Reflecting on articles from March 29th

Celebrity Twitter Ecosystem
An interesting diversion from a 1971 dissertation I am reading for research. Funny to see who is following who, but hard to take what they say with any degree of seriousness. When has Martha Stewart ever said anything without a high degree of self-awareness? Airing our thoughts with an added degree of “public permanence” produces a need I think, conscious or not, to plan what we say. I wonder how many “tweets” are totally spontaneous, as they might be if we were simply expressing them out loud.

Wikipedia: Exploring Fact City
First, I am conflicted about small town vs. city life and frankly, wouldn’t want to be without either. Occasionally, Noam Cohen seems to advocate the latter as a model for life as well as a metaphor for Wikipedia.

I find Wikipedia to be a great resource. What I particularly like is the way it can take one in so many different directions. For example, I looked up New York-based composer Nico Muhly and, depending on why I was looking at Nico Muhly, could move onto the film “The Reader”, Bjork, The Juilliard School, playwright Craig Lucas, the rock band “Grizzly Bear”, Philip Glass, Vermont, and links to articles touting him as a prodigy or not a prodigy. The links are in many ways the best part. One comes away with a much broader view of the subject than if you simply read the entry. One can see Nico through his publisher’s page, an official website, his myspace page, articles and reviews from “The New Yorker”, “The Guardian”, “Smithsonian Magazine”, and “The Advocate.”

I don’t advocate Wikipedia as a source for research any more than I would have advocated the Encyclopedia Britannica. I do however find it a great starting point and a much richer portal into a subject than any encyclopedia before, online or hard copy.


Feeling Too Down To Rise Up
I have often wondered over the lack of rage in the last five or so years, as in issue after issue, our government has not only failed us, but been seemingly criminal in doing so. Has technology contributed to this? You certainly see a high degree of anger in the blog world and in comments made to editorials and on news sites. Go to the Daily Kos and Rush Limbaugh’s site and you will see anger and rage in equal measure. Does the ability to unload online make it less imperative for one to take it to the streets? People certainly say some of the most “uncivil” things online and I am not at all sure they would say them publicly, without the shield of an alias.

Disconnectedness – I am concerned with the effect of people regularly “tuning out” to the environment around them. I remember John Cage’s experiments with recording ambient noise in neighborhoods and playing it back for audiences. Those who “got it” came to realize the richness of everyday sounds as well as the annoyances. Perhaps our need to escape has resulted in a need to be disconnected from the everyday. For our students, it may be a need to escape from school. Even while trapped inside from 8-3, they use their mp3 players and phones to take themselves momentarily away from the dullness of classroom routine. The closest equivalent from my time would be daydreaming. We had walkmans and boom boxes, though boom boxes were a much more public statement, something one doesn’t hear much of today.



Is Facebook Growing Up Too Fast?
Wow, much to cover here, but I’ll give some of it a shot. First to the specific points raised by Alyson in posting these articles.

I am flying south this afternoon, (I’m off school this week), so I won’t be able to be present for the April 7th online meeting, but I wanted to address the issue of the drama teacher. I am sure he thought, with limited understanding of what was available, that this was a good idea. From my perspective however, he had to feel at least some ethical discomfort in “friending” his students. One of the reasons I have been hesitant to use Facebook in a broader fashion, is that I don’t want to be able to access my students’ pages and I don’t want them seeing mine. I am in the 20% group that makes full use of privacy settings. The last thing I want are pockets of band kids asking to be my friend. I had one student, a senior, ask about it at school, and I replied, “Not until you are out of college”. I’m assuming he will forget by then. Whether as a parent or teacher, I don’t want to be “virtually” hanging around my students’ socializing outside of class. If information comes my way that involves the health and welfare of students, then I’ll report it, but they are entitled to socialize online and off with some degree of privacy. There is a fascinating Frontline documentary, “Growning Up Online”, that does a good job discussing what is public and private online between adults and young people.

My solution to the drama teacher, students, and their parents would be a Wikispace or some kind of classroom blog. As noted in my previous entry, our school’s website is equipped with blogging features within a class or activity. Contributions are limited to members who must log in to post, but posts are viewable by anyone visiting the site. Students are assigned an alias to protect privacy, though I can identify them by rolling the mouse over their alias. Parents are looking for safety, students for privacy, and teachers (at least this one) for a way to interact with students over class topics in a secure “online” educational environment. I want it to reflect features of social networking sites and blogs, to be user-friendly, but to be wholly separate from the social networking part of their lives that Facebook represents. Now if only my school would give students their login information!

Considering the report of the teacher and Danish Prime Minister, well, Denmark is pretty small compared to the US, so let’s take it to a smaller scale. Would it be possible for a teacher in NYC to get Mayor Mike, James Levine, Ethan Hawke, or Derek Jeeter to come and address a class? I wouldn’t rule it out, but we do have a number of barriers, virtual and real between celebrities/politicians and “regular folk”. Whether technology is something that can bridge the gap is still being tested. It is certainly easier to try and friend one of these people or respond to their blog, than to try to get into their apartment building or office and knock on the door.

I would like to address the privacy issue and Facebook’s terms of service. It was noted in the article that Facebook was changing these terms to protect themselves from lawsuits and that other sites had similar terms. Still, we need to continue the conversation of personal information being public or private, and who owns this information, particularly as we produce a generation that has a very different mindset with regard to making the private public. I know that were I to use Facebook more, I would be sensitive about what I put on my page, knowing Facebook may exert ownership rights somewhere down the road. As with anything that is still being hashed out, I do think the public will find a balance between the public and private. Some of this will come from the lessons learned from others, as with the gate chief who lost his job.

