Mural.ly: Visual Essays for intermediate EFL Students

My intermediate EFL Korean university students are using Mural.ly to create collaborate visual essays on culture. We learned four different components of culture: universal, specific, transcultural, and localized. They used Mural.ly to identify, illustrate, and explain how the different parts of culture interact/overlap.

Their final project on culture was to create a visual essay that compared and contrasted transcultural and localization. Transcultural is an idea/object that is imported from another culture. Localization is when a culture takes that idea/object and makes it uniquely their own.

The hard work of Group 3: Kim Seoul Yeon, Kim SeHee, & Kim In Jae

The collaborative visual essay process on apps like Mural.ly, if structured properly, facilitates students learning visual literacy, critical thinking skills, and the creative process.

None of the students have done anything like a visual essay before. Today, they discussed how this course design is the exact opposite of their Korean education. I explained to them that when you are first learning this kind of visual processing it is like me asking, “Can you please tell me where the air begins and the sky ends?” But eventually, they will begin to be able to identify the different kinds of clouds, air molecules, what the different color of the skies mean…eventually, they can see where the sky ends and the air begins.

The hard work of Group 3: Kim Seoul Yeon, Kim SeHee, & Kim In Jae

Next, we are going to learn about “remixing.” They are going to find out the sky and air are inseparably interconnected together - just like they thought it was in the first place. We are coming full circle with a new kind of clarity.

During this initial learning period about remixing, the students will write and comment on each others’ blogs. I consider this online journaling. We will use Blogger for its user-friendly interface, but the discussion will monitored similarly to a Blackboard discussion. Thankfully, I don’t have to worry about netiquette as they students are quite lovely.

We began the remix discussion early by watching this video (as in follow this link) that shows one of their favorite western action movies (Matrix) was actually an American localization of a transcultural movie genre created by their neighbors (and refined by the Korean film industry as well). 

Digital Citizenship Week: October 21-25, 2013

I don’t know about you… but I said and did some questionable things as a kid. I don’t think any of them would have landed me in jail… What does throwing eggs at cars get these days?

Brooks-Young (2010) believes that children are the same as ever. They make the same mistakes and celebrate the same achievements, but the world that they are navigating is dramatically different.

I was born in 1967. You can do the math. Also, you will note that it was the pre-cellphone and PC era. I was so unwired that I actually played outside from sun up to sun down “within yelling distance” for lunch and dinner.

Cameras? Cameras were some kind of treasure that we’d discovered to capture our friends’ smiles and laughter… we gave the roll of film to our parents and two weeks later an envelope of pictures magically appeared. Half of the time, we had forgotten what pictures had been taken. An envelope of pictures was discovery. 

Slow Technology provided a Built-in Timeout

It wasn’t that long ago when there was a built-in timeout to “stop, drop, & think about it” before doing something stupid with that picture, text, or letter…

Any impulse control related brilliant brainstorms that we had as kids that involved letter writing or image taking was stalled due to delivery time. It was impossible to execute such schemes in real-time, unless your Dad worked for the FBI. Therefore, any of our most brilliant ideas were scrapped due to the boredom as we waited on the technology lag time.

It was just easier to go toilet paper their house (which I don't recommend as I think it is a crime now). 

Everything online is Public

So, is it really possible, even as an adult, to conceive that everything that we post on Facebook/online is public? I mean, do you really understand how people see your posts as you make comments on your friends' cute picture? 

Or as my technically illiterate friend did… she posted an entire personal letter on her Facebook wall thinking that was our private message system... her clients were able to read the very personal letter until she realized what she had done. Thankfully, there was so social fallout.

But mistakes really do happen and a lot of people see your comments about the things y'all did in high school together... TMI. 

Digital Citizenship

Admittedly, I only listened to my parents after my grand ideas failed. But having the information to reconcile my impulsive decision-making with real world consequences was crucial to my ability to grow up into a decent citizen. Thankfully, I had filed away lessons on citizenship to be referred to at a later time.

So, the lessons on digital citizenship matter. It is like when my Dad stopped littering because he got tired of hearing me quote what Mrs. Johnson said about litterbugs. 

