[Air-L] digital literacy takes a field trip to a farm

[Burcu Bakioglu]

David, I see your point here, but maybe it is because I am teaching in
Indiana, but I've been battling here with the most outrageous attitudes
against the internet. Internet is all porn, internet is a dangerous
addiction, internet's for stalkers/harassers, etc... Creating online
identities is stupid, virtual worlds are a waste of time, virtual
communities serve to no purpose and are used for bad purposes, etc...

Now I am proud to say that after one full semester most of my students are
coming around. I even had one of my students (who was severely critical of
the class in the beginning of the semester) open up an SL account to his
mentally challenged cousin and blog about the positive effect it had on him,
but that's after a semester full of hard work and silent resistance.

Most of my students have laptops, but have not used it for anything but to
check their e-mails. Sadly, most of the stuff they learned in my class
(except for Facebook, perhaps) is totally brand new. A student writes in her
blog that I was *forcing* students to blog, i.e. for grading purposes.They
greatly enjoyed your Flickr assignment though, i must say...

So, yes they have a problem with logging off maybe, but are they doing
anything interesting there? That's my concern. The repeated media slogans
that i hear in my class tells me most are not.

One student at a time, folks... That's the task that awaits us...

b.


On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 10:42 AM, David M Silver <dmsilver at usfca.edu> wrote:

> when i began teaching undergrads about the internet in 1994, i had to
> coax and convince them that they should use it. "you'll find email
> useful," i'd say, or, "be the first person in your dorm to have your
> very own home page on the world wide web!"
>
> later, of course, we - students and profs - flocked to the web but not
> to all sites. in the late 1990s, i had to coax and convince my students
> to try out lambdaMOO and other more esoteric sites that our class
> readings described in detail.
>
> with web 2.0, the things we used to theorize - virtual communities and
> online identities - are now, through yelp or lastfm or facebook or
> flickr or blogs or wikipedia - are everyday destinations with our
> students.
>
> coming full circle, i no longer have to coax and convince my students to
> log on. these days, i have to coax and convince my students to log off.
>
> thanks to list members for sharing their own attempts/struggles with
> logging off and thanks to nicole ellison for sharing her media-use diary
> assignment.  for another assignment on logging off, see my USF colleague
> andrew goodwin's blog post:
>
> http://professorofpop.blogspot.com/2008/04/why-kill-time-when-you-can-kill.html
>
> finally, i want to echo something kim de vries said in a post to the
> list: my students and i did not go low tech nor no tech.  in some ways
> we went high tech in that we used more technologies than we normally use
> in a day. we used saws, axes, shovels, FIRE, wood stoves, gas stoves,
> and pens, paper, and books.
>
> david silver
> http://silverinsf.blogspot.com
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-- 
Thanks,</burcu>

Burcu S. Bakioglu

Web Developer/Content Editor
Option Six
www.optionsix.com
Improving performance through e-learning

Ph.D. Candidate, Indiana University


http://www.palefirer.com
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