This made me (Pooja) laugh. A New York Times Article from 1858 wonders if transatlantic telegraphs were necessary, or “too fast for the truth?”
“Superficial, sudden, unsifted,” is how news via telegraph were described in this article. Sound familiar!? I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Read Adrienne Lafrance’s article on the evolution of communication mediums here:
I (Pooja) am always looks for new strategies to build good habits (and break bad ones). An article by James Clear in Business Insider visually represents a few strategies for building new habits. I find these images to be simple yet effective as a daily reminder. They are already on my fridge 🙂
Here are two I particularly liked. To see the rest click on the link below.
Success is a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. —Jim Rohn
The best way to improve your self-control is to see how and why you lose control.
—Kelly McGonigal
Read the entire article here:
One of my(Pooja) dearest friends recently started her own blog: www.edumodels.ca. Roopa and I have been best friends for almost twenty years. We are both educators and can discuss our views on education for hours on end. Her most recent post was so beautiful, I decided to re-blog it here. She reflects on book written by J. Krishnamurti (philosopher/educator): Education and the Significance of Life. I have not yet read this text, but after reading Roopa’s blog post, it is at the top of my reading list.
Below is an excerpt from Roopa’s blog:
Taking an important step (leap!) back, Krishnamurti pushes us to think fundamentally about the purpose of education, and focuses on the importance of self-knowledge and individual freedom. In a chapter on “The Right Kind of Education” he expands:
The purpose of education is to cultivate right relationship, not only between individuals, but also between the individual and society; and that is why it is essential that education should, above all, help the individual to understand his/her own psychological process. Intelligence lies in understanding oneself and going above and beyond oneself.
In addressing the danger of setting ideals for children (whether in educational institutions, or as parents), and in conditioning them, Krishnamurti makes his views clear:
The right kind of education consists in understanding the child without imposing upon her an ideal of what we think she should be. To enclose her in the framework of an ideal is to encourage her to conform, which breeds fear and produces in her the constant conflict between what she is and what she should be; and all inward conflicts have their outward manifestations in society.. If a child lies for example, of what value is it to put before her the ideal of truth? One has to find out why she is telling lies. To help the child, one has to take time to study and observe her, which demands patience, love and care.
Krishnamurti’s emphasis on the primary importance of self-understanding; the secondary importance of technique and profession; and the understanding of the individual child, all resonate very strongly with me. In practice, I’m curious as to how this plays out at the Krishnamurti schools; and I will follow up with a post on the schooling Krishnamurti called for later this week!
To read Roopa’s entire blog post as well as her previous posts, click below:
http://www.edumodels.ca/blog/education-and-the-significance-of-life
As I continue to read the news about states exiting the Common Core standards to reclaim standard-setting autonomy, I am reminded of a quote from a participant from our SSHRC study on literacy teacher educators:
“You’re teaching the student. You’re not teaching the curriculum. The student should be in the middle and to try to stretch the curriculum to fit around that.” (Melissa)
The Common Core Standards are national U.S. standards for English Language Arts and Mathematics grades K-12. The implementation of these standards began in 2011. However, in the past few months three states have formally withdrawn from the Common Core Standards (Indiana, Oklahoma, and South Carolina). Recently, Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana made public that he was also looking to formally withdraw from the Common Core Standards.
This turbulent time in the implementation of national standards reminds me of the stance several of our literacy teacher educators had on teaching directly to national mandates. Several had lived through many curricula, and so tended to veer away from explicitly teaching the curriculum. Rather, they emphasized with their student teachers that the focus should always be on the student.
Below is a chart summarizing U.S. resisting the implementation of the Common Core:
Source:
http://dailysignal.com/2014/06/19/want-bobby-jindal-pulls-louisiana-common-core/
Google’s daily doodles tend to put a smile on my (Pooja) face, as I suppose they are intended to do. The past eight days of Google’s doodles have been dedicated to the FIFA World Cup being hosted in Brazil. To keep pace with the World Cup, the doodles have been changing multiple times a day to reflect in real time what is happening in Brazil.
