Part 1: The Video

Tice Multimodal Essay

Part 2: The Colosseum

 

The Script: What is written on the Dominos

 

What I am trying to say is that while I am not a fan of the essay and I think the essay as a whole needs to retire or die . . . I would consider an alternative to the written essay with the rules and formatting. Why can’t I turn in a written work in this form? A domino colosseum if you will. I am still getting my point across, even though it is not traditional. Let the students take control of how they choose to present their work. Let them be proud of what they have made in what ever form they choose to make it in. Stop pushing the “academic” mold on Us!!

 

Part 3: The Note

This is an extreme example of what I am talking about. No…I do not expect everyone to do something like what i did with the dominos.

If someone wants to create a blog or a website and then turn in the link, the student should have that option.

The main idea is that the control is with the student in what they produce. Not the teachers.

 

and i am not talking about university life. Yes it can give young people a jump start into what the real world is actually like. Jobs, bills, educational responsibilities, etc. We know that life is multimodal. LIFE! yet classes are modal limited and rely on the standard works of figuring out what you know or if you have learned anything. If you are an English major 99% of the standard works is in the form of essays. Short in class essays, formal MLA formatted essays, average (3 page) non formal and not formatted essays. Then you have to deal with the “genre”. compare and contrast, analyze this passage, etc.

The education system in general needs an overhaul. In Junior high they begin to teach you the essay. They say it will prepare you for the future, and by future they mean high school. In high school they raise your essay skills, and raise the importance of the essay. They say it will prepare you for the future but what they mean by that it prepares you for college. It does not help you if you decide to work or do anything else besides college. In college they say it will prepare you for the real world. But no it doesn’t. while some jobs do require a lot of writing, such as grant writers, journalists, and so on, the average person after college will never have to write another essay. (For those that may disagree, yes there is an exception. University professors have a fancier essay. They’re called articles, but not many people become professors.)

So the essay is to prepare you to be a lifelong academic and nothing else. It is also a tool teachers use to see what you know. This is why multimodality is so amazing. Teachers can find out what the students know in a way that works with the students mind and gives the students less stress. Let’s be honest… Essays=Stress. and too much stress is a bad thing.

I, Cherie Tice, will now give to you an account of my multimodality through the years and apply it to discussions of the class. In some way at least.

 

  Chapter One:The Internet: Dawn of a New Age

My first real experience was similar to the one described in the mode videos. It was the first time the students used the internet at school. I was in elementary school and it was this new and interesting thing. The internet was new to most of us in itself and when we looked at these things called “webpages” there was words, pictures, different fonts, and colors. What i didn’t know at the time was that it was all done purposefully  and done for a specific reason.  Though of course a fourth grader doesn’t think about these things, nor do they understand the importance of modes and their place in the world. Beyond this new fangled thing,called the internet, we could only hope that our chapter books had a picture here or there.

 

Chapter Two: Young Adult. . . Young Social Media

MySpace didn’t get popular until i was fresh out of high school. When that happened I was hesitant simply because I had no clue what social media was or how to even go about using social media. Soon I found the world of coding the original MySpace 1.0 pages. With coding I was able to very literally pick everything about the page. Things I wanted to hide, things I wanted to add and so on. My top friends list was custom made buttons of pictures of my friends, while on the opposite side I had some smaller icons and next to it a scrolling box with memories or them. At the top i had a custom made playlist that would play automatically when someone visited while the background was whatever color or image or whatever I was feeling that week. I did not realize it at the time but I was using modes to get across a personal message of who i was.

 

Chapter Three: Here and Now and the Modes

Not much has changed between chapter two and now. I no longer code pages like the MySpace 1.0 pages, but since the only place that has 1.0 profiles anymore are roleplaying websites unless you are in that, or create a site myself I have not coded anything. The only real difference is that now I know that there is a technical term for what i was doing for years. Being a part of the multimodal community without even knowing it. Knowing what I know now about modes and multimodal I couldn’t imagine being in a world that is not multimodal in some way.

Someone once said “In order to learn the thing, you got to do the thing”.  Or is it the other way around? Or was it Kim that said that? Like the mystery of the tootsie pop the world may never know, however this post is not about tootsie pops but in essence doing the thing to learn the thing.

 

For me personally, just being thrown into something is the scariest thing ever. Especially if I feel like I have no clue what i am doing. I could make this short and sweet and say that this has been my internal experience with the internships, but then this blog would be really boring to read and you’d probably walk away scratching your head.

I won’t do that to you so don’t worry.

 

After a few weeks I learned to see the ESL resource center as not so much a tutoring place but a place of business, the only real difference is that no money is exchanged. Students come in as needed for help with different things and they are helped. They are greeted and helped much like a business. I can do that. I can greet like nobody’s business but the act of tutoring, this is the area that I watch. With the exception of last week  (it’s a whole new blog to tell about what i was going through internally.)  The center itself is a resource, a tool.  and within the tool are smaller tools (tutors), and smaller tools (dictionaries, thesaurus, writing tools, etc…).

 

so to learn the thing you gotta do the thing right?  Well those that come in for tutoring are active participants in what i will refer to as the “you do learn thing”. They are immersed with the English language and come to the center as a tool to continue to learn the thing as they are doing the thing. At the same time, as an intern I am also in the act of the “you do learn thing”. I can watch all day long but eventually if i want to become proficient and even confident about doing what i am learning I must branch out and do the thing and use the tools available to me as the students that use the center as a tool do.

 

and if you can’t see the whole featured image here it is in whole

 

I had such a rough time with this reading. In some areas I thought I was re-reading things I read a couple paragraphs before. Long story short there was a lot of going over paragraphs more than once. So for this blog I am going to actually take a passage and talk about it.  Before you ask, yes, this in not normal for me and blogging.

 

Learning is not merely situated in practice- as if it were some independently reifiable process that just happened to be located somewhere; learning is an integral part of generative social practice in the lived-in world. pg 35

First i had to look up the word reifiable. Oxford dictionary didn’t have it. Webster didn’t have it either, so I am pretty convinced at this point it is not a word. That or there is a typo that really needs to get fixed. Either way my understanding of this passage will be a little off since I am at a loss for what the word means.

One reason I am not an English Lit major is because I think that sometimes the curtains are blue because the author likes blue curtains. There are some things I prefer to read plainly, one reason I liked this text, i will still like literature better.

Anyways, back to the topic. What i got out of this passage was that the act of learning is not something that can be done in one place and one place only. The act of learning can and will happen everywhere, not just because learning, like literacy is a fluid and growing entity, but because it is part of the world that we and our ancestors have created. That the learning processes, created by our ancestors, is the set way in which we should learn. But then this quote comes to mind

Normal is an Illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.

While i will agree that there should be no set classroom that is the only designated place for learning, it is one place where one can learn. If i need to learn how to fix the drains under my kitchen sink, i will not take a 3 unit class on house repairs and plumbing. I will use tools and look online and go to the library if necessary. In this case the new classroom is the home, and as long as you have access to the internet the classroom is everywhere your internet is.

Is sitting in a classroom normal for an institution of learning? Yeah, sure it is. Is it chaos for those that think that there should be reform, or even just those that can not stand the setup of a modern classroom. (I mean come on! these chair/desk combos are just horrible and uncomfortable!). Yeah it is. it is its own little slice of chaos, though not to the traditional sense of the word chaos.