#NetNarr: Sketchnoting Dark Mirror’s Nosedive

This week in Networked Narratives, one of the assignments is to watch the “Nosedive” episode of Black Mirror on Netflix, which tackles through its dystopian vision how the world is revolving more and more on the “like economy.”

Black Mirror Sketchnote: Nosedive

The Black Mirror Wiki (yes, of course, there is a thing) explains:

Lacie Pound lives in a world where anyone can rate your popularity out of five stars, from your friends to strangers you meet on the street.

As with other Black Mirror stories, this one takes the tech-infused idea to the extreme, as Lacie tumbles into social media wasteland after her own brother trends her downward.

I found the ending to be interesting, where Lacie has all of her approval technology removed after an episode, finds herself in jail and yet approaches real happiness and freedom when she starts to trade insults with another prisoner. They are no longer shackled by technology.

Black Mirror Sketchnote: Nosedive

I decided to sketchnote the story as I watched the episode, to try to capture in doodles what I was seeing and thinking about. This was the second time I have seen Nosedive, so I sort of knew what was happening.

Peace (ecaeP),
Kevin

#NetNarr Comic Strip Story: The Return to Arganee

 

Horse with No Name

For the start of Networked Narratives, I decided to send one of my comic strip characters on an adventure through the fictional world of Arganee. So Horse with No Name (I left The Internet Kid at home) set forth and met some strange creatures — bots and dogs and alchemists —  and went on a Quest. I had fun making the comics, which I did in a just a few days in a burst of storytelling and then released them somewhat daily into the NetNarr stream over two weeks time.

I often wondered what the NetNarr students in the two University classrooms were thinking, if they even caught the comics. They were just starting class, and maybe barely wandering into the hashtag.

You can read it as a PDF with this link.

Another option is a Padlet that I set up, with all of the comics in order.

Made with Padlet

Peace (making comics),
Kevin

Slice of Life: You Call That Cheating?

(This is for the Slice of Life challenge, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We write on Tuesdays about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.)

I live in the heart of New England, surrounded by New England Patriots fans. Yesterday was a somber day in the classroom. Many tired eyes following the defeat in the Super Bowl to the Eagles.

I’m no Eagles fan. Neither am I a Patriots fan. I am, alas (this year, anyway), a New York Giants fan, and my students know this. (They also know I am a Yankees fan, which is a kind of blasphemy here in New England but I stand proud in the storm).

The first student to arrive yesterday is my most competitive. He has often has trouble shaking off events from recess. He’s an athlete, a star football player. He came in shaking his head.

“They cheated,” he mumbled as he passed me, and I could see it was a phrase he probably had on his mind since the game ended the night before. “The Eagles cheated.”

He looked at me, calculating that a Giants fan could not be an Eagles fan. Surely, he was thinking, I’d agree with his post-game analysis. He was looking for affirmation.

“Don’t you think the Eagles cheated in the Super Bowl, Mr. H?”

He was looking in the wrong place.

“Nope. Nobody cheated. There were some … interesting plays, but the Eagles won, fair and square. They outplayed the Pats. It was a great game to watch.”

This quieted him. For a second. He clearly didn’t want to hear me. When another student, another athlete, came in and said, “They cheated,” the first student echoed, “I know. They did. Right?”

Which led to a discussion in our Circle of Power morning meeting about sports, and competition, and losing gracefully, and being humble when winning, and a reminder of how we are moving into our annual Quidditch season at our school, where bragging and accusations of cheating and more between classes and students will not be tolerated.

I thought I reached them, with some perspective on fandom and sports and maybe a view of the biases of reality that exist in favor of those ideas which we already support (ie, my team lost, therefore, the other team cheated). But, maybe not. As the class was moving out the door, I could hear the conversation going again. “I know, right? Even the refs were in on it.”

Sigh.

Peace (need not be competitive),
Kevin

Making Music in Colleagues’ Google Classrooms

Cell Music Analogy Project

We’re more than half-way through a professional development session on learning how to best use Google Classroom. The session is being run by my colleague, Tom Fanning, from the Western Massachusetts Writing Project. I’ve been using Google Classroom since the start of the year, but I asked our district to consider PD for other teachers, since I was getting a lot of inquiry from colleagues about how it works and why use it.

The session has nearly 20 teachers from our entire school district, and Tom has us making pilot Google Classroom spaces, inviting each other in as small groups of “students” to play the role of learner.

John Coltrane Jazz Project

My group has three other elementary teachers, and as I was working on their assignments — a cell analogy project, a state history project and a notable African American biography (and mine is a Parts of Speech project) — I decided to keep to a common theme of music across my work.

