“Test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposite ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain” sanity
“What we need here is an original moment.”
Now he’s using powerpoint as a vidcast? That’s a weird presentation.
Kids in Ft. Worth… write about eating ice cream.. the kids just couldn’t say enough…
“ever since I’ve been searching for the joys those Ft. Worth children brought to their writing”
“a new enthusiasm for writing when that writing is in a mediated environment accompanied by…” music, pictures, etc.
“You’ve got to see this.”
“imagine that the essay is no longer with us”
“If we can still retain the ability to function, then we can get on to other things.”
“Begin with the allegory…”
“In the simplest terms allegory says one thing and means another. It destroys the normal expectation we have about language, that our words ‘mean what they say.'”
Looking at a young child’s writing:
“the hat is provided… an icon… The central image is the hat. Drawing it I can conjure up wishes. You can do the conjuring too. See the hat.”
Grad student:
“e-portfolio… my work… design documents…”
“Graduate student has very precise concepts of rhetorical form and audience…”
“if we ask Carol, … computer-mediated communication led her back to the sense of wonder and exuberance she remembered as a child.”
presence of aesthetics… iconographic significance…
“writing academic essays is an elaborate game…”
“There are other forms of student expression that are valuable… especially to the … of student voice…”
“rhetoric, poetic, and electronic…”
“individual and collective…”
“What would the room look like with the gorilla (essay) not there?”
at the research network forum…
“hierarchy is just not as important as perspective”
“work that our students have performed” (Very different language.)
Has some weird segues into Miles Davis and James Taylor music…
Okay. I am not as impressed with these as I expected to be. The visuals are better than a podcast, but that’s about it. The child’s picture is visible and the writing legible. But the computer screen shot, which he proceeds to parse, is hard to read and I would have liked to have been able to see what he didn’t point out. So he does use visuals in a good way, but not exactly the best. Would this have been as good with a podcast? Well, he couldn’t have thrown the eye looking into infinity in there. But it’s kind of like the music. I didn’t get the connection. (Okay, the Taylor had a forced connection.)
If we are going to include this kind of technologically multimodal classroom, shouldn’t we have a better grasp of it than our students? Can we teach our students what we ourselves do not know?
Now, I have actually considered/planned on adding music and art to my Early Brit Lit class. There’s a Christian song about everyman that I want to use a clip of when we are reading Everyman. And art of Beowulf would be interesting, putting together a collection would be fun and having them rotate through the screen as we read would add a counterpoint to the melody of the poem that the original with the scop and music…
Hmm. Maybe I need to think about that a lot more than I have. Maybe my lit paper for the CCTE should be a on a multimodal presentation of Beowulf.