WHAT I LEARNED
1. Two jokes for the price of one
2. One liners are funny
TWO TUTORIAL VIDEOS I LEARNED FROM
Friday 31 October 2014
LEARNING TO BE FUNNY PART 4
WHAT I LEARNED
1. Two jokes for the price of one
2. One liners are funny
Tuesday 28 October 2014
THE YOUTUBE DEBATE
KENDRA AND I DEBATE IT OUT ABOUT YOUTUBE'S PLACE IN THE CLASSROOM
I ARGUE
1. It's a waste of time
2. Education lecture videos are not more intriguing than a real life lecture
Now how hard was it to go through this blog with these Youtube videos and remember anything I was talking about?
I rest my case.
Saturday 25 October 2014
LEARNING TO BE FUNNY PART 3
What I've Learned About Comedy So Far (from watching a bunch of comics online)
1.Comedians are acting. (portraying a character)
Goes into character at 1:20. I've seen sets of his where that's how he talks the whole time.
2. Cuss words aren't funny (in and of themselves)
3. Interesting yet plausible stories are funny
4.Bold statements followed by specific examples are funny
5. Self Aware Comedy is funny
6. Bringing back jokes is funny
7.Convince the audience it's a conversation not a performance
8. Props are funny
9. Riffing Is Funny
10.Voices are funny
1:23
11.Least funny to most funny
:58 Reasons for cell phone loss
12.I've never thought about that/ I've thought about that and never said it
Friday 17 October 2014
MEDIA SMARTS: RESOURCES FOR BUILDING DIGITAL CITIZENS
This week I discovered MediaSmarts. It is an amazing website dedicated to educating students not only with media but about all forms of media. I found it incredibly insightful and I know it will be a great help in building lesson plans once I am a teacher.
MediaSmarts has a wide variety of resources for both parents and teachers. You can browse the resources by topic or browse through the teacher resources section of the website.
I found three very helpful resources that I am going to be using in my future career.
1. MyWorld
MyWorld is a game for developing digital literacy. It has an interactive desktop that gives challenges to the students. For instance maybe a friend (a character) will email them about internet bullying and the game will give them options to email the teacher (a character), or how to respond the friend's email. When they need to know something they can go to an online library, a fake Google site or consult one of the 4 mentors. The four mentors are experts in specific fields. And the student has to match the mentor (and their advice) to the problem they are experiencing. It helps students with everything from recognizing and reacting well to hate speech to validating internet claims and reading Wikipedia articles discerningly.
It's not something that I think would be useful throughout the course but I could set the students up to play it at either the beginning or end of a unit on digital literacy.
2. Passport To The Internet
PTTI is a lot like MyWorld but there are some interesting things that separate them. They are both concerned with online safety and morality but PTTI also has games that help develop digital skills. There's one really great game where you try to find a website on the search engine using pre-selected phrases. For instance if you use a phrase that isn't in quotation marks only irrelevant websites will come up. Also it's a more creative space-- instead of a desktop you begin the game at internet station, the gateway to the internet.
I would use this program and MyWorld interchangeably.
.
3. Web Awareness Workshop Series
There are plenty of resources like this on MediaSmarts. There are self-directed tutorials, power point slides and guides for workshops on cyber-bullying, web discernment, etc. The workshops are a great way to inform your teaching. There's also a lot of information that can go into building lesson plans.
MediaSmarts has a wide variety of resources for both parents and teachers. You can browse the resources by topic or browse through the teacher resources section of the website.
I found three very helpful resources that I am going to be using in my future career.
1. MyWorld
MyWorld is a game for developing digital literacy. It has an interactive desktop that gives challenges to the students. For instance maybe a friend (a character) will email them about internet bullying and the game will give them options to email the teacher (a character), or how to respond the friend's email. When they need to know something they can go to an online library, a fake Google site or consult one of the 4 mentors. The four mentors are experts in specific fields. And the student has to match the mentor (and their advice) to the problem they are experiencing. It helps students with everything from recognizing and reacting well to hate speech to validating internet claims and reading Wikipedia articles discerningly.
It's not something that I think would be useful throughout the course but I could set the students up to play it at either the beginning or end of a unit on digital literacy.
2. Passport To The Internet
PTTI is a lot like MyWorld but there are some interesting things that separate them. They are both concerned with online safety and morality but PTTI also has games that help develop digital skills. There's one really great game where you try to find a website on the search engine using pre-selected phrases. For instance if you use a phrase that isn't in quotation marks only irrelevant websites will come up. Also it's a more creative space-- instead of a desktop you begin the game at internet station, the gateway to the internet.
