Question of the Week (6/8/12)

As we approach the end of the semester, reflect back on the class and share what you liked and disliked about the course. Was there a particular aspect of the course you liked? If so, what was it? Was there something you wished we had covered in the course, but did not? What were your favorite aspects of the course and why? What were your least favorite? Post your answers to these questions by the end of the day on Tuesday. Remember to respond to another classmates' response. Enjoy your weekend.

Question of the Week (6/1/12)

Read the article below entitled "Wasting Time". Do you believe this article reflects your online habits? Why or why not? Give specific examples to support your points. Also, what should be done to help students be more productive online? Again, provide specific examples.
The article cites that low income families waste more time than families with a higher income, but when you look at the comparison, low income families spend=11.5 hrs/day and higher income families=10 hours/day. 
Aren't both of those numbers too high? What is this article trying to prove? Be sure to fully answer the questions in your post and respond to a classmates' response by 3 p.m. on Tuesday. Happy posting!

May 29, 2012

Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era

By MATT RICHTEL In the 1990s, the term “digital divide” emerged to describe technology’s haves and have-nots. It inspired many efforts to get the latest computing tools into the hands of all Americans, particularly low-income families.

Those efforts have indeed shrunk the divide. But they have created an unintended side effect, one that is surprising and troubling to researchers and policy makers and that the government now wants to fix.

As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show.

This growing time-wasting gap, policy makers and researchers say, is more a reflection of the ability of parents to monitor and limit how children use technology than of access to it.

“I’m not antitechnology at home, but it’s not a savior,” said Laura Robell, the principal at Elmhurst Community Prep, a public middle school in East Oakland, Calif., who has long doubted the value of putting a computer in every home without proper oversight.

“So often we have parents come up to us and say, ‘I have no idea how to monitor Facebook,’ ” she said.

The new divide is such a cause of concern for the Federal Communications Commission that it is considering a proposal to spend $200 million to create a digital literacy corps. This group of hundreds, even thousands, of trainers would fan out to schools and libraries to teach productive uses of computers for parents, students and job seekers.

Separately, the commission will help send digital literacy trainers this fall to organizations like the Boys and Girls Club, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Some of the financial support for this program, part of a broader initiative called Connect2Compete, comes from private companies like Best Buy and Microsoft.

These efforts complement a handful of private and state projects aimed at paying for digital trainers to teach everything from basic keyboard use and word processing to how to apply for jobs online or use filters to block children from seeing online pornography.

“Digital literacy is so important,” said Julius Genachowski, chairman of the commission, adding that bridging the digital divide now also means “giving parents and students the tools and know- how to use technology for education and job-skills training.”

F.C.C. officials and other policy makers say they still want to get computing devices into the hands of every American. That gaps remains wide — according to the commission, about 65 percent of all Americans have broadband access at home, but that figure is 40 percent in households with less than $20,000 in annual income. Half of all Hispanics and 41 percent of African-American homes lack broadband.

But “access is not a panacea,” said Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft. “Not only does it not solve problems, it mirrors and magnifies existing problems we’ve been ignoring.”

Like other researchers and policy makers, Ms. Boyd said the initial push to close the digital divide did not anticipate how computers would be used for entertainment.

“We failed to account for this ahead of the curve,” she said.

A study published in 2010 by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that children and teenagers whose parents do not have a college degree spent 90 minutes more per day exposed to media than children from higher socioeconomic families. In 1999, the difference was just 16 minutes.

The study found that children of parents who do not have a college degree spend 11.5 hours each day exposed to media from a variety of sources, including television, computer and other gadgets. That is an increase of 4 hours and 40 minutes per day since 1999.

Children of more educated parents, generally understood as a proxy for higher socioeconomic status, also largely use their devices for entertainment. In families in which a parent has a college education or an advanced degree, Kaiser found, children use 10 hours of multimedia a day, a 3.5- hour jump since 1999. (Kaiser double counts time spent multitasking. If a child spends an hour simultaneously watching TV and surfing the Internet, the researchers counted two hours.)

“Despite the educational potential of computers, the reality is that their use for education or meaningful content creation is minuscule compared to their use for pure entertainment,” said Vicky Rideout, author of the decade-long Kaiser study. “Instead of closing the achievement gap, they’re widening the time-wasting gap.”

Policy makers and researchers say the challenges are heightened for parents and children with fewer resources — the very people who were supposed to be helped by closing the digital divide.

The concerns are brought to life in families like those of Markiy Cook, a thoughtful 12-year-old in Oakland who loves technology.

At home, where money is tight, his family has two laptops, an Xbox 360 and a Nintendo Wii, and he has his own phone. He uses them mostly for Facebook, YouTube, texting and playing games.

He particularly likes playing them on the weekends.

“I stay up all night, until like 7 in the morning,” he said, laughing sheepishly. “It’s why I’m so tired on Monday.”

His grades are suffering. His grade-point average is barely over 1.0, putting him at the bottom of his class. He wants to be a biologist when he grows up, he said.

Markiy attends Elmhurst Community Prep, located in a rough area (the school has a tribute hanging in its hallway to a 15-year-old girl recently stabbed to death by the father of her baby). Thirty-five percent of the students, like Markiy, are black, and most of the rest are Hispanic.

Alejandro Zamora, 13, an eighth grader, calls himself “a Facebook freak.” His mother, Olivia Montesdeoca, said she liked the idea of him using the computer (until it recently broke) but did not have much luck getting him to use it for homework.

“He’d have a fit. He’d have a tantrum,” she said, adding that she really did not understand some of what he did online. “I have no idea about YouTube. I’ve never even heard of a webcam.”

