My New Short Film

If anyone is interested, I just finished a short film about dogs and the YES song "Heart of the Sunrise." I made it as a Christmas present for my brother and his dog, Noby (the one catching the frisbee). I hope you enjoy it, and please feel free to give any form of feedback you like.

Reflection on 506 Presentations

First, I would like to thank all of you who made comments and questions during my presentation. My presentation was lacking in organization. There was simply too much information to present to the class. Rather than lecture on some of the aspects of my website, it might have been more constructive to explain the purpose of my website in a few sentences, and then let the audience ask questions while they explore the pages for a few minutes. This strategy would have made my presentation more effective, efficient, and interactive.

• What did you learn in the doing?

Most of what I learned in creating my website dealt with technology, which I have mentioned on my website and my reflection paper. I feel technologically empowered. In terms of literacy and video games, the discourse is expanding, so more people are taking this topic seriously.

• What more would you like to learn?

I want to find out about more ELA teachers that are using video games in their classrooms, what types of games they are using (commercial or educational; genre specific), and what teaching strategies they are using.

Now that I will be student teaching, I will be talking to more students about video games, and, as professor Stearns suggested, I could create a video game club after school. What do people think about holding a video game club during student teaching? Should I wait until I am hired?

• What pedagogical applications to middle/high school ELA classrooms do you see?

I see the use of video games in ELA classrooms working very well, but the resistance from parents, administrators, and teachers will most likely prevent me from seriously studying video games in the classroom until I receive tenure.

• What might you add/delete/do differently if you were to continue to work on this project?

Future work on this project should probably be more formal, as Professor Stearns has suggested. Since parents, administrators, and teachers are already skeptical about the role of video games on adolescent literacy, it is in my website's best interest to have a more professional look. Since my ultimate goal is to convince the skeptical of the significance of video games to adolescent literacy, I should also organize my website according to the questions that critics have about video games, and why I focus on commercial video games over educational video games. I had already done that in my 663 research paper, so I did not want to repeat myself completely this semester, but now I will go back to that.

Here is my feedback on other presentations:

Dawn, the combination of Gregorian Chant(?) and images of nature, classical art, and wave-like text, created a unique and interesting interpretation of romantic poetry. Your presentation showed how powerful the fusion of these mediums can be on the senses. Thank you for sharing.

Tamara, it was interesting see the excerpts of your constructivist approach to film production with your students. It is too bad that we were not able to see the entire film.

Chrissy, you made a comprehensive PowerPoint of our NYSEC experience. I liked that it was interactive and well-organized. I have very little experience with PowerPoint, so maybe I'll come to you with questions if you don't mind.

Natalie, that was a great presentation on cyberpunk novels. You provided a digestible summary of the genre, and I like how you showed the genre's significance to contemporary society.

Dave, your website looks good so far, and I liked your efficient and effective presentation.

Tracie and Charm, it was too bad that your presentation was cut short because your website project looked very good. I especially liked your discussion of digital portfolios. Great job.

Danielle, thank you for providing me with useful tools for navigating the web on my own and in the classroom.

James, your attempt at creating an educational video game was admirable. As you said, only a team of James' working for seven months could have successfully tackled this task. But thank you for the insight you provided.

I'm glad I have had such a good group of people to work with throughout this program, and I wish everyone luck in your future endeavors.

By the way, my blog has at least one fan in Mexico!

The Wiki: 506 and Beyond

Partially because adding to a wiki is like adding to an encyclopedia, it took me a while to appreciate the idea of the wiki; the credibility of such a collaborative work runs contrary to the traditional sense of authorship. But what I have come to love about wikis (a little too late for our 506 wiki) is the focus on substance over recognition. Wikis are not void of author recognition, but the emphasis is not on who supplied the information but the information itself. Considering that wikis can be constantly updated by anyone, and they are free, encyclopedia sets have become obsolete. Back to our 506 wiki, another problem I had was that our interests are so diverse that instead having a dozen heavily edited pages, we have a fifty pages that are hardly edited. Although I did not get much out of our course wiki, I did acquire a greater appreciation for wikipedia; I am convinced that it is a great first step for research in virtually any field. Wikis simply accumulate more information and link to more information that an encyclopedia set ever could.

Blogging in 506

Through creating a blog of my own that I was required to add weekly posts and software, I have developed a new appreciation for blogs. The autonomy of personalizing my own blog was the hook that really drew me into blogging in 506. Having my own blog encouraged me to learn a little html code, get familiar with hyperlinks, add Clustrmaps (I saw it on your website James), and apply compatible open source software for attaching video, photo, and music to my blog and websites. In summary, blogging enabled me to combine multiple literacies to communicate. I also liked that we were required to comment on our classmates’ blogs. Reading other peoples’ comments on my blog gave me a real sense of audience. I think these practices could be very useful for developing literacy at the secondary level, but only if students are required, as we were, to participate through a certain amount of posts and comments.

Movie (re-)Reflection

I had a great time making "Chaucer: Undead in the 'Burbs" for our movie project. I'm really glad I was able to use open source software to put the film on the web; take advantage of the film capabilities of my Canon Power Shot; and store all my footage on my camera's memory card. As James knows, I made three films with my friends, two in high school. Making films in today's classroom is so much easier, and it is easier for students to have a real sense of audience for their films. My concern is that there is a discrepancy of comments about my film on YouTube. I really appreciate the comments that some of you have made, but I was hoping to get some non-506 comments as well. What is it about the YouTube audience that has caused this discrepancy? With virtually any topic available to view, perhaps the zombie Chaucer market has yet to explode. Maybe I need to change my film's tags? It may be that anyone can view videos, but people have to sign up to make comments. As of today there have been 126 views of my film, but only two comments.

Chaucer for fun

Here's a post for all you Chaucer fans, who are not afraid to take your love of Chaucer beyond the classroom. Bill Baily performs a skit in the spirit of Chaucer.

Tecmo

Tecmo Bowl (1988) and Tecmo Super Bowl (1991) reinvented football video games. The controls are simple but intuitive, while the side scrolling camera angle allows the player better focus on most of the action. Recently a few friends of mine told me about an open source version of Tecmo Super Bowl complete with updated rosters. Our plan is to create a tournament through this program and create a website to keep track of game statistics. This is very interesting to me because it merges my generation of gaming (Nintendo and Super Nintendo) with the current generation of online gaming.

Here's some classic Bo Jackson Tecmo Super Bowl Action