I would use this program and MyWorld interchangeably.
.
3. Web Awareness Workshop Series
There are plenty of resources like this on MediaSmarts. There are self-directed tutorials, power point slides and guides for workshops on cyber-bullying, web discernment, etc. The workshops are a great way to inform your teaching. There's also a lot of information that can go into building lesson plans.
Friday 10 October 2014
LEARNING TO BE FUNNY PART 2
One of of the requirements for my ECMP322 learning project was that I had to learn something that I didn't know how to do already. I chose to learn how to do stand up comedy. So I got together my favourtie people (my boys and my wife) and had a comedy night in our living room.
I think I proved I don't know what I'm doing.
I think I proved I don't know what I'm doing.
Thursday 9 October 2014
THE NEW SEXUAL REALITY OF CANADIAN STUDENTS
While watching Sext Up Kids and The Sextortion of Amanda Todd I felt a few distinct emotions. Anger, disgust, sadness and the like. But two ideas laced itself through both narratives. Two facts, that became more and more evident with every stat or real-life story.
photo credit
André Mouraux
1. Technology has drastically and possibly forever changed the sexual climate that children and teenagers live their lives in.
2. As an educator (and a father) I need to be pro-active in educating and empowering students to safely and positively navigate the world of technology as digital citizens.
The internet is the new wild west. It's a near-lawless territory with a developing etiquette and social and moral code. It is the old generation's new reality and the new generations only reality. Since technology has not moved slow, the principles of digital citizenship are still being developed but they are not widespread as cultural value norms. For instance there is no cultural consensus on whether it is rude to text while you are talking to someone in person. This can seem like an overwhelming idea but it doesn't need to be. We get to be the people that develop this new world.
These factors are at play when we talk about digital sexuality. I want to talk two different areas that are underdeveloped when it comes to digital sexuality and how that effects Canadian students.
1. LAW
When Amanda Todd went to the police about her sexual extortion they were not any help. Their advice was to stay off the computer. Telling a teenager to give up the internet and cell phone usage is like telling an adult to give up transportation. It's how they navigate their world. She had to develop her own safety code, no longer sharing pictures with "randoms". It makes me wonder, if everything on the internet is traceable why is it so difficult to find people that commit crimes online?
Anyone who has a picture of a nude or near nude minor is in possession of illegal pornography. This may be the law but in Canada we don't see it being enforced as the law. One teenager in the film Sexted Up Kids said she shared a nude picture of herself and had to find out, herself who had the picture and tell them to delete it. Sadly we see a different attitude towards these situations and other situations of illegal pornography. This is most likely because the victim of the illegal photo-sharing most likely was the first to share the picture. This is part of a larger attitude towards females. It's an attitude that believes that women only deserve justice when they are completely blameless. I will talk more about this later.
Pornography is illegal for all minors and yet 93% of boys watch porn before they are 18 and 62% of girls. This would never be allowed if these statistics came from the illegal sale of dirty magazines from corner stores. But the internet seems impossible to police.
2. CULTURAL VALUES/NORMS
As the documentary Sext Up Kids points out, children and adolescents are being constantly competing messages. Girls are told to flaunt their bodies, that there is a sense of worth that comes from how they look. They are told that their bodies can look sexual, as if sexuality were way you look. In the documentary they mentioned a study of female pleasure in sexual activity and found the majority of younger females talked solely about how they felt they looked during the act. One commentator said in this sexed up culture the students are living in a society that girls can choose to be sexy or invisible. She doesn't have many other options.
So with these cultural values being propagated is it any wonder that female students take a million selfies and that a percentage of those are going to be nude and near-nude? But not only does the sexed up culture demand this type of body-based sexuality, it also demands the image of purity simultaneously be maintained. As soon as the teenage girl takes the nude selfie that society has been priming her to take, she is deemed by society as a whore. It does not take much to be a whore in Canadian societal values. In our cultural tradition whores don't deserve justice, they deserve everything that follows the loss of their perceived purity.
Boys on the other hand are having their sexual world shaped by the fiction of pornography (as are girls). The majority of pornography would be classified as hardcore porn, which is porn that depicts violent, semi-violent, demeaning, solely male pleasure based pornography. If this is their sexual education they will see women as an object in their sexual experience. Simultaneously they are being told they are the driving force of romance in a romantic relationship. A romantic concept of love is not limited to Romantic Comedies. The media that boys consume has the same type of romantic expectations if not more. In a typical action film not only are you the one that buys the flowers, you also need to kill an army of ninjas and give up your life for your love. So boys are constantly told to lust for and love women, to cherish and demean them, to be romantic and have specific sexual expectations that only benefit themselves.