Taj Mahal BluesMan Project

My cell analogy project used a musical score as the point of comparison. I chose Taj Mahal as the Massachusetts history project, since he is the state Blues Artist. And I researched John Coltrane’s musical legacy for the biography project.

Look. Google Classroom is a fantastic work management tool that my students enjoy using and which has certainly made my work as a teacher a whole lot easier. It’s also clearly another finger reaching out to grab more Google users. We talked about this in our PD session and I talk about it with my students. Google wants to nurture young eyeballs for later in life, when it can target them for advertising, and make money. To think otherwise is to delude ourselves.

For now, I see more positives on our end than negatives with our dive into Google Classroom, but it’s always important to keep the larger perspectives in focus, on what we give up when we use free technology with our students. I’m glad we addressed and debated Google’s mission and motives in our PD. We can all move forward, knowing to some degree what we and our students are getting into.

Peace (in the rooms of music),
Kevin

On Twitter, I’m a Teacher/ On Mastodon, I’m a Writer

Last month’s theme in CLMOOC to “audit” our digital lives and activities has been quite valuable. I’ve done some weeding of followers/following in Twitter and beyond, and cut back on my email notifications designed to draw me into social media spaces. I’ve spent time thinking about the role of social media, and my use of it.

One observation that I made about myself is this: On Twitter, my identity is mostly as a teacher, talking learning and connecting with other teachers. But on Mastodon (a federated social network free of corporate influence), I feel like I am a writer.

Of course, there is overlap — I sometimes write about teaching in Mastodon and I sometimes make and share other kinds of work than educational pieces on Twitter — but my digital identity has sort of solidified in those spaces on one spectrum or the other (at least, in my head).

I noticed this landscape as I was culling through and removing hundreds of followers and those I follow on Twitter (literally, I think I cut back on nearly 1000 people, and counting, as I continue to prune), and thinking about why I would keep whom I kept. Mostly, those who remained were connected to education. Which makes sense. I write a lot and share a lot about being a teacher. I ask for resources from other teachers. My hashtags that I follow in Tweetdeck are nearly all related to learning and teaching.

In Mastodon, that is not the case. There, I write and share spaces with other writers. Some are fellow teachers (with overlaps in Twitter, even) but even they are less likely to go on about teaching. We write about other things there. I’ve taken to writing in a “small stories” section of Mastodon with regularity. I also share small poems and pull out small quotes from books I am reading. (Small as a form of writing is a common theme for me in Mastodon).

Now, some of this observation of Twitter-teacher/Mastodon-writer is due to the folks who inhabit the spaces, I think. I have long been connected to other teachers, mostly through National Writing Project, since my first day of Twitter, thanks to the guidance of my friend, Bud Hunt. My entry point was a network of teachers, with mostly a United States connection.

In Mastodon, what I see are all sorts of other people in other professions, from other parts of the world. There are computer programmers, social activists, social service workers, artists and animators, professional clowns and more. I’ve tapped into something grander than Twitter, and it feels like a more nurturing space for writing. Maybe that’s because Mastodon is still fairly small in size and reach. It’s also due to the underlying philosophical concept of Mastodon — that the users are in control of the network, not the network itself (for, there is no main organization overseeing it all — it is spread out across many servers in a federated space).

And here? This blog? I think this blog is the space is where those two worlds — teacher and writer — often intersect, collide and sometimes even crash.

Peace (writing it, learning it, teaching it),
Kevin

The Freedom, and Power, of the Press

I went into Steven Spielberg’s new movie, The Post, the other day as a fan boy of Katherine Graham, long-time publisher of The Washington Post, and came out humming with a powerful reminder that the press in America has a job to keep government in check. That’s being tested in this day and age of Trump.

If you don’t know the story, the movie is about the publishing of The Pentagon Papers, a secret report that showed the United Stated government knew for decades and over multiple administrations that the Vietnam War was a disaster, so they lied to the public and the press — time and time again — to avoid the shame of a military defeat. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of soldiers were sent overseas to fight, and to die.

The New York Times, and The Washington Post, led the charge to make the secret report public, and both were sued by the United States Attorney General to stop from doing so. Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the press in a powerful legal moment that defined one of the pillars of our society — the press has the freedom to ignore warnings from the government over what to publish.

At the end of the movie, after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the newspapers, the entire audience in the movie theater I was in cheered and clapped at the court’s decision and at the bravery of the newspaper publishers like Kay Graham to risk jail and financial ruin, with the unspoken specter of Nixon and then Trump being in the room (neither would not want to be in that room, I am pretty sure), and all of Trump’s “fake news” utterings being exposed for what it is: a deflection of criticism and probably a real fear of the investigation underway.

