Twenty five ovaries on the table at the dementia centre

Grandpa was in full grump today launching into a convoluted complaint that saw him railing against slippers, moving horizons  and zimmerframes.

After startling me by claiming to see twenty five ovaries on the table ... a conjured image so disconcerting that I still haven’t shaken out of my mind – [Trust me - thinking of belladonna lilies as “naked ladies”   just isn’t the same thing as imagining a vase of pink tinged stalked ovaries] –he  started his grump

It seems that slippers are noted for their ability to “betray and disappoint”  ....“all these slippers that give you bad service “- “one sole is an inch wider than the other sole .... you fool ... what can you expect from rubber soles ... etc etc  ... until he runs out of froth and gazes bleary eyed  at the foreign pair of slippers he has jammed on his feet ...he then adds without any sense of chagrin  ....”especially when they are not mine” ...

He wanted to know why when he drinks juice from the green plastic tumblers the horizon moves ... “just when you are certain that you know where you are the horizon moves and the juice that should have gone into your mouth runs out the side and rolls down your chin” ... I have had a similar horizon shift experience but not with juice in green plastic tumblers but he settled only when reassured that “horizon shift” was as he suspected a design flaw in the tumbler

And then we hit the zimmer frame argument – it seems that despite the best intentions in Grandpa’s observations zimmer frames in dementia centres end up being “one of those  things you can put in people’s way rather than put in people’s hands.” – he has rich anecdote to support this conclusion.

I loved this insight because putting things in people’s way rather than putting things in people’s hands seems to be something we struggle with a lot in education –

Identifying what are the conditions of value in teaching and learning and then identifying  what might enhance these conditions (“putting things in people’s hands”)  or betray these conditions (“putting things in peoples way”) is something I think about a lot with respect to ICTs and education.

I was still thinking about Grandpa’s zimmer frame classification and the twenty five ovaries when I checked my bloglines account ....

The Valve blog ... a must read has a site disclaimer that helps me clarify the things I love about bloggers

The blogs I keep coming back to have

“Authors' ideas, faiths, hypotheses, stubbornness’s against assaults of reason and evidence, points of literary honor, interests, temperaments, obsessions, political affiliations, high-bouncing utopian ideals, limpet-like reactionary attachments, elective affinities, stylistic crotchets, journalistic forays and hobbyhorses [that ] are their own, not their fellow authors [bloggers] ...ALSC's. The Valve Blog Association of Literary Scholars and Critics

The Teaching for lust  and Linguistics for administrators   posts features the 30 million plus views YouTube Hotforwords philogogist and teacher Marina explaining the various meanings of “dope”

I have been thinking about how to engage teachers in unpacking the new media literacies in the context of education, referring to Jenkin's white paper for insight

A definition of twenty-first century literacy offered by the New Media Consortium (2005) is
“the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual, and digital literacy overlap.These include the ability to understand the power of images and sounds, to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute them pervasively, and to easily adapt them to new forms” (p. 8).We would modify this definition in two ways. First, textual literacy remains a central skill in the twenty-first century. Before students can engage with the new participatory culture, they must be able to read and write. Youth must expand their required competencies, not push aside old skills to make room for the new. Second, new media literacies should be considered a social skill. P19  Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

... but after being sensitised by Grandpa’s twenty five ovaries it strikes me that Marina may provide a better professional learning discussion example of the use of new media literacies in education – for the effectiveness of the content communicated cannot be valued by looking at the text alone.

The Valve post lets us know that evaluating the audio track tells us the content is competently captured

At Brainstorm, the ever-trenchant Richard Tabor Greene tested the videos on his students (I’m sure violating the guidelines of his institutional review board for human-subjects research in the process):
Now, evaluating this audio track—she chose to explicate word histories and does a simple competent job, if not an extraordinary job. Indeed, if you close your eyes and ignore her bulging breasts, the impression of stupidity from her goes completely away. I tested this on students the other day, giving them the audio and giving a control group the video versions, and asking ratings of 50 randomly combined dimensions. A cropped video version without her breasts upped her non-stupidity score, nearly doubling it.