Video of Alan Alda's thoughts on Misogyny
In the Sext Up documentary it ends on a note that students are really looking for romantic love not sex and the former should be sought over the other. It's my personal opinion that both are flawed visions for relationships that have a hierarchical framework in which the man has ownership over the woman. In the romantic framework men are expected to take care of the female. To woo and win. When in reality those relationships are best understood as a partnership, as a team. A team that makes the world a better place, maybe raise some kids as a team. I know it's not very romantic though but it will build a better world.
1. Technology has drastically and possibly forever changed the sexual climate that children and teenagers live their lives in.
 |
| photo credit Kathy Cassidy |
The internet is the new wild west. It's a near-lawless territory with a developing etiquette and social and moral code. It is the old generation's new reality and the new generations only reality. Since technology has not moved slow, the principles of digital citizenship are still being developed but they are not widespread as cultural value norms. For instance there is no cultural consensus on whether it is rude to text while you are talking to someone in person. This can seem like an overwhelming idea but it doesn't need to be. We get to be the people that develop this new world.
These factors are at play when we talk about digital sexuality. I want to talk two different areas that are underdeveloped when it comes to digital sexuality and how that effects Canadian students.
1. LAW
When Amanda Todd went to the police about her sexual extortion they were not any help. Their advice was to stay off the computer. Telling a teenager to give up the internet and cell phone usage is like telling an adult to give up transportation. It's how they navigate their world. She had to develop her own safety code, no longer sharing pictures with "randoms". It makes me wonder, if everything on the internet is traceable why is it so difficult to find people that commit crimes online?
Anyone who has a picture of a nude or near nude minor is in possession of illegal pornography. This may be the law but in Canada we don't see it being enforced as the law. One teenager in the film Sexted Up Kids said she shared a nude picture of herself and had to find out, herself who had the picture and tell them to delete it. Sadly we see a different attitude towards these situations and other situations of illegal pornography. This is most likely because the victim of the illegal photo-sharing most likely was the first to share the picture. This is part of a larger attitude towards females. It's an attitude that believes that women only deserve justice when they are completely blameless. I will talk more about this later.
Pornography is illegal for all minors and yet 93% of boys watch porn before they are 18 and 62% of girls. This would never be allowed if these statistics came from the illegal sale of dirty magazines from corner stores. But the internet seems impossible to police.
2. CULTURAL VALUES/NORMS
As the documentary Sext Up Kids points out, children and adolescents are being constantly competing messages. Girls are told to flaunt their bodies, that there is a sense of worth that comes from how they look. They are told that their bodies can look sexual, as if sexuality were way you look. In the documentary they mentioned a study of female pleasure in sexual activity and found the majority of younger females talked solely about how they felt they looked during the act. One commentator said in this sexed up culture the students are living in a society that girls can choose to be sexy or invisible. She doesn't have many other options.
So with these cultural values being propagated is it any wonder that female students take a million selfies and that a percentage of those are going to be nude and near-nude? But not only does the sexed up culture demand this type of body-based sexuality, it also demands the image of purity simultaneously be maintained. As soon as the teenage girl takes the nude selfie that society has been priming her to take, she is deemed by society as a whore. It does not take much to be a whore in Canadian societal values. In our cultural tradition whores don't deserve justice, they deserve everything that follows the loss of their perceived purity.
Boys on the other hand are having their sexual world shaped by the fiction of pornography (as are girls). The majority of pornography would be classified as hardcore porn, which is porn that depicts violent, semi-violent, demeaning, solely male pleasure based pornography. If this is their sexual education they will see women as an object in their sexual experience. Simultaneously they are being told they are the driving force of romance in a romantic relationship. A romantic concept of love is not limited to Romantic Comedies. The media that boys consume has the same type of romantic expectations if not more. In a typical action film not only are you the one that buys the flowers, you also need to kill an army of ninjas and give up your life for your love. So boys are constantly told to lust for and love women, to cherish and demean them, to be romantic and have specific sexual expectations that only benefit themselves.
Video of Alan Alda's thoughts on Misogyny
In the Sext Up documentary it ends on a note that students are really looking for romantic love not sex and the former should be sought over the other. It's my personal opinion that both are flawed visions for relationships that have a hierarchical framework in which the man has ownership over the woman. In the romantic framework men are expected to take care of the female. To woo and win. When in reality those relationships are best understood as a partnership, as a team. A team that makes the world a better place, maybe raise some kids as a team. I know it's not very romantic though but it will build a better world.
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