03/03 reading reflection

Here's a guy who gets it.

I chose to read chapter six of our assigned reading this week, "Poetry Fusion: Integrating Video, Verbal, and Audio Texts." After a few previous readings on digital literacy and seeing just how woefully inadequate their very understandings are of what they want to use, this is a guy who gets it. Honestly, I think I may use a lot of his layout as information for designs on video production units I'm thinking of. Would I use it all? I dunno, I'm not a fan of podcasts, but the way he's using them here makes an incredibly convincing argument in favor of them. We've all had those teachers who said "read the poem out loud to yourself or your classmate." Who's ever done that? Not me. Not worth it. But here, the author manages to get that same effect our teachers were shooting for, but in a FAR more authentic and useful way.

Ted, Leigh, and Dan all remember it, they were in the class with me. Linguistics. "The History of English", a woefully outdated doc that had some great information in it. My favorite part was the guy who put the Old English Beowulf to music and sang it. What this chapter espouses is something similar to that - it creates a poem that you hear and appreciate for its original style. You break away from the density of the language in reading it.

In terms of video and multimedia, he brings a similar versatility. And, while it's largely left unsaid, the implication to me (at least, I hold to it) is that students with an intrinsic understanding of multimedia literacy begin to connect the dots...again, between what they know and what they don't know. We see that in a huge way about halfway through the chapter, under the "video as text" entry, where a student who began the project with no reaction to the piece is able to develop a real appreciation for what's going on. The main reason, I know, is that the student has taken what he/she knows (how a movie looks) and has been able to marry it to what he/she didn't know (the deeper interpretation of a poem), and a huge part of this has been in learning the essentials of how to make a movie. The teacher had the student break a script, basically, in order to shoot it. The beauty here is that in breaking the script, all of the students have been textually digging into the poems and uncovering deeper meaning from a large variety of angles.

Assessment - again, full honesty: I've taught aspects of this to college kids. I largely assessed/graded completely informally based on the idea of "do they have a plan and did they execute it?" I really like the breakdown of how he laid out his rubric, and what I love most of all is that the students have a hand in grading.

This entire post feels un-meaty. The problem is that I not only don't disagree with anything here, but I just love it. Again, this is a guy who gets it.

My link of the week:

Adobe's video production curriculum

I really like this area for the same reason I liked the chapter I read: it's a good, solid starting point to looking at how to teach the subject.