Imagine all your life you’ve only eaten cold dog food. Day in, day out, that’s what you’ve come to know and expect. One day, someone comes along and gives you some warm dog food. It is quite an improvement. Warm dog food seems great. The bar is low. Your expectations are low. Education gets served a lot of cold dog food and, occasionally, when we get some warm dog food it seems great because we’re comparing it to the poor quality products and services usually categorized as “educationalI think this is why whacky fonts and clipart are seen as such great options to improve crappy worksheets/ppts..” Think about educational videos, ppts, educational video games, the LMS etcI’m sure you can add some more.. The bar is set amazingly low. When we see bad, but not bottom of the barrel, it seems decent. It is education after all. What can we expect? They did warm the dog food up for us. We need to start comparing our products to things people use and participate in when they are not coerced and when they feel they have options. Things involved with learning don’t have to be of poor quality. We see people learning and enjoying themselves in real life all the time. We know what good media is. We don’t have to […]

My bad. image source Turns out my last post attacked a post that was set up to be attacked (his companion piece is here). I could have saved myself some time and read more of the site. The only problem I have with small pieces loosely joined is, for me anyway, it’s easy to lose the overall context of the pieces and you end up with misunderstanding because that context is missing. I subscribe to lots of sitesI don’t know how many, several hundred feeds probably. There’s good and bad in that. Especially, considering I suck at remembering names and I subscribe to some people just because they disagree with me totally.. It’s a little too easy for me to see the chunks as individual ice cubes rather than pieces of a larger glacierIt’s a lot easier to notice the yellow snow if you see it surrounded by white snow.. Sometimes that matters, sometimes it doesn’t- another way technology has made media literacy a little more complexI’m not saying that context is only important now but rather that technology and the way information flows has become increasingly divorced of a larger context and is often seen separately from an author’s larger body of work.. Totally my fault and looking back at it, the post did seem too easy. I’m leaving […]