Cyber-Bullying Response

This article I read is not particularly dense with information. However, it does provoke a few curiosities.

I guess I have never thought of how the implementation of technologies would require an entirely new body of laws and precautions. Least of all would I suspect that adults would fall victim to the extent of requiring legal action. I mean, I remember the woman who made a false Myspace account to torment a girl on behalf of her daughter (Read about it here, the Megan Meier case). But adults using a website to post their harassment publicly just seems stupid. It would be like a murderer posting a picture of the murder weapon on Facebook.

I know I am a horrible person, and the first thing that comes to my mind is “You are going to get caught. Harass people more intelligently!”

Interestingly, this article doesn’t really suggest approaching this any differently than any other case of defamation of character or harassment. Simply don’t engage, keep everything on record, and contact the authorities.

Slaughterhouse 5 - Final Post

I think often about how humbling an experience college is. I have to, because I am no longer the person evaluating. Rather, I am under the magnifying glass of my superiors. Often, I imagine Dr. Kaplin reading one of my essays.

“*…there is an entire generation of Koreans comma splicing and punctuating BEFORE their citations!” That’s what he must think every time he reads one of my papers.

*This ellipsis is making his eye twitch

I reflected on these moments often while reading this book. Kurt Vonnegut writes in exactly the sort of way I would tell me students not to write.

Not surprisingly, upon given an assignment where you ask a student to describe an event in a descriptive way, their thoughts immediately go to this strange temporally-focused recollection.

I opened my door. Then I went to my car. There was another door. I opened it, too.

And so on.

I never noticed that Vonnegut’s writing style is basically a refined version of this. Even in a story about time travel, a book that is not even linear by nature, it is the same sort of format. “This happened. Then, there was this. Not long after…”

Anyway, this long winded introduction is an attempt to not reveal anything about the book. It is one 

of those books I see myself revisiting in a few years to try and pick up some things that I might have missed along the way. I am still not quite sure why the entire story is told from the perspective of a guy who only met the antagonist once, and it was while he was “shitting his brains out.”

In conclusion: Slaughterhouse 5 lives up to the hype. And, for those of you who have already read it, I would recommend the book “Rant” by Chuck Palahniuk. 

A Bitchy Flibbertigibbet.

I am absolutely tickled pink that this is a real expression, verifiably. The next time I am offended by someone, I will be sure to call them this.

“Slaughterhouse Five” has been on my literary bucket list for a long time now. I have always labelled myself a Kurt Vonnegut fan and, until very recently, I didn’t realize that I was basing that assumption off of the fact that I read one of his books about 7 years ago.

Unlike the other book I (called “Slapstick”), I actually had a really hard time getting into this book. I have heard nothing but good things, so I struggled through the beginning. I must have read page 15 at least 7 times, as I just couldn’t get invested and my mind wandered as a result.

I am glad I did eventually muscle through it, as my efforts have been thusly rewarded.

This book, so far, appears to be about time travel. I am glad that I had no previous knowledge about the content of the book, because figuring this part out has actually been the redeeming aspect of this story for me.

So it goes.

Anyway, I don’t want to give away too much of the story, as I would be pretty unhappy to read a review that gave away the goings on of the book. Either way, at the halfway mark, I am beginning to understand why this book is a cult classic.

Response to Nancy Bailey

This reading, again, is going to cause me to become the cynical asshole of the class and question the necessity of some of this. Nancy Bailey is kind of saying the same thing that all of the other readings have discussed thus far.

Yes, technology should be used in the classroom. Yes, contemporary students respond well to multimodal approaches. Yes, teachers need to be aware of the literary practices that their students are engaging in outside of school (referenced here as a “New literacy stance” with an “insider mindset.”). Yes, this raises questions about the repercussions of the inclusion of these technologies. Yes, which technologies we should incorporate versus which ones we should not is a valid concern.

Ready for the cynicism? Here goes:

In one of my classes, I sit between 2 girls. They are substantially younger than me; it is a depressing and ongoing theme in my life currently. The girl to my right keeps her cellphone in her field of vision constantly. It amuses me to no end because the method she uses to take it out of screen save mode is a petting motion. And she checks it at least 5 times every minute, even though it is on vibrating mode and it never vibrates. I can almost hear her saying “My preeeeeeeecious….”

Ok, maybe that last part is in my head. But she covets the thing.

The girl to my left is even more impressive. She never has less than 3 forms of technology in front of her. Texting during class is an offense not even worth mentioning. One time, while my professor was lecturing, this person watched an entire video about puppies. I shit you not, an entire video about puppies. The volume was off, she was not wearing earphones, and there were no subtitles. No content was necessary, just moving images of puppies. And texting. And Twitter. And Facebook. Fittingly, I am fairly certain that the one thing she wasn’t doing was following the lecture.

