Double Entry #6

Collaboration, Computation, and Creativity:

Media Arts Practices in Urban Youth Culture
by: Kylie A. Peppler, Yasmin B. Kafai

1. "Researchers interested in computer-supported collaborative learning have paid little attention to the field of arts and design education as the more prominent focus has been on science, mathematics and to a lesser degree, social studies and language arts."

   I completely agree with this assessment of the direction that most computer supported learning has been driven.  The main reason for this trend, in my opinion, has been standardized testing, and the amount of emphasis test results have been given.  My favorite line is one from Mr Holland's Opus where Richard Dreyfuss says if the arts are taken out of schools the students won't have anything to read or write about.  This article touches on that concept throughout, with the focus being on how, through creative endevours of a student whose reading level is low, could be helped by allowing the student to be creative through expression and art work.

2. "Commonly, this group of scholars posits that literacy is best understood as a set of social practices, which can be inferred from events and mediated by written, visual, and other types of texts (Barton & Hamilton, 2000)."

   I found this quote interesting in the fact that it is now being recognized that literacy is not just written word and printed word.  Literacy has evolved to include social practices that use other mediums of communication.  Any teacher who does not see at least one cell phone or other mobile device of some kind, where the students are either texting, twittering, facebooking, or some other form of social mediaing, has gone through the day with their eyes closed.  I witnessed students who could not write a coherent sentence if it bit them on the butt.  THose same students could take a cell phone and through shorthand texting, write those coherent sentences.  They understand that new medium of language better than standard English.

3. "Computation is also a learned skill that becomes useful as youth, even those like Brandy that are unable to read, can use for creative production."

   This quote goes along with the previous one, in that even though Brandy's reading level had not improved, she was able to express herself through other mediums, and become quite successful at it.  Through her successes it might be found that the likelyhood for improvement in her other academic areas also improves.  I believe that once a student has found something in which they enjoy and are successful at, their other studies are generally positively affected.  For example, some students choose to stay in school for one reason or another.  IF they were not privey to that reason they would have dropped out and become nothing more than a statistic.