Lisa C. Miller
It’s kind of odd, but my reading for this course is now crashing into the assignments and projects I am rushing to finish before the beginning of the next week. We are having to create a digital “movie” as part of the class and I have just now read Miller’s description of the process of creating digital movies for storytelling in the classroom. Of course, I already understood the context of this activity, the making of a movie for my ENGL 7741 class. I recognize that the instructor is trying to lure some of us out of our written text focused minds into the digital realm where so many of our students dwell. My own children have grown up with things like YouTube, so the value of digital film is perhaps more taken for granted by them than by me.
Miller’s trials and tribulations with technology make her own story seem a little dated. I can’t imagine anything but my own personal limitations preventing me from completing my own assignment, paltry as it is, and certainly not any limitations of either the technology available to me. The rationale for utilizing creative multimedia in the classroom is completely convincing. I understand, at an intellectual level, that this is something of value which could create opportunities for planning from lesson to lesson, building an artifact that could exist in an online portfolio of work from which a teacher could both assess product, process, performance, and improvement over time. Immensely valuable stuff. And based on my experience in the ENGL 7735, Teaching Writing class, I can make a strong connection between the kind of writing/storytelling that our instructor has engaged us in the ideas advanced by Miller, and I can now acknowledge the utility of integrating the methods of teaching writing ;earned in that class and the methods of producing a text/product to be shared learned in this class. Finally, at the end of the semester, ideas are kind of flowing together and making sense and I am beginning to realize that the ideas I hold about writing are not incompatible with the ideas that have been posited in ENGL 7741.
Indeed, I recall that one of my students last semester presented one of her projects in digital format, which at the time was quite astonishing to me. There is however, one reservation that I continue to hold about the integration of digital media and the teaching of English language arts, and it speaks more about me than it does about the technology. I am extremely averse to uploading anything online. I am very against putting myself out there in the read/write web. I hate the idea of sharing like that. I am an immensely private person, even posting this log on my blog is a “painful” experience. I don’t want to share these “ramblings.” If I am to put something out there it needs to be done with far more care and deliberation than the process or time has allowed for this course. My first instinct for my own digital film, once it has been graded, is to go online and remove it. Scrub it out of existence. I don’t want it out there. I hate the idea of it being viewed by anyone other than my instructor. At the same time, I am trying to get some of my own writing published in the traditional manner. It might seem like a contradiction but it comes down to my own values. I still value the written word above all other forms of expression. But I recognize that these are my values, and that they are unlikely to be the values of my students. And that is the rationale behind this course, and why our instructor is pressing us to open our minds and consider the unthinkable: joining the kids in the virtual world.
No comments:
Post a Comment