This is a comic as part of my exploration of digital media with other folks taking part in Digital Writing Month.
Peace (in the frame),
Kevin
Author Archives: dogtrax
Considering Stereotypes: The Gender/Digital Life Resource
My class is in the midst of creating a travel brochure for an imaginary world. The theme and idea could be just about anything, but the teaching has been around reading informational text (real travel brochures, the genre of information text) and then creating a fictional brochure with the same elements (plus, we tie it into the theme of Peace as part of our school’s affiliation with Peacebuilders.)
Yesterday, a girl came up to me, sharing her rough draft work with me. Her map showed a circular planet, divided in half by a roller coaster (a lot of them have echoes of theme parks, probably because we used Disney and other parks’ travel brochures for our initial investigation into the format). There were a bunch of symbols on the top and another bunch on the bottom. I squinted to see what they were. She asked me, “Which side of the planet do you think is the girls and which is the boys?”
It took me a minute to realize that she was creating a space for girls and a space for boys, and the symbols represented stereotypes of the gender (tiaras and dancing shoes for the girls, for example, and a game system and a football for the boys.) I used the opportunity to talk to her about stereotypes, but she just shook me off, and continued her journey around the room, polling kids on what symbols should be where on her map to represent boys and girls. I’ll be revisiting that issue later, maybe as a whole class discussions.
So, this morning, I was pleased to see this: CommonSense Media just released what looks like an interesting set of free lesson plans and resources built around gender identity and stereotypes related to the digital world, particularly around media and advertising. I do some of this during our Digital Life unit, but not enough. I’m going to use some of the ideas here to strengthen those discussions this year.
The resource is called Girls, Boys and Media: A Gender and Digital Life Toolkit
It’s worth a look. I’ll be digging into it.
Peace (in staying openminded),
Kevin
Featured on the InstaGrok Site
Our class did the most online searches last month with InstaGrok — a web-based too for gathering data and making sense of it — and the site featured our classroom. They asked if I might be willing to answer a few questions about how we use InstaGrok for our research projects. I did, and it gave me a chance to do a little reflecting on the things and approaches we were doing.
Peace (in the reflection),
Kevin
Digital Writing Month: The Masters are Messing with my Flow
The other day, I shared out a Google tool that allows you to have “characters” in a Google Doc “write” with each other. This video is from a related tool, in which you can collaborate with “masters” of literature – Shakespeare, Poe, Dickens, etc. Google captures the real-time writing in the document and kicks out a link. I did a videoshot of my writing with the tool and then layered in some audio reflections of the experience.
You can “view” my live document here.
Peace (in the digital experience),
Kevin
And Two Final Zombie Vs. Twitter Comics
We’re nearing the end of the Twitter Vs. Zombies virtual game that has been unfolding all weekend. I’m a little tired of being a zombie, to be honest, so I am sharing out the last two comics that I created as part of Digital Writing Month. Tomorrow, I am back to a regular ol’ human being with a regular appetite, and fairly normal tweets (although that is a judgement call on the part of my followers, who must be wondering what the heck is up with all the zombified tweets this weekend)
Peace (in the comics),
Veteran’s Day: 25-Word-Stories
This is a revisiting of a post I did two years ago, when I wrote a number of 25 Word Stories on Twitter to honor and fictionalize the stories of veterans. (I am a veteran, too, but, thankfully, never in a war) I think the stories still have a certain narrative power to them. The one with the “maps on skin” still resonate with me as the writer.
If you are a Veteran, thank you.
Peace (in the world),
Kevin
Digital Writing Month: The Zombie Factory Movie
My son was hounding me to create a stopmotion movie yesterday and so I finally agreed, after dinner, to help him get set up. As he started to talk about his “story” (which is something I require him to have in mind – a mental storyboard — before we get started so that it doesn’t just devolve into complete chaos), I realized that he was envisioning a sort of zombie-like story.
Which was a strange coincidence, because I was in the midst of playing the Twitter Vs. Zombie game (although no one in family knows it) as part of Digital Writing Month. With a couple of story tweaks, we decided to base the movie around a Zombie King and a zombie factory, and a hero who destroys it and captures the Zombie King. He was the hero. I was the Zombie King.
We got to work — using the Smoovie app software to create scenes with Lego pieces, and then iMovie to add narration and music (from Freeplay Music), and then Youtube to publish (he is very conscious already of “views” and maybe that is a topic of another post on another day, given that he is only 8 years old). I shared the final video out as part of the Twitter vs. Zombie game last night, adding our creation into the narrative mix of the unfolding game.
Peace (in the movie),
Kevin
Book Review: The Mark of Athena
I want to thank Rick Riordan. When my youngest son turned eight years old, he suddenly stopped wanting me to read to him. It broke my heart because I have spent years with him and his two older brothers, snuggled up, reading books together. But he now reads his own novels (He’s in the middle of the Harry Potter series). I wandered around the house, without a listener (the dog wouldn’t sit still).
