Category: Media and Pop Culture

Internet Addiction

Another aspect of digital literacy will be to know when to say when.

For all its utility, it’s no secret the Internet is one of the most effective distractions ever invented. That is more true among the younger generations, who are more comfortable in the online world and more apt to find hours spent surfing sites such as Facebook compelling.
Experts say that distraction is becoming a problem at MSU, as it is on college campuses across the country.
Increasing numbers of students are reporting their extracurricular online activities are taking a toll on their academics. And college officials, more accustomed to encouraging students to go online than telling them to stay off, are still looking for remedies.

In a health survey conducted this year, 18.5 percent of MSU students reported that spending time using the Internet and playing computer games had caused them to get a lower grade on a test, a lower grade ina class or to drop a class altogether.

Lansing State Journal: Internet addiction at MSU increasing

I am not a gamer, but I admit that I am addicted to email, blog reading, tangential research, and the occasional link to YouTube, The Onion, or some other distraction.
Is there any more fitting irony incongruity (I spent two more minutes of my life researching the difference between the two) than the fact that I am blogging this, at home, while I should be writing my dissertation?

Enough said.

Blogged with Flock

TIME.com: 50 Coolest Websites

So, I ran across TIME.com: 50 Coolest Websites the other day. There are many great sites on here that I have tried already like Jumpcut, YouTube, and Charity Navigator, but many more to explore.

I am curious… does anyone else have experience with any of these websites that Time thinks is cool? As an educator, what would you add? Perhaps we can start a list of the 50 coolest websites for writing teachers.

The Pop Culture Translator

Screenshot of Pop Culture TranslatorThis summer, RCWP has been doing a number of workshops related to writing and new literacies. One of them was on using pop culture in the classroom and the facilitator of the session just shared The Pop Culture Translator with our list serv.

This site is both hilarious and scary all at the same time. Since my son is a fan of Sean Paul, I thought that I would listen to his video translation first. While I was not so subtle in talking to my son about the message of the song (which, he admitted, he didn’t understand all the innuendo, he just liked the beat. Yeah…), this translator is attempts to be as literal as possible, something that our language and technology often don’t do. So, I laugh, while also thinking about the implications that it makes clear. It’s not as if I didn’t listen to music laced with innuendo, nor my parents, but the ways in which things are becoming more and more blatant kind of scares me as a parent.

At any rate, as a teacher, I think that this is an interesting way to appropriate media for critical purposes and would like to know more about how others might use something like this with your students. What would a lesson using this site look like in middle school? High school? College? I can imagine that the conversations would be somewhat different at each level, but I think that the idea of “translating” one text into another discourse is very intriguing and offers many critical possibilities for language learning; take “mash ups” as an example of that. Using technology as part of that makes it all the more compelling. I will try to remember to share it with my son the next time he is over. And, I will see how his translations compare.

I hope that they put more examples up soon…