Archive for the ‘audio’ tag
Learning 2.0 Conference Shanghai Mashup 1.1: Exotic Soundtrack
Bear with me. This is an experiment in Bloglines. BL wouldn’t read the Google Video embed (Google Reader did), so I want to see if it will show this YouTube version (new original GarageBand soundtrack - my second outing as an electronic “composer”).
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Shaking Up Shakespeare: an AP Literature Mash-Up _King Lear_ Project
In one of the great ironies of my life, I’m probably the only HS teacher at KIS not to have a 1:1 classroom, since I teach only AP Lit for seniors - the only grade level not required to buy MacBooks for school this year. But yesterday, I jumped in anyway with a project that incorporates the constructivist and 21st century literacy / web 2.0 ideas of having students create a “legacy product” for their assessment, instead of turning in stale homework to teacher.
Here’s the scoop: We’re reading Shakespeare’s greatest and most difficult tragedy, King Lear. The syntax and diction of the play are over the students’ heads, with a couple exceptions, but they have to become proficient at reading 16th century English for the AP Exam. So that’s the learning objective: give them practice at accurate comprehension of 16th c. English.
So here’s the “Constructivism 2.0″ project to work toward that goal:
1. I created a wiki on Wikispaces (free for teachers), entitled “King Lear Street Talk.” We’ll use this wiki to create a student-written modernized prose translation of Shakespeare’s play. (Setting up the wiki took only ten minutes, max. An eight-year-old can do it.)
2. In teams of two, students have to write a translation of one page of the play into today’s English. Accuracy counts, and so does the quality of the script they’re re-writing. If any team has a disagreement about how to translate any section of their page, they have to cover their butts by explaining, in the wiki page “Discussions” page, what they disagree about. Pedagogically, we all know that to translate archaic language into modern language, we have to comprehend that archaic language. So this is practice and close reading and comprehension on a line-by-line, focused level.
3. We’ll keep translating the play until we have the full 5-act play translated. We’ll publish that as a free e-Book using Lulu.com, which anybody can download to read.
4. We’re also going to record “radio performances” of our modern translation of the play on GarageBand podcasts, and upload them to Librivox.com, a literature podcast site that is a library of readings of copyright-free, public domain world literature. Senior citizens, blind people, and people who just like audio-books use this site to listen to 1,000’s of different titles. This can also be used by future classes as an intro to the tragedy - ESL students, younger students, and others can benefit by listening to these podcasts before reading the original version. So the students are becoming teachers of future students with this product.
So this will give students practice in all the AP Lit and Language Arts skills on our Standards and Benchmarks - reading, writing, speaking, listening, critical thinking (which comes when they debate opposing interpretations with their teammate, as well as when they decide how to act out different lines when they record their radio play podcast).
But instead of doing that in the old, stale way - handing in their translations to teacher, and performing a giggly mess in front of the class - they’re making a real product that they can share with the world, and - for the excellent performers - mention on their college applications as an example of their best work as part of their “digital portfolio.”
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Webcam Reflections for Summer Reading (and a Little Fun with David Sedaris)
[Note: Bloglines users won't see the student example embedded below. I wonder what aggregators do show them? Drop a comment and let me know?]
I just finished reading and responding to the first summer reading assignment for next fall’s AP Literature class. It was just a warm-up, asking them to read David Sedaris’ “Us and Them” from the Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim* collection of memoirs. If you haven’t read this story, I can’t recommend it highly enough, from an English teacher’s perspective. Of all the Sedaris stories I’ve read — and I’ve read most of them — this one qualifies Sedaris to me as a “literary” writer, in the highbrow sense of the word. Beneath the vulgar surface of low humor are quite a dazzling number of literary tricks and trap doors, all there for the discerning reader to enjoy alongside the jokes about turds and other crowd-pleasers.
I like assigning this story as a first class reading especially because it’s a litmus test that separates the skilled from the less-skilled readers. Sedaris writes with a double point of view — himself as an adult writer remembering an experience of himself as an eight-year-old. The child’s point of view dominates the narration, which concerns a family ostracized by its community because this family (the Tomkeys) “doesn’t believe in television.” The child narrator reflects the TV-worshiping pathology of the “normal” community, and tells the readers how “puny,” “stupid,” and undesirable the Tomkeys are with a wide array of damning words. And the less-skilled readers fall for one of the best tricks in the “literary ” authors bag: the unreliable narrator.
