Month: October 2006

Re: Popular Media Representations of Scientific Methods

Steve asks, “can you think of any examples of representations of “scientific method” in popular media?”

I am not often on the look out for this, let alone watching TV, so I am sure that there are some examples that are embedded in shows other than CSI that have implications for you.

However, the one show that does come to mind is Zoom, and the daily experiment that they do. I don’t know if this is similar to something like Mr. Wizard or Bill Nye the Science Guy in terms of framing the scientific concept, but it might be a place to start in terms of current popular culture.

One other thing that you might think about are movies, although I don’t know if ones like Weird Science would count.

Learning Chinese as a Critical, Multiple Literacy

The Chinese Immersion Program that my daughter is enrolled in has been featured in the local media over the past few days, mostly due to the fact that US DOE officials were in town. Here is a clip from the newspaper.

The Lansing School District will expand its new Chinese immersion preschool into a full elementary experience with an $800,000 federal startup grant announced Wednesday.

Likewise, Michigan State University and Dearborn Public Schools have received a multiyear, multimillion-dollar grant from the federal government to develop a K-16 Arabic instruction curriculum.

Both Chinese and Arabic are among the most critical foreign languages needed in today’s schools, according to the federal government.

Lansing State Journal: Globally speaking

Now, I am all for this program (obviously, since my child is in it), but I am becoming increasingly concerned with the ways in which this program is framed, both by the school and the media. The way that the DOE uses “critical” to describe these languages needs to be unpacked a bit. Basically, the way I hear it, I think that critical means something like this:

  • Learn Chinese so we can continue the capitalist march into China and that we can communicate with them for our own purposes, mainly to make money. Check out this NPR story from today on this topic.
  • Learn Arabic so we can beat the terrorists. (I won’t say anymore about this, because others have said it more eloquently and passionately than I could.)

In this discourse of critical language learning, no discussion emerges in the ways that a multiliteracies perspective would suggest we think of “critical literacy.” In this mode of thinking, we might say that learning Chinese is important so we have a better understanding of the culture and language so that we can express ourselves more clearly.
It might also suggest that the visual, gestural, and otherwise artistic “texts” that the Chinese culture produces are different from our own, let alone their way of thinking and being in the world, and understanding that perspective can give us insights on how the rest of the world views us. And how we view ourselves.
Rather than learning Chinese to be able to make money (and, I know, that is part of it, no matter how idealistic I want to be), why can’t we focus on the cross-cultural understandings that can come of this?

Having worked with many international students at the Writing Center, I have come to appreciate the ways in which students from different cultures communicate — the words and phrases they chose, who and what has agency in their language, the structure of their narratives and arguments. This is why I want my daughter to learn another language; she should be better able to communicate in English and in Chinese because of the cultural and rhetorical understandings that she can make from knowing both of these languages and cultures.

I am happy that she now wants to see the Great Wall instead of going to Disney Land. Her world is growing every day. As a bonus, she will be able to “compete in the global economy,” but that is just be a bonus on top of the cross-cultural understanding she would posses.

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Thoughts on Morville’s “The Sociosemantic Web”

Today for Critical Studies, we read a chapter from Peter Morville‘s Ambient Findability, “The Sociosemantic Web.” This chapter suggests that taxonomies are out, folksonomies are in, yet (given the choice) Morville says, “I’ll take the ancient tree of knowledge over the transient leaves of popularity any day” (p. 139). That was the one line of the text that confused most of us, given his overwhelming support of how links, tags, and other forms of metadata can contribute to our understanding of the web, but that was one of our only concerns.

A few things that the chapter raised, however, related to the ways in which we, as researchers and educators, find, use, and distribute knowledge, as well as what counts as literacy now. First, we talked about the ways in which we “traditionally” did research in school with 3×5 cards, encyclopedias, and card catalogs which then lead to a final, polished paper of regurgitated information. Today, students are (or, at least, they could be) working from Wikipedia, keeping Google Notebooks, checking out social bookmarks and blogs of others working on similar research, and creating collaborative reports with a wiki. In what ways does this challenge the traditional power structures evident in schooling, in general, and literacy education, in particular? Was there ever a “pure and good” way to do research, despite the clear and concise steps that we would like to believe comprises good research?

Second, the idea that the world was built on taxonomies and is now working in folksonomies (although we are not so sure there was ever a dichotomy) makes what we want students to do as literate citizens very different than what it used to be. It is no longer about memorizing one idea sequentially after another, but instead looking for connections — sometimes suggested by experts, sometimes by peers — and trying to synthesize ideas into something new and useful, not just to repeat it for a test. We talked about the list of genres represented in hypertext (p. 146) and the ways in which composing those texts on paper as compared to using hypertext drastically changes the task. In some ways, linking is the new way to create citations (although, looking at a list of someone’s references to see what to read next has been a skill that we’ve used before the Internet).At any rate, it was an interesting read and since Morville might be coming to campus later this year for a talk, I figured it would be good to write a little bit about his work now.