All the peripherals for my Dick Smith VZ200. Just plug it into a crap TV, slap in a tape and wait for very little to happen... Image from gateman.com/museum/e.html
When I was around ten my grandfather bought me a computer. With a little research I’ve discovered it was a VZ200 (thanks old-computers.com). I plugged it into an old school 12 inch black and white TV. It had no hard drive or anything like that. As far as I recall, to run programs you could either load them off audio cassette tapes, or program them in yourself. The whole process of loading off a tape and hooking it all up was so cumbersome, that after a few goes at the simple games, I was over it.
Games on Tape: They seem more exciting in retrospect than they were at the time...
Basic was an understatement. Image from vz200.org.
Clearly out of concern for my street cred, around that time my parents sent me off to computer camp for a week or two. I don’t recall much, but I do remember sitting in a dark computer lab, learning to program some very basic things in the aptly named programming language, Basic.
By the end of the week I’d learned how to make my computer count forever –clearly a productive task– and spent far too long watching ever-growing numbers scroll up the screen.
A Commodore PET. Hours of "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" waiting to happen. Image from Pikturewerk on Flickr.
This was my one computer trick for the next five years or so. In middle school I remember the lab had a few Commodore 64s and PETs. They’d all counted up to some pretty damn high numbers by the time I was done with them. On top of that, the mini-geography nerd in me had a brief fling with Carmen Sandiego… But then high school, nothing. Really. I don’t recall actually touching a computer during high school. I had an electric typewriter with a small 100-character display and that was that.
The Apple LC. Colour comes to my digital world. But little else. Image from Phil Gyford on Flickr.
So it’s likely of little surprise that when I moved to Montreal to begin film school, and my parents gave me an Apple LC, I was almost aggressively disinterested. None the less, they were clearly somewhat less grumpy inward-looking teenagers than I was at the time, and they insisted it would be useful. They even plugged it all in on my new desk. When they turned it on, I distinctly remember thinking, “hmm… The pictures are in colour now… That does look a bit better…”
All the same, a few games of Oregon Trail, and some late night essay-writing was about all the love it got, for the following two years. This didn’t change until one of my friends came around with a laptop he’d recently bought. He plugged in the modem and I first heard that squealing dial-up handshaking sound as he connected to the internet.
Enter the Internet... And a whole new world of reasons to use a computer. Image from Derek K. Miller on Flickr.
And with that, everything changed. Within a few months I’d bought a PowerPC with a whole gig of hard drive space and a screeching dial-up modem. I was off.
I wonder, when we look back, if that will seem like a transition on the scale of the industrial revolution, the introduction of cars, or telephones. And this scale of reaction from someone who saw it all in urban, western increments. Imagine the contrasts for someone whose grown up in a setting where contemporary technologies haven’t replaced just incrementally different modes, but entire generations of tech growth have been skipped. Where video conferencing, social networking and e-commerce on smart phones has arrived in one of the many places where there were no phones at all, and little travel or exchange outside of the immediate community.
With that rate of change, it’s no wonder rising stars of digital culture like Pinterest or Instagram seem like bandwagons we should all be on, but when I start to look at my own digital footprint, portfolio, presence or whatever you want to call it, there are some notably questionable investments of time, thought and energy.
In my next post, I want to look at where that’s getting me. What pressures are pushing me along, and what counter-pressures pull me back and make me reflect. In the meantime, I’m either going to go for a walk or update my Facebook.
I love this.
I love it when you read something that manages to express a belief you know you’ve held for some time, without ever having found the words or means to put it out into the world. It’s just happened to me.
I was revisiting the website Route 21, a research project and proposal from an organization called the Partnership for Twenty-first Century Skills. And I followed a link describing an approach to core academic subjects in the 21st century.
What it proposed was a set of literacies that point a refreshing lens on some tired sideroads of curriculum. They propose the need for core subjects (such as Language, Math, Arts etc.) to be taught in the context of what they term themes, but I prefer to keep using their word literacies instead. They are, in no particular order:
The reason I like the term literacy applied to these is that when we look at them as subjects or themes, it seems to suggest an established and somewhat static body of knowledge, history and theory that one can learn and apply to exams and hopefully life. Whereas literacies to me imply the idea of a background underpinning of knowledge that works in collaboration with interdisciplinary skills to support critical and reflective approaches to an ever-evolving stream of information, challenge and experience. Literacy does not seem a stagnant thing the way subject study can default to being…
In terms of the choice of literacies in this project, I think they’re pretty spot on. Certainly each of them is a complex and evolving aspect of our personal and cultural lives. Each has local and global application. Each is a deep, resonant and meaningful area, with enormous potential for integrating the purposeful learning of traditional core skills.
