Since Animoto was one of the free tools introduced to folks at our Western Massachusetts Writing Project event around Pop Culture, Technology and the Common Core, I figured I would use images from the day to create a quick video for our WMWP website and to share back with participants.

Peace (in the exploration),
Kevin

I came across this parody by Mad Magazine, and it seems to dovetail nicely with my unit right now on Digital Lives.

Peace (in the funny),
Kevin

 

(Taken from the CommonSense Media handout: Offline/Online Me)

We spent our second day in our Digital Lives unit talking about identity. For my 11 and 12 year old students, this can be a pretty complex concept, particularly when we are thinking about how we make shifts in our personality and the way we want to the world to perceive us based on where we are. Once again, the CommonSense Media site curriculum around digital citizenship has been a rich trove to pull from, including an interesting video about how kids represent themselves (and not always for the good) and a useful handout that breaks down how one student represents themselves online and offline.

The video and the handout led to interesting conversations in my classroom throughout the day, leading to an activity around the creation of avatars for their Glogster accounts. Their mission: create a visual representation of themselves so that if I, or anyone else, were to ask why an avatar was chosen or created, they could make a clear connection to some interest or hobby or facet of themselves. It can’t be that the avatar is cool. It has to be there for a reason.

But back to our discussions for a minute. Here are some vignettes that stayed with me.

• Many students who are gamers talked about the choices they make around usernames in gaming communities, like World of Warcraft and the like. They mentioned how they try to choose a name that represents the qualities of a hero or an adventurer. They like that part of a creation of an account, it turns out, probably because they can slip outside of their own name and identity.
• One student noted that he plays an app game on the family iPod, but that his father first created the account. For a while, both son and dad were playing, and sharing the account, but now dad doesn’t play nearly as much. The son, of course, still does. The gaming community for that app, however, must assume (and why wouldn’t they?) that it is just one player — the dad. So sometimes, messages come from other players directed at dad, but received by the son. Nothing inappropriate, but my student noted how “strange” it was to be perceived as someone other than himself, and as an adult, too. A real adult — his dad.
• A small number of girls are passionate about horses, and apparently there is a pretty popular equine social networking site that many of them are part of. They noted how they enjoyed how everything there is all about horses, and one student made the comment that in the network, she feels like an expert about horses and admitted to a certain confidence she doesn’t always feel outside of her equine community.
• I asked how many students have ever not given their real ages when signing up for an online site, and many raised their hands. Most choose older, not younger. Some have done this with Facebook in order to skirt the 13 year old age regulation. When I asked why they would create an identity that was older, most could not really explain. But one student did note that if felt that they could seem cooler if they were older.

Peace (in the shift),
Kevin

PS — Here is a good resource collection from National Writing Project’s Digital Is about identity.

At the holidays, I received the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. And while the story was familiar -- I already knew much of Jobs' history from other books and profiles -- I still found it pretty fascinating. Let's face it: if Jobs were our boss, we would have strangled him. If Jobs were our principal, we might have revolved against him. His temperament and lack of emotional connections, and drive to create his vision or else, made his companies at least very interesting to watch. But I would have hated to work under him.

The bio does a nice job of peeling the outer layer off Jobs, though, and allows us to understanding him a bit more through the very personal interviews that Jobs granted Isaacson. For me, I was most fascinated by his intense desire for design, and how that need for intuitive design elements shaped all of the products he would be putting into the market -- from the devices that hold music to the stores that sell machines, and even in the layout of the Pixar offices. Design considerations also went into the insides of devices -- things most people would never see. So much of what we see is so ugly, but not Apple products.

Isaacson nicely explores this area of Jobs' life, and how that need for perfect design affected his dealings with other people. (And it is also so intriguing the parts where we see Jobs and Bill Gates interacting, and how different their approaches were to technology - particularly around design: Gates could not understand the fuss and Jobs could not comprehend how one could not fuss over it. That dichotomy could be a whole book in itself. I'd love to see a bio on Gates that goes as deep as Isaacson goes here, but somehow, I doubt that will ever happen. He's not that kind of person, as far as I can tell.).

