Journal #1

Title: "Power of the Mashup" Authors: Susie Boss and Jane Krauss
Published in Learning and Leading with Technology, Aug., 2007.

In this article the authors report on how two teachers are using technology in their classroom. One teacher is in southern California and the other is in rural Australia.

The teacher in California teaches a high school Literature class. He routinely assigns Voltaire’s 18th century novel Candide. In an effort to foster student interest in the work and to entrench their desire for knowledge of great literature he is using Google Earth and the Internet as an application to the assignment. The novel is an epic adventure where the main character, Candide, travels throughout Europe and South America. In this class students use Google Earth to visualize computerized images of the many different geographical locations Candide traveled to. The teacher believes that this application of technology to the reading assignment has helped students gain a more substantial interest in the reading assignment because they are able to identify with the places written about. The teacher believes the application has bolstered his students’ interest in the assignment.

The Australian teacher teaches History. At his school students are prohibited from using or possessing MP3 players. This hard and fast rule has caused some tension among the students. In an effort to find some common ground, the teacher created a plan where the students could use their MP3 players to record information they were studying at differing local historical sites. The teacher reported that the plan worked well and that he observed greater performance by the students especially aural learners.

These examples illustrate how technology can be used to aid learning in the classroom. The article’s message firmly advocates adding technological elements to the curriculum and seems to suggest these as successful examples. However, the article is more an illustration of two isolated events than it is proof that this ‘mashing-up’ of learning and technology was a worthwhile endeavor. Although the article describes positive subjective assessment of the two experiences it is too shallow an inquiry to truly establish either as a success. This leaves the reader skeptical and suspicious as to the articles credibility.

1. Can computerized satellite imagery foster development of imagination? Reading literature is arguably an exercise in which students have the ever-vanishing opportunity to develop their imagination by reading a great literary work. Readers create visual images in their brain based on the author’s skill and expertise in writing prose. In Candide, readers use their imagination to travel the 18th century world with Voltaire’s fiction. The writing in Candide is rich in description and detail and it leaves me pondering the value of a satellite image as a reference. It is, after all, a work of fiction and I do not think satellite photos do much to inspire the students to appreciate the enduring quality of Candide. However, this teacher states that it did help encourage students to read the novel and that is of some value. How well inspired the students were by the writing itself is remains an unanswered question.

2. Are these applications a use of technology for technology sake? My answer is yes. In both cases the use of technology was unnecessary. Using Google Earth was cute and a nice diversion but it was irrelevant. Voltaire wrote of these places 250 years ago and he traveled to very few of them. Because 20th century imagery has little to do with geographical locations created in the imagination of an 18th century writer the exercise seems indulgent. Actual knowledge of the locales Candide traveled to is an exercise in memorizing facts and this focus is misplaced as applied to the beauty of reading literature. Literature is not a science.

Also, the use of the MP3 player in the History class invites all kinds of distractions such as memory capacity, battery strength, possible theft, loss of saved data, etc… Although both of these experiments may have made the learning exercises more fun for the students, it seems to have little actual value as an application of technology for better learning.