Week 8: Multimodality and Assessment.

In his article on multi modality and assessment in the classroom, John Vincent states that "in the early years of school, children work multi modally. Teachers accept, and indeed encourage, expression in multiple forms; drama, gesture, written words, drawings and song." (Vincent, 2006). I have had the honour of teaching French Immersion Kindergarten students as well as Grade 2 (FI) - I have also worked as school librarian and computer lab resource teacher. 

In my experiences with primary students, there is no doubt that multi modality is the norm (at least in my classroom). Teaching a second (or third, or fourth) language in an immersion setting increases the use of multi modality on the part of the teacher as well as the students. My Kindergarten classes were always noisy, dramatic, gesture-rich, environments where we would use our whole self to communicate with each other. My students drew, sculpted, engaged heavily with nature, played, role-played, and mostly laughed a great deal while learning. How did I assess their learning? Through observation, anecdotal notes, and via video and photo evidence which parents could also enjoy as it would reside on the class blog. When asked by parents how their child was doing, I would always tell them that their development was a process that would see them develop over time. I told them that I scaffold learning activities and encourage reflection and peer to peer sharing so that each student can learn from me, from his/her peers, and from him/herself. I would show parents the progression in ability from one month to another by having digital portfolios of student work accessible only to the parent - where the blossoming of their child revealed itself on the pixelated page.  Assessment was always ongoing, in progress, formative, collaborative, and overt. My students all learned how to self-evaluate and how to provide critical feedback to their peers - they weren't always great at it but learning to assess is itself, another skill to be learned over time.

When I took on the role of school librarian and computer resource I was excited to work with junior and intermediate students using digital technologies and visual arts. I taught in fact every grade in this capacity and had carte blanche to teach them what I wanted. While instilling a love of reading was high on my list of priorities, so too was the use of digital technologies and what I now understand to be digital literacies. However, I was shocked to discover that the older the child, the longer s/he had been in school, the less imagination s/he seemed to have and also the less curiosity or motivation. I just watched Sir Ken Robinson's "Changing Educational Paradigms" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U) and cannot wait to watch everything else he has available online. His point of view that children are forced into molds for an education built on antiquated values originating in the industrial revolution, and that those who do not comply are anaesthetized, was mind-blowing for me. Vincent states that the further from the Kindergarten classroom, the more the focus on writing, and the further from free expression of learning via multi modalities. Teachers spend their time on classroom management, encouraging "hyper" students to sit still, and "phased out" kids to snap out of it. What's weird is that even when I offered an open-ended project using digital tools, the students had a significantly difficult time engaging and opening up their minds to creativity and imagination... It is tragic that we bludgeon creativity out of our students in school. It is particularly tragic when you stop to consider that in the work world into which they will enter; problem solving and ingenuity are highly valued skills.

Anyway, I'm off on a bit of tangent (as usual) - but all this to say that it seems clear that we ought all to be integrating multi modalities in our classrooms. There's just a couple of tiny things that get in the way...

