it was a fine place that i would say, to see some interesting presentations, and also with warming environment. I enjoyed that day, of course it was also partially because of the weather.However I was thinking, that it could’ve been going a step further. Facebook Twitter, yea great stuff, but I guess I was looking forward to something with gaming or more media related presentations. (by gaming NOT second life)So here are some pictures. The reception, also where the tag teams was. tag desk of the symposium, which thought it rocks!and also saying, Thank you for your work Tag Desk team!MOO stickers! also was a great idea, which I want to use in a different conference!
Archives for April 2008
Will you marry me?
I received my first almost marriage proposal on Saturday at the TLT symposium when I suggested that I relay instructions to my fellow classmates through Twitter. The day was a blast. I truly enjoyed passing notes with my 597 community. We had the chance to conduct conversations about diverse topics when we were in opposite sides of the conference center. It was interesting to see how many of the topics were related and the different questions my classmates posed. It is also a challenge to get our thoughts into 140 characters. We’ve now developed our own lingo. 597 has now become part of my new PSU community, something I didn’t have when I first arrived in January. I’ve had the opportunity to gain a deep respect for each person in the class.
Lessig opens up a lot of questions for me. He showed us these great videos and talked about how it gives cultural access to anyone with a $1500 computer. He’s right, but as usual, my concern is those without access to that computer. I worry about the grand canon that is being created between the haves and the have nots. My background in the arts wonders how artists who make their living through creating works will be protected. It takes a lot of time and money to create these videos, music, and scripts. I plan on reading more of his books to familiarize myself with his ideas.
Lessig’s style is both entertaining and informative. I’d like to know exactly how he creates his presentations and how to achieve the perfect timing. It is a great way to teach modern students.
The workshops made me more aware of the identity I create online. I realize now when I place items on Facebook that professors, classmates, former students and so many other people can see it. I’ll adopt the Mother Meter for Facebook. If my mother wouldn’t approve of the content on my Facebook page, don’t post it!
I fully enjoyed working at the TAG table. It was a great way to interact with professors at other campuses and learn about their research. I also had the opportunity to teach about Twitter and explain Facebook. These are things I couldn’t do just a few short months ago.
Overall, the TLT was a great day. I look forward to next year and possibly taking a greater role in the festivities.
I am not the only one!! Check this out!
Read the original at my blog for cool links
Funked has many cool links to the past if you read the original not in Pligg. The links never come through. Adds more to the story and thanks for your great support!!
Donna
Survivor: Web2.0, and the Twitter Community Challenge
PSU seemed to be the center of the universe during this past week. With many prominent figures on campus, I am fortunate to have seen one of the most intelligent, passionate, and inspiring speakers imaginable. His speech opened my eyes to the possibility of change, the need for change, and a proposed plan for a path to change. It is also worth noting that my new outlook is not unique, as nearly every other member of the capacity-level crowd has since expressed similar reactions.The funny thing is, I am not referring to Barack Obama. Nor am I referring to Bill Clinton. And I am certainly not referring to Jerome Bettis – wow, PSU really was the center of the universe last week! The speaker I am referring to is Lawrence Lessig, keynote speaker for the 2008 TLT Symposium. Lessig’s presentation, which cleverly explained and explored digital creativity and its surrounding issues to, at times, John Phillips Sousa, writing, and Latin, has opened my eyes to need for an updated, intelligent revision of copyright law. Enter Creative Commons. Fortunately (and appropriately), Lessig has made his speech available to the PSU community, though this version omits some of the brilliance of the slideshow that is playing behind him (and Read My Lips is slightly out of sync, comprising the effect). I recommend you watch it in its entirety. While Lessig is awe-inspiring and worth more than what I have written thus far, I would like to dedicate this entry to the TLT Symposium itself and the community of which I am now a part. I