Feb 21: The greatest teaching aid: UFOs.

The session began with a look at the trailer / titles to a 1951 hollywood film titled "The Day the earth Stood Still". This classic film sets the stage for the traditional view of UFOs and visitors from outer space. The music for this film was composed by noted film composer Bernard Herrmann, who introduced a new instrument, the theramin, to provide the eirie mood of the tense setting. (Note how easy it is to find relevant clips on YouTube.

Chris Rutkowski then took over and spent an hour exploring UFOs as a "teaching aid". He argued that teachers need to take advantage of topics with built in interest ... such as UFOs. He demonstrated how issues of scale can be demonstrated with such simple "teaching aids" as a poppy seed bagel, where the poppy seed and bagel can represent in scale the earth and the sun. Several demonstrations expanded this idea.

The demonstration also drove home the point that technology is more than computers. When we move towards new names such as ICT, something gets lost (a la McLuhan). In this case, simple "non projected materals" and "teaching aids" get thrown out as we attempt to move towards a high tech definition of educational technology.

Feb 19: The documentary tradition

Documentary is defined by Canadian John Grierson as "the creative treatment of actuality."

Feb 14: From Riel to Review

The class began with a consideration of the upcoming first-ever Louis Riel Day, on Monday Feb. 18. Working on the assumption that if we are going to have a holiday, that we should know what the holiday is celebrating, we took time out to briefly examine Louis Riel with a technology twist. We began with a speech by Riel from a 1979 CBC film titled Riel. The excerpt we heard came from a 1979 LP.

From there we used Wikipedia to find a basic overview of Riel, and then switched to Google Images to find a photograph of the Metis flag: a white infinity symbol on a blue field.

We continued our search for Riel info by moving to DAI, or PROQUEST, a source of digitized dissertations from Ann Arbor Michigan. Twenty-three Louis Riel studies were identified. It was noted that one could obtain the abstract and the first 25 pages free. An entire dissertation could be downloaded as a pdf for approximately $40.

While on the University databases, we stopped over briefly at the massive Oxford English Dictionary Online. We searched for Metis and found, among other things, a useful timeline of the word, indicating its first use back in 1815.

The second part of the class went back to the Wikipedia phenomenon. The TEDtalks presentation by Jimmy Wales explained the theory behind an open encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone.

We concluded the session by turning to a first step in reviewing the course content.
Several questions were asked and that review is on-going.

Outline for Tues. Feb 12: Documentary

One of the major components of educational technology is the genre of documentary. This class focuses on that important domain for at least three reasons:

1. It is a genre that has re-surfaced in recent years. However, like the third element of McLuhan's tetrad, the documentary genre has been retrieved from its past usage, but retrieved with a difference. That is, the contemporary documentary, represented by the films of Al Gore and Michael Moore, are significantly different from the historic approaches. This class will examine several documentaries in order to gain an understanding of what the documentary is all about.

2. The concept documentary has at least an implicit, if not explicit tie to education and instruction.

3. The documentary today is subject to much misunderstanding.

4. There is a significant Canadian documentary tradition and contribution.

This class spent some time exploring the issue of documentary as a film form particularly relevant to educational technology.

Some of the key points were:

1. What is a documentary? This NFB film explored documentary as the "creative treatment of actuality" from John Grierson.

2. Several documentaries were viewed, exploring the breadth of the concept as well as the development of the concept:
Example: City of Gold. NFB 1961. Pierre Berton. Music: Eldon Rathburn. Producer/director Roman Kroiter (Winnipeger who also created I-Max. as well as "direct cinema" style." Three basic components: visual, voice, music. Visual is the photography; Every frame is a work of art. Voice is either narrator or actors voices. Music melds it together.

The Spaghetti Story was a 1961 April Fools joke which used all the techniques of documentary to illustrate how the documentary conveys a feeling of truth and accuracy.

Contemporary documentaries were excerpted including :
Michael Moore. Bowling for Columbine. Style: in-your-face beligerent humour. One non-fiction film: Canadian Bacon with Alan Alda and John Candy.
Al Gore. An inconvenient truth.
TV reality shows demonstrate the latest post-documentary style.

Documentary modes may be grouped into four categories (Nichols 1991)
Expository (voice of authority) City of Gold, nature documentaries,etc.
Observational (fly on the wall) eg. Lonely Boy; most single camera student documentaries
Interactive (includes the presence of the documentarist) eg. Michael Moore
Reflexive (invents subject matter). Talks about itself. eg. Al Gore shows the making of Inconvenient Truth

A typology of information technology users: Where do you fit

The Pew Internet & American Life Project produces reports that explore the impact of the internet on families, communities, work and home, daily life, education, health care, and civic and political life."

This group has produced a typology of internet users. You can find out where you fit by taking their online test here

The study's pdf report is here.