1. Our educational system itself: “The current generation of decision makers ranging from politicians to teachers sees the world from a different perspective than the digital generation (Green & Hannon, 2007). The young people of today cannot remember a world without the internet, SMS, MSN, iPod, MySpace and Facebook. However, the decision-makers decide how digital media will be used in the schools and the professional world. They make laws and regulations that restrict the potential inherent in digital media. This represents a short-term solution to a long-term challenge. The problem is that schools run the risk of basing their teaching on presentation, communication and assessment methods that are about to become obsolete in both form and content” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2008, p. 145).  It is this legacy that keeps classrooms teacher-centric and, as stated by Mezirow "the very definition of education itself is almost universally understood in terms of an organized effort to facilitate behavioural change".
2. Standardized testing. For as long standardized testing remains as antiquated in design and purpose as the educational system, there is no room for creativity. The tests are deadening for even the brightest minds, and frustrating to the point of lunacy for many, as evidenced in the spoken word YouTube video offered to us tonight by Rebekah. Also consider that these tests are only capable of assessing what is easy to measure. Is ingenuity measurable on a test? How about lateral thinking? Deductive reasoning? How sad that the issuers of these tests seem to place more value on recall than on high level, or critical thinking skills. 
3. The curriculum. Enough said, surely??! 
4. Assessment practises. It would seem to me, the newbie, that at least some serious thought is currently going into how to design assessment around new learning, new literacies, and multi modalities. Hooray. The sad part is that, much like educational reform, I suspect that by the time assessment practises have caught up with teacher reality, they will already be out-dated. I do not believe that assessment can be "canned". After all, teaching is not canned. What is required however is perhaps some well-structured professional development that helps teachers to understand that what needs assessing is the process of learning; perhaps by focussing on design, visualization of literacy, modes and modal affordances, transmodal operation, cohesion and staged multi modality (Wyatt-Smith and Kimber, 2009). Teachers also need to understand that whatever criteria are being measured should be made explicit to the students and, ideally, co-created and negotiated with the students. They should know that assessment needs to be longitudinal; in other words, student and teacher should conference regularly to revisit the rubric (if one is used) and to assess where the student is, what can be changed or what extra focus is necessary. These conferences should also be opportunities for the teacher to gain a deeper understanding of the thought process and design choices made by the student. Students can be encouraged to create an online journal, wiki, or blog in which to document the learning process. This can be private, shared with only the teacher, or shared with a select number of peers to encourage peer to peer reflection and analysis. Ultimately, the use of digital multi modalities represents yet another evolving, new, and exciting area for education. Unfortunately, this also translates into yet another learning curve for educators. Those who truly wish to prepare their students for life will jump on the bandwagon. They will learn, evolve, revise, implement, revise, reflect, reimplement every responsibility in their role as educator for their students' sake. The others... who can say?

Week 7: Visual Literacy

In Kajder (2006), Pacey stated that English class was "the place that kills your reading, teaching you to read to not fail".

This single statement has stuck with me. Why? I have two sons, one of whom has always hated reading. My other son, Nicholas was an avid reader - I remember him ploughing through all the Harry Potter books in the space of a month while maintaining an A average at school with no problem. My children all attended private elementary school and then moved on to high school in the public sector. This year was Nicholas' year to embark on his high school career. It also marks the year that he stopped reading for pleasure.

I find this devastating and have tried to pry out of him why he no longer reads. Being an adolescent, communication deficits are to be expected, but what I have gleaned from him is that his English teacher has beaten out of him any desire to read. She assigns endless novel studies, she gives tests weekly, and has all students present regularly in front of the class some aspect of the work under study.

Does she at any time allow students a choice regarding their mode of process and production? No. It's 12 font, double-spaced work and oral presentation. Old school. It's important to mention that Nicholas is a good writer as well as a good reader and I feel it's equally important to point out that he refuses to complete his assignments for his teacher. He has gone from a 90% in Grade 8 to a 46%. Devastating, frustrating, infuriating.

Nicholas has become Pacey: "the school reader, a role I play because you require it from me".

At home, Nicholas spends his free time online; gaming or social networking. His favourite place is Minecraft. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out why. This is a place where he creates his own reality, lives in a space and time which suit him, and over which he has control. There is no doubt in my mind that for him, visual literacy (among other digital literacies) is what inspires him, motivates him, and helps him to make sense of his world.

Nancy Frey, in Kajder, states that "adolescence has often been described as a journey of self-discovery, a time when adolescents measure the width and breadth of the world and figure out where they fit in that world" (Frey in Kajder, 2006). Clearly Nicholas does not feel that he fits in the world of Grade 9 English. I am so incredibly tempted to try to help his teacher to make the connection between adolescent attraction to visual literacies (and other digital literacies) and the curriculum.

I showed him my Photo Story and, while he told me it was lame, he also agreed that my teacher must be "well cool" to allow this sort of activity in a Master's course. There is no doubt that the use of digital technologies (in this case is a visual narrative) increases student engagement and certainly makes learning more authentic and relevant, "in today's world, literacy includes an understanding of how texts are constructed and how a variety of forms of representation work together to convey meaning". I would argue though that the simple (or not so simple) act of integrating digital tools in the classroom is in no way a guarantee that academic achievement will improve. In the case of the visual narrative, if implemented effectively, certainly students will gain competence in the critical thinking required to synthesize text, images, symbols, metaphors, and sound to create an elegant, logically integrated piece... However, again, this does not guarantee academic achievement. In fact, for as long as the school system remains steeped in old values, it's hard to say if digital tools ever will categorically improve anything more than engagement. The goals of education and the affordances of digital technology simply do not create a happy marriage.