am fortunate to have found my way into State College, then PSU, and then CI 597C, where I have met the awesome Cole Camplese and Scott McDonald. They have opened my eyes and mind to new resources and possibilities in the pedagogical process. One such resource was Saturday’s symposium.I am part of Team Tweets, a group that selected Twitter as the technology to present. We selected Twitter because we had never heard of it, not quite aware of how much potential it would have. When Allan Gyorke sent his 8 Steps for the TLT Symposium that included the plea to use Twitter, we saw an opportunity for our class to actively use Twitter in their own teaching/learning experience at the symposium. I think we are all glad that we did!Several blog entries (John, Micala, Reginald, Renegade) have been posted expressing how Twitter helped enhance their symposium experience. They, as do I, credit Twitter and the sub-community it facilitated with making this conference more meaningful to us. I, while sitting in a session on Collaborative Techniques for First Year Seminars, was able to communicate with a new Twitter-friend who was in a session on Social Networking. While we were discussing the same topic and having an active conversation, it wasn’t until about 30 minutes into the session that we realized we were in different rooms! Later, as I was fulfilling my responsibilities at the Tag Team Table, I met several nice people who had written their Twitter names on their name tags. I added my Twitter name and we struck up a nice conversation. In fact, we have still be following each other’s tweets and I have even been following their blogs (hopefully you are following mine now, Micala and Reginald!). Twitter helped facilitate small talk — or did it eliminate the awkwardness of it?These are just two of many observations and thoughts I have regarding Twitter and the new community to which I now belong. I need to save the rest for my discussion in class next week so that the class hears new material =)Another emerging issue is the awkwardness of using Twitter while attending a presentation — be it lecture, session, etc. Is sacrificing eye contact with the facilitator worth the added benefits of discussing the lecture topic? For which parties is it beneficial: facilitator, participant, or both? What other challenges does a Meet & Tweet present?These and many others are issues we need to tackle as a group in addition to focusing on the positives of Twitter. “The group” includes CI597C as well as the new community who is hopefully following our class’ blogs. Feel free to participate!For now, I need to change my copyrights to Creative Commons licenses!
Not a Buzzkill. I’m Just Sayin…My Identity is Funked
The musical group Foreigner is staging a “Comeback Tour”. It is sponsored by the AARP. That got a big laugh during Leno’s headlines bit last night. I laughed too, but then it hit me hard. Things are going to be different. And it is not just about getting older. It is all about community identity and how it will be designed for us. I remember freedom, sorta.
As I am now a card-carrying member of the AARP (when did THAT happen?), I guess I should feel pretty good about the fact that I came back to school, overcame my “deer-in-the-headlights” terror over using such technologically sophisticated applications such as ANGEL, and relish the fact that I survived the first several weeks of CI597, and am carrying an A- average. In fact, I was a TAG-Team member at a teaching table for tech! Who-da thunk it two years ago? Then, I was teaching in a rural school with a 1970’s photocopier (where the whole top slid across) and a thin-client server for students to word process and grab a few references from the Internet. We had just upgraded to Windows 98. W00T!! (I know what that means now) So you can understand that after TLT, confidence was running high. In fact, my 23-year-old daughter who ran rings around me on her laptop 5 months ago now has voiced new respect for what her mother has become in the tech department. She and I talked for several hours Saturday night about Lessig’s keynote presentation and the sessions I attended. This gave me a chance to debrief with someone out in the world who had no previous perception of the Web 2.0 concept, yet has been operating in a virtual community of her peers for many years. All of her high school and college friends are scattered over the globe but she is as “up” on their lives as if they lived within shouting distance. Texting (a verb) is like breathing to these young people. As our discussion unfolded (3 hours), I grew more and more reflective and more quiet. Actually, disquiet. I began to fall into a funk. After Lessig, I am beginning to feel that the identity that I have is all funked up.
