Blog Post 8

In the first video I viewed, This Is How We Dream, Dr. Richard Miller discusses writing in multimedia. This video shows how our society is changing from a "reading/writing culture to a seeing/video culture." He says he grew up in a house full of books and briefly discusses the differences between using books and computers to read and write with. He says that now our “workspace is the desktop.” I agree, because everything I need at home is in my computer. I still have important documents on paper, such as the deed to my house and title to my car, but all the important documents I have created are on my computer. Recently, I even had legal paperwork sent to me via email from my attorney.

He explains that he wrote and published a letter about the Virginia Tech killings by computer, and did this “without stepping foot in a library.” One great thing about having documents in a computer as opposed to paper is that they, as Dr. Miller states, “live forever” online. You don’t have to worry about a document being misplaced or destroyed if it is online. This is very important in keeping accurate records for recording and preserving history. He says this is the process of “sharing knowledge infinitely.” He gives a great example of this with the media produced on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Here, Dr. Miller shows us photos, audio and video files of Dr. King’s speech and important articles archived on one web page so they are easily found and accessed.

In part 2 of the video, he discussed more closely the academic usage of the internet. He pointed out how it takes much longer to publish a written piece of work in text than publishing it online. He discussed bots sent into cyberspace to record different data, for example, they used bots to find out what is the happiest city. I was impressed that he addressed issues such as inaccessibility of some educational sites, funding, class sizes and a lack of other resources necessary for his dream of media writing to come true. But he is confident that, with inspiring teachers and new resources and spaces, his ideas can be implemented in universities in the future. I agree that this is where our future is headed. I think I will be prepared to write with multimedia for my students. I already have experience with it at my job and with this class. I believe my high school and middle school students will already have experience writing multimedia by the time they are in my class.

In Carly Pugh’s Blog Post #12, she suggests that students create assignments for Dr. Strange’s class. She does a great job of sharing ideas in her own personal playlist and gives basic guidelines for completing the assignment. I think this is a great idea. Soon we will be creating assignments such as these for our elementary to high school students, so why not create a worthwhile assignment for future EDM310 students? She definitely uses multimedia to write this post. The videos she shared made me realize that I haven’t saved any of the really great videos Dr. Strange has assigned us to look at, such as Did You Know? by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod and Jeff Brenman. I will make my own playlist and think about what kind of assignments I would give.

In The Chipper Series, a student talks to Dr. Strange about her work being late, the process of her procrastination and asks him to teach her so she doesn’t have to learn. Ultimately, Chipper drops out of school because of EDM310 (I wonder if this is a secret fear of Dr. Strange’s) and starts her own school for pilots, where students can spend as much or as little time in class and doing work for the class. Finally, after her school and other brief careers in various fields failed, she realizes she needs to go back to school and learn the right way, by doing her work and being on time. That is the primary message in this video. If you do things the right way from the start, like coming to class, doing your work and turning it in on time, you can save yourself a lot of time and unnecessary stress.

In EDM For Dummies, former EDM310 students talk about tutorials made by former students designed to help us understand and succeed in this class. I think it is very kind and helpful that students have made videos to share with new students on how to use Twitter, Skype and how to do other assignments in this class, such as the book trailers. I believe this should be continued as they have helped me on more than one occasion. I would like to participate in making tutorials for some projects in the future and was already thinking about the upcoming SMARTBoard project to do this. The primary message in this skit was to describe how there are many sources for help in understanding EDM310. Three students were kind enough to share their helpful blog, EDM310 for Dummies blog page.

The video, Learn to Change, Change to Learn featured educators who focused on how schools are growing technologically and how we need to provide teachers with the permission and resources necessary to educate children in this ever-changing world we live in. They mentioned how important it is for teachers around the world to connect and share with each other. One of the main points of the video is that the world around us is developing and it is up to us to make sure our students are developing along with it. They need to be able to find answers and solve problems on their own, know how to be sure they are finding accurate information and know how to share information with the rest of the world.