As an aside, I was pondering the view that visuals are this generations's vehicle for writing when it occurred to me that, in the early development of humankind, visuals were also an important vehicle for writing. Think cave paintings. They told stories, recorded facts, and there were no words. Think of the Bayeux Tapestry. It recorded facts in immense and glorious detail. There are very few words, and those that do appear are mainly labels for people's names (Harold) or dates. Even the writing of the ancient Egyptians, hieroglyphs, was image based. Chinese and Japanese writing is in fact symbols to represent ideas. When did writing (the black and white alphabetic sort) take over from visual or image representations? Was it the Gutenberg Press? Whatever it was, we seem to have come around circle, at least vaguely... a wobbly amoebic one?! :)

History of Writing

Week 6: Copyright and Plagiarism

Whether a person uses a work in its entirety or a chunk thereof; the law would still view this as either plagiarism or copyright infringement. Where it comes to incorporating chunks of someone else's work in a remix: The remixer may well be producing something new and different from the original, however incorporating a couple of seconds of someone else's work within that remix would nevertheless constitute a violation of copyright. 

The sad part in all of this is that the digital technologies we have now, and which are continuing to blossom, afford our children (and us of course) the opportunity to create in the same way that the human race has created for hundreds of years... by remixing culture... but the creation of copyright law, as Lessig so elegantly points out, was not written to deal with such rapid technological advancement. 

I found Lessig's comment in the Ted Talk about balance to be particularly poignant really: "We need to legalize what it is to be young again".

We, as the older generation, have grown up knowing that we must cite or otherwise acknowledge the use of other people's work. Today's multimodal technology doesn't really lend itself to such practices. As Lessig (2008) points out: "In my view, the solution to an unwinnable war is not to wage war more vigorously. At least when the war is not about survival, the solution for an unwinnable war is to sue for peace, and then to find ways to achieve without war the ends that the war sought. Criminalizing an entire generation is too high a price to pay for almost any end. It is certainly too high a price to pay for a copyright system crafted more than a generation ago."   I believe that until a balance is found between the law and the new generation of creators, that question of responsibility will remain nebulous at best.

In the US 

     If we were talking about the US, then I would be more concerned as illegal use of copyrighted materials is quite doggedly pursued. Here in Canada however, we are more lax. An interesting article on copyright damages suits can be found at the link below. In the article, Geist states: 

"it is important to note that recent changes to Canadian copyright law limit liability in non-commercial cases to a maximum of $5,000 for all infringement claims. In fact, it is likely that a court would award far less - perhaps as little as $100 - if the case went to court as even the government's FAQ on the recent copyright reform bill provided assurances that Canadians "will not face disproportionate penalties for minor infringements of copyright by distinguishing between commercial and non-commercial infringement."

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6710/125/

Dr. Michael Geist is a law professor at the University of Ottawa and holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law.  

I think it's relevant to point out that plagiarism isn't a crime while copyright infringement is. That being said, reading this article makes it fairly clear that Canadians can most likely relax and sleep easy with regards to non-commercially driven copyright violations.

I think it's relevant to point out that plagiarism isn't a crime while copyright infringement is. That being said, reading this article makes it fairly clear that Canadians can most likely relax and sleep easy with regards to non-commercially driven copyright violations.

Canada's Federal Copyright Act doesn't even mention minors, so it's hard to know whether the parent or the child would be responsible for "misdeeds" online. However, I also looked into the Parental Responsibility Act (Ontario) which states:

Parents’ liability

2.  (1)  Where a child takes, damages or destroys property, an owner or a person entitled to possession of the property may bring an action in the Small Claims Court against a parent of the child to recover damages, not in excess of the monetary jurisdiction of the Small Claims Court,

(a) for loss of or damage to the property suffered as a result of the activity of the child; and

(b) for economic loss suffered as a consequence of that loss of or damage to property. 2000, c. 4, s. 2 (1).