Google doodles are usually created in California, U.S.A. However, this is the first time doodles are being created outside of the U.S.A.: “[A] handful of the team’s 17 members are reacting almost in real time to games, results and events happening in the 12 World Cup venues.” (http://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/news/google-doodles-go-international-with-fifa-world-cup-2014-544758)
Doodles are usually made months in advance, but to keep the doodles relevant they are being created only hours before we see them. The doodle team leader, Ryan Germick, stated:
This has never been done in real time response, there is not really an event so singular where the whole world is watching. The fact is that this is a singular sport, one game is on at a time and the whole world is fixated on one match and so it is a chance to be part of the dialogue. The part we are celebrating is that the whole world comes together.
Here are stills of my favourite Google doodles so far:
Today’s doodle was a familiar scene for many people working in offices all around the world:
This doodle is set in Rio De Janeiro’s favelas. The “L” from Google is kicking the soccer ball around by itself:
This doodle was featured on the first day of the World Cup. This moving doodle featured many of Rio de Janeiro’s famous sites:
Self tracking applications (e.g. Fitbit, Sleep Cycle, Moodpanda, MyFitnessPal) have gained much popularity over the past few years. People want to track how many calories they are consuming; how many steps they are taking; how many hours of deep sleep they are getting.
I was recently introduced to another self-tracking application, Rescue Time. This application monitors your computer and tracks usages such as hours spent on e-mail, hours spent writing, and hours spent on facebook (too many!) According to their website (https://www.rescuetime.com), Rescue Time believes their application can help you be the most efficient with your time:
On one hand, with so many possible distractions at play while working, I see that Rescue Time could be a useful tracking tool. However, on the other hand, I wonder if Rescue Time could add to my already long list of possible distractions!?
Has anyone used this application? What have been your experiences? I would love to hear from you!
With the symposium a few days behind us, I (Pooja) have had some time to reflect on what was discussed in London, England. Clare wrote a reflection post on day one of the symposium (https://literacyteaching.net/2014/06/06/symposium-day-1-reflections/), so I want to reflect a bit on day two. Day two started off with mini-presentations which asked presenters to focus on a central question: What is happening with digital technology in your context?
Shawn Bullock, assistant professor at Simon Fraser University, raised some interesting issues related to digital technology and education:
o Persistent- recording (video, audio) events changed the nature of public space;
o Replicable- recordings became replicable;
o Searchable- today we can search for any recording
(danah boyd)
Understanding how the nature of public space has drastically changed over the years, Shawn posed an important question to the group: What is the role of education in theorizing privacy in the digital age?
As the symposium was coming to a close, we were guided to reflect on the past two days. Many people realized that the rapid increase of standardization and data driven initiatives was happening across all contexts. However, many individuals commented that the conversations over the past two days were “energizing.” Being in conversation about big issues across international contexts made many teacher educators realize they were not alone. In fact, many commented they wanted to keep up the momentum by further collaborating and “making some noise” in teacher education.
Once again, we’d like to thank TUG Agency for so graciously hosting us. TUG provided a vibrant and exciting atmosphere for our symposium to take place. Check out their website at: http://www.tugagency.com
Thank you!!!
As many of our blog followers know we are hosting the Symposium : Rethinking Literacy Teacher Education for the Digital Era: Teacher Educators, Literacy Educators, and Digital Technology Experts Working Together. One of the main activities of the project is bringing together 17 experts from three fields and 4 countries (Canada, US, UK, and Australia) to address the following questions.
• How can literacy/English teacher educators (LTEs) prepare student teachers to develop and implement literacy programs that capitalize on digital technology (DT)?
• What teacher education curriculum changes are required to better prepare future teachers to integrate technology in their own teaching?
• What professional learning support do LTEs need to develop courses that will integrate and make greater use of DT?
The Symposium will be held over two days: June 5 and 6 in London England. We will send updates daily.
