A Fairy Use Tale

In light of this week's discussion about and readings on copyright, I wanted to post this video on fair use:



It's one of my favorite videos on YouTube.

Tech savvy kids

This is in response to Amy's post about kids not being allowed to use their knowledge about technology in schools. (I would have just responded in comments, but you can't post a link from comments--I don't think!) I completely agree with the point you make there. How are we supposed to help students attain media literacy if we have so many restrictions? Many students come to school equipped to learn on many levels, including in multimedia ways. While today's students aren't "naturally" media savvy as some assume, they are ready to handle learning on many levels and communicate in many different ways. Not only do schools' curriculum rarely meet their learning needs, but, as you described, the school acts as a huge barrier to their media use. Schools don't build on what students are capable of, and actually block their ability to use media successfully.

I found a report from the New Media Consortium, A Global Imperative that addresses some of these issues:

It comments that "schools do their students a disservice when they fail to teach literacy in the expressive new language that their students have already begun to use before they even arrive" (page 2). It also builds on what the Jenkins (MacArthur Foundation) paper touches on and what Carol mentioned in class about the way this generation approaches, uses, and views technology tools is "fundamentally different from the way their older counterparts approach using the same tools" (2).
I also like the image on page 9 (page 15 in my pdf viewer) of the enablers and barriers to multimedia literacy.

Are students allowed to be tech-savvy at school?

As I was preparing for class, When Libraries Get Social: How Tech-Savvy Teens Are Shaping Library Culture really caught my attention and made me stop and think. The school I work in does not allow students to bring laptop computers to class, I-pods and cell phones must be kept in lockers throughout the day, social networking sites and blogs are blocked, and they are not allowed to check email. (They are not even issued a school email account for educational purposes.) The quote by Linda stone in the Teen Reality # 3 slide, “Multi-tasking is a way of life – and people live in a state of continuous partial attention”, puts it all in perspective.

Educators are preparing students for their future. Many students will go on to college and others will join the workforce. Obviously I took the college route. As a teacher I spend my day taking attendance, constantly checking email for names of students that need to go to the office, finding the correct Smart Board files, entering grades, and making sure video clips are loaded! I do all of this while I am teaching a lesson and monitoring 25 students, and most importantly it is all done on the computer. My husband, on the other hand, tried college; it didn’t work out, and then he went on to the workforce. He now works for a company that makes plastic. His first six weeks were spent training in a conference room, mostly behind a computer. The funny thing is…..he is not training for an office job. He will be working in the packaging part of the plant, mainly filling hoppers and moving them with an engine. Even though this is a factory/production job that doesn’t require a college education, he still has to have the ability to multi-task and utilize technology. Logging in the hours he worked, checking email, keeping up with safety guidelines, and computing the amount of plastic that has been loaded for shipment are all aspects of his job and using the computer on a daily basis.

Are we really preparing students for their future? Whether they go on to the workforce immediately after graduation or go to college first, they are destined to be required to multi-task using technology.

When I arrived to work after 10 days off for spring break, my computer was out of commission. Next year all of the computers in the building will be replaced, but for now we are dealing with sporadic hard drive crashes. I was the latest victim! It was one of the worst days I have ever had at work. I felt completely lost without my computer for only one day. Although I didn’t have my computer, I could listen to my I-pod, use my cell phone, and go to the library to check my email and this class blog (only because they unblocked it for me) if I wanted to during my prep period. I couldn’t live a day without just my computer at work, and yet we are asking our students to live without all of their gadgets everyday.

I realize we have to have some guidelines or it would be complete chaos. I have been very persistent in suggesting that students should at least have school email accounts. There are many times I create a lesson, worksheet, etc. at home and email it to my school account so I can access it at work. I am sure you are all thinking – why doesn’t she just use a flash drive? I forgot to mention we can’t use those either! Email accounts would at least give students the freedom to pull up a project or assignment to present or print. As of right now they would have to email it to a teacher in order to access it at school.

This is just an example of one school that has forbidden students to be tech-savvy during school hours unless it is confined to a specific lesson that a teacher has created for students to showcase their multimedia talents. And in a school that only has one main computer lab outside of the two computer classrooms, it has to be a lesson that is prepared and scheduled at least a month in advance! We are asking our students to live outside of reality while they are at school. They have grown up in an era of multi-tasking using various forms of media and now we are asking them to give their full attention to science, math, language, and history without technology at their fingertips. It doesn’t seem realistic.

