Close Reading and Online Annotation with Scrible and Diigo

In this post, I discuss the use of two tools for supporting online reading and annotation, which can serve as powerful ways to do close reading in classrooms (Johnson, 2014): Scrible and Diigo. Both tools allow users to mimic pen and paper annotation in online environments, with some limitations. For a short screencast showing the very basics of these tools, click here.

Scrible

Scirble is an online annotation tool that allows readers to mark up articles they read online. It features sub-tools that mimic analogue instruments such as pens and highlighters, and that function similarly to those found in PDF editors. For those of you familiar with annotating in a common downloadable program like Adobe Acrobat Pro, Scrible is actually much easier to use. I’ll get into the technical features and how to set it up shortly, but first let’s cover the basics. When you open a webpage with Scrible, you get a toolbar at the bottom of the page that looks like this:

The tools contained in this image allow readers to:

• Share articles with others (presumably once they have been annotated)
• Highlight text
• Add notes in the style of a Post-It
• Change the color of text
• Underline text

Once students have finished annotating, they can save their annotated page to the Scrible library. An annotated page might look something like this:

These annotated pages can be shared with other readers, referred to as Collaborators on the Scrible site, who can make their own comments or respond to the comments of the original annotator, allowing two readers to engage in collaborative discussion or annotation of a text via the web, which can increase comprehension and understanding (Fischer & Frey, 2012).

The Scrible library allows readers to store webpages chosen for particular purposes or inquiries in its library. You might also teach students to use a tool like Evernote to export annotated texts outside of the web browser. Readers can easily access previously read sites and make comparisons between texts, either within the Scrible website or after exporting to another program.

So, how do readers access Scrible? Scrible can be added as an extension to web browsers like Chrome, or, for those who are weary of adding too many extensions, you can use an easy workaround: adding the site to your bookmarks bar (this is what I did). Either method you choose allows you to open a website on your own, and then click the Scrible button to begin annotation (sometimes you have to sign in to your Scrible account before you can annotate). Here’s what the button looks like on my bookmarks bar:

There are a few limitations to this tool, however. You can’t add text directly onto the page; the annotations are limited to highlighting, underlining, changing text color, and adding text in the form of virtual sticky notes. And while the Scrible library is passable and other tools can be used to export annotated pages, there is no built in way to, say, export an annotated page as a PDF. In a world inundated with online tools and accounts, it’s a bit of a pain to add on any more than you have to. And when you’re working with students, this can really become burdensome. Working with 150-200 kids’ accounts can get messy quickly, and depending on what other systems you have at hand, it might be easier to access documents outside of the Scrible system.

Diigo

Diigo  is a similar online annotation tool. Students can install it as a browser extension which creates a button next to their web search bar that allows annotation on a website that they're already on. In contrast to the visible toolbar in Scrible, Diigo is nearly invisible. Instead, readers use the cursor to highlight text in an article, which causes an annotation toolbar to appear:

Using this toolbar, readers can highlight text, attached virtual sticky notes, or share text to social networking sites like Twitter. Like with Scrible, readers can not, add text directly to the webpage as they would using pen and paper.

Diigo automatically saves annotations to its webpage, which can be accessed later, either by individual annotation or by pulling up the full text of a website. On the Diigo site, readers can also annotate uploaded PDFs and use outlining tools. Teachers looking at text structures could use these tools to help students identify aspects of writing online with a collapsible outlining tool that allows them to switch between reading and making comments on an outline.

Like Scrible, and like any digital tool, Diigo is not perfect. Neither tool allows readers to add their own text to a page, a severe limitation for those of us who want to use these tools to promote close reading and metacognition (it's so much easier when you can see the results of your thinking right there next to the author's text!). 

Let's talk about the libraries these pages get saved to for a minute. In contrast to Scrible’s drab but clear library page, Diigo’s is more colorful and busy, showing readers some of their annotations from the moment the page is opened:

While this previewing of annotations may serve useful to some students, I found that it cluttered up the page and made it more difficult to organize multiple documents. If you are thinking of using this tool to promote online inquiry or comparing documents, I would advise trying them out for yourself (or having your students test-drive them) and making a call based on what seems to work best in your context.

As with Scrible, readers using Diigo can not easily export full versions of their annotated documents to formats like PDF, Word, or Google Docs. They can easily tweet or e-mail links to these documents in Diigo, but the tools works to keep you functioning within its ecosystem.

To me, these limitations prevent either tool from functioning as fully as they could throughout a writing process, and make it more difficult for readers and students to integrate the work and learning they do annotating webpages with other documents like PDFs, photographs, or scanned pages. However, online reading takes many forms, and either Diigo or Scrible can be used to support active, close reading in online spaces, allow readers to save articles that might otherwise be lost to time after a webpage is closed, and consequently, to return to, re-read, and compare documents, all aspects of close reading advocated by teacher-scholars (Fischer & Frey, 2013).

