fair use rights. I was encouraged by our study of creative commons licensing and how sharing can produce positive, global effects on society. I am excited to see what types of projects I will take on with my students in the coming school year.
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