Image borrowed from Common Sense Media, 2013. 

Here are a litany of online resources to inspire a wide-range of lesson plans for about any age groups that gives your students the information to file away:

Common Sense Media.

Edutopia.com Digital Citizenship week.

Edutopia.com Digital Citizenship Roundup. 

Digital Citizenship gone awry.

Last night, two of my Korean university students explained that cyberbullying becomes extreme after high school in South Korea. High schools students are much more likely to be bullied in person than online. But something changes dramatically after high school and the chances of becoming a victim of cyberbullying increases even further after graduation from the university.

In Korea, online disinhibition doesn’t appear to be the rampant childhood problem that it is in the United States. In South Korea, there is now a cyberpolice force that handles defamation, along with other online crimes. Cyberbullying appears to be illegal in South Korea.

Cyberbullying is not illegal in the United States. Instead, cyberbullies are prosecuted under stalking and harassment laws. I could only find a cyber enforcement unit under the FBI.

So, what about the parents? 

So... if online disinhibition appears to be just as much an adult problem as a childhood issue… Then a cold-hard reality is that some children might be encouraged by, or modeling after, their parents. 

Therefore, one question for educators is how does your digital citizenship curriculum address the adults' digital citizenship habits that might counter your lessons? And where do students go for help with these matters, if the adults in their lives aren't acknowledging the possible impact of their own online misbehavior on their children?  

FBI Cyber Division. Image borrowed from fbi.gov. 

Online Privacy: A Relic

Cyberbullying

Celebrating Connected Educator Month (October)!!

To connect or not connect, that is the question of the modern educator…

In “What ‘Connected Education’ Looks Like: 28 Examples FromTeachers All Over”, Katherine Schulten provides a litany of positive ways that social media (Facebook to Edmodo) can be integrated into a wide variety of classrooms.

Three teachers used Edmodo to ask students to explore individual profiles of 19^th-century immigrants. The result was the students showed empathy, as well as “demonstrated deeper understanding of the mechanism by which immigrants sought cultural and societal integration in 19^th-century America” (Schulten, 2013).

AFTER THOUGHT: Wouldn’t an amazing next step be exploring the profiles of contemporary immigrants and refugees? The faces of the 19^th-century immigrants were historically much different than those coming to the United States today.

An English Language Learner (ELL) instructor at a community college is asking students to use their cell phones to take images of new vocabulary and idioms that they encounter outside of the classroom. They are using social media to build their own word lists, as well as bridge the real world with the classroom.

AFTER THOUGHT:  I would love to see those students use the images to produce storyboards that narrate their stories (fiction or real time/past or present).

Why so much hate? 

Social media is banned in the majority of the school districts across the United States.

Recently, the Los Angeles Unified School District reinitiated a $1 billion plan to put an iPad in the hands of all students. The first attempt failed because the students cracked the security settings that had locked out Internet and social media. Officials quickly confiscated all the electronic devices once they discovered the breech.

So, the unified school district wants the students to use disabled iPads to their fullest potential? I just keep getting the image of someone tying my feet together and yelling, “Run! Run!”

My daughter has long since graduated from high school (last January), but I have several memories of being asked for math help. You have lost me after basic algebra (although I can hold my own in statistics – the brain is a perplexing place to function).

After the initial eye-rolling and teenager let-down, her fingers would start wildly tapping the keyboard like a mad-scientist on the brink of world destruction when an “Ah-Ha!” would echo triumphantly through the apartment… one or several of her friends had tutored her via a variety of virtual resources from social media to video to watching real-time examples on a shared virtual document or brain storming app.

They didn’t do her homework for her. They actually helped her study virtually. They did for her what I could not.

According to Patricia Deubel (2009), the National School Board Association published studies that showed that “almost 60 percent of studentswho use social networking talk about education topics online and, surprisingly,more than 50 percent talk specifically about schoolwork.” An unofficial survey of my daughter’s social networking habits, I can easily buy into that statistic.

Social media was crucial, and still is, to her academic success.

BUT what are students doing the other 50% of time?