“There is no collusion” being the modern version of “I am not a crook.”

The movie itself is a bit too melodramatic — it’s a movie, after all — but I found the portrayal of Graham to be solid, particularly in the scenes where she grapples with being a woman thrust into her position by the suicide of her husband and surrounded by men who think they know better than her about the company she leads. We see Graham come into her own as a powerful woman in a time when that was not common. A scene where she leaves the Supreme Courthouse and is surrounded by a sea of young women protesters is a powerful visual, and Spielberg lets the sight of Graham in the crowd tell the story of her impact in society.

The other thing I loved is the way Spielberg captures the printing press operations, and as a former newspaper journalist, I remember watching our presses rolling, and feeling the building shake as the newspaper was “put to bed” at night. The setting of type and the excitement of grabbing a paper fresh off the press … it’s all tangible reminders that the news business has changed, and we’ve lost the art of making a newspaper to the speed of updated webpages.

Peace (and power to the press),
Kevin

In the Newspaper: Game Design Sparks Student Writing

Chalk Talk Game Project

The local newspaper published a column that I wrote about our sixth grade video game design unit, and how I use what we do as a way to encourage more writing out of my students, in different genres and different audiences.

The column is part of a monthly series of teacher-written pieces that come from a partnership between our Western Massachusetts Writing Project and the Daily Hampshire Gazette. I coordinate that project — helping WMWP teachers develop ideas and coordinating the contact between teacher writers and newspaper editors — and every now and then, I write, too.

Since the Gazette has a paywall, we have permission to move all of our pieces to our WMWP website. It also allows us to archive all of our teacher writing for the Chalk Talk series.

Read The Games They Make

Peace (in the write),
Kevin

 

#NetNarr Research: (re)New Media Art and Cultural Jamming

A research endeavor in Networked Narratives is an invitation to curate and document early examples of New Media Art from a book no longer readily available, except for its examples in the Internet Wayback Machine. Cool. Work done to document the art will eventually end up in this Tumblr site.

Students from different NetNarr classes and the open web are invited to join in. Scroll down through this post, about midway, and you will find instructions. From that same NetNarr call to help document early New Media Art:

For an appreciation of current digital art we will explore these foundational examples of digital, networked art. They represent a time of wild experimentation, new technologies, but also to see what could be done with much slower and less sophisticated internet. But also, we will examine the issues of how well digital art holds up over time, especially when many were created with technologies not currently available, or have themselves vanished. It also opens the door to question the ephemeral nature of digital art.

Here is mine, which looks at an example of early cultural jamming with technology and media and art:

  • Title of Art Work: ToyWar
  • Artist name(s): ®TMark
  • When it was published on the web: October 5, 2013
  • Technologies used: Website design
  • Current URL (if still available online): Not available
  • Link to Wikibook page (in Wayback Machine)https://web.archive.org/web/20131005190945/https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/RTMark (or specifically, for ToyWar: https://web.archive.org/web/20131005021204/http://toywar.etoy.com/)
  • A brief summary of the piece, not just copied from the book (quotes are okay, but write your own analysis of the piece): The ®TMark (or art mark) was a network of anti-corporate parody and satirical artists, designed to poke holes in the nature of the emerging Internet and information networks through what is known as “cultural jamming.” It’s first venture was known as the Barbie Liberation Organization and it later was the target of a legal battle from the musician, Beck, for its appropriation of his music. ®TMark often asked for ideas from its audience, and supported and even funded the development of such art. Its work had a significant anti-corporation nature to it that rattled the business world. The ToyWar effort is a good example, as it used biting satire in a real-life legal battle that unfolded in the courts over the use of the name “etoy,” with an actual toy company fighting a small artistic collective over the name and the web domain name. ®TMark’s project zeroed in on the way the business world takes ownership of names through legal battles and intimidation, and this cultural jamming project is reflective of an era when corporations began gobbling up URL and domain names. The®TMark group seemed to have developed extensive “war documentation” of the battle between a small company and the larger corporation, turning the financial and legal battle into a form of public art and protest, including the development of a “game” in which ®TMark members took part in Denial of Service attacks at the corporate website in a form of virtual “sit ins” and other new media protests.
  • Screenshots that represent the work
    The ToyWars Documentation Project
    The ToyWars Documentation Project
  • The ToyWars Documentation Project
  • Information on where the artist is now: It seems as if the ®TMark may have fallen apart or merged into other anarchic collectives. Online searching reveals little information about the project and the collective’s website link seems to have been taken over by some Japanese contraception company marketing the “after pill.” Joke? Not? Subversive Art? I don’t really know.

Interesting stuff …

Peace (in the documentation),
Kevin