But when The Mark of Athena — the most recent book in the Heroes of Olympus series by the prolific Riordan — came out, my son came back in. So, I owe ya one, Rick. (Plus, he has learned how to count with Roman Numerals with the book. I’ve had him tell me the chapter number for each chapter, navigating the Roman symbols in a fun way). My son and I have spent the last two weeks completely immersed in the continuing saga of Percy Jackson and his demigod colleagues, including his girlfriend, Annabeth Chase (daughter of Athena), as they continue to move towards an epic battle against Gaia and the forces of Giants who want to overthrow Olympus and destroy the world.
(A side note: I ordered The Mark of Athena from Scholastic as part of our book club. When it came in, I had the book on my desk. I had more students come over and look at it and talk about it than any other book that has been on my desk this year. One girl was so excited about it, she did a happy dance across the front of the room. But then she realized that she did not have the book yet and her parents might not be able to get it for her anytime soon. I looked at her. I looked at the book. And I lent it to her to read. She zipped through it in five days. My son, who was waiting for the book, too, was not at all happy that I had lent it out before he got a look. BUT, the teacher in me trumped the parent in me.)
I won’t give the plot away, but this book centers on Annabeth Chase more than any other demigod, and that’s a good thing. She is smart, and powerful, and she uses her wits to survive a terrifying ordeal late in the book. And the seven demigods are mostly an interesting crew. The only one who does nothing for me is Jason, the son of Jupiter (ie, Zeus) who just seems like a dud to me. A powerful dud, but still, a dud. Still, Riordan finishes the book up in a very dramatic style, sending two demigods to an unknown future (I won’t say which two) in a classic cliffhanger moment. I got to the last page and my son looked at me.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“What happens?”
“We’ll just have to wait ..” and we both looked to the back page, where the book advertises the next in the series — The House of Hades — which comes out in Fall 2013 “… for another year.”
“Nooooooooooooooooo.”
You could say he’s hooked. Thanks, Rick.
Peace (in the adventure),
Kevin
Digital Writing Month: Running from Zombies (Comic)
If you are just joining me here, you may be wondering about my sudden fascination about zombies. Well, I am taking part in a weekend Twitter-based game called Twitter vs. Zombies as part of Digital Writing Month. (You can see my post about it from yesterday). And I figure, as long a I am in the game, so, too, should the characters from the webcomic I have been creating as part of Digital Writing Month.
And so, Shirley is on the run from her friend, Dave, who has been bitten and is hungry. In this game of text and tweets, you can’t trust anyone. Not even your favorite blogger.
Peace (in the adventure),
Kevin
DeComposing in the Twitter vs. Zombie Game
I can’t say I am a big fan of zombies (well, who is, really?) and I have often wondered about the ways zombies have taken anchor in popular culture. But friends in the Digital Writing Month adventure launched a Twitter-based game called Twitter Vs. Zombies is more complex than I can go into here (although you can find all the emerging rules here). It’s essentially a massive game of Twitter Hashtag Tag, and I have to say, it drew me in this weekend.
I started the game out as a zombie (no comments from the peanut gallery, thanks), and throughout the day, I tried to bite (#bite) humans to turn them into zombies, as they used various hashtag commands to escape (#dodge) and save themselves (#swipe) as a cooperative survival experience. What struck me early on is how easy it was to become immersed in a game that was entirely virtual and in text. And it was fun, particularly as folks got more and more creative with their tweets as they ventured into the imaginary landscape. Pretty amusing.
I was reminded a bit of Jane McGonigal’s theory around gaming, particularly large-scale social gaming, and how the act of play and invention brings together a myriad of people (even zombies). I wonder how this could translate to the classroom — without zombies, perhaps, but in some other vein, so that the nature of game and play would become an undercurrent throughout the day, week, or month. I think some schools have done this, and I need to do some research.
Another thing that struck me was how different this kind of game is from other games that I play — from video games, where we are mostly in the world of someone else’s imagination, to board games. Here, although the rules provided some boundaries (I got called on the carpet for exceeding my #bite ratio and it was my own fault — didn’t read the rules carefully enough), it was the imagination of the folks playing that created the “board” on which we — the “pieces” — were moving.
I admire the folks who set Twitters vs. Zombies up, and how they created not only rules set for adaption and potential flexiblity based on users comments and suggestions, but also a spreadsheet for keeping track of data. Very interesting.
Plus, I just earned another #bite for posting this blog post. Booya. I’m back in the field …
Peace (in the game),
Kevin
PS — speaking of decomposing, that is also the name of the blog of my friend, Paul Oh. Maybe he’s a zombie, too?