The Zen of Homemade Tomato Sauce

"I got lots of seconds if you really want 'em, and for cheap!" the farmer's wife says. I take another bagful. Bruised, imperfect, unsightly to some, but not me. Their inner flesh holds summer in its folds and time to capture it has come. I lug at least three dozen to the car.

My wife doesn't relish the job of par-boiling to get the skins off and removing the snot and seeds. A good hour or more of dissecting. Aches the back. Trashes the sink and stovetop. But she knows what's in store at afternoon's end simmering and mellowing that tender meat of summer's flavors. 

There's no crayon for the hue in these pots. An earthy perfume wafts through the home. Onion and garlic. Peppers and wine. And the last of those herbs saying, "I'm done, get me in there." 

Man, wife, plants, everyone doing their part. A task, yes, and so fulfilling. When making sauce, I always feel my father's spirit: "Stir it or you don't eat!" he'd bark. Love and family and the cycles of life. Right now, such anticipated delight makes the whole world feel complete.

This time two kinds - mega basil and zesty pepper. 

Oh, I'll have trouble choosing tonight.

And when family and friends taste their requisite batch,

the essence of summer captured will go its appropriate way.

On Media Literacy

"You Won't Be Needing Your Laptops Today." 
   Wired Bodies in the Wireless Classroom

The premise of this article by Kevin M. Leander is that even when new technological tools are introduced into the flow of traditional school practice and valuing, they fail to change the "look and feel" of schooling marked by the conservation and transmission of pre-defined categories of knowing and being. The author cites Hodas (1993) research, remarking that the structures of school and teaching practices have remained essentially the same for 700 years. But new developments in information and entertainment technologies, being social, not institutional, may bring hope that they will draw the classroom out of the dark ages and into the 21st century. 

Somewhat implying their obsolescence from my perspective, Leander says the blackboard, overhead projector and the photocopier represent and enforce the concept of traditional school space-time and the teacher's role of authority. This may be true, but this technology likely will be in use for quite some time. It works. And it's far from obsolete.

These tools help enforce the commonality of a lesson taught and are practical and efficient to gauge a student's understanding of subject matter along with performance against her or his peers. I have a hard time trying to figure how education could work effectively devoid of these classroom "trappings." Should students be given free reign to learn however they'd like with their laptops so long as it fits within the subject matter? And do it wherever they want to so they're not constrained by schoolroom time-space traditions? 

I'm all for individual technology in the classroom and about a third of my students this semester bring laptops in with them for note-taking and subject research. But there is a dilemma, as the author points out, in laptops and wireless internet in the classroom. Just because you can use the technology, it is not a replacement for moving beyond the containment and closure of traditional school space-time. Students need the structure. And instructors have to have it to teach.

Where wireless/internet technology could work much better than it is (and work really well) is in bringing the classroom home with students. An extension of schooling outside of school time-space, not as a replacement for it. Getting deeper into a subject. Extra credit research. On homework. And during the summer months. This isn't being done enough. My daughter has told me that she has no problem being "in school" during the summer - so long as lessons can be delivered to her over the internet and can done within the time-space of summer vacation.  

It's hard for me to imagine "re-imagining and re-enacting the social life of schooling as a spacial practice" experiencing what I do in my classroom. I just don't feel much learning would take place. Many of my students have told me they like how structured my instruction is. They learn better from it and wish other teachers were more like me.

Preparing for the Next Generation

Interesting article by Alan J. Porter. Mr. Porter posits that despite advances in technology to deliver information, attitudes and assumptions about how information is structured and delivered hasn't. Essentially, information comes to us in a book-based paradigm where pages are turned one-by-one to advance from beginning to end of a piece. The author claims that this will not be acceptable for the new generation of information consumers.

In Questioning the Old Paradigm, he mentions that instead of strictly enforced hierarchies, the digital generation will instead access essentially a "flat ocean that users search instead of navigate, then dip in to find the components they need to build their own solutions." Okay, I get this. And I think it's true. But it's important to be mindful that this addresses just the process, not the outcome.

I too have a teenage daughter and I've watched her essentially do the same thing the author has witnessed with searching and networking to find information on a school homework subject. Incredibly efficient. She can find more material on a subject in 30 minutes than she could find in the library in 3 hours. But what about the outcome? Is finding information efficiently akin to learning it efficiently?

A somewhat similar situation occurred in my writing lab last Friday morning. Instead of drafting their manuscripts (the intention of the lab) a handful of students were Facebooking and compiling snippets of content off the internet into somewhat convoluted listings to presumably be formatted later into their work. Generally, they seemed quite pleased in what they felt was efficient use of limited lab time. When I asked one student what he was doing, he said, "writing." Hmm.

The issue in both these cases is fragmentation, both in process and content. First with lack of synthesizing all this fractured search-based information and secondly, doing so on a path that leads to true understanding of a subject. What I believe traditional hierarchies that books provide us with is a framework for learning a subject based on the author's knowledge of how it can best be learned and then, giving us a way to deepen our understanding of the subject. 

No question the digital generation can find information quickly. But this shouldn't imply that they're learning quickly. If time isn't spent concentrating and contemplating on a subject, we run the risk of superficial understanding. No depth, only factoids. If my daughter was networking with true subject matter experts on her homework, that's one thing. But I'm still waiting to hear that she's come across one. And until she does, I'll still feel better seeing her augment her studies with a real live book.

On Blogging Literacy

Comments, contrasts and comparisons on the advent of the Social Media Release 

and Learning with Weblogs

In their piece, The Social Media Release as a Corporate Communications Tool for Bloggers, the authors define the social media release (SMR) as a blend of the traditional press release and digital social media. Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. Also called USG - user-generated content or CGM - consumer-generated media, in effect, it turns messaging from a one-to-many monolog into many-to-many dialog. In essence, their study examines the impact this new tool will have on bloggers.