As academics we tend to work in our “silo” which although allows us to specialize it has limitations. The symposium will provide an opportunity to work in an inter-disciplinary manner which may help us move forward the field of literacy teacher education. The participants are:
Canada
Clare Kosnik (P.I.)
Clive Beck – Co-applicant – OISE/University of Toronto
Pooja Dharamshi – OISE/University of Toronto
Cathy Miyata – OISE/University of Toronto
Lydia Menna – OISE/University of Toronto
Shawn Bullock – Simon Fraser University
England
Jean Murray – Co-applicant – University of East London
Bethan Marshall – Co-applicant – King’s College
John Yandell – Institute of Education, University of London
Sue Dymoke – University of Leicester
Sam Twiselton – Sheffield Hallam University
Alison Baker – University of East London
U.S.
Lin Goodwin – Co-applicant – Teachers College
Peter Williamson – University of San Francisco
Australia
Simone White – Co-applicant – Monash University
Graham Parr – Monash University
Neil Selwyn – Monash University
Scott Bulfin – Monash University
The Symposium is being held at Tug Agency:
Tug is a search marketing led agency, specialising in pay per click
advertising, biddable display, search engine optimisation, affiliates and
social media marketing. We’re called Tug because we believe that pull
marketing is the most cost effective way to drive traffic to our clients’ websites,
and the best way to drive ROI positive online conversions.http://www.tugagency.com
Nora Young, the host of CBC Radio’s Spark, was the keynote speaker of a conference I (Pooja) attended yesterday. She spoke about data science as a growing field of study, in fact, many universities have created departments of data science. With the growth, Nora noted, comes a need for what she called critical data literacy. She illustrated the need for critical data literacy with an example of mapping technology. Google maps have quickly become the go-to application for finding directions and/or locating businesses on a map. However, being critically data literate, guides us to question like: who gets to decide what appears on a map? The answer is most often large multi-million dollar enterprises like Google.
To disrupt google’s monopoly of the growing online map industry, initiatives like Open Street Maps have been created. In January of 2014, The Guardian commented on the need for applications like Open Street Map. They likened it to “a wiki-like map that anyone in the world can edit. If a store is missing from the map, it can be added in by a store owner or even a customer. In terms of display… each person or company who creates a map is free to render it how they like..” (Wroclawski, 2014) A site, which allows community members to add and edit a map of a community to which they belong, is powerful because it positions community members as experts.
I am looking forward to bringing this mapping technology into my classroom. I hope my students can create maps of their neighbourhoods.
A snapshot of a map made by community members:
Read more about Open Street Map:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/14/why-the-world-needs openstreetmap
Recently, a friend started a lunch delivery service. She makes healthy, delicious, and affordable lunches every day. The lunches are delivered in an aluminum container, also known as a tiffin. She got this idea after watching a documentary about Mumbai’s Tiffinwallahs aka Dabbawallahs (those who deliver tiffins). Each day in Mumbai, “approximately 4,000 dabbawallahs deliver 160,000 home-cooked lunches from the kitchens of suburban wives and mothers direct to Mumbai’s workers.”Harvard’s Business School has studied this intricate delivery service, calling it “the world’s most ingenious meal distribution system.” What makes this service so fascinating to me is the coding system the tiffinwallahs have created. Although many do not have traditional literacy skills of reading and writing, they have re-defined literacy by creating a of successful and efficient communication through elaborate colour coding. Forbes magazine has awarded the “dabbawallahs a 6 Sigma performance rating (a term used in quality assurance if the percentage of correctness is 99.9999999 or more).” The business is also growing at a steady pace of 5-10% year.
The colour/numerical code created for the lids of tiffins:
Watch the Tiffinwallahs in action:
Read more about the Tiffinwallahs in Mumbai here:
http://signalvnoise.com/posts/2882-the-incredible-delivery-system-of-indias-dabbawallahs
Literacy Teaching and Teacher Education 