I think in part it’s that learning the tools of a kind of literacy that has appealed to me in the study of digital literacy and my current Masters as well. This is not about learning best practices and a set of tools. It’s about acquiring the literacy needed for critical and reflective approaches to whatever comes next.
All photos by Jamie Raskin
Arriving at Yokohama International School I was confronted, 2 weeks in, with our kick-off Back to School Night. The three of us second grade teachers crammed 50+ attending parents into one small classroom, on unfortunately petite chairs, and proceeded to stumble our way through a Powerpoint.
It felt stilted, like many of these sort of events. Being largely scripted by the content of our slides, parents left having likely little sense of who we -their children’s teachers- were. We certainly got no sense of who our students’ parents were.
While nights like these are framed as an introduction to the year, with a taste of its curriculum, philosophy and so on, in the end I believe most parents come wanting to get a sense of who the teachers are, and for teachers, the best takeaway possible is to begin building partnerships with your students’ families.
The next year was much the same. We added a few words and maybe a picture or two to the Powerpoint (as embedded below). But basically, we stood and fumbled along unsatisfyingly.
The next year a different directive came through. We were asked to meet with our students’ parents separately, in our own classes. The idea that the primary purpose of the night was actually meeting the parents had come to the foreground, and there would be no more hiding behind the Powerpoint, and the words of my peers.
At first I was intimidated. I hadn’t done it this way before and wasn’t sure how to play it. I took a look at our previous presentation and felt the weight of standing and reading through the slides.
A Sloppy Joe: Food that makes you feel as good as its design. From Joyce Godsey on Flickr.
A Bento Box: Food that makes you feel as good as it looks. From Taiyo Fujii on Flickr.
Then I recalled a great talk I’d been to some months earlier. My friend Christine had invited me to an evening lecture at the Apple store in Ginza to see Garr Reynolds, author of the much-lauded Presentation Zen. Garr spoke at length about design principles, none of which were particularly new to me in and of themselves. Simplicity, contrast, line, balance… I remember a particularly notable comparison between images of a bento box and a sloppy joe, and his continued analogy of how you feel once you’ve consumed one or the other. What was new about his talk was the application of these same design concepts to presentations. He asserted that reading from the screen was neither necessary, nor effective. Instead he advocated, as I understood it, for the use of beautiful, resonant images with key words only or no words at all. Images which evoked directly or through juxtaposition the sense of what you were discussing. For me, it clicked.
Recalling this, I started to get excited about reinventing my presentation for the parents that night. I adored the way searching Flickr by conceptual tags, associated with the content I wanted to speak about, brought up suggestions of creative, nuanced and evocative images, whose indirectly associated content I would never have come up with independently. I felt like I was collaborating in my image selection with all the photographers who somewhat abstractly tagged their art works. Using these images, with key words written in color-tones drawn from the photos, I put together the following presentation, as a backbone for my talk.
What followed that night was undoubtedly the best such evening I’d been involved in. The key words on the slides were more than enough to scaffold my talking points, and the beauty and sometime humor of the images created a much more personal and casual tone in the room. I was able to speak to the audience, instead of reciting the slides, and react to their responses with far greater flexibility and sensitivity. Combine that with meeting only the parents of my students, and I’m sure we both came away with a much better sense of who each other were than in years past.
Having changed my tack to this style of approach, I will never go back to a conventional Powerpoint format. Go Zen.
That was Zen. This is now.
Many apologies for the title of this post.
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There are such a wealth of digital storytelling tools out there, that it’s always a challenge for me to know which ones to suggest for my students. Today I decided to try an experiment. I took a series of a few photos, chose a range of tools, and decided to have a go at telling the same photo-story with each one.
I’ll go through them one by one and detail some advantages and disadvantages along the way. I’ve made a point of exclusively choosing free tools that allow for use of my photos, and can easily be embedded in this blog. Hopefully, this will enable me to find appropriate tools for my class, and maybe even support readers by outlining the scope of these tools for their own purposes.