You can count on more than half of most classes blindly parroting the third-grader’s opinion of the Tomkeys. Uncritical readers, they swallow whatever whatever moral judgments they hear from the narrator–even if he’s an eight-year-old. The power of the printed word to kill thought: “It’s true because the book says it’s true.” A scary irony there, how books can as often close our eyes as open them.
The skilled readers, though, don’t fall for the unreliable narrator trick. They notice more than what is “told” in the story; they notice what Sedaris, the adult author, shows. And the images he shows of the Tomkey family, contrary to the herd-like judgments bleated by the vindictive and petty-minded “normal” community, are all too admirable. The Tomkeys are actually the healthiest and wisest family in the neighborhood, ostracism and all. It’s the couch-potato, consumerism-drugged “normal” community that’s sick.
This is just the tip of this eight-page story’s virtues, but for my purposes here enough. The story is a wonderful vehicle for letting students (and any readers beyond school) discover something important about themselves: namely, whether they think with their eyes, which requires the consciousness to really see and reflect on experience rather than sleep-walk through it, or instead think with their ears–which is not thinking at all, but the flaw of all blind followers. It amazes me how many of my students finish the story and join in the damning of the Tomkeys (the title’s “Them”) with a fervor and complacency that makes the “Us” quite frightening.
That Sedaris himself belongs to a “them” all-too-often ostracized, damned, beaten, and lynched by the “moral” “us” gives an added layer of depth to this story. Sedaris, as you probably know, is gay. Students–many of whom condemn homosexuals and, in class discussions, even advocate killing them–invariably come to love his writing with a passion. To what extent, if any, this makes them less eager to spill gay blood is something I wonder about sometimes. They see the beauty of this writer and love the joy he brings them with his art. But then they hear from other social “authorities” that this same man is an “abomination” and deviant. Life.
(If you’ve every listened to or watched Noam Chomsky giving speeches or interviews, you may have noticed that he repeats the injunction to “start with what you see in the world, not what you hear authorities and society say about it” as if it’s the first step to real thinking–or to any consciousness at all. I always think of Chomsky when I read “Us and Them.”)
Anyway. I gave this litmus test of a story to my students, and asked them to respond on a Moodle forum to two simple questions: What’s the story’s meaning, to you? And how does Sedaris create that meaning as a writer? Standard stuff.
But I’ve been using Flixn a lot lately, so I threw in an extra credit option: After writing your answers to those questions, fire up Flixn and talk about the story to your webcam. I’ve never assigned “webcam reports” before. I thought some of you might find it as interesting as I did. I like four things about it:
1. It’s a way for me to put names with faces before the school year starts. I don’t know any of these students, but the webcam reflections change that. They ooze with student personality.
2. It’s a way for me to compare student writing with student speaking skills, which can inform decisions for alternative assessments and multiple intelligence differentiation, etc.
3. It’s authentic. I love writing about literature sometimes, but love talking about it to an audience that’s also reading it even more. But I don’t like writing “literary analysis” essays, as a rule, because it’s such a stuffed and chalky genre. Who does that except Ph.D.’s writing for other Ph.D.’s (or, more accurately, for tenure)?
4. Other students are more likely to watch these webcam reflections, and peer-learn from them despite themselves, than they are to read the “school-y” reader-resonse questions in the forums. You’ll see evidence of that from “Judy,” after the student sample I show you below. First you’ll see this this student’s written response (which is a pretty goodon second look, brilliant interpretation), and then her Flixn response. Then you’ll see her classmate’s very telling — and unassigned — reply to this student. (For the record, the student’s mother gave me permission to make this public by “unwalling” it from Moodle.) Here you go:
Us and Them: The Invisible Distinction
The meaning or the main theme of the story Us and Them by David Sedaris is simply the negative role of television and other modern distractions on family unity and further on the individual’s personality. In this particular story, the main character, who is only about 9 or 10 years of age, develops an interest in the neighboring Tomkeys because they don’t have a TV. The start of the whole ordeal is due to this key fact: Tomkeys don’t have a TV, so therefore they are different from the rest of the society. The narrator pities them for their lack of common sense, and blames this on the absence of a TV. He believes that the Tomkeys are “ignorant and alone,” but what he doesn’t understand is that he is the one who is ignorant and alone. It seems as if the narrator’s family dislikes the Tomkeys for what they are. They are united, whole, and are a true family, because they know how to spend time together at the table and on the weekends. They actually talk to each other because they don’t have a TV distracting them from having quality time. Others, like the narrator and his family, see this as being “uninteresting,” as the narrator puts it. The narrator has been fed with false family images by the TV, and believes that a family unit should be fun, interesting, and attractive, and doesn’t understand why the Tomkeys are so ordinary. Also, we can see that the TV has altered the young narrator’s personality. He is unable to make friends (even though it is partially due to the frequent moving), and is indifferent and almost so apathetic that he hopes “that in walking around after dark I might witness a murder.” He sees a murder as entertainment, because he saw so much of it on TV. The TV, as can be seen from the narrator’s attitude, has corrupted the audience by feeding false images, and further on caused people to compare real life aspects to what is on TV.
