Documentary Project

I want my students to be engaged not just with the historical content we study but with the world and their reading of the world. That is where documentary film could come in. I think viewing and making documentary films could be an extremely powerful medium of expression as well as a teaching tool. Currently, I am playing with this idea of having students document parts of their own lives or things that interest them as well as learning about the medium of documentary film by viewing films in that genre. Although, some of this would be able to be done during school hours an after school club would probably lend itself better in terms of time and resources. Also, with an after school club there would be less constraints and it could be a great place to flesh out ideas and make mistakes. So far I am compiling a list of the technologies we could use because I don't think it would all have to be done in a movie format. I am also exploring films to watch together to help guide our thinking and get inspiration.
My list for films to view is small right now and I would love some help. So far this is all I have..
Promises
Hoop Dreams
Born into Brothels
To Be and to Have
Iraq in Fragments
I am trying to use films that feature young people.

Anselm Kiefer, The Renowned Orders of the Night, 1997.

Media Ecology

Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. -Neil Postman
Maybe I am just sensitive but I cannot watch violence in movies or television without being affected negatively. In fact just about everything I see and listen to impacts me which on the upside can produce positive and joyful experiences but if I am not careful there can also bear out negative consequences. Billboards are in my opinion a kind of vigilante form of media especially dangerous to the media sensitive. I have thought about moving to Vermont just so I would not have to look at them anymore.

Ogden Nash got it right when he said:
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree;
Indeed, unless the billboards fall
I'll never see a tree at all

This may seem neurotic but Carl Jung thought neurosis had the ability to give invaluable instructive guidance. It pointed out a tension between the conscious and unconscious mind. Maybe the angst some of us feel at the sight of the crawl on cable news or Paris Hilton escapades is the canary in the mine warning us of trouble ahead.
What I like about the concept of media ecology is that it questions the ways that forms of media don't just add to the mental landscape but change the composition entirely. When I look at media this way than it makes me feel much more responsible for what I put out into the world and question the effects it will have on others. Although media ecology is does not have a clear framework it is interesting in that it is showing "movement toward increasing integration of both the physical and the social sciences". http://www.media-ecology.org/

My Mac and My Narcissism

O.K. so full blown narcissism is found in only 1% of the population but I have to believe that I-Pods, I-Tunes, and I-Photos are pushing me closer down the continuum to that 1%. I am just beginning to explore these technologies but find that I am getting a little obsessed with what I like and don't like and all of the things that I appropriate to represent myself. Does Apple know that is possibly promoting a DSM-II classified disease "characterized by extreme focus on oneself, and is a maladaptive, rigid, and persistent condition that may cause significant distress and functional impairment"?
It does not seem to be a coincidence that in a society where the most commonly used words in the lexicon are I and me that Mac would identify its products as I-Books, I-Tunes, I-Movies, and I-Phones. Another thing I wander about is if the logo for Mac, an apple with a bite taken out of it, could it be possibly referencing the apple off the tree of knowledge of good and evil? And if so what is Mac trying to say?

EVC

The New York City based Educational Video Center EVC http://evc.org/inspired me to start to envision my history classes as documentary film and voicethread http://voicethread.com/ studios where students are creating historical accounts all their own (talk about revisionist history). This could be fantastic for research skills, digital literacy, critical thinking and potentially social action. This could really break the model of the teacher as storyteller in high school history classes model which I am extremely guilty of but want to move away from.

What the Postman Delivered

Below are some excerpts from Neil Postman's book The End of Education. A man I used to teach with gave me this book to challenge some of my educational philosophies, it worked. Anyway I heard Postman's book Technopoly cited on a Moving at the Speed of Creativity http://www.speedofcreativity.org podcast and it prompted me to revisit him. The premise of the book is that Education needs "Gods" and that some of these Gods serve and some fail and some are false. Anyway, one of the False Gods in Postman's opinion is the God of Technology (along with Economic Utility and Consumerism). He offers a nice critique of technology and gives in my opinion helpful principles that could be modeled as guiding principles for teaching technology. I think it is critical that we show that we understand the trappings of technology as well as the benefits. That being said we should probably emphasize the ways that technology can be used to build community and increase communication (blogs),make classes more democratic and collaborative (wikis, googledocs). As well as multi-modal (Voicethread, I-Movie).

Postman
Technology education is not a technical subject. It is a branch of the humanities. Technical knowledge can be useful, but one does not need to know the physics of television to study the social and political effects of television. (191)

It should also be said that technology education does not imply a negative attitude toward technology. It does imply a critical attitude. To be “against technology” makes no more sense than to be “against food”. We can’t live without either. But to observe that it is dangerous to eat too much food, or to eat food that has no nutritional value, is not to be “antifood”. It is to suggest what may be the best uses of food. Technology education aims at students’ learning about what technology helps us to do and what it hinders us from doing; it is about how technology uses us, for good or ill, and about how it has used people in the past, for good or ill. It is about how technology creates new worlds, for good or for ill.


Ten principles
1. All technological change is a Faustian bargain. For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage.
2. The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others.
3. Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Like language itself, a technology predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments and to subordinate others. Every technology has a philosophy, which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.
4. A new technology usually makes war against an old technology. It competes with it for time, attention, money, prestige, and a “worldview”.
5. Technological change is not additive, it is ecological. A new technology does not merely add something; it changes everything.
6. Because of the symbolic forms in which information is encoded, different technologies have different intellectual and emotional biases.
7. Because of the accessibility and speed of their information, different technologies have different political biases.
8. Because of their physical form, different technologies have different sensory biases.
9. Because of the conditions in which we attend to them, different technologies have different social biases.
10. Because of their technical and economic structure, different technologies have different content biases.