In an attempt of finding a unifying link, I’ve chosen to devote the very few hours to finish my TWINE project as I have really enjoyed working on it and as the final paper was built on it too.

The first part was dedicated to a completion of one path. A path where bad situations didn’t negatively affect the people enduring it. But on the contrary gave them more endurance, bravery and courage to stand in the face of all demeaning forces. Now the second and final version of it covers the two paths Robert Frost’s poem “Tge Road Not Taken” diverged into. More precisely, the change that has been done is the drawing of a second path where life’s cruelty has affected people negatively driving them, more or less, to choose ending their lives and committing suicide.

What I wanted to do here is to try using this visualization tool in order to visualize and get a sense of how much effort I’ve placed on different topics in one of my pre-written essays. Though this essay was supposed to speak about all sorts of discriminations that are practiced over women, children and people in general, and now that I have statistically visualized what I’ve written, I realized how imbalanced my argument was.

Regardless of that, now I have to re-read the whole document to double check this hypothetical assumption and conclusion, cause it might be a matter of different word choices that reflects this imbalance.

Anyhow, visualization, if given enough time and effort, is a very important tool that vividly quantifies and thus help us qualify the work we are attempting.

Frequencies chart

Cirrus

This piece of writing has really fascinated me. All I’ve been thinking about the past days (though it feels like months) is how to use the (D)igital as a medium or a tool of facilitating and further easing the process of both teaching and learning in a given classroom. Having read this article, it totally got me thinking in a totally different way. The assumption in this article goes against the grain. It takes the media, digital tools, and electronics and its effect on educational experiences in a different path.

Instead of viewing it as tools, it has become introductory materials that familiarizes the students with whatever is to be given later on in class. The assumption, as far as I understood it, calls for teaching naked, in a class that is in all senses “unplugged”. In other words, it calls for an educational experience where the technology becomes a preparatory tool for the class, and the class in itself is self-contained and self-sufficient to stand without bringing anything from the newly emerging and increasingly facilitating digital tool.

This piece brings on the notion that we mistakingly keep confusing the idea of digital with electronics! At first, I thought [hell yeah its all about electronics or why would they call it digital]. The answer to this notion keeps coming and going, affirming and negating what I’m reading ! The last three lines of teaching naked, that are narrated below, are hitting the very core of the subject matter but I really couldn’t think past its abstraction. “Can we imagine “teaching naked” as more than merely doing without, but as something already integrated to the circuit of its electronic counterpart? What if instead we kept the “digital” in the non-electronic senses of that word: something to get your hands on, to deal with in dynamic units, to manipulate creatively?”

All in all, I think there is plenty of other things I should be reading and encountering before I can actually utter an opinion or position myself.

Today’s assigned readings somehow draw a great attention to the idea of visualizing the text using digital tools in an attempt to mentally introduce us with the theoretical idea of visualization and thus get us prepared and ready to enter a more practical mode to work with Voyant visualizing a task.

I found great pleasure in seeing how Kelly, for example, has taken Ngram tool and implemented it in an attempt to visualize millions of words, as he puts it. Statistics if used, understood, and analyzed properly are great indicators. Students can learn a lot by seeing how common a word is and how less common another structure is.

In just few days I have realized how wide are our choices are as scholars now and future teachers later on. The task thus has become familiarizing ourselves with whatever is there and appropriate it in a way that serves the subject or the medium we are trying to communicate and get across to our students.

Taking Kelly’s example and further extending it, I would say that I have reason to believe that this tool would absolutely work best with teaching grammar for instance. With [phrasal verbs] for instance, students would know which combinations are common and which combinations are impossible and regarded as error.

Digital tools, like everything else in life, is a two-sided weapon. Just like the case with excessively using sensory materials in an educational experience, allowing a total reliance on such digital tools can be dangerous. Though it is extremely helpful if used appropriately, and can be severely distracting and disorienting if used in a wrong way.

The Encyclopedia of Chicago is a great example of a digitalized work. Having walked the paths browsing it, I realized how hard it is to create those digital texts with all those hyperlinks that creates a greater thread. Navigating through out the paths are easy and makes the life of the researcher easier, yet as a person attempting a multi-linear text project tonight i really pity those guys working behind the screen creating an easily accessed and navigated platform for us.

Browsing this encyclopedia, one gets to know almost everything about Chicago; as the website provides different entries, historical sources, maps, special features as well as a user guide to leads one towards reaching his end.

The digital website is carefully crafted; as it provides its  the reader with a sight friendly navigational choices. Everything comes in order, and even if where you ended up being is not where you wanted to go, you can always go back and search again. The search bar is also another facilitative tool.

This website did not also forget or overlook graphic demonstrations. Almost in each page one is presented with one or two pictures that not only makes the page looks nicer but helps clarifying the rest reached before the searcher even starts reading.

The content might be slightly (or totally) overlooked here, but that might be due to the fact that all I’m focusing on now is the integration and creation of multi-linear texts (if that is to be regarded as an excuse).

The future is geared towards making advances based on newly emerging technologies. So I’ll be brave enough to say, though I don’t necessary know how would that be achieved yet, anything dealing with digitalization is so promising ! I’m not really sure how good I’ll be in this field, and how will I transform my ideas into tangible digital in-born material in such a short time, but I know for a fact that it’ll open up a door of possibilities WIDE OPEN. Technology is taking over almost all old means, and therefore neglecting it in educational spheres would be a great shame! Whenever I think about digitalization, technology, and also media, I see it as the new literacy. In an age where the pen was the only means for spreading knowledge, literacy was judged according to whether or not the person knows how to read and write. Now, in a digitally oriented world, literacy is measured by one’s mastery of technological usages.

Old books and old means of education are not, in anyways, attacked. All I’m trying to say is that, one should use whatever there is to create the best educational experience for the students, even if that experience demanded curation and editing of materials, and a holistic transformation of one’s role in the classroom.

Throughout and after this course, I really hope I can develop the skills needed to create a platform where I am no longer a traditional teacher, but a material designer,  director, guide, monitor and progress evaluator.

I LOVE IT, for all the good reasons there is !

By far, this week’s reading is the most joyful, less problematic of all other readings ! Regardless of its multiple layers, it seems to blend so well that all layers seems one ! This book tells stories, shows pictures, teaches and suggests a method of teaching at the same striking moment. As having gone through a process of writing a critical pedagogy lesson plan lately, I know how problematic it is to make a link between the problem and our education while using literature as a medium. This author seems to equate it in a way that it looks so effortless.

The idea behind the text, and the human element behind it, is what struck me the most. It advocates its causes in away that doesn’t feel like advocating ! It diverts our attention, or better said, takes out the film of familiarity in regard to certain humanistic problems, that those old sad experiences, regardless of its place of origin, feel not only so new but also persist with the same long-felt pain ! The simplicity of the language might have had a hand in that; as its simple, everyday sort of language, allows its readers not only to understand it but put him/her-self in a similar shoes and actually live it and all the pain, worry, sadness it brings about !

All in all, I really like this week’s piece and I’ll sum this post up with a statement quoted from Ziyad “Nowak, indeed, is more of an artist than an author.”