Sedaris was able to create the meaning of the story mostly through his word choice and the attitude of his narrator. He uses words to actually imply the narrator’s personality, and the narrator’s personality further on explains why he thinks that way. For an example, when the Tomkeys spent the Halloween night on a trip, the narrator described that “they had spent the previous evening isolated at the lake and had missed the opportunity to observe Halloween.” The interesting word choice is “isolated” and “observe,” because it causes the effect of feeling as though the Tomkeys were of another place, and that they are not part of the community. They are just observers, bystanders, and foreigners to the narrator. This is possibly why the narrator views the Tomkeys as being inferior. The Tomkeys do not fit the social norm. Also, in the last paragraph of the story, the narrator says that he “protected and watched over these people, but now, with one stupid act, they had turned my pity into something hard and ugly.” How was he, a small boy, able to “protect” the Tomkeys? He just felt that way, because he believed that he was superior to the Tomkeys, and believed it was his duty to watch over them and ridicule them even more. And what was he to pity a happy family? He watched television and they did not. In fact, he feels so superior to them that he says he gave them the “gift” of his curiosity. So, when the time came for him to look back on himself, he turns for the TV with its false images, so that he didn’t have to see his ugly self, and again, is unable to regret his ugly behaviors.
Student “Judy” then replied:
honestly at first I got intimidated by the length of your two paragraphs. I was about to click the “back” arrow to go back to the forum but I found your video! It’s much easier for me to comprehend your explanation by listening to you and watching your eyes looking back at me =). I really enjoyed it!
And then she bothered to hit “reply” again to add:
p.s. I wish I had a web cam.
You don’t have to hear me characterize those two pieces of evidence, do you, reader? Look at what it says about engagement.
There’s one more reason I like this Flixn twist: it’s just more fun than text.
***
*That link, by the way, includes mp3’s of Sedaris reading from the book on NPR. And here’s a bonus for you: David Sedaris reading an essay on David Letterman 
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A Message from Neo, Complements of Voki
[Update: For the record, this is a spoof. Watching it, it even spooked me. Interesting. Hover your mouse over the screen and watch the character.]
Voki’s kind of cool. Just found it. Think of the possibilities.
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Daily Diigo Snips and Comments 03/28/2007
Poynter Online - Writing Tool #1: Branch to the Right
Phil Turner : The business of writing Annotated
Love the businessman who also loves great writing. From Phil’s blog:
We’ve been talking about how to write in the business world. Here’s my starting point:
“Short sentences, short paragraphs, active verbs, authenticity, compression, clarity and immediacy.”
Recognise this? It’s Ernest Hemingway. It’s the first thing he was taught as a young reporter on the Kansas City Star. He later said: “Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing. I’ve never forgotten them.”
It’s easy to forget ourselves that when Hemingway was writing like this it was near-revolutionary. This style of writing is almost commonplace today. He did away with all the florid prose of the Victorian era and replaced it with a lean, clear prose based on action rather than reflection.
Nowadays if people ask me to recommend a book on business writing, I give them a copy of The Old Man and the Sea. Just 100 pages. Not a word is wasted. It’s written for a 12-year-old and yet it won Hemingway the Nobel Prize.
Communicators in business can learn a lot from Hemingway. . . .
Lars Eighner’s Homepage Writers’ Workshop FAQ: Q. How can I identify weak verbs? Annotated
Nice, conversational hierarchy of verbs with an application exercise after:
Like all parts of speech, verbs are strongest when
they are precise and concrete. For verbs, “concrete” is the quality
of expressing real movement in the real world–or in fiction, the
world we accept as real. In other words, strong verbs tell us
exactly what is done and that is a real action.Verbs have a natural hierarchy, from strongest to weakest:
- Doing (strongest)
- Saying
- Thinking or feeling
- Being done to
- Being (weakest)
This example should illustrate the hierarchy of verbs
in reverse order (from weakest to strongest):
- Jim was sick.
