I’m attending the PBWorks Camp for teachers, and this is my homework for my second week, a screencast made using Jing on how Styles in MS Word can help in writing long pieces such as academic papers or business reports: 2009-07-02_1211
I re-did this a number of times, dealing with –
fitting what I wanted to say to the time available
figuring out what to leave out
making sure my set-up worked
reducing the size of my Word screen so I could fit everything into a smaller frame
stumbling while I was recording
I really like learning from screen captures myself, so I enjoyed creating one
All the brouhaha about financial game playing and our perilous financial system has brought a question to my mind: why do we talk about wages with percentages?
%
If someone, A, making $20,000. gets a 5% raise, that’s $1000.00 dollars and they now make
$21,000.
If someone, B, making $200,000. gets the same percentage, 5%, they get $10,000, and now make
$210,000.
Both get 5%, which sounds equal, but, in fact, A got 10% of what B got, and B got %1000of what A received, or half of A’s salary.
In plain language,
B received $9000. more than A.
So a year later they each get a 5% raise again.
A started at $21,000. this time and got $1050. which gave A a total of
$22,050.
B started at $210,000. this time and got $10,500. which gave B
$220,500.
This time
B received $9,450. more than A,
that is, at the same percentage rate,
the actual difference in money increases by $450.
and each time they get another 5% raise, the difference will increase.
The rich get richer, faster.
Here’s my refined Querulous Question #1:
Why do we use percentages to talk about wage increases when that only increases the disparity every time? B gets increasingly more than A, so the difference between their wages keeps increasing. Why don’t we just say what the actual numbers are?
I’d really like to know if it’s just habit and convenience or if there’s an actual, communication-based reason for this.
The most fascinating thing about the web is that there is no end; there is always more and new.
The most frustrating thing about the web is that there is no end; there is always more and new.
Everything is always changeable. My website – jnthweb.ca – is not the same now as it was a half-hour ago. I just added my most recent brilliant idea,
Currently, I look at Twitter using the third or fourth application I’ve tried. It’s Nambu now; it was TweetDeck, and who knows what I’ll try next. And Twitter is the poster child for constant change, as Tweet after Tweet flips by.
My friend showed me her new laptop today, and I drooled enviously, although mine does everything I want and need and is only a little more than a year old.
I’m behind in my Bloglines again, no, make that still. I never did fully catch up.
Trying to catch up! - via Creative Commons/Flickr
So I love the web, and I learn so much from what often feels like frittering my time away, but there is no end to what you can learn to do and learn and do on it. Clay Shirky, in Here Comes Everybody, says in the first 100 years after the invention of the printing press, it broke more than it fixed. I know that the printing press brought endless developments with it from dictionaries to science, from the Enlightenment to romance novels, and more. And here we are in the same early stage with the web, where everything is alway beta, never done!
An autodidact is someone who learns outside of regular school settings, someone who teaches herself (or himself). It used to be a kind of demeaning label, meaning someone who had spotty and uncertified knowledge. I claim the label “autodidact” as a badge of honour! I used to learn from books, even sometimes from tv, but now we have the web. I love the web. I learn so much from what I find on it.
Recently I gave myself a task that requires me to learn more about how to create web pages. I’d heard about CSS and knew, theoretically, what it could do. But every time I tried to do anything using it I hit THE GAP. THE GAP is the point where I get stuck and can’t go any further, even though I can see what I could do two steps along the learning path I’m on. When I hit THE GAP, I’m stuck. What I do then, is ask a knowledgable friend, if I can find one, or, more often, find a workaround. For a while, my workaround was wikis. I love wikis but they’re meant for sharing, not for using as your personal website, although they can work, sort of, as one.
One of My Wikis
Sometimes I find something a lot of the design work has been done for me, and I use that. Blogger had templates, and so does WordPress, which I graduated to.
My Blog
But my design vision just isn’t satisfied.
I used tools like the old Netscape Composer and currently its grandchild, Nvu, both of which are WYSIWYG web page creators.
