Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Digital literacy….expanded (last part of preconference workshop)




This post is full of links to really good visual resources - highly recommended

Really big thrill for me today as I got to have lunch with Tracy Mitrano from Cornell, trying really hard not to gush like a foolish schoolgirl. Then after lunch she and Joan Falkenberg Getman gave a presentation and led a discussion on the topic above, considering how we move from information literacy to digitial, visual, technological literacies and fluencies.

Starting with the video Copyright v Copyleft 


Tracy went on to discuss the obligation we have to students to help them navigate the online world, not to scare them with horror stories but not to be complacent about the law either. She really struck a chord with me, talking about our moral duty to educate students about the law, the reality of the now that they must follow, whether they like it or not, but not to just leave it at that. It is just as important to help them understand the basis of the current situation and let them see they can have a voice to influence change. 

Moving away from legal area of copyright, she drew the distinction between that and academic integrity. Again starting from a different perspective and avoiding being directive of referencing/plagiarism dos and donts. Her approach was to welcome students into the academic community and to help them recognise that as part of that academic community, they are adopting our philosophy of being respectful of other people's work, contributing to the community by sharing the work of others and citing it accurately. 

Joan shared her experiences of being part of the Horizon Report committee and their commitment to "eat their own dog food". Picking key features of their approach:
Immersion - collective intelligence (of 50+ members), wiki (online collaborative writing), social bookmarking (share resources that persist), online ranking (helping sort and synthesise), publishing (pdf of "fixed" version plus living version produced through comment press), openness through creative commons

Horizon Report - CommentPress 


More about CommentPress

Joan then went on to share a whole range of digital resource/visual literacy resources, all were really interesting and definitely worth further investigation


Graphic Facilitation (a flipchart activity will never be the same for me again):

Explore Research Literature visually - RefViz

New approaches to presenting:
Virtual Macbeth - by Angela Thomas
Digital storytelling - Alan Levine's 50+ ways to tell the Dominoe story
Vaiku - a video based haiku that must be exactly 17 seconds long and made of 3 frames (5 seconds, 7 seconds, 5 seconds) - Example

New approach to thinking (?)
More information about Cornell's Digital Literacy Resource

6 comments:

  1. sounds like a good workshop - lots of interesting links to catch up with.

    i'm not sure about eating dog food - my own or anyone else's, thank you very much - but thought it'd be worth making a comment about the 5-frame photo story. i had a go at doing a couple of these a while ago, thinking it'd be something quite light-hearted and distracting in the short-term - but it turned out being a lot tricksier than it sounds. (at least, to do it well is quite difficult - although maybe that's just me!) so i was wondering whether there was anything about attitudes/perceptions to introducing similar sorts of activities?

    and...will we be seeing 5 frame photo stories of the denver experience from you and helen? :)

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  2. Sorry about the dog food but it is one of my favourite weird expressions so whenever someone actually says it I can't resist it.

    There was discussion in the session about just how challenging these simple-looking activities can be, so no, it isn't just you, and if you think the 5-frame thing is hard the vaiku thing was just mind-blowing. The discussion was about the literacies needed to use media, and particularly visualisation, to present and share learning, that this isn't easy and that it takes a different mindset to synthesise and visualise in a way that looks good and still retains meaning. Joan talked a lot about the challenges we face in developing new literacies, I'm not sure I can effectively paraphrase so I've asked her for the slides on the challenges and will share them when I get them.

    5 frames from us....tempting, very tempting

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  3. Gaagh! not too much, just so much!

    I love the vaiku and 5 frames things! How ace would it be to have the shuspace still replaced with a vaiku, or a picture sequence?

    Will dig into these more.
    h

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  4. I know it is all pretty cool - but I mostly jealously covert the skills of graphic facilitation

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  5. vaiku idea just starting to sink in....really liking it

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  6. I'm green-eyed too. But if I could draw like that I'd probably be cartoon artist instead.
    We should pick up on the Horizon Report, but the links were all fab, and I'd like to get my hands on RefViz. What a great way to do a lit-search.

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