I tested Marina on the adolescents who pass through the corridor – they were engaged, provoked, interested and could recall everything   - an observation that makes me think again about the possibilities in the new curriculum for teachers who obviously have much to learn about creating multiliteracy based communications for students in ways that are “open, rich, undermining, charged, connected, and practical”.

All of which leaves me with the same question but in a different context

How can we avoid education in the new literacies becoming an example of “corruptio optimi pessima” the corruption of the best is the worst of all?

Comments

[botts]

what... the biggest boobs in the history of artichoke and there's no comments.... puhleease!!!!

interesting that the fact that marina is blonde and has big boobs is immediate reason to question her intelligence. the pervasiveness of media stereotyping has caused us to become blind to the possibility of blondes being intelligent and we've fallen hook line and sinker.

why does brainstorm even consider the need to "test" the videos? as stated, they are educationally and factually sound if not earth shatteringly original in content. if they were delivered by some unshaven fat bloke from the south west of oz would they still be put to the same scrutiny? i think not....

and now... back to the boobs

botts

[artichoke]

Botts you rescue me ... I too had been marvelling at the complete absence of comment on this post ... it has so many different ideas for educators to contest .. and as you note ... it has boobs

I wondered if it is our middleclassness - our conservative bias -that makes us uncomfortable/ or in this case completely unable to comment on using the erotic to enhance new media literacies/ communication

(something we cheerfully dissect wrt sex messages in advertising in our media studies classes)

I am glad you picked up on the assumption of stupidity in Tabor Greene's analysis ... I had wondered if it was a gender thing ... because I didn't assume stupidity at all when I viewed the clip

I was interested in how we don't yet understand clearly the use of participatory media and multiliteracies in education - if you check out Marina's clip you see images, text, icons, voice, camera angles, lighting, video framing, topical choice of content, body positioning, facial expression, etc etc not to mention the heaving breasts - combined to get the message across - it makes the stuff that most of us are generating for TeacherTube look pretty lame - as any comparison of viewer stats will confirm - and I suspect it also means that we don't understand enough about multuiliteracies to teach others how to do it well.

The Sahel article in the National Geographic and Martin Thrupp's Education’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’: Part One – Persistent Middle Class Advantage have both reminded me how dislocated we are as a profession from the important stuff that goes on in others lives.

[botts]

ok... let's draw this out some more.

question 1. how many people specifically view the 'hotforwords' youtube videos because they want to / need to / know they will / learn something? just because its educational we immediately suppose its agreed purpose is education, but i'm thinking there's a bunch of 14 yr old boys going phwooaahh look at those, turn down the sound its distracting my perverted thoughts...... etc etc

hector20067 says -
i can't pay attention to what u're saying because of your things:)):P

boboshanti1 says -
Marina when are we going to see you completely NAKED?? You sexy, crazy,Croatian beauty!!!!!

and on it goes....

question 2. assuming we have a plentiful supply of ict interested teachers with heaving breasts, how long would it take for some lame ed dept official or smothering parent to complain, demand answers regarding the use of inapproprate 'stuff' in schools?

question 3. who are we teaching this multiliteracy skill to? kids are doing it without our help. most teachers don't know / don't want to know / don't have the time to learn to know / how to do it effectively. so maybe the answer is to teach skills about recognising the worth of multiple literacies. teach skills about recognising good use of multiple literacies. teach skills about accepting multiple literacies as a valid form of expression. it'd be like teaching art history to people who can't draw. they can see the art and recognise it's worth and it's beauty and even it's validity, they just can't do it themselves.

question 4. i watched the ted video again and when thinking about qu. 3 i got to thinking that maybe the other necessary skill is to do with freedom and release and relinquishing power and letting creativity back in again. should we not be teaching our teachers about the inner child, about letting ourselves be awestruck by the beauty that surrounds us, about being brave enough to accept that we don't know everything, about touching the sky? why do we insist on seeing the mechanics of the thing over and over? when we can divide by four why do it over and over and over? why not teach them music and show them the 4/4 beat or the 3/4 beat? the repetition is the same, the outcome (dividing by 4) is still the same, its just the method and the context of delievry that has changed.

oh yes - the sahel thing is perhaps the most beautifully worded piece i've read for quite some time - thankyou for the link to that.

botts