This is a small part of a whole something.
Category: INTE 5340
Digital Critique – 30 Years and 73 Seconds: The Challenger Disaster
Tomorrow, January 30th, will be the 30th anniversary of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. I remember, in that pre-social media era, hearing the announcement on the public address system at my middle school. There will no doubt be a lot of reflection of that fateful day in the media. One of those such retrospectives is on the website of KUSA Channel 9, a local NBC affiliate here in Denver, Colorado. It’s called 30 Years and 73 Seconds: The Challenger Disaster. What’s unique about this retrospective is that a good portion of the video footage was recorded from Cape Kennedy on that day. The archived footage includes elementary school kids from Boulder watching the launch and seeing their stunned reactions to the incident, which NASA officials announced as a “major malfunction.”
We often think of digital storytelling as from the perspective of the ordinary citizen with a smartphone rather than from a local news reporter with a camera crew. Since this particular digital story involves video content from the pre-YouTube era, it makes sense to incorporate broadcast journalism substance and style from the mid 1980s timeframe.
For this digital critique, I’ll focus on a few key areas:
- Research – The production team utilizes the archived video from 1986 well. The narrator and on-air journalist, Gary Shapiro, was on the ground in Florida then to cover a feature about the group of Boulder elementary kids who were sent to watch the Challenge launch. The web posting also includes an array of scanned photos, including the tragic photos of the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding. In addition, there is quite of bit of up-to-date footage of those students who are now in their middle age as well as Shapiro himself.
- Sense of audience – This was one key area in which the digital content was strongest. Anyone who was roughly the same age as the Boulder students could remember that day and how they felt both then and now. In my case, I was able to sympathize with them in a pre-9/11 era when I thought this was the biggest tragedy I had ever seen on TV. Fortunately, those students were able to overcome the adversity of that fateful day and witness the next shuttle lunch 18 months later.
- Media application – Like I mentioned in the research section, the production team made good use of the archived footage. The cross-cutting better the past and the present bridged the 30 year time gap. One criticism I have is the way the piece is narrated. Like most television journalists, Shapiro uses a certain cadence, with the wide range of inflection, that I sometimes find a bit too formulaic.
Unfortunately, the website doesn’t offer much flexibility in being able to embed the video into this blog, so you’ll have to click the link and jump to a new tab.
DS 106 Daily Create: Old West Wisdom Sayings
For a DS106 Daily Create this week, I chose “Old West Wisdom Sayings.” There are 3 pages of Old West Wisdom phrases to choose from, but somehow I knew this phrase would be too good to pass up. A simple Google image search of the keywords “horse” and “politician” came up with this often posted and mocked image of shirtless/brainless Russian president Vladimir Putin on a horse. A quick Adobe Photoshop adjustment and out comes Western commentary on an Eastern political figure.
Personal Reflection on Week 1 of INTE 5340
This is my fourth semester in the University of Colorado-Denver Information and Learning Technologies master’s program and it seem that every first week of the semester either goes fairly easy or a bit crazy. I’d have to say that the first week in INTE 5340, Digital Storytelling in the Curriculum went more in line of the latter rather than the former. This was a busy week of reading, website building and syllabus digesting. I’m sure things will smooth out over the next couple of weeks, but so far, there’s been a significant lack of communication and engagement among peers in this class. Communication and collaboration are the keys to a productive online course, but so far, the online engagement has been minimal.
Granted, it’s a short week and some students are no doubt trying to get their WordPress blogs up and running. Still, the lack of online discussion is a concern. The first chapter reading of the course textbook took so getting used to but things might get interesting as we get farther into the readings. Nonetheless, I’m still intrigued by the concept of digital storytelling and look forward to the next few weeks.
Chapter 1 of “New Literacies”
According to Merriam-Webster, the term “literacy” dates back to the later half of the 19th century. In the first chapter of New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning, authors Colin Lanshear and Michele Knobel appear to focus on how the term “literacy” in education became a more important concept than “reading & writing” in the latter half of the 20th century. They give due credit to Paulo Freire’s findings regarding the importance of literacy, as well as the consequences of illiteracy, in the advancement of a society. In addition, Lanshear and Knobel cite the results of the 1983 policy statement, A Nation at Risk, which set off educational and political alarm bells in the English-speaking world at a time when economies were moving into the computer age. I reflected on this significance of this information when I thought back to my days in elementary school when we began learning how to use Texas Instrument personal computers. At home, my parents decided to purchase an Apple IIE computer. Back then, personal computers were more an investment in education rather than entertainment.
As with most assigned classroom readings, I found some of the information in this first chapter a bit difficult to understand, especially since my professional background is far from education. Yet, I was interested in how Lankshear and Knoble connected the literacy crisis of the 1970s and 1980s with importance of digital literacy today. In addition, the authors bring up the unique concept of “the literacy of participation’’(p. 26), which plays a major role in online education. Nowadays, it’s important to not just learn by yourself but also to learn within a group and exchange information and viewpoints. This dialogue of perspective seems to be the driving force behind digital storytelling.
If I had any criticisms about this first chapter, it’s that Lankshear and Knoble don’t talk enough about the role of technology in the discussion of digital literacy. The mouse simplified the user interface with the computer. The modem enabled both computers and users to communicate with one another across local and national boarders. Word processing software made the composition process less time-consuming. These advancements happened before Mark Zuckerberg launched the social network revolution in his Harvard dorm room. Granted, our class has only read the first chapter, but I think it’s important to mention computer technology when there is a discussion regarding digital literacy.
To be honest, I’m very curious as to what the next chapters will discuss. The cover of the textbook includes over a dozen technology icons that most people could identify, including a mobile phone, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Wikipedia. In the last few pages of the first chapter, there’s a mention of a concept of “new literacies” in a social rather than a technological context. That’s certainly something I didn’t consider when I was staring into a green monochrome monitor of an Apple IIE learning how to type up a book report. It will be interesting to see how Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel further view literacy in the Web 2.0 era.