Author Archives: Amy Wolfe
Lev Manovich’s The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 hours in Kiev
I thought people in class might be interested in Lev Manovich’s The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 hours in Kiev. “Using computational and data visualization techniques, [Manovich] explore[s] 13,208 Instagram images shared by 6,165 people in the central area of Kiev during 2014 Ukrainian revolution (February 17 – February 22, 2014).”
Elizabeth Losh wrote a guest essay for the project as well. “Hashtag #Euromaidan: What Counts as Political Speech on Instagram?“
Science Has Great News for People Who Read Actual Books
Here is another interesting article about reading and comprehension and comparing ebooks to printed paper books.
“Science Has Great News for People Who Read Actual Books”
Here is a short excerpt “Our brains were not designed for reading, but have adapted and created new circuits to understand letters and texts. The brain reads by constructing a mental representation of the text based on the placement of the page in the book and the word on the page.” I know, for myself personally, when I read and I’m trying to recall something I read, I get a mental picture of what side of the page the quote or sentence I was thinking about was on.
What do other people think? How do you read and remember? What do you think about all these new studies coming out talking about either how multitasking and reading online is training our brains to learn in new ways or how reading a printed item allows for more comprehension and understanding? Can they both be true?
Posted in General, Writing/Memory/History
Tagged comprehension, Memory, print books, reading
1 Comment
Is Google Making Students Stupid?
This article, “Is Google Making Students Stupid?: Outsourcing menial tasks to machines can seem liberating, but it may be robbing a whole generation of certain basic mental abilities.” by Nick Romeo appeared September 30, 2014 in The Atlantic. I thought it was interesting and fit well with our readings this week by Paul Duguid “Material Matters: Aspect of the Past and the Futurology of the Book and Carla Hesse “Books in Time“
Why I Just Asked My Students To Put Their Laptops Away
I was sent this really interesting article on multi-tasking and how a professor of technology at NYU has now told his students no laptops, cell phones or tablets are allowed in his class. I found what he had to say really had some merit. I know from my own personal experience my fellow student’s laptops have distracted me during a class, especially when they are not doing anything class related but checking their email or shopping online.
I also found this interesting “Humans are incapable of ignoring surprising new information in our visual field, an effect that is strongest when the visual cue is slightly above and beside the area we’re focusing on. (Does that sound like the upper-right corner of a screen near you?)”. It was funny as I read that my Mac Mavericks OS popped up a notice about a new email in the upper-right hand corner of my screen and I had to fight my impulse to click on the notification.
Why I Just Asked My Students To Put Their Laptops Away by Clay Shirky
Here are some of the other studies he mentions in the article:
- Think You’re Multitasking? Think Again by Jon Hamilton
- No A 4 U: The relationship between multitasking and academic performance by Reynol Junco and Shelia R. Cotten
- Divided Attention: In an age of classroom multitasking, scholars probe the nature of learning and memory by David Glenn
- Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows by Adam Gorlick
- Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers by Faria Sanaa, Tina Westonb, and Nicholas J. Cepeda
What do you think of what he has to say? Do you agree? Is this part of the “generational divide” and “crisis” Losh referenced?
Posted in General, New Media Pedagogies
Tagged discussion, Generational Divide, multitasking
1 Comment
New Media Literacies student blog
Welcome to the student blog / discussion sharing site for the course “New Media Literacites.” This space will be used to share ideas, comments, ideas and collaborate on projects for our course.
