Welcome to a new semester in the media lab, room 207A. Communication Technology and Applied Journalism (AKA The YEARBOOK Course) will be held here. This room will be an incubator for experimenting with new appraoches to communication and creative expression. I am looking forward to a semester that is interesting, challenging and productive and maybe sometimes a bit strange (and hopefully a bit fun, too). i LOVE to see students being creative and spreading their wings; so, please, jump right in and try some new ways of communicating your ideas in my classes. You can email me any time, about anything at all, at cheryl.gould@tcdsb.org.

Ms Lo Bianco and I took our grade 12s to tour an old-fashioned (but still operating) publishing house called Coach House Books, located in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood. A very interesting and educational experience, and the good folks at Coach House Books offer this experience for free. We were all fascinated and charmed by the old building and the antique (and modern) printing machinery.

We then stopped for lunch in Kensington Market. Or that was the plan, anyway. The teachers had lunch in Kensington Market and most of the students ran all the way down to Queen and Spadina for McDonald's! Old habits die hard, I guess.

Then we stopped in to MOCCA (Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art) to check out their CONTACT Photography Festival exhibit. We had a terrific host there, a young man with lots of knowledge to share about the work and the photographers represented. After he guided us through the exhibit we wandered back to school.

The following photos are my digital photo creations, based on images I captured during this excursion.

How I Learned to Access, Evaluate and Question Information

I am turning 42 in a couple of months. When I was a high school student, I had one course that introduced us to computers. We had to learn the language called DOS (Disk Operating System) to instruct the computer to perform basic functions. There were no graphics. It was really boring to me, like learning to use a glorified calculator. I couldn’t understand the purpose of the exercises. This course was taught by the only computer instructor in our school, an unpopular middle-aged math teacher who wore heavy-rimmed spectacles and his pants belted under his armpits. He was unmarried, lived with his mother, called himself “daddy” and us his “kiddies”. If that wasn’t bad enough, things got really weird and uncomfortable when his mother got sick that year I had him and he began to have a mental/emotional breakdown. The class completely killed any interest I might have developed at that age in computers (and computer people).

Numbers weren't really my thing, anyway. I used to read all the time. Just about anything within reach, but especially novels. I learned to access, evaluate and question information through reading, especially thorugh reading words written by brilliant minds and by experiencing thoughts and intellectual activities via characters and narrators in books. I was most intellecutally stimulated when inhabiting a universe created by a skilled writer. Some films influenced me, as well, but I was generally disappointed with films when I compared them to the books that they originated from. Some discussions and words I heard from other people also influenced me in this regard, but rarely, in person, did I encounter in my young life anyone who actually taught me anything significant about accessing, evaluating and questioning information. Until I entered university, my mind was primarily influenced by reading.

To some degree, music also taught me to question and evaluate information. I was stimulated by songs with socially critical lyrics, irreverent lyrics, or unique phrasings. Music with unconventional or sophisticated or complex composition expanded by capacity for thought. Music, in a variety of ways, expanded my intellect. It was like reading in that sense, but music had a greater visceral impact than words on a page. Music is, after all, a language -- but one that transcends words, and so, in that sense, might be considered superior to words. I am sure I would have a much more brilliant mind had I dedicated myself to reading music as I did to reading novels. But novels were so easy for me. I took the path of least resistance and graduated from university with an honours degree in English literature.

When I observe my students, I notice that the role of music hasn’t changed much in their generation. They have their iPods and portable speakers, we had our Sony Walkmans and ghetto blasters. Aside from the fact that they are more exposed to music videos than we were, I don't see a great difference in the role of music when I compare their generation to my own. Many of them thoughtlessly groove to any popular tune with a dance beat, but some of them find voices in song that inspire them to question society, evaluate information and perhaps rebel against convention. Some of them are dedicated to learning music, not just consuming it, and I wholeheartedly encourage them in this pursuit. I find that only a small percentage of them are devoting much time to reading, however, and I am not pleased about that.

Prensky’s arguments in “Digital Natives” are often compelling, but he seems to be implying that we should should just accept the fact that intensive reading (i.e. reading books and long articles) by young people is now history, and we shouldn't sweat that circumstance because most knowledge can be transmitted through multi-media and gaming experiences anyway. As I mentioned before, I have seen maybe one or two movies in my entire life that come anywhere near the experience of reading the books that inspired them. So I can’t roll over and accept the death of reading. I am interested in all kinds of mediums of communication, both as a consumer and a creator, and I am skeptical that multi-media artifacts can be as intellectually enriching and educational as reading. Students consuming a multi-media diet can become educated and literate, but a great deal of their intellectual potential will remain undeveloped. Reading helps individuals develop their intellectual capacities to the fullest.

If the physical construction of the brain is affected by immersion in the new technologies, I am skeptical that this "digitally-modified brain" will represent human progress. I believe the new brains are more likely to be intellectually limited, even stunted. My students who are not big on reading generally do not write very well. This might indicate that they don’t think very well, either. Self-aware digital natives tell me themselves they have limited attention spans and trouble maintaining focus. Many of them do not celebrate and embrace this characteristic, because it makes learning and completing many complex tasks difficults. Should we change our expectations radically, and decree that anything that takes longer than half an hour for a student to consume, learn, or complete is no longer desirable or worthwhile? Shall we begin to widely value and evaluate proficiency in playing games, cruising Facebook and watching youtube -- the tasks that digital natives have no trouble sticking with for long periods? The "future content" Prensky prescribes is useful and even necessary in moderation, but reading skills are still essential and we do the digital natives no favours by allowing the new technologically-saturated culture to dictate the parameters of the teaching methodologies we employ, thereby limiting their development as readers.

In addition to my pedagogical concerns, I want remind the Prensky-ites of the world about the now-scientifically-documented health risks that come with increased exposure to electro-magnetic radiation. In my opinion, Prensky and his comrades need to temper their enthusiasm for all things digitized. But please don’t misunderstand me to be a luddite -- I LOVE the internet and am excited about a lot of the new technology. I work every day, however, with digital natives who lack balance in their lives and suffer from digital overexposure and digital addiction. This is not good for the soul. I'd like them to spend more time outside and more time reading. For the healthy development of future generations, we might want to consider the ages-old "legacy content" called The Middle Way as we embark on redesigning our curricula.

I have never had a web site or blog before and I am entering into this world for the best of reasons: all my students! If I become the next superstar of the blogosphere I promise I will never forget my roots, St. Mary's people.

On to the important business at hand. On this site, I plan to use this online space to showcase student work, post items of interest and inspiration, communicate about the courses I teach and link to useful resources.

So what do you all (my students and community stakeholders, I mean) want to see on this site and do with this site? Let me know, please! I want to hear your beautiful voices through your written words.