My Domain
But my reach exceeds my grasp because I want something I have more control over. I want to produce the kind of website that says to readers “this person has powerful content: you can tell by the appearance!” (I’ve read the research on how people are reading before they decode a single word. The appearance of the text and page gives information that signals information to readers which profoundly affects how they take in the content.)
I’ve learned a little HTML code, and I’ve bookmarked sites where I can find more. But I’ve never taken a course in it, and a lot of it just looked bizarre and unreadable to me. (I was a text person initially, and not technically inclined, but I want to communicate on the web so I have to learn how to do so wholistically.) And using “View Source” and copy/paste seemed to me like a kind of plaigarism and theft. (What can I say? I’m old-school.)
Sometimes I think I learn backwards. I know my desired destination but I keep getting blocked at THE GAP. But I continue to struggle to build a little further out into the unknown territory, and I learn something from each struggle. Each struggle closes THE GAP a little more. I read manuals and follow instructions but I think most people who are inside the knowledge bubble have trouble being aware of what those outside the bubble might not know. The instructions are crisp and clear until they mention going to the “terminal shell” or some other ‘obvious’ term. Huh? Wikipedia tells me what it is, but I don’t get how to use it in this set of instructions. (I’m not the knowledgable audience they were writing for.) So I stop and try some other path. Till I get frustrated with it, because I’ve foundTHE GAP in it. I’m really good at findingTHE GAP. So when I find someone, often on the web, who explains things in a way I can understand, someone who gives me the practical aspects of the concept, I am delighted, excited and grateful.
That happened to me today. I found Chris Coyier’s video on HTML & CSS – The VERY Basics. 32 minutes of pure pleasure. He shrank –the gap – till it virtually (no pun etc.) disappeared for me.
He has a gift for teaching and I’m a grateful student.
Clay Shirky, in Here Comes Everybody says “for a hundred years after, the printing press broke more things than it fixed” (pg. 73).
We are watching parallel occurrences currently. CBC’s Sunday Report broadcast this excellent informative description of what is happening to newspapers now.
We are living in confusing times because we are living through the biggest change in human communications since the printing press, maybe the biggest change ever. You can see this in the small changes that happen as we leave an old technology for a new. It is clear that newspapers and magazines, even tv, are challenged by the web. (Some tv shows are becoming almost loss leaders for the web. At the end of every news show, watchers are invited to see more information, visuals, and details on the show’s website.)
The table of contents on the left is clear and easy to read, and each of the story teasers links directly to the story.
Most other papers have sites that aren’t nearly as easy for users to sort through and read. They are still using layout similar to the paper layout. The New York Times have produced a game-changing news site design; it is no longer a website emulating the newsPAPER. It is a news website that will appeal to readers who aren’t going to the newspaper website as an adjunct to the paper. It is a news site design that those who haven’t grown up reading newspapers will gravitate toward. I think it is one of the small changes that lets go of the legacy format, and truly adapts to the new medium. I wonder what McLuhan would say!
Now the next question is how they will monitize it.
Michael Wesch is a pedagogical hero of mine. I’ve watched videos his classes made; I’ve watched a video of him explaining his teaching, and I asked a question on Twitter, and even though he doesn’t follow me, got an anwser from him within a few hours! He understands the impact of the new communication ecosphere we swim in, applies his understanding to his teaching, and can explain clearly why this is urgently central to education.
Here is a link to my highlighted copy of his recent Academic Commons article – From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able which I discovered via Stephen Downes. Indeed, as Wesch says, you set up your network and information comes to you.
As a longtime communications teacher, I am fascinated by our changing communications media and platform. And when I’m teaching, no matter the direct subject I’m teaching, I never lose awareness of the changes our culture is going through, and the responsibility of teachers to help prepare our students for this new and rapidly evolving communications environment. They will be swimming in it for the rest of their professional and personal lives.