While I appreciate the goals of teachers like Carol Olsen, I just can’t get completely on board with the “Spoonful of sugar” concept. I do believe that education does not have to be a boring thing. I do believe that not all children have the intrinsic desire to be educated, and that teachers must aspire to create engaging lessons for things that are sometimes not outwardly engaging. But I also believe that there is real value in muscling through something that is difficult and less engaging. There is beauty in the results as well.

End rant.

Blogger HATES my video, but you can watch it on youtube here.

In anticipation of heart-felt photo albums, Robert Frost, and ambient music, I wanted to approach this project very differently both conceptually and stylistically. As a person interested in teaching art one day, I wanted to do something I have never done before that could be useful to my future students: an animation.

I explored three different animation programs, most of which were quite disappointing.

First and foremost, I learned that this is absolutely not a project that young people should do. Honestly, even as a university task, it was quite daunting. Most websites I referenced suggested 24 frames/second of animation. That’s a lot of drawing for a 2 minute video (2,880 to be exact). To combat this, I did a few things.

1 – I doubled up the images. It makes for a choppier video, but, so long as you find a program where you can easily adjust the frame rate, it can actually be quite beneficial

2 – To take advantage of doubling up the frames, you can make subtle adjustments between the doubled frames. This is what I did for things like blinking, which makes it so that you can get things to move at different paces easily.

3 – I used a white board. This way, I didn’t have to redraw the background for the sake of making subtle adjustments.

To be honest, the time taken to make this could have probably been cut in half if I had 2 people and the proper equipment. Even though the drawing was quick, and the camera was only about 4 feet away, that commute is time consuming when you have to make it 2,880 times while also being careful as to not trip over chords or move the camera.

My advice: leave animation to the professionals. I know that I am certainly retiring.

Now for the software:

Frames: They offer a 30 day free trial on their website, which is enticing. Also, it is the full version, NOT a downgraded trial. The only qualm I have with this program is that it is clearly designed for children, thus it doesn’t let you do much. It is pretty basic, and it actually wouldn’t even allow me to adjust the frame rate to a fast enough pace. So I scrapped this program pretty quickly.

The next program I used, IKITMOVIES, actually looks rather badass. Unfortunately, the trial version they offer is garbage. You are only allowed to open the program 10 times in the trial, and each time you can only work on your project for 15 minutes before it automatically closes. I figured that 150 minutes would be plenty of time to throw together my project, so I uploaded all of my images and began working. They have really cool effects like gunshot flashing and explosions, which I had hoped to add to my introduction. However, I quickly learned that the trial version was not about to let me save/export anything. So this was a massive waste of time.

Sadly, Movie Maker was the best program by a long shot. And I don’t say “sadly” because I think it is a bad program. On the contrary, it is really intuitive. But it is clearly not designed for animation, and it saddens me that I wasn’t able to use an animation program to create this. I actually froze the program a few times because it simply didn’t like the idea of running through so many slides so quickly.

Another major drawback I didn’t like was that there could only be one audio track. I had grandiose plans of including sound effects, perhaps music, and I was even hoping to try making a version of it without the subtitles, and have the poem read. Sigh…

In conclusion: don’t animate.

Barnwell and "Saber-Tooth Curriculum" response

We are at a truly unique point in history. That seems ridiculous to say, as every time in history is unique. But when people look back on this period of time, it will be seen as the dawn of the electronic era. We are the historical transition from the pen and paper to the desktop and mobile device. And as we trek forward into progress through actions of unknown consequence, the issues churned up in our wake will be our signals of warning to the future. The Paul Barnwella article touches on one such issue.

The reason I talk about this particular technological advancement (The use of mobile devices, particularly in classrooms) in such a hyperbolic light is because we are just starting to see the impact it is having.

This is the nature of all development, really: Fast food was an effective way of mass distribution, quick service, and low cost; fossil fuels were readily available, a lucrative business, and made energy readily available; the mass production of entire cities in China was an effective means of dealing with a huge population influx; etc. Looking back these examples, we see how the initial response to each situation respectively made sense. We also see now that these seemingly harmless responses were anything but.

The same is starting to be seen in the use of mobile devices. According to Barnwella:

“I came to realize that conversational competence might be the single-most overlooked skill we fail to teach students.” 

It is true. In our quest to reject the antiquated for the up-and-coming, we have sort of lost sight in the value of foundational skills, like the conversation. I think this is the point being made in “Saber-Tooth Curriculum.” It begs the question: do the benefits of mobile devices outweigh the obstacles they present?