What becomes frustrating is that many of these emerging “service industries” are built on the backs of “free labor”, users who help make the decisions as to what works and what doesn’t. Then as the “service” becomes a “corporation”, users begin to feel they are losing their voice, representation if you will, and they may look to other venues. Several years ago, myspace was dominant among my students for social networking, based on an “unscientific” survey of my 120 band members. Now virtually all of them use Facebook. Facebook may have many years ahead of it, but keeping the customer happy is a tried and true maxim they should never get too big to ignore.

My School Website Progress, Or Not...

Both hopeful signs and continued frustrations on the middle school/high school blogging front.

On the hopeful side, a middle school student, having logged onto his personal page on the school website, was able to send me a message. I received both an email notification and it was there when I logged onto my teacher page. Sounds small, but it means my middle school students are FINALLY getting their login information!! A mere 5 months. I set up what may become my middle school class blog (there is a template within the teacher page for this). Though we are now on "Spring/Passover/Easter" break and I don't expect much traffic, I may try a simple post there and see if there are any comments/responses.

On the frustration side, I setup my blog for high school only to find out they have not received login id's/passwords!! Found out one teacher got them for his AP class, and so five band members can post to my high school class blog. I'll just have to demand it after break for my other 115 band members. Once they realize they need to give access to 20% of the school, maybe they will go ahead and do the rest.

More frustration comes from the overall use of the site, its potential going untested, and the timing of technology in the midst of a budget crisis. Some are questioning our commitment to this as we are making substantial cuts elsewhere. Our previous site dated from 1999 or 2000. It was disorganized and principally a place to post information. The purpose of the new website was threefold (at least for some of us): to give the site a much needed update, to give its maintenance to an outside entity, and to allow for the kind of interactions in a secure environment that were occurring throughout the web 2.0 world.

Well, we have an attractive looking site that is fairly easy to navigate. We have teacher pages and class pages, blog templates, and rss. What are most teachers doing with the site? In my very "unscientific" survey of teacher pages (about 20), most were using the pages to post a description of the class, a few links, and class files. Some had a picture included! We devoted a professional development day in February to the new website and what I have just described were the minimum requirements for that day. So - a number of teachers met the minimum and that's been the end of it. Others use the "file posting" feature and offer a wealth of links. Few, if any have activated any "discussions" (another feature) and blogs of course are useless until students can log in.

Is this another case of dropping technology into schools and watching it become yet another virtual "file drawer" rather than a tool to enhance learning and contribute to collaboration online?
We have an opportunity that is remaining largely unused and unnoticed and at what expense to the district. Now the district is considering cutting the position of "technology coordinator". Who will oversee the next steps? Will there be next steps? Certainly in my classroom, but I fear few others will see it as time well spent. The gap widens...

My one hope is that others will see the benefits of my students' blogging about band and try it out in their classes.

Introduction

This intro will provide a bit of background on who Dan Brown is (other than a famous author), why I am taking MSTU5814, and what I hope to gain from the class.

I have been teaching music for 20 years in a small school district in Westchester County. I work with both middle and high school students and teach band, jazz band, and percussion. When I began my teaching career, the groups were very small and there was a community feeling to our rehearsals. Everyone had a voice and dialogue was an important part of the rehearsal process. As time went on, the groups grew in size and popularity, but I began to feel the sense of community slipping away. It became ever more difficult to have effective dialogue with a class of 106 that only met for 40 minutes a day!!

A few years ago, my thoughts turned to ways in which students communicate with one another. Many educators I work with see these modes of communication: texting, IMs, blogging, facebook, and the like, as a negative influence on student habits and behavior. While I share some of their concerns, I quickly realized the potential this media has for "connecting" students in my class.

In rather primitive ways, I have sought to use what is available in my school (eboard), to create opportunities for students in band to communicate with one another about issues that come up in class, and to post excerpts from rehearsals on which they can comment. It has given voice to students in band I don't normally hear from and sparked lively debate among members over any number of issues I can't cover in one class. They are quite willing to take the opportunity to "constructively" criticize things I do in class and offer suggestions, which I appreciate. I do encourage very much a "two way street" approach. Our new school website has a blog feature for each class that I am presently in the process of setting up.

My hope is that students will feel more invested in the class, understand that their voices are relevant, valued and supported. I am also excited at the potential for keeping classroom conversations going between classes, thus making band more than a mere 40 minute elective sandwiched between two AP classes.

Currently at TC, I am working on a doctorate in music education. My research includes collaboration with students to develop a model for online communication and reflection that gives students a more active role in the direction of daily rehearsals. Wow, that's a mouthful! The goal is to let them reflect on experiences in class, discuss options with peers as well as myself, and help chart the direction of future rehearsals.

One of the issues I struggle with in my research is privacy. I am a pretty private person and not one to easily share the personal aspects of my life publicly. My students have no such issues. They display so much of their lives online. However, I think we have a role to play in sensitizing them perhaps to how public they really want to be. How? That is a question I need help on.

Another concern is with how connected some people feel they need to be 24/7. Just last night, I sat watching our high school musical production of Les Miserables. During one of the emotional high points of the show, I suddenly heard clicking behind me and turned around to see two girls busily texting on their cell phones. When I spoke to them about it being as disruptive they started to argue the point, at which time I had to take them out of the audience and finish the discussion in the lobby. They really didn't get it. I was made to think of that video post of Jonathan Stewart and Twitter. We laugh because, though exaggerated, we see the truth in such satire.

I look forward to working with and talking to everyone. Though I love technology, I am very much a novice, necessarily so as I still need time in the day to practice piano, conduct rehearsals, and read Dewey. (I think Dewey takes longer than everything else!) Feel free to share your expertise and offer advice whether I ask for it or not.