Ms. Robell, the principal, said children needed to know how to use technology to compete, but her priorities for her students were more basic: “Breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

Many lower-income families take great pains to manage how their children use their devices.

In Boston, Amy and Randolph Ross, neither of them a college graduate — she works in a hospital and he at a bookstore — recently bought their twin 15-year-old girls laptop computers as a reward for good grades. The parents make sure the computers are used mostly for homework or for the girls to explore their interest as budding musicians.

“If you just buy the computer and don’t guide them on the computer, of course it’s going to be misused,” Ms. Ross said.

Her mother-in-law, Edna Ross, the matriarch of their African-American family who lives nearby in

Dorchester, Mass., feels the same way. She got a new Hewlett-Packard computer last year through a project funded by the National Institutes of Health intended to provide both access and nine months of digital literacy training.

Edna Ross is strict about how her grandchildren use the computer when they visit. One of her grandsons once sneaked onto the computer and put a picture of himself on his Facebook page making an obscene gesture.

She told him if he could not control himself, he could not use the computer. Training, she said, is crucial.

“If you already have a child who feels like anything goes and you put a computer in his hand,” she said, “he’s going to do the first negative thing he can find to do when he gets on the computer.”

MORE IN U.S. (1 OF 33 ARTICLES)

Question of the Week (5/11/12)

For this week's post you need to accomplish two things:

1) Write about the ways that you currently use technology to help and improve your learning. For example, you may use google docs to keep all of your written work easily accessible, or you may use google calendar to remind you of important events and appointments.

2) Uncover some new technological tools to help your learning. For example, if you are disorganized, find a tech tool to help you become more organized. Discuss how you would implement this tool into your learning life.

The goal here is to think about the ways technology helps you in an educational setting. Be sure to respond to a classmates' response and to post by 3 p.m. on Tuesday. Have a great weekend.

Question of the Week (5/4/12)

Choose one of the articles posted on the Media Literacy class website (see links below as well) and respond in writing. Briefly summarize the article in a couple of sentences. Take notes as you read the article and ask yourself questions. These questions will stimulate your thinking. Then tackle the questions in your post. When writing a reaction piece, your writing will be more opinionated, but you need to be sure to back up that opinion with fact from the article.  Your post should be around 250-300 words and include a response to another classmates' posting. Post by 3 p.m. on Tuesday.

Read these articles in preparation for Friday's(May 4, 2012) blog post:

Insulin Pumps, Monitors, Vulnerable to Hacking

http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/health&id=8289545

Why Johnny Can’t Program

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-rushkoff/programming-literacy_b_745126.html

The Flight from Conversation

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/the-flight-from-conversation.html?_r=4&pagewanted=3&ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=all

Question of the Week (4/27/12)

"Caught up in the entertainment, we sometimes don't 'see' the camera work, composition, editing, lighting, and sound. Nor do we 'see' the production struggles that accompany every film -- including the script's many rewrites..." (From Writing about Film the packet handed out in class).

Formal Analysis
A formal analysis of a film or films requires that the viewer breaks the film down into its component parts and discusses how those parts contribute to the whole. Formal analysis can be understood as taking apart a tractor in a field; you lay out the parts, try to understand the function and purpose of each one, and then put the parts back together.

In order to do a convincing formal analysis of your scene you'll need to use the terminology provided to you in the Writing about Film packet. Keep in mind that the more proper terms you use, the more you convince your audience that you are an authority of your topic.

PART I
Click on the link below, choose one scene from North by Northwest and begin by conducting an annotated shot sequence -- a shot-by-shot analysis (see your packet and class notes for additional information). Count the number of shots and identify each one in the scene. List them on your shot sequence worksheet provided, noting the type of shot and who or what is inside the frame. After you have completed the annotated shot sequence, identify the other production aspects of this scene by reviewing the scene again -- the costumes, lighting, set decoration, music etc. List them on your worksheet as well. What are they telling you, the audience, about the scene and the characters in the scene. Turn in your shot sequence and production analysis on MONDAY. This is worth 40 points.

PART II
Then, using what you know about the film's plot summary, analyze in depth in 750 words or less what is happening in the scene. What do the characters' facial expressions communicate to us? If there is dialogue, what does that communicate to the viewer? Conduct a formal and very in depth analysis of your selected shot. This short analysis is the ONLY thing you will post on the blog. This is due by 3 p.m. on Tuesday and you MUST respond to another classmates' response. Your analysis is also worth 40 points. Enjoy!

Click this link for film clips to analyze for this assignment: North by Northwest Clips

Question of the Week (4/6/12)

This week we will be watching numerous film clips and you will be expected to write several analytical paragraphs based on the clips you watch. Any time you are going to write a film analysis or critique, one of the best places to start is with your first reaction to the film, which is where this blog question begins. 
Click on the link and watch this clip from the movie Benny and Joon. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxTiMb32_FE


Did you like this film clip? Why or why not? Did seeing this film clip make you want to possibly see the rest of the film? Why or why not? 


Post your response by the end of the day on Tuesday at 3 p.m. For this post you do NOT have to respond to a classmate's response. Enjoy your weekend. 

Question of the Week (3/30/12)

As we finish quarter 3, how has the class progressed for you? What have you really enjoyed? What have you really not enjoyed?
Then, looking ahead to quarter 4, what projects/topics would you like to do or study? Post your responses by 3 p.m. on Tuesday. There will be no late credit given for this week's post. If you don't post by 3 p.m., it will count as a zero. Keep in mind this is one of your last grades for quarter 3.
For this post only, you do NOT have to respond to another post. Enjoy your weekend.