The answer to that question depends on what author or resource that you decide to read.

My daughter and one of our
favorite students, Se-Ra. 

Susan J. Brooks-Young (2010) argues that social media replaced all the banned public gathering spaces where youths can no longer congregate. Brooks-Young cites a collection of curfew and loitering laws that make it near impossible for students to gather, be loud, and socialize without getting into trouble with the lawman.

Insert old Western Sheriff here saying, “Why, our town shuts down at sunset and only the outlaws and teenagers roam the streets in this here parts… and I know how to take care of the outlaws and teenagers… Why, yes I do.”

Social media – good, bad, or ugly – is the public social space for millions of teens (and now people over 35 are no longer social media strangers – we have to figure out what our kids are doing somehow).

Many authors are contributing social media with the negativity and disassociation. In The Winter of Our Disconnect, Susan Maushart cites that our bodies actually produce chemical reactions when in a conversation with someone (while in the flesh) that doesn’t occur virtually. Scientists claim that depression and other ill effects can set in without face-to-face conversations. 

Maushart also goes on to identify examples of teenage violence that the perpetuator contributed to “just needing to feel alive” or some such, after being isolated in his virtual world, and apparently, was taken aback when her son could relate to such thinking.

SIDENOTE: I must admit that I don’t know any teenagers who use the dialect that Maushart is trying to capture in her epic life's tale of a family off technology… it is just makes me uncomfortable reading it (and I don’t know why).

Let’s get serious for a moment.

Both authors noted that the number one issue online is cyber-bullying and there has been a rash of accusations (accompanied withpictures of proof) followed by young suicides that have verified that the virtual world is just as weighted as the empty streets once used to be for GenXers (and all generations before). Playground bullying has been taken an unfortunate new sophistication.

Are educators more likely to identify potential cyber-bullying, if they are on the same social networks as their students? What is hall monitoring in the iGeneration age? 

Evidence has also been found that the students feel more connected to their instructors when they are on regulated social media together, as part of their class projects and curriculum. I have found that my university students are more responsive and accountable. It shows in their work and attendance.

I also know that my daughter would have never made it through math without it…

How effective is to always power-down every time that they enter into a classroom? Do we really have their attention or just their obedience?

As an educator, I prefer to have their attention. 

Multitasking Madness: Performing at our peak feels good...

In The Winter of Our Disconnect, Susan Maushart (2011) admits that working at our peak often feels like play. So all that time that digital natives spend on social media while completing there homework is, in fact, energy spent on learning the technical skills and literacy needed for success in the contemporary world.

Collaborative Facebook games, like Farmville, appear to the digitally ignorant like an investment in building a world of virtual nothingness, but in actually, research shows that Digital Natives are in fact learning online cooperation and social etiquette, according to Maushart (2011). They are learning 21^st century project management and how to complete projects by assessing global social collateral and resources.

Man caught multitasking on the train.

In Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn, Larry Rosen (2010) argues that the technology at the fingertips of the iGeneration lends itself to multitasking; what else is there to do when carrying around a computer in your pocket, but to multitask?

Rosen (2010) points out that laboratory research shows that university students make lots of mistake multitasking under the conditions of the studies, but he argues that most of the iGeneration don’t work under those same artificial time restraints. In fact, multitasking (in technology terms) does take longer to produce results, but that no more mistakes are made in the final products as unitasking. And he argues that in some circumstances that up to 46% more can be accomplished by those who use technology on the go. So, the viral image of the guy sitting on the subway floor working on his dissertation -because a new baby awaited him at home- illustrates how multitaskers can utilize time lost to a digit defunct unitasker.

How to manhandle multitasking in the classroom?

I recently gave my students, in an upper division content-based EFL conversation class, a three-part midterm project. First, they are to submit an individual blog answering the following questions:

(1) As a Korean student of the English language, why is it important to study culture?  

(2) What is the most interesting thing that you’ve learned so far in the class?

Next, the students will work in groups to complete the final two parts of the project using a Google chrome app called Mural.ly. Mural.ly is a brain storming collaborative app that allows students to work remotely to build visual/text essays that relies heavily on the iGeneration’s unique form of literacy.