Same

(2)  The parent is liable for the damages unless the parent satisfies the court that,

(a) he or she was exercising reasonable supervision over the child at the time the child engaged in the activity that caused the loss or damage and made reasonable efforts to prevent or discourage the child from engaging in the kind of activity that resulted in the loss or damage; or

(b) the activity that caused the loss or damage was not intentional. 2000, c. 4, s. 2 (2).

I also read an illuminating article at WIPR (World Intellectual Property Review) which discusses the intellectual property nightmare created by memeing and the speed with which they transmogrify into new memes or different formats (e.g. video). The process for identifying the copyright owner and the potential copyright violators is extremely complex and not always possible. Within this article Damien Collier, in 2011. Its purpose is to provide the creators of viral videos with a service that includes handling licensing requests, tracking down violators of copyright, and even the development of brands for memes. 

The US is most definitely more diligent about tracking down so-called violators than we are here in Canada. In 1998, Bill Clinton passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which came into being via the World Intellectual Property Organization and which serves to protect Online Service Providers from liability when their users infringe copyright law but also to extend the reach of copyright law, thus enabling the pursuit of violators. 

I could ramble on about law ad nauseum but I think that, to Lessig's point, the big issue here is the chasm between the law makers/owners of copyright and the right of the people to engage in cultural practices that include the remix and mash up of existing works to produce new ones. It's not like this is a new concept, it's just that never before has it been so easy, so rampant, and so disconcerting to the holders of the "original" works. In the entire history of art, literature, drama, and even dance, it is understood that re-inventing, or appropriating, rewriting, retelling, adapting - whatever you want to label it - has, and always will be how culture is fashioned and how it is rewritten to echo the realities of the current population. Only now is it criminal to do so... Take Romeo and Juliet for example, here's what I gleaned from www.historicalfiction.com:

1440's  Masuccio Salernitano's poem Mariotto and Ganozza

1531    Luigi da Porto, Newly Found Story of Two Noble Lovers

1554    Matteo Bandello, Romeo e Giulietta

1562    Arthur Brooke, The Tragic History of Romeus and Juliet

1582    William Painter, Palace of Pleasure

1590    Lope de Vega, (Spanish version)

1590's  Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Restoration, William Davenant, wrote a revision of his uncle's (Shakespeare) play

1679    Thomas Otway, The History and Fall of Caius Marius

1744    Theophilus Cibber, revision

IMDB indexes over 34 films based on the story. These include West Side Story (don't forget that was on Broadway too), and my personal favourite, Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet.

2010    Robin Maxwell's novel O Juliet

...but today we can't adapt, remix, retell, appropriate using digital technologies because the world has gone crazy...

Week 5: Trajectories of Remixing

I have to be honest in stating that this course in digital literacies is taking me significantly outside of my area of knowledge. Every week I feel saturated with more new information than I can process. Many of the tools, web sites, and ideas are foreign to me and while I would love to explore them all, I have to satisfy myself with attempting to synthesize the readings themselves into my current knowledge stores.

Having said that, each new week elicits in me a compulsion to read further - to gain greater clarity regarding one or other topic or idea presented in the course texts. This week it was the notion of copyright. I looked into Lawrence Lessig's 2008 publication "Remix: Making Art and Commerce thrive in the Hybrid Economy". I didn't purchase it, but practised a little of my own "piracy" by downloading the available pages from Amazon.com.

I enjoyed Lessig's (2005) argument that "culture as a whole can be construed as remix" since it echoes the fashion in which oral cultures are propagated. The telling of a story is retold in an ever-expanding narrative by each successive teller; and each time that story is retold, new layers of meaning, new ideas, new experiences, new angles are incorporated to reflect the meaning-making of the individual telling the tale.

In the introduction to Remix; Lessig describes the laments of Sousa that the evolution of "machines" to perpetuate music was going to dumb down culture by making us consumers of culture rather than producers. He saw a sad decline in the perceived value of learning to play musical instruments as a way to celebrate good music, and culture, in favour of listening to "infernal machines".

In today's culture however, it is thanks to these infernal machines and more specifically, thanks to the explosion in digital technologies that our children are becoming experts in the creation of new expressions of meaning. Not only do young people create "mash-ups" of music, using software like GarageBand and Cakewalk as a form of entertainment, but, like Greg Gillis, some dedicate their artistic selves to the production of "remix" music as a way of life (Lessig, 2005, p. 11).

