Blogs on Media Literacy

For decades, students have been completing assignments in school. Often, these were seen only by the teacher, graded and returned to the student. Sometimes, the work was posted on a classroom wall or in a school hallway. Many teachers kept portfolios of student work for report card conferences, and the rare teacher taught students how to build their own portfolios from their work.

Dr. Victor Frankenstein loved technology, and Mary Shelley's work of fiction was at once a cautionary and promotional tale of technology's incredible potential. In the iconic story, he took the pieces of a human being and stitched them together to create something monstrous -- but in many ways more human than the model he was hoping to produce.

Who doesn't love a little irony?

I'm a big fan of remix and mashup culture. I love the idea of taking one thing and adding new meaning by combining it with another; or of using tech tools in unexpected ways to build a new hybrid creation -- practices like this have a role to play in digital literacy. I think remixes and mashups can be particularly engaging tools for teaching and learning, so I was delighted when I discovered the work of John D. Boswell, a.k.a melodysheep, the creator of Symphony of Science, a project that remixes science lectures and content into music videos, made using the often over-used and much-blighted audio tool Auto-Tune.

ASCD's annual conference (see #ASCD13 on Twitter) recently came to a close, and one of the main themes that kept surfacing was the need for more "connected educators." At this conference, there were definitely some great "firsts." The general session kicked off with a keynote from Freeman A. Hrabowski III, who tweeted his first tweet; an impromptu #edcampRogue sprouted up from in-attendance edcampers; and author and poet Maya Angelou was even tweeting at age 85!