TV Turnoff April 2007
The kids are just about to begin reading Brave New World, and to supplement our analysis of it, I am once again providing my "media studies" unit. By "media studies," I mean mainly "media literacy" and the main emphasis is on the TV. I will post more as time permits, but for now I wanted to invite anyone who is interested to join us (my high school classes) for our TV Turnoff, from Friday, April 13 to Monday April 23 (yea, I'm pushing them a little). Come along...
Slippery Joaquin's Photos
posted about this on tms.org
this may feel like blog-overkill, but we dropped a note about this project on themediaspot.org. we're excited about this type of project from TMS's perspective -- it's relatively simple to implement, but rich in media education potential.
feel free to comment there, JAG, if you'd like to go on the official TMS record.
an iPod for every student
check out this article on the excellent PBS learning.now blog about iPods and cheating, and a Duke U initiative to give every incoming freshman an iPod.
(jag, you may want to keep tabs on that blog in general -- it's been a great resource for The Media Spot, and a fun column to read.)
turned off
jag, your turnoff is over and it seems like it was quite a success...
http://heritage47.wordpress.com/
what do you think? i'm interested in particular about the use of the blog. of course, RED and i do a lot of work w/ media education using Net-based tools, so it seems natural to us, but how about you? did you really intend for more of a "technology turn-off" than a "TV turnoff"? (wasn't clear strictly from your posts -- i know there was more context from your class discussions. and if the former, would a more focused experiment -- just the TV, just the cell phone/texting, etc -- be more fruitful?) was the irony of the reporting medium a distraction?
what about the written responses from the kids? more quantity, less quality?
blog created
for all those who want to follow along, the blog is here: http://heritage47.wordpress.com/
have fun, jag!
blog it
cool, jag.
as i mentioned on the phone, this is right up the alley of what we're doing at The Media Spot. i think you should grab a free blog at wordpress.com, and write up your experiences there as a class.... i'll follow up with you via email about that.
this is assuming, of course, that it's a TV turnoff week only, and not a screen turnoff week... it's hard to imagine denying students access to a computer for 10 days, which is of course pretty interesting. (wasn't so when we were in high school, eh?)
for my family's part, the TV turnoff would be no sweat (threatened only by DVDs of Da Ali G Show and Sealab loaned to us by our neighbor...). how far outside the mainstream does that make us? anyway, i'm in.
[EDIT: quick ed. note -- when entering tags while posting on this site, separate multiple tags by a comma; spaces are allowed within a given tag name.]
The TV turnoff is only the
The TV turnoff is only the first of a three parts in a unit I tentatively call Media Studies. The blog for the turnoff is fantastic. If you haven't checked it out, you should. I summed up that part by speaking of McLuhan's famous quip, "the message is the medium." A lively discussion about the effects of certain media ensued. The second part focused actually on propaganda, or on "the message of the message," both subtle and more overt. For that, we looked at Nazi propaganda, American World War II propaganda, and then we read a couple of passages about publicity or commercialism (from John Berger's Ways of Seeing and Neil Postman's How to Watch TV News). This year, that was a lightning quick sub-unit. The last part was storyboarding. While the kids were going through this entire unit, they were asked to read Brave New World. Eventually, they had to select a passage from it and convert it to a movie scene storyboard. Those assignments come in this Monday. All in all, the Media Studies Unit was great, even though it is still only half of what it could be.
just a guy is Joey D