The authors remark (p. 3) that whether SMR eventually becomes an accepted standard within an industry or market still depends on whether its users find it easy to use and useful. Examining the SMR using the TAM (Technology Acceptance Model) naturally places their study focus towards the extent SMR is accepted as a technology by the PR industry and the bloggers that surround it, versus the way it is used and the validity of its published content. True, SMR has the potential to play a role in the progression of media communications. It is ideal, as the authors suggest, as a vehicle that has the capacity to allow for more external comments from users. However, along with the media affordances of the technology, in my opinion, the integrity of the content will have a big say about acceptance.

The biggest challenge I see with SMR's is that an originator, say a consumer products company like Johnson & Johnson, loses control over the delivery of information on its product. Opinion flamers in their zeal for misadventure can easily introduce doubt in consumers' minds about a product. For instance, a rumor can be started that many Q-Tip (a J&J product) users have had the cotton ends get stuck in their ears requiring expensive medical visits to remove them and sometimes, even permanent hearing loss. Should it become viral, J&J, despite its army of attorneys, would have little ability in quenching these flames, to say nothing about finding and prosecuting the originator for defamation.

I see a contrast with this issue from Blogs, A Primer by Barclay Barrios on The Lifecycle of Online Scholarship. Mr. Barrios remarks that in the summer of 2004, bloggers were given press passes first to the Democratic and then the Republican National Conventions, in effect, implicitly legitimizing blogging as a form of journalism and recognizing the power of blogs to shape public opinion. A truly momentous occasion in media communications no doubt. I can understand the author's rosy prognostications about blogging's future and to be fair, his focus was on its potential in the classroom. However, My perception is that it didn't take long after this for blogging's more nefarious capabilities to emerge as more and more blog posts filled with negative, heavily-biased, outright untrue information about candidates and their positions. In these partisan times, this has only increased.

The downside? An AP-NCC poll survey conducted last month about public trust covered in last Friday's edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found a majority of Americans place blogs, banks and Congress tops in having the most distrust. Only 8 percent of Americans are extremely or very confident in their trust of blogs. 54 percent said they have little or no confidence in blogs or other citizen media, according to the poll. If this is the case, the value of SMR becomes somewhat more murky.

In their article, Learning with Weblogs: Enhancing Cognitive and Social Knowledge Construction, authors Helen S. Du and Christian Wagner investigate the impact of weblog use on individual learning in the context of university senior-level business education. The authors work off of a constructivist model where individual learning is process-oriented and knowledge is developed by learners as they build their own cognitive mental models. They contend (p. 3) that weblogs can contribute to collaborative learning where it emerges built through sharing and social interaction.

Not surprisingly, students in the study had no difficulty in handling the technology, (students seem able to work pretty much with any tech), but had to get used to writing for this new medium. (p. 12) Ultimately, their research suggests that weblog performance can be a significant predictor of student learning outcome, possibly better than traditional coursework measures. The authors do mention in their findings that blogs need a healthy balance between individualism and collaboration and i agree. I feel that although learning using weblogs may be enriched, it has limitations as far as creating a better collective outcome than an individual one. 

I see support for this contention in When Blogging Goes Bad by Steven D. Krause. In his experiment in using blogging in the classroom, he found that collaboratively-written blog spaces can be a technical challenge, since most blogging programs just allow writers by invitation to post, not truly collaborate. Blogging, by nature is personal and thus, has limitations to generate dynamic discussions. Since blogs are more individualistic rather than collaborative, they may be better suited as online personal journals. So long as these points, both advantages and limitations, are kept in mind, and curriculum is deployed accordingly, blogging has its place in enhancing education and will likely increase. Our use of blogs in this course is an example of this.

Looking from the Inside Out: Academic Blogging as New Literacy

A connection and comparison to "What does it mean to be literate?


First, let's look at literacy's formal definition. At a base level, being literate is an individual's ability to read and write. In a way, it's input and output. There's also a more complex function of literacy that includes the creative and analytical acts involved in producing and comprehending textual meaning. At a higher-level function, being literate means understanding while also being able to contribute to meaning. It's both textual in consumption and also in production.

Literacy is a state but it's also an activity. Authors Julia Davies' and Guy Merchant's text example (p. 169) of young girls exploring aspects of their own identity hits the nail on the head. From a traditional standpoint, this was accomplished (and still is) using diaries, writing letters and talking on the phone. Today, the affordances of the internet and blogs offers another avenue of expression, contributing to a person's literacy development by promoting discussion of ideas, only now at hyperlinked speed with global breadth. Digital literacy.

The authors remark (p. 175) that while blogs can serve a wide range of purposes, they are ultimately arenas through which we communicate about ourselves. Being literate makes reference to our ability to understand and incorporate textual tools of written discourse (along with visual elements, if desired) to craft one's identity and advance thoughts and ideas that has meaning and benefit to others doing the same. This gets to the crux of what literacy means - having the ability to express or "build a dynamic story of oneself" - no matter the method of delivery such as blogging.

On a separate note, I hadn't heard of Blogsome.com (p. 183) before. Blogsome.com allows posts to be tagged and categorized to enable building a database for reference in writing future posts. This reminds me of the search functionality on blogs, but through tagging, I can see much more accuracy and efficiency for referencing leading to, as the authors state, (p. 195) a more transparent research process with other users contributing to the shape the research takes. If research informs literacy, this is a giant step.

Today's Dilbert. Couldn't help myself...

Being careful on first steps

A careful man

Little nervous. Working carefully here, taking it slow. Want to make sure I don't do anything or push any button that I'll regret later. I'm sure I'll get better as time goes on. I hope you are impressed with my first effort into the world of emerging media.