The story I’ve decided to tell happened to me several years ago when I traveled through North Pakistan, en route to Northwest China, along the Karakoram Highway. A route as old as the silk road, through one of the densest, highest regions of the Himalayas, cutting a stripe through spectacular valleys, dotted by gorgeous, profoundly hospitable villages and full of the most remarkable hikes and treks I’ve had the pleasure to travel.
Tikatok
Owned by book retailer Barnes & Noble, Tikatok is a digital book-maker with three levels of complexity. It offers a fairly detailed degree of design control and, for a fee, you can add audio or order a printed version of your creation. After spending 20 or 30 minutes building the book, I went to embed it only to find that there was no full-screen capability for reading the embedded creation. The result is the profoundly difficult to read text below. To view it in a more useful version, you have to click on the link below and visit the file where it’s hosted on the Tikatok site.
Click on a link to access a more readable version.
Ahead
Ahead is a Prezi-like tool for creating zoomable presentations across an indefinitely expandable workspace. While significantly more versatile than Prezi (pieces in the galleries include full websites built on its platform), its interface also takes a bit longer to get ahold of and feels rougher around the edges. Once you get a handle on the basics it moves along quite smoothly and is very easy to share and embed. In consideration of the learning curves of my students, I don’t think I would be likely to introduce this one. It seems to have a lot of potential, and is still in beta. I think I’ll have another look in a few months!
Sliderocket
A whole other beast. Sliderocket is a very slick slideshow creation platform. Sort of like a fully functional Powerpoint or Keynote application, but free and online. It has free and pro versions, but even the free version is very full-featured with numerous themes and templates. It allows for files to be imported from Powerpoint, and has a full set of analytics. Easily navigable, it none the less includes clear tutorial material. In my quick play with it I felt immediately quite fluent and would certainly use it again.
As a note of appreciation, most of the tools used in this post were found on Alan Levine’s Wiki CogDogRoo, where he conducts a similar experiment, but using over 60 tools, some with very minimal degrees of difference. Thanks Alan!
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Earlier this year my partner and I began to consider what our next step might be along the international education road. To be fair, we came at it from a very cushy spot. We have great jobs in a great school. We love Tokyo and living in Japan. But part of this life we’ve chosen is about exploration, moving on and discovering new things. So inevitably we know we’ll eventually look elsewhere, be it next year, the one after, or somewhere further down the road. It’s a cyclically exciting time when colleagues begin announcing their destinations for the coming year and it always gets my imagination going.
So a few months ago I confronted the reality that if I was to consider a transition, I had to get my resume up to speed. I know myself. And I know that a little phrase like “get my resume up to speed” actually means days, if not weeks of fiddling with design and content until the beast is tamed. I also know that to update a design for me often means a complete re-invention.
I started by looking at the last CV I’d put together (below). Not bad.
The text was nice, the essential ingredients were there. It was legible and navigable, without looking like everyone else’s. Lovely pictures of some of my ex-students, brought back nice memories and made it clear that this was a document about working with kids. But I recalled an interview with a kind principal where she noted that though it was a great CV, she wanted to see the pictures in colour! It made me ask myself, why are CVs so dominantly black and white?
So the process began. I started to look at the many ways the idea of a resume has been reinvented over the past years. I looked at much-lauded dynamic digital resumes, as described here on Mashable. I looked at the self-promotion websites of other international educators, like my friend Sean’s and prolific edutech Langwitches blogger Silvia Tolisano. I even played with some infographic generator CV platforms, like visualize.me and re.vu. I was even quick enough off the block on the latter to nab the domain re.vu/jamie!
An infographic resume generating platform: re.vu
While I saw the benefits of all these ways of framing yourself professionally, I also decided that I needed to start somewhere, and that one element of these tools of self-promotion would inevitably the “traditional” paper resume. So, with color, design and content in mind, I started to build the friendly orange monster dwelling below.
I started with these considerations… It would have to be a design-intensive, but print-friendly document. Adobe InDesign became the tool of choice. It was likely to make it’s first impact on anyone on-screen, and so any interactivity would have to be hyperlinked. This required a platform allowing for a quality publication of a pdf file, which retained links and printability. Issuu won. I decided to maintain the lovely student images of the past, but couldn’t bring myself to make them full-colour from a design perspective, so settled on a warm rusty tone that complemented the orange and yellow visual elements. An added consideration was the addition of QR codes to allow readers with the print copy in hand to access materials with their mobiles.
Weeks later, it was ready to publish.
Months later, it already needs an update.
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many hats by Jamie Raskin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
