Week 3 Reading Response
This week’s I read Lankshear and Knobel (2008) Ch1:DIY Media: A Contextual Background and Some Contemporary Themes. In this chapter Lankshear & Knobel discussed the topic of the history of DIY and its current applications. The authors has also addressed thoroughly on the four aspects that the DIY media has impacted in today's world:identity, participation, resource mobilization and learning.
Some part of the chapter is abstract for me to understand. Asking question and reading other people's annotation helped me understand. The authors discuss Henry Jenkins’ (2006) concept of participatory media as a means for increased involvement in media creation: “[t]he power of participation comes not from destroying commercial culture but from writing over it,modding it, amending it, expanding it, adding greater diversity of perspective, and then recirculating it, feeding it back into the mainstream media”(Jenkins, 2006, p. 257; see also Bruns, 2008, p. 93) This statement got me think about the last week's reading about remixing. The power of remixing/DIY Media is it provides people the opportunities to express themselves by using available resources and also have people collaborated and connected through the process of collaboration. Knobel and Lankshear used rich and detailed examples to illustrate how the DIY media increased literacy by increasing writing skill, improving communication skills, and promoting greater creativity through participating in the use of digital media.
They emphasize that through this approach “the focus is more on how we learn, than on what we learn”. I couldn't agree more with this statement. From last week's reading " An Open Letter to My Students", Kris Shaffer also express the same teaching pedagogy. He wrote:"Your education should help you develop skills that will last your entire career (which could be upwards of 50 years). We don’t have all the information that will be required of musicians working in 2060. However, what we do in these classes can help you develop the skills of inquiry and analysis you’ll need to figure out how to work in those new settings." It is impossible to teach students everything and hard to predict what kind of knowledge they will need for their future career, however the skills for success is pretty much the same: How we prioritize time and focus? How do we communicate? How do we look at the problem in different angle. How do we work with others?
I also really enjoyed this week's recommended reading( I always find myself enjoy more reading when it is not "required", am I the only one?). Audrey Watters's two articles" Openness and Ownership: Who Owns School Work?" and "What Do We Mean By Open Education" talks in depth about openness in education. She asked several questions in the paper :"Does “open” address cost issues, for example? Does it address access issues? Does it enable more sharing, easier collaboration?"
One one hand we say everyone has the right to get education. On the other hand, the increasing cost of schools is one of reasons that people didn't go to higher education. In my ideal world, being open means education will be free, at no cost of the learner. Also it would be fully accessible for everyone, and designed to be collaborated and remixed.
For my interest driven scholarship, I did some research on pruning plants, especially on cucumbers and tomatoes. Even though both type of plants seems good at climbing and grow vertically, the way of pruning is different. I was able to find an excellent video on Youtube on how to pruning cucumber, but not much luck about tomatoes. Nevertheless, after reading and watching the videos, I jumped out from couch and ran to my garden, I hand pruned all my cucumbers with ease and confidence. Things didn't go well with tomatoes, I made two mistakes while pruning: I pinched off the main stems instead of the "suckers". Finger crossed that my tomatoes will survive and produce more fruits as it is the purpose of pruning.