- Jim was being made sick by the clam dip.
- Jim felt sick.
- “I feel sick,” Jim said.
- Jim vomited on the Persian rug.
The strongest verbs express actions in the realworld. The weaker verbs express less real-world action. At the bottom are the being verbs which express either no action or very little.
As an exercise, revise a couple of pages (about 500 words) of your writing so that verbs which are not already doing or saying verbs are raised at least one level in the hierarchy wherever this is possible.
Poynter Online - Writing Tool #2: Use Strong Verbs
Poynter Online - Writing Tool #3: Beware of Adverbs Annotated
From this excellent writing site:
At their best, adverbs spice up a verb or adjective. At their worst, they express a meaning already contained in it:
- “The blast completely destroyed the church office.”
- “The cheerleader gyrated wildly before the screaming fans.”
- “The accident totally severed the boy’s arm.”
- “The spy peered furtively through the bushes.”
Consider the effect of deleting the adverbs:
- The blast destroyed the church office.
- The cheerleader gyrated before the screaming fans.
- The accident severed the boy’s arm.
- The spy peered through the bushes.
In each case, the deletion shortens the sentence, sharpens the point, and creates elbow room for the verb.
A half-century after his death, Meyer Berger remains one of great stylists in the history of The New York Times. One of his last columns describes the care received in a Catholic hospital by an old blind violinist:
The staff talked with Sister Mary Fintan, who (in) charge of the hospital. With her consent, they brought the old violin to Room 203. It had not been played for years, but Laurence Stroetz groped for it. His long white fingers stroked it. He tuned it, with some effort, and tightened the old bow. He lifted it to his chin and the lion’s mane came down.
The vigor of verbs and the absence of adverbs mark Berger’s prose. As the old man plays “Ave Maria�”
Black-clad and white-clad nuns moved lips in silent prayer. They choked up. The long years on the Bowery had not stolen Laurence Stroetz’s touch. Blindness made his fingers stumble down to the violin bridge, but they recovered. The music died and the audience pattered applause. The old violinist bowed and his sunken cheeks creased in a smile.
How much better that “the audience pattered applause” than that they “applauded politely.”
Excess adverbiage reflects the style of an immature writer, but the masters can stumble as well. John Updike wrote a one-paragraph essay about the beauty of the beer can before the invention of the pop-top. He dreamed of how suds once “foamed eagerly in the exultation of release.” As I’ve read that sentence over the years, I’ve grown more impatient with “eagerly.” It clots the space between a great verb (”foamed”) and a great noun (”exultation”), which personify the beer and tell us all we need to know about eagerness.
Adverbs have their place in effective prose. But use them sparingly.
Workshop
- Look through the newspaper for any word that ends in �ly. If it is an adverb, delete it with your pencil and read the new sentence aloud.
- Do the same for your last three essays, stories, or papers. Circle the adverbs, delete them, and decide if the new sentence is better or worse.
Poynter Online - Writing Tool #39: The Voice of Verbs
–Excellent Steinbeck example of a well-chosen passive verb. Nice Ackerman example of copulae (”is” sentences) as good writing. Nice, subtle lesson.
Poynter Online - Writing Tool #8: Seek Original Images
Poynter Online - Writing Tool #7: Dig for the Concrete and Specific
- This Poynter Online series is wonderful. Though a journalism site, it alludes to master writers constantly.
- post by cburell
Fencing With the Fog: Weak Verbs and Pansy Words
- Interesting screenwriter rant on verbs and nouns. Funny thing is, most of her verbs are weak.
- post by cburell
- Good exercise at end: simply underline all “to be” and “to have” usages in your draft, and decide how many you can improve.
- post by cburell
- Man, Yale can be dull.
- post by cburell
Writing, Clear and Simple - Notebook - Told you so: Use active voice!
- Re: Passive voice.
- post by cburell
Language and grammar tips for writing
- Short. Good.
- post by cburell
Internet Archive: Details: Atom Bomb [Joe Bonica's Movie of the Month]
- Great archival footage of atomic bomb tests.
- post by cburell
Internet Archive: Details: News Reports 02
- Radio reports of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
- post by cburell
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