Link to: Girl Talk creating a mash-up

Uploaded on Mar 28, 2007

Girl Talk creating a mashup from Elvis Costello's Radio

Link to: Girl Talk: Bounce That 

Published on Dec 6, 2007

Professor Matthew Soar at Concordia University in Montréal, as a contribution to the Open Source Cinema Project, teamed with his students and spent what he describes as "three very intensive weeks rotoscoping a concert video" of Girl Talk. They were, he says, inspired by Bob Sabiston's digital rotoscoping (Snack and Drink, Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly), and by Christine Harold's OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture, a textbook used for his communications course.

Indeed, remix is not restricted to music. It has helped to extend multimodal literacies via the combination of different media elements into a new textual expression to create something new (Lankshear & Knobel, 2008, p. 186).  Lankshear & Knobel define remixing as

“selecting, cutting, pasting and combining semiotic resources into new digital and multi-modal texts (bricolage), which is achieved by downloading and uploading files from different sources (internet, iPod, DV-camera, digital camera or sound recording devices)” (Erstad, Gilje, & de Lange, 2007, no page)."

There is no doubt in my mind that the affordances of multi-modalities in the art and science of remixing is not only engaging for young people but allows them opportunities to demonstrate that they are more than capable of critical engagement and creative production (Lankshear & Knobel, 2008). So what's the problem here - why don't we see the employment of multi modalities and remixing deployed on a large scale in integrated curricular instruction in schools across North America?

That's a very big question and one to which there are many answers, including but certainly not limited to:

• educational reform and the challenge of the traditional conception of school (students have little control over their learning processes and creativity is thus often constrained). See also Lankshear & Knobel, 2008, p. 199 "The Idea of Schooling"
• the role of the teacher (who is not uncommonly digitally incompetent) 
• the non-standardization of the role and usefulness of Project Based Learning as a conducive pedagogy for digital literacy and thereby opportunities for remixing 
• the traditional definitions of reading and writing or text ("a text is rather a ‘tissue of citations’ born of a multitude of sources in culture (Barthes, 1978). In this light, the author is simply a collaborator with other writers, citing them and reworking their ideas” (Diakopoulos, 2005, no page). Also, "for young people writing today means something much more using images, sound and video to express ideas (ibid., p. 177–178)" (Lankshear & Knobel, 2008, p. 188).  
• the mainstream understanding of what literacy is, "literacy is not a static term but relates to technological innovations, and cultural and political strategies and developments." (Lankshear & Knobel, 2008, p. 182) and that literacy equates to "Socially recognized ways of generating, communicating and negotiating meaningful content through the medium of encoded texts within contexts of participation in Discourses (or, as members of Discourses)." (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006, p. 64).

Another issue however, going back to my starting point in this post, is that of copyright. Before the vast expansion of digital technologies, our conception of writing meant text via alphabetization, print on a page, black and white. Today, youth understanding of writing usually involves digital technologies and encompasses images, or sound, or video, as well as traditional text, and often all of these modes at the same time, remixed to express something new - and adding to our culture. The problem with this, legally speaking, is that pre-digital age copyright laws remain in effect. In a board of education, one can only imagine how emphatic would be the desire of bureaucrats, principals and teachers to steer clear of legal entanglements and how fearful they might be that students would put them in delicate situations should remixing projects become widely accepted practice in schools. The fact of the matter is however that most of our children are already criminals according to copyright law. What teenager does not habitually download "free" music from YouTube, or have an enviable library of torrent downloaded movies from sites such as PirateBay? 

(Lessig, 2008)

Criminalizing those (mostly young people) who embrace our "read-write" digital culture (Lessig, 2008), is utterly pointless as well as potentially culturally crippling. However, until the law makers develop a way out of it, I have to assume that school boards will continue to be wary of allowing students to "plagiarize" even while these same students develop healthy online followings as creative digital remixers outside of school. That's kind of messed up - as my sons would say.

"Remix is an urgent, eloquent plea to end a war that harms our children and other intrepid creative users of new technologies. It also offers an inspiring vision of the post-war world where enormous opportunities await those who view art as a resource to be shared openly rather than a commodity to be hoarded." (retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594201722/ref=rdr_ext_tmb)