What is often unnoticed is that in just over a century we have gone from having one way of recording, putting marks on paper, to multiple ways of recording, all more viscerally immediate than text. Photographs, recorded sound, moving pictures all speak more directly to our senses and emotions than squiggles on paper – which our minds must translate into meaning before we can have our sense and emotional responses. It is easier to think critically when text is what we are ‘reading’ than it is when we see and hear less mediated (so to speak) representations of the world we live in. We are now living in what Ong called “secondary orality” and that is what our students have been growing up in, and to a certain extent, what we grew up in too.
I have never known a world without photographs, radio and records, movies and television. However, text was still the dominant medium, at least in my educational experiences, for most of my early schooling, and mass media ruled. I looked, listened and watched, but I could only critique; I couldn’t participate.
Now I can sit in my study and produce multimedia, as in this blog post.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
The audio is poor, but understandable, and I’m combining text with video. I can embed other sites, like what I thought about this new multimedia platform that we can access using computers –
and I can link to other sites for readers/viewers who want to explore more of the educational possibilities – http://jnthweb.pbwiki.com/
and I can make movies using my screen –
Vodpod videos no longer available.
more about “Generating a Table of Figures in Word…”, posted with vodpod
There are other tools that I can use to create a mixed media text, and, here is the point I want to make:
We need to be teaching our students (technical and non-technical) how to compose using the expanding possibilities of the web as a multimedia, participatory communication platform!
“Autodidact” was, at one point, a mocking term. Someone who had taught themselves was someone who didn’t really know because they hadn’t learned in the authority-approved, academy-approved, institutional manner. They were “undisciplined” because they were outside of the academic disciplines. Yet the connotations around this word are shifting. As the web, with the immediacy of its access to information, becomes more and more a part of our lives, more people are learning outside of the traditional institutions. Being an autodidact now has more caché, and more real value.
Most people who are web 2.0 savvy are autodidacts because they have taught, and are continuously teaching, themselves about what is available and what can be done with it. All kinds of people are learning outside our educational institutions. Some are now skillful learners despite having struggled to learn inside the institutions. And inside our educational institutions, the most exciting and dramatic changes in human communication EVER are often being ignored and avoided by many who should be leaders in learning. In my opinion, universities and colleges are just not keeping up.
Don’t get me wrong; there are amazing people out there doing amazing things in their classes. I loved Virginia Yonkers’ description of a course she developed; it blew me away. It’s a course that everyone should take, IMHO. We all need to know about “communication (mobile communication technologies such as cell phones, pda’s, video conferencing), information sharing (pod and vodcasting, visual information software, blogs, pageflakes), collaboration (wikis, groupware), and networking (facebook, LinkedIn, Ning)”. I admire the hands-on action research approach she uses with her students, but what I admire most deeply is the framework she has created so her students are learning the complexities of the impact of the new communication tools – (read her post!)
Yonkers demonstrates something very important with her design of this course, something that educational institutions should be paying close attention to because it is the value-added aspect of the expensive education they are meant to provide. It is easy, now, to find information on the web, and tutorials, both free and with a price. All kinds of people offer books and videos for sale on all kinds of topics on the web. But what Yonkers offers, and what universities should/ could be offering, is a rich learning context lead by a fellow learner who is skilled in shaping learning for herself and her students. Her students are learning applications, and the communications implications of these new tools, in a rich social learning environment. (A comment of hers on her post reveals that the technical environment wasn’t that rich.)
I have taught myself at least basic use of most of the applications she has her students use. I am an autodidact where web 2.0 is involved. I chose what blogs to follow, I harvest links from Twitter and my Bloglines account, and I use del.icio.us (and diigo) to be able to re-find links I value. But when I read this –
I know that I need deeper, richer, more contextual learning than I can get from being alone f2f with my computer screen. I need a learning community to bounce ideas off and learn new possibilities from. I envy Yonkers and her students. I’ll leave you with Yonkers list of what current and future workers need to know, and a question: How widespread, do you think, is the teaching and learning of these work literacies?
Learning Living 