Let me try to explain. At the TLT I was walking with MY peers. Many of the faces on the other side of the TAG-Team table were of my vintage. If I had a dollar for every time I used the phrase, “If I can do it, you can too!”, I would be shopping at Wegman’s instead of Walmart. I was an AARP spokes-model for teaching with tech! The first workshop I attended was about networking non-traditional students. Most of the attendees were professors over 40. As I opened my spanking-new Macbook, the gals on either side of me marveled at how I hopped on line, opened Twitter and began communication with the “outside world”. I even impressed myself. I explained about Team Tweet and what the class was doing. I felt like a kid again. That is, until the presenter mentioned Battlestar Gallatica and I was thinking…W00T W00T! I know that show! My shout out became a little woooo when he stated that most of the students and even many professors in college today have never hand cranked a window in a car…And so it began…
You have to understand why the blue funk is happening. I get what Lessig was saying. I STUDIED LATIN in 1971. Junior High. It was that or French, the universal language of the world. Latin was archaic, only churches and taxonomists spoke it, and the “educated” were expected to be able to at least score high on an SAT verbal by knowing rootwords of Latin. . At least Latin helped me with my verbal scores enough to get me into college. That class and Catholic high school taught me that mastering the romance languages was tantamount to being judged as successful in this world. That was then.
Lessig was right on, of course. Even in 1971, Latin was out as a referent of social status, and poor spelling, grammar, and syntax became the criteria that labeled a person as beneath the status quo, poorer, less worthy. Why, if you could not write, you may as well prepare to dig ditches or work in a factory. You could not go to college. And, back then, that was ok because there were many factory jobs and ditches to be dug. There were choices and freedom to choose. The masses from the other side of town dug the phone lines and sewer drains, and I, the first of my family to choose to college, became the elite, the worthy. College was penultimate. In the world, I was saluted for my accomplishment. My Father wanted no part of an uppity college kid. My less fortunate sister (did not go to college due to lack of money) considered me privileged, above her. She made me pay for my new status by disconnecting herself from my life. I have never thought about how my success with language played out culturally in a community where oral history, family, and no formal education determined whether you remained in a group or not. Yet we still had choices. For while. My Mother was forced to go to college at 45 years of age to keep her job, and my sister obtained her BS at 43 for the same reason. The choices were narrowing based upon the cultural requirements of credential.
I share all of this because I believe that to fully realize what Lessig and open cultural creativity means to society as we know it, we need to fully understand how the culture was/is and how it affected/affects real lives. We also need to accept that people my age and older who still preside over institutions and lawmaking bodies will have the philosophical mindset that knowledge is the property of the elite. IT will still be for sale. IT will still come from hallowed halls. When I talked with age-appropriate AARP peers at the TLT, I was ever-conscious that I should be on the professor side of the table at this stage of my life. The fact that I am again a student and know what I know without the benefit of credentialed bully pulpit to share or apply it, I realized that I am funked. In order to get the paper that credentials me I need to trade in the intellectual capital of the elite, not the pop culture of the Web 2.0 masses.
Viewing this through practitioner filters, I am still funked, as my students of the masses will need to pass standardized testing in the “newlatin”. Science is writing, math is writing, better readers make better writers. My students cannot even write in their home languages-Spanish, African American Vernacular English, Euro-centro American Rude Language (I made that one up=teen talk). Politico-cultural barriers are widening the gap between the haves and have nots, and the design of the community forges the identity. I my mind, the oppression is no longer about internet access, or socio-economic status. NCLB, high def cable boxes in every home or no more free (uh, speech)TV, consumer tracking labels, Web 2.0 archiving, copyright laws, changing the constitution….the funking deepens.
I hear Larry Lessig. My daughter hears Larry Lessig. Larry brands himself as a pessimist. I agree. With what community may I identify? With what community should YOU identify? If the masses gain access to cultural trading capital, then culture evolves and we all know what we need to know for leveraging control of our lives. If the elite maintain control of the cultural creativity and we stop knowing…IT will be one Grand Funk (old referent…not the Railroad).
Oh Cole (Mr. Orwell) I hope you were not right about Soylent Green….
Found this on Lessig site today, from tlt
Campaign.USA – washingtonpost.com
All: This article is not only interesting, but also features our favorite–Psuedo-Simon Andrew Keen!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/31/AR2008033102856.html