From Couch Potatoes
to Zappers.
(Jenkins, 2006, pg. 74) I agree with Phillip Swann when he says interactive television should and will be designed for zappers. It’s only practical that an audience make a split decision as to the benefits of watching a yellow poodle over the Stephen Hawking’s Universe. With so many more options every day, it comes down to audience survival. When I was growing up we had three major channels to choose from. Studios had fewer competitors and could take their time producing shows compared to today. Grabbing the zappers’ attention is a fast pace challenge that no longer yields the majority of the TV audience. The audience has split into highly specific interest groups.These groups recognize the amount of time in their day has not changed and they need to make a quick decision as to how they are going to spend it. I applaud the young zappers for recognizing the fact.
(Jenkins, 2006, pg. 77) Jenkins discusses the reorienting of casuals, the portion of the audience outside the loyal routine viewers, to basic mechanics or background of a television show. This is an important step in any learning environment. The rule of thumb, tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them and then tell them what you told them, rarely fails. These are the added aids that students and viewers complain about because they no longer need them, but fix on when new to a situation. For example, in using virtual environments to teach a subject, a “beacon” avatar could easily become the target of classroom jokes, but probably only after the student no longer requires a guide to tell them the ends and outs of making their way through the new interactive venue. Online accelerated classes benefit from such an avatar guide since the repeated instruction and assistance is required for new students every few weeks. Orienting the audience is a critical element in planning the success of new interactive environments.
I’m glad I read this chapter when I did. I had toyed with having my daughter audition for a similar show tomorrow. Before that is, I actually watched the show. The audience on this particular night was filled with barbarians and the judges were not very convincing. All I could see was their careers. When I see a great actor, I always forget they are acting. The same should be true of teachers. Yes, in some cases our careers are on the line, but no student should ever have to see it. We should care about them, do our best and try to forget the scores.
Source:
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: NYUPress.
This morning while exploring edupunk on Joe Bustillos syllabus, an interesting theory was presented by Stephen Downes and George Siemens. They arrive at their analysis after studying the shortcomings of behaviorism, cognitivism and constructivism. (Siemens, 2004, ¶ 23) Siemens paper on connectivism has some great quotes for education like “Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual.”
The theory takes into account the changes in the learning environment since pre-technology in education. Here is a theory that at its root realizes what is learned is not completely under the control of the learner. So if behaviorism attempts to pour information where it wills how do we measure what comes out when regardless how hard our students may try- what comes out is different than what the behaviorist poured in? After all, if it is connected to what goes on at home, say the priority of reading each night, how can the outcome be predicted much less fairly assessed by what goes on during the school day? Yet we try and we punish our reading teachers for the connections being made in the student’s mind elsewhere.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
3 Comments
That's one up for the teachers, thanks Libby for that insightful comment about us reading teachers!
Tuesday, July 7, 2009 - 05:15 PM
So, this would mean that I absolutely positively, well okay I take a little bit of credit, that I can't control how much a student learns because of his/her environment?This goes back to age old debates: are we mere products of our environment or does volition have the ultimate say so how we live our lives?
Tuesday, July 7, 2009 - 05:46 PM
Here's a story about a girl who didn't let the pandemonium of life choose the outcome of her learning.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-harvard20-2009jun20,0,1882109.story" target="_blank">Khadijah Williams
Tuesday, July 7, 2009 - 05:52 PM
While reading Henry Jenkin’s book Convergence Culture I am taken back to when digital was actually rare. The first interactive Video discs I worked with in the early 80’s were the size of a 33 record. Many months went into organizing these sequences and revisions would be enormously expensive even without the lengthy focus groups required to agree.
Later while working in Dallas at Video Post where the president of the company, Neil Feldman would try to teach me about 4444.
I wanted to understand because Neil was so excited. Of course that meant direct RGB with an Alpha channel. All I honestly understood was that with every generation of copies my art looked worse and worse before our precious large D1
tape was brought in, at the time the only one in Dallas. Then, digital was 720 x 486 pixels but today it’s almost 6 times that size.
Regarding Jenkins discussions on Spoiling Survival, though I have friends who go as far as to audition, I just always imagined a kraft services table behind the palm tree and so could never become as involved as so many have. Of course that is a mark of our current culture, stories threaded around one central theme. And the threads are farther reaching each day. The Spoilers are another story.