For the second part of the project, the student groups will provide two visual/video examples for the following terms: cultural specific, cultural universal, transcultural, and localization. They will use virtual sticky notes and symbols to justify their examples and to show interconnectivity between the categories. In essence, the class is building a collaborative mind map that will “show” what culture is to them collectively.

Next, the students will find a music video with many transcultural references. They will produce a similar Mural.ly mind map explaining how the transcultural references are localized (made uniquely Korean) by comparing them with Western or other Asian examples of the same idea/product.

Students will present and discuss both mind maps to/with the class.

While designing the project, I thought my students were going to freak-out. I was afraid they were going to think it was too much work and perhaps, too complicated.

Image borrowed from: http://daltondenhaag.
globalstudies.nl/2010/10/28/texting-or-tv/

Instead, they spent a half hour totally engaged with each other as they figured out how to assess Blogger and Mural.ly on their cellphones. They collaborated until everyone was able to assess the apps or until there was a solution for all. Next, they worked together while exploring Mural.ly. They obviously loved the features and immediately understood what I wanted from their projects. #I had designed their project to resemble how I had taught them the materials.

They were technically tied together and the students were comfortable in their native environment. I wish that I could have bottled their enthusiasm.

I will post the results of their collaborative projects at the end of the month.

The Creative Process of Multitasking.

The Creative Process

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” 
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

Kurt Vonnegut also says not to use semicolons as they are some red-headed stepchild of nothingness; he states that they are a grammatical marker of the college educated. Is a semicolon like putting a letterman jacket on my sentence, Mr. Vonnegut? If so, I wear my grammar markers proudly like a chess club champion wears his varsity blazer!

Vonnegut believed life to be a creative process; art is life, life is art. Zing.

And while pondering what my current creative process in art-making is… I just kept coming back to the same idea: the creative process is firmly, consciously embedded in my daily life process. There is no magical moment where I stop everything to create an art product.

Just as Vonnegut advocates that arts “are a very human way of making life more bearable.” I came to the realization that I am in the business of teaching creativity in the mundane, everyday. Art is a point of view and the actions that follow it.

As an multimedia artist, I run around making a lot of mediocre art followed, or inclusive of, some pretty decent writing. I am writer who prefers the creative manifestation of performance art, guerrilla installation, and dancing in the shower (okay that is dangerous… I dance in the classroom). And my process of how those projects emerge depends on the project. Some parts of the creative process requires unitasking while my collaborative nature in project-based art-making are inherently multitasked.

But out of it all, I never could remember a time where I sat down to draw with the computer on, the radio blurring, and allowing my kid to talk to me. So… for this experiment, I decided to work on the logo for an upcoming production of Vagina Monologues in Gwangju, South Korea, that I am co-directing.

We wanted a fierce she-dragon as our logo. As you can see, my she-dragon is not fierce. She is ornate and my daughter promises to make her more fierce once she puts it on her computer and external drawing pad.

Observations

Admittedly, I wasn’t attached to the outcome of the creative process. I knew from the beginning it could be aborted at any point. There were no high stakes in my ability to be a successful logo designer. I have every intention of delegating this logo development to the professionals.

Nonetheless, it was nice to draw for the evening as my 30 minute assignment turned into a few hours.

I was surrendered to the process. I had no attachment to the outcomes. I felt free to do whatever I wanted. I don’t always give myself that freedom. Although, I live in the creative process – so much of the stress that I experience in daily life is measured by how much that I think is riding on the success of my end product. It was really nice to just go with the flow. Too allow the process to be what it was.

And out of this release of control, I became more open to ideas from Ana (my kid) and from other sources of images found on the computer. I tried ideas that normally are believed beyond my skill set. I was also listening to female artists known for their rebellious natures… I am sure that inspired my reckless abandon.

Interestingly enough, I can find this place of surrender and freedom in other art forms that I am more confident – say in writing or some performance genres. It is always interesting how selective that I am about going with the flow and how that is in direct correlation with my sense of self/confidence/faith in the process.

…as if I am the source of the creative force… not.