Saturday, September 2, 2006
Demon Casting
I t's probably just the thing I deserve for entertaining even the slightest interest in SU's season opener. I kept one eye on the game via ESPN.com's Gamecast, and, as you can see for yourself, the cast, which reported, much to my suspense and jubilation, a 24-24 draw down the stretch, turned out to be in error. Wake Forest wins, 20-10. Cruel, ESPN. Just plain cruel.
Ah, but wait. Not all of my fall sports optimism is dashed. A former student (McLaughlin) put Park past John Brown U. with a goal in the 87th minute this afternoon. Nice!
Photos and Locative Tagging
F lickr launched a new geotagging feature this week (via). It's tied in with Yahoo's mapping API; via Flickr, you can assign locative data to your photos simply by drag-and-drop methods. The Flickr blog reports an impressive surge in the geotagging of photographs with some 1.2 million geotagged in the first 24 hours after the feature's rollout.
Granted, if a photo already had geotags assigned, the new system automatically recognized them, so a fair portion of the 1.2 million were probably auto-assigned rather than initiated by Flickr users.
Several months ago I made use of some of the earlier geotagging efforts, which established grid coordinates as tags unto themselves.
The new scheme, however, keeps the locative data under the hood and instead offers a simple link to a map alongside a label indicating "Taken in/near <placename>."
After months of thinking they were defunct, it turns out that all of the old geotags haven't gone to waste.
They're working to post the photos assigned geographic data in the tags to sites like loc.alize.us.
Kits
M y 06-07 NCTE Professional Resources catalog arrived in the mail yesterday. I leafed through it, giving it a thorough looky-loo, and while I was curious to find more kits than ever before, here are a few of the literacy education kits I did not find. Maybe next year.
- Soup of Soups Recipe Writing Kit: Consists of 35 plastic spoons, a dried leg bone from an unidentified farm animal, a cube of bullion, dehydrated carrot flakes, and a stack of Country-classic Style Aunt Bonnie Recipe Cards (blank).
- What In the Heck Were You Thinking Kit: Inside you'll find a small glassine envelope filled with quick-forget dust, which, when you cast it into the air induces such raucous fits of sneezing that everyone in the class will fail to recall the wrong-headed lesson you danced through on the previous day. Includes a set of handouts for fill-in-the-blank haiku.
- Remove-A-Tongue Kit: Face it, during the winter months students sometimes
put their tongues to the metal poles at recess. Minimize the trauma and
embarrassment with this kit. Contents: a Dixie cup for filling with warm,
salted water.
- Singing Aloud Absent Musical Inclination Kit: Cochlea-numbing eardrops.
- Graffiti Paintball Kit: Contains all of the makings for splattering miscellaneous verbiage on the school grounds. Also includes official-looking invitations to distract up to three administrators with a "lunch away," and two sets of stencils (12" and 28").
- Testing Your Shakespeare Professor's Coffee Mug Contents for Traces of Liquor Kit: Basically, it's a miniature chemistry lab. Results may take up to ten days to materialize; be patient and continue studying your Lear in the meantime.
- Whatnot and Detritus Kit: Ships overnight from the Jasper County Landfill. No two Mystery Kits are quite the same, guaranteed.
- Lame Skit Kit: Two peacock feathers and a Julie Andrews audition cassette tape. Cassette tape player not included.
- Time to Fill Friday Afternoon Roar For
John Kitna Kit:
One
inflatable Lions fan helmet and a package of 1000 thumb tacks. (Available only
in SE Michigan.) Going fast! The first fifty orders include a free autographed
Charles Rogers poster. - Retired Mobile Devices Sandbox Kit: One 60G iPod with a dead battery, a Nintendo Gameboy and two cell phones along with a twenty pound bag of Malibu sand, and an instructional guide.
Selfe and Hawisher, Literate Lives in the Information Age
S elfe, Cynthia L., and Gail E. Hawisher. Literate Lives in the Information Age. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004.
Selfe and Hawisher incorporate 20 case studies, selected from more than 350 interviews, as the literacy narratives that substantiate their study of the acquisition of technological literacies over the past 25 years. Following ethnographic methodologies (interviews, observations, subject-agency), Literate Lives in the Information Age historicizes and thematizes the as-told accounts of the 20 subjects who are also often positioned as co-authors of individual chapters. The project, according to Selfe and Hawisher, was inspired by Brandt's talk on oral histories work at the 1998 Watson Conference. Drawing heavily on Brandt and Giddens, the book emphasizes the social and cultural factors affecting the formation of technological literacies, from race, class, gender, and ethnicity to family attitudes, mobility (relocation), and locale. The project concludes by highlighting the following eight themes:
- "Literacy exists within a complex cultural ecology of social, historical, and economic effects. Within this cultural ecology, literacies have life spans" (212).
- "Although a complex set of factors has affected the acquisition of digital literacy from 1978 to 2003, race, ethnicity, and class too often assume key roles. Because they are linked with other social formations at numerous levels, and because their effects are often multiplied and magnified by these linkages, rage, ethnicity, and class are often capable of exerting a greater force than other factors" (216).
- "Gender can often assume a key role in the acquisition of digital literacy, especially when articulated with other social, cultural, and material factors" (219).
- "Within a cultural ecology, people exert their own powerful agency in, around, and through digital literacy, even though unintended consequences always accompany their actions" (221).
- "Schools, workplaces, communities, and homes are the four primary gateways through which those living in the United States have gained access to digital literacy in the decades since the invention and successful marketing of the personal computer" (223).
- "Access to computers is not a monodimensional social formation. It is necessary but not sufficient for the acquisition and development of digital literacy. The specific conditions of access have a substantial effect on the acquisition of digital literacy" (227).
- "Some families share a relatively coherent set of literacy values and practices--and digital literacy values and practices--and spread these valued among their members. Information about, and support of, electronic literacy can flow both upstream, from younger to older, and downstream, from older to younger members of a family" (229).
- "Faculty members, school administrators, educational policymakers, and parents need to recognize the importance of the digital literacies that young people are developing, as well as the increasingly complex global contexts within which these self-sponsored literacies function. We need to expand our national understanding beyond the narrow bounds of print and beyond the alphabetic" (232).
"The increasing presence of personal computers in homes, workplaces, communities, and schools has brought about dramatic changes in the ways people across the world create and respond to information" (1).
"[W]e can understand literacy as a set of practices and values only when we properly situate our studies within the context of a particular historical period, a particular cultural milieu, and d a specific cluster of material conditions" (5).
"The book is organized into seven chapters that follow the 20 participants in their efforts to acquire varying degrees of technological literacy, along with this introduction and a conclusion sandwiching the case studies" (24).
Terms: "cultural ecology" (5), "technological gateways" (84), "conditions of access" (84), emerging and fading literacies (54), Giddens' "duality of structure" (60)
- Related sources
- Brandt, Deborah. Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2001.
- Giddens, Anthony. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979.