Comic Book Confidential

In a comment on Mary's post about the harmful effects of media, I said this discussion has been going about as long as any media has been popular and targeted at youth. One example I mentioned was the U.S. Senate Hearings on comic books and their role in juvenile delinquency - this link has a summary and transcripts.

Here's a video that was used as evidence for those hearings:



This footage is an excerpt from Comic Book Confidential, a documentary by Rob Mann. My brother clued me into this - he saw it in his serial illustration class (all about storyboards and comic books and yes, I'm jealous) at Columbia College. He highly recommends it to anyone interested in comic books or issues with censorship and popular media.

The video isn't terribly expensive (less than $20), so if you're building a library collection of comic books it might be a valuable addition. Besides historical footage like this, it also includes interviews with many major figures across different genres of comics and graphic novels, from artists of traditional superhero stuff to authors of more complex titles.

Internet Addiction?

If you poke around on geeky blogs, you may have seen some reference to the editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry talking about "internet addiction." I thought it might be a fun side note to Mary's post about the "harmful effects" of media.

Here's the actual editorial:
Issues for DSM-V: Internet Addiction
Jerald J. Block, M.D.
Am J Psychiatry 165:306-307, March 2008

How do the techies respond?
There are some entertaining comments on this post:
Push To Classify Internet Addiction As a Mental Disorder
Duncan Riley, Techcrunch.com, March 17, 2008

This isn't a new issue: as the editorial notes, it's already been widely discussed in Japan, Korea, and China, where high-tech entertainment options are more sophisticated than the are in the U.S. My friends who love Manga & lots of other Japanese entertainment turned an envious shade of chartreuse when they read this:

In Tokyo, the New Trend Is 'Media Immersion Pods'
By Virginia Heffernan, NY Times, May 14, 2006

So, what do you think? Is this another example of the APA "problematizing" any behavior or personality trait that strays too far beyond "the norm"? Or is it a real problem?

Examples? Counter-examples?

Discipline, Schools, and Facebook

This interesting story from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune discusses recent suspensions and reprimands at an area high school. What did the kids do? They posted photos of themselves at parties--drinks in hand--on Facebook. OK, I won't argue that high school kids should be drinking; it's against the law. Posting pictures of yourself breaking the law is pretty dumb. Yet, the report seems to indicate that the pictures were not available for public viewing, meaning that someone narked on their classmates.

How should Facebook profiles and other online information be used in school settings? This case isn't the first time online information has been used as evidence against students. It's happened in Toronto, Cincinnati, and St. Louis.

Social Networking Sites, Teens & Government Deals

I just caught this story on techcrunch, my default source for all breaking news on techie stuff. Of course it's also on traditional news sources too, like the AP and Reuters.

MySpace just changed/upgraded several policies for younger teens using their site to try to protect them from contact with sexual predators and any other adults they don't know. Some of the new policies are aimed at giving parents more control, some are aimed at changing the visibility of younger teens' profiles and some are simply upgrading the response time for complaints.

It will be interesting to see how teens themselves respond to the policy changes. Will they mind having a separate high school section? Many teens already lie about their age to use the site, I wonder how these changes will affect that sort of behavior.

The teens I know on MySpace are pretty careful about the way they use it, using fictional locations and fictional names and posting pictures with multiple people in them so it's hard to tell who they are unless you know them. They've figured out the security settings for the most part but they still get unwanted messages from people sometimes (I do too, not necessarily age inappropriate people or "obscene" messages, just unwanted contact). I'm not sure how much their parents understand about the way they use the website but I know they share tips among their friends.

It seems like most of this legislation/tutoring stuff tends to come from a top-down perspective, but I wonder how much they try to take advantage of the "horizontal" relationships to spread information about the site and the best security tips. Besides updates from Tom, which are kind of annoying. Also I wonder how the new limitations about adult/teen interactions will affect libraries trying to make themselves available on MySpace. I don't have any experience with institutional use of MySpace- my younger sister got me to add a profile but I barely use it since facebook took off. Anyone else have more to add on that front?

[From Carol: There's even more about the MySpace story available at cNet.]

Just Right or Just Stretch?

I'm not much of a fan of readability guidelines, AR levels, Lexiles, the 5-finger rule, or any other sort of ways of corralling kids' reading. Would you want someone to tell you--at whatever age you are now--that the new Janet Evanovich book you wish to read is much too simple for you? Or perhaps you should pass on reading Proust and the Squid because it will--it's obvious, isn't it?--be too challenging for you?

In today's New York Times, film critic A.O. Scott makes what I view as a level-headed critique of the "just-right-book" approach to deciding what movies kids should be able to see. Read it and let me know what you think.