Great Posters for Bedroom Walls
October 22nd, 2008
Josie Fraser says some really interesting things about new media literacy.
Her approach is great, she gives recognition to the e-safety issues and progress made on cyber-bulling and associate issues in the UK, but points out there has been very little discussion in the UK about the breadth of new media literacy.
Australia is even further behind than the UK. We haven’t got beyond food advertising and obesity. Our public policy makers will be left behind, as children and young people continue to change the way they interact and engage with the world.
I’d love to see some of the energy being put into social media innovations and marketing put into the development of ideas for changes to Australia’s primary and secondary curriculum to included new media literacy.
Tags: newmedia, literacy, edcucation
Children, Comics & Creativity
October 17th, 2008
A short piece over at GeekDad.
It is just one of an increasing number of ways to engage children in narrative and story-telling through new media.
Since we drew on cave walls, or could utter enough words to share emotion humans have been telling stories. There are millions of stories on YouTube and blogs and interwoven in the fabric of the internets.
The stories are the same. Happiness, pain, hurt, love, confusion, good vs evil vs apathy…
Make sure we all keep telling stories.
Keep reading and writing out of kindergarten
October 17th, 2008
I struggle to understand why educationalists insist on ignoring what we know of early childhood development and keep trying to impose academic-type concepts on children for whom play is the most important learning process.
In today’s, Age they report an review of Australia’s English curriculum in which literacy will be revamped to include a decent whack of new and old. There will be a renewed emphasis on grammar and colonial Australian classics like Henry Lawson, but new media will also be given greater status as text.
My concern is the call for literacy in kindergartens. Children can begin kinder before they are 4 years-old and while some children may be ready, I’d want to see further research justifying this would actually benefit the literacy standards of children into the future. It has the capacity to frustrate and impact on the self-esteem of children who are simply not ready and don’t need to learn to read and write.
In fact, perhaps the review could talk to the newly established Club Penguin Australia. As I wrote recently in GeekDad, the Club Penguin Times (a weekly email newspaper connected to the game) gets 30,000 submissions a day from children including articles, poems, questions, jokes and more. Literacy standards are dropping because our education systems can not keep up with the changing ways in which children learn and engage with language. How can a teacher of 30 years begin to engage internet-savvy primary kids in poems from 100 years ago?
If it was me, I’d be having the children read the poems as spoken word, record them. Rewrite them into different text forms or styles? How would Shakespeare send a text message?
I’d prefer to see greater emphasis on teaching methods at primary level, rather than proposing a solution to impose literacy at stages of children’s development when they, in general, are not ready for it.
Teaching children: using the media they like
October 9th, 2008
As adults we often get obsessed about the way we did things, the toys we played with, the way we learnt and we in many ways are a bit obsessive about it - and definitely protective about it.
This post at GeekDad is a great one at showing we can teach young people using media and communication methods they understand - learning statistics through a manga-style comic. This is a great idea on two levels.
1. The obvious level is - hey kids are more likely to read comics - they’ll read this and hopefully learn something. Or it will reinforce what they learnt in class. I mean, how good would it be to have your maths teracher say, well that is the lesson, for homework I am distributing this manga comic that you should read. Bet they do homework that night.
2. But, what I find more interesting is that the comics have a plot - and I think there is the power of this medium. I studied creative writing when I went to Uni because I love stories. I think story-telling is how we all learn best. A good narrative has the power to communicate in ways we can not otherwise do. Now that might be a book, a spoken word piece, a bedtime tale, a speech, a movie, a computer game…whatever - as long as the narrative is good the lesson will be learnt. So, teaching maths through a narrative is a great idea.
The pilot for History Hackers used the narrative of Edison and Tesla to teach about electricity (but really physics) - GeekDad covered that too!
I’d argue The Wiggles work because most of their songs are very simple narratives that children can connect with - going somewhere in the car (Big Red Car), making a cup of tea (Dorothy’s Rosy Tea) etc.
So - storytelling. We’ve been doing it since before we drew pictures on cave walls. Before we wrote we taught through the story. Think Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime, think the storytelling cultures of Europe, the lessons of colonial west stories in the US.
All hail a good story.
Tags: stroytelling, manga, education