Feb 7: Marshall McLuhan Parts 3 and 4

This class will finish McLuhan's Wake. A follow up discussion will apply the tetrad to specific examples.

Time permitting, a follow-up dealing with the previous class will focus on these issues:
1. Google Jockeying
2. Issues of copyright.

Assignment "Ideas worth Trying" is due today.

Feb 5: John Finch. Manitoba Education

John Finch is a consultant at Manitoba Education who consults in the Information and Communications Technology program. His presentation (Feb 5) covered three areas.

1. A continuum model for Literacy with ICT Across the Curriculum (available online)
2. Digital Citizenship. (Check online for 9 dimensions of Digital Citizenship).
3. EPearl: A process portfolio being introduced into many school divisions in Manitoba. EPearl is a Concordia University product.

A35 Presentations

Thur Feb 21

• Chris Rutkowski (UFOs.)
• Review for exam

Tues Feb 26

• Ruth, Jaclyn, Michelle (Using PAINT)
• Christina, Katie, Gabi ((Males in choirs)
• Alice, Christie (---)

Thur Feb 28

• Alain, Ellery (percussion)
• Cecilia, Karen, Erin (useful technologies)
• Christine, Shelby, Melissa (Garage Band)

A13 Presentations

Tues Feb 19

• Brett, Jamie (I), Jamie (II).

Thur Feb 21

• Ashley, Catherine, Amanda
• Carla, Anne, Lorraine

Tues Feb 26

• Kim, Michelle, Lisa

Thur Feb 28

• Pattie, James, Mary
• Laureen, Francine, Meaghan, Darin
• Langrill, Drew, Curtis
• Shawn, Karl, Dwayne

Tues March 4

• Stacy, Robyn, Crystal

A 14 Presentations

Tues Feb 19

• Kate, Keri and Brandi

Thur Feb 21

• Gavin, Eric, Paul: Podcasting

Tues Feb 26

• Amanda, Jeremy, Nate: Bullying
• Melissa, Charlene, Sandra: Louis Riel
• Andrew, Gavin, Kelvin, Andy: Space Travel

Thur Feb 28

• Laurel, Debbie, Nicole, Melissa: Movie Maker
• Angela, Athena, Sharon, Fleur: iMovie
• Olivia, Tannis, Richard: Brain academy
• Sarah, Jenn, Kristin: Sex education
• Tyler, Dan, Marco: Smoking
• Lisa: Adult Ed / Listening

Thursday Feb 7. McLuhan Part 3 and 4

This class will wrap up the McLuhan documentary with parts 3 and 4: Retrieve and Reverse.

Tuesday Feb 5: Manitoba Department of Education ICT standards

This class welcomes John Finch from the Department of Ed. John will take the entire class period to walk us through the (new) ICT technology standards for Manitoba.

Note we have already seen the ISTE standards (US based). If you do not have a copy of the summary, get one here.

In the days to come, we will examine one more set of standards (from UNESCO). These have just been released last month , January 2008).

Help on McLuhan

Introducing McLuhan
Initial thoughts

In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan predicted that education would be transformed as society embraced what he called variously “electric technologies”, electronic technologies, or media. His arguments were both provocative and controversial. He became a celebrity. Some thought him a genius; others a charlatan. His most famous statement was the provocative “the medium is the message.”

After his death in 1980, his ideas seemed to vanish quickly. But somewhere around the beginning of the 21st century, people began to look back and to realize that his predictions and theories were coming true. Contemporary technologies were indeed having a critical impact on contemporary schooling and contemporary education.

Sir Ken Robinson said that we have no idea what we are teaching kids for. The future, he says, is just too unknown. His answer: We need to encourage creativity. McLuhan’s answer: Teaching about technology is the only way we can avoid being pulled down by the vortex of commercialism, hype, globalization.

McLuhan and his Canadian colleagues argued that the growing information technologies would transform formal education.

The basic idea behind media theory is that communication media are not simply conduits for transmitting information. Instead the media themselves influence the meaning of a message and therefore the media shape our society. Therefore, the media ultimately shape our educational system. The medium is the message. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

McLuhan argued that all media do four things: They enhance a human function; they extend our senses. They make obsolete something that we used to use. They retrieve a function that we previously had lost. When pushed to the extreme they reverse into unintended functions.

We live in spaces. If our vision is highlighted, then we live in a visual space.
When audio is highlighted, we are in an acoustic space. Spaces were assumed to be based on our senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch.
Today, there seems to be a new electronic space. Or, digital space. Being thoughtful about digital space is sometimes dubbed digital citizenship.

McLuhan’s Wake is a 90 minute documentary film that explores McLuhan structured loosely through his “four laws”.

See an excellent review at http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/mcluhanswake.php

The resource guide for the film is available at
http://www.nfb.ca/webextension/mcluhanswake/resource.html