Two weeks ago, I got a comic book biography of Jobs. Needless to say, Steve Jobs: Co-founder of Apple by Bluewater Productions was a lot thinner. But the comic book bio touched on some important moments of Jobs' life, and accomplishments, and does not quite skirt his explosive personality, but doesn't dwell on it much, either. Reading the comic book version after Isaacson's version was like watching a highlights real. I suppose if you have students interested in Steve Jobs, and the biography is just too much, the comic book version might be worth putting into their hands. You can tell, though, that the publisher rushed to get it onto the market to ride the wave of interest following Jobs' death and Isaacson's book. I found a few proofreading errors, and the writing is weak at times.

Both of these books give a view of Jobs as someone who has made a mark on modern life, and you can't argue against that.

Peace (in the bio),
Kevin

We just launched into a unit (a new one for me) around Digital Lives, which will cover such topics as safety, personal information, social networking, passwords and more. I am mostly adapting a great curriculum developed by CommonSense Media, which has some interesting videos, lesson plans and activities. Yesterday, I began by posting a huge icon with the words “digital footprint” on the interactive board, and then we began to chat about what that meant.

Most had no idea. And once we began discussing the digital debris they leave behind at websites, I could already see some eyes opening up. Clearly, they don’t think much about their digital identity when they are online, and they are online a lot. Facebook, Youtube, and many other sites form the basis of what they do when they are on the computer. Very little computer time is offline.

As it turns out, this week’s Time for Kids magazine was perfectly tailored to begin our discussion. The topic of the main article was about how schools are starting to use tablet computers and technology in order to replace textbooks and inform instruction. They were quite interested in the programs where students get iPads for the year. We then went over the results of a survey I gave them two weeks ago about their own habits of technology. I paused at places where I have seen changes this year (more mobile devices, more confidence in their technical savvy, more viewing of videos online, etc.) and we had a long discussion about Facebook and password protection (to be continued another day).

We ended up talking about avatars, and how one represents oneself in an online space. They have some work to do around brainstorming an avatar for themselves, and then we will be doing some work around avatar creation on Wednesday, using our Glogster community as a place to experiment with representing themselves in an online environment.

Here are some of my notes from our far-ranging conversations during the classes yesterday:

• They immediately noticed that school districts that are providing iPads seem to be in places that are well-off, which led to a discussion around the issue of the “digital divide” in which the “haves” get access, and the “have-nots” don’t. I was happy to talk about this problem, but it was the students who observed this and who worry about it;
• We talked a lot about advertising, and how “free” sites aren’t really free. They were startled to learn that YouTube gets 2 billion hits a day, and that Google owns Youtube, and makes money off it by embedding advertising into sidebars and now, more and more, into videos themselves. One student said he took the time to read some of the new privacy policy by Google (praise for him!) so that he could understand what might happen to his skateboarding videos;
• Protecting reputations was a central focus, and will continue to be, as we talked about the relative permanence of what you put online in sites like Facebook. I reminded them that in a few years, they will be applying for college or seeking a job. It may seem like that is far in the distance, but it is not when it comes to your online digital footprint. It follows you. I could tell that got the attention of a number of students;
• The Time for Kids article sparked a long discussion (guided by me) around the pros and cons of iPads and tablets in the classroom. The pros included embedded media, cost savings, interactive learning and connection to the outside world. The cons included possibilities of theft, distractions, and the need for constant upgrades.

I’m really impressed by their insights, and thinking, and I look forward to more of these discussions. At ages 11 and 12, this is the time we want them to be thinking along these lines. I want them to be critical thinkers, and critical users of technology. However, as I stressed many times, this is also not to freak them out, and make them so nervous they don’t want to go online anytime. It’s all about managing their identity and my aim is show them some tools to do that.

Peace (in the footprints),
Kevin