Reading Response 2: Online Reading and New Literacies

LABELING AND DEFINING LITERACY IN 2018

As scholars have come to see literacy as embedded within social contexts, the term has broadened from a previous emphasis on the reading and writing of printed text to include other types of knowledge (Lankshear and Knobel, 2008). As we begin to conceptualize literacy or reading within their sociocultural contexts, we might see that texts and our work with texts are parts of these contexts, these lived situations, which of course involve much more than just print and decoding. As Lankshear and Knobel (2008, p. 13) explain:

From a sociocultural perspective, it is impossible to separate out from text-mediated social practices the ‘bits’ concerned with reading or writing (or any other sense of ‘literacy’) and to treat them independently of all the ‘non-print’ bits, like values and gestures, context and meaning, actions and objects, talk and interaction, tools and spaces.

Literacy, then, comes to include the construction of meaning in contextualized situations (Hammerberg, 2004), including practices, ways of knowing, being, or maneuvering within these contexts. Given the multitude of contexts and situations, there are many of these ways of constructing meaning, and the term literacies (rather than literacy) emerges to suggest the multitude of these ways of making sense of things within social contexts (Hammerberg, 2004, p. 649):

Ways of being literate, then, change depending upon the cultural practice one is engaged in, making a notion of "multiple literacies" possible (Scribner & Cole, 1981; Street, 1984). Because literacies are seen as multiple, changing on the basis of the social and cultural context in which communication occurs, sociocultural theories see identity as fluid and changing too.

New literacies are described as “new” in a number of ways and for a number of different reasons. They could be said to be technologically new in the sense that digital texts and communications have allowed for different types of text that often include, but are not limited to, alphabetic print. These digital texts often mix modalities and incorporate features such as hyperlinks (Johnson, 2014). At the same time, we might say that such features are not exclusively new or relegated to the digital realm; texts that include non-print features have been around for thousands of years (Siegel, 2006) and might be said to be “new” even if they are not digital or are in fact quite old.

A second way of discussing new literacies is to emphasize the types of practices surrounding texts, both online and offline texts, that are developing in our era. These might include a more widely distributed creation and publication model, interaction between authors and readers, greater collaboration, and, to bring this topic explicitly into the classroom, publication for audiences beyond teachers. These are the types of activities referred to by Lankshear and Knobel as the new “ethos” (2008, p. 25) of new literacies.

I agree with the general viewpoint and description of literacy practices taken by scholars within New Literacy Studies. While I am more apt to emphasize, alongside online texts, the ways in which non-digital texts can function in these “new” ways, and to dwell on the arts and aesthetic experience (Dewey, 1934) when thinking about these practices, I see this difference more as a different area of emphasis rather than a disagreement, although, as I’ve mentioned before, this is an area I am still exploring.

Is there any benefit to talking about these processes as online reading comprehension or digital inquiry, or does it create more confusion?

To me, when considering the benefits of terms such as “online reading comprehension” or “digital inquiry” in relation to new literacies, each term emphasizes different aspects of literacies in our current context. Any term that includes words like “digital” or “online” of course emphasizes literacies connected to computers (of one sort or another), while broader terms like “new literacies” might be said to be less descriptive or precise, but perhaps more inclusive. Particularly given the ongoing buzz in school districts surrounding technology, "online reading comprehension" seems to offer within the term a way to keep the conversation focused on student literacies rather than the technology itself.

Similarly, "digital inquiry" has implications for curriculum and instruction that suggest what for many would be a “new” way of thinking about teaching. The term suggested by Castek et al.’s (2015) piece on internet reciprocal teaching, “new literacies of online research” highlights both the newness of new literacies as well as the research and inquiry aspect of reading online, which positions online reading as more of a distinct activity from reading comprehension. Ultimately, I think something is gained and something is lost with each term. Literacies are so complex, multifaceted and interconnected that perhaps we are bound to need a family of terms that could be used to emphasize different aspects of multiple literacy practices that are undertaken in new and continually changing ways.

As I try to make sense of the landscape of research on new literacies, I do find often find myself confused and asking questions about the use of different terms within overlapping schools of thought. For example, what are the overlaps and differences between multimodal theory, multiliteracies, social semiotics, and New Literacy Studies? If I wasn’t trying to put together a larger picture of literacy research though, I don’t think terms like “online reading comprehension” or “digital inquiry” would add to that confusion – it only becomes confusing for me when trying to parse how so many different writers are using these terms.

As a teacher thinking about practice (rather than as an emerging researcher trying to understand a field of inquiry and research), I think these terms provide fairly straightforward connections to things I am familiar with; moreover, each term has implications for curriculum and instruction built in. For teachers, there is an endless amount that could be learned about teaching and very little time to do it in, so terms that connect to things we already know and have implications for our work can certainly make it easier to understand and make connections to pedagogy.

Considering the way that Leu et al. (2013) use the terms uppercase and lowercase new literacies both clarify and muddy the waters. It is helpful to read the authors’ descriptions, as it has been helpful to read a number of articles in this course that help clarify the landscape of research surrounding new literacies. At the same time, the variability of the terminology used, combined with the overlap in the terminology – Lankshear and Knobel (2008), for example, refer to new literacies using both uppercase and lowercase letters separately, but in a different way than is described by Leu et al. (2013) – can be confusing. In some ways, I think these overlaps and differences between authors are the inevitable consequence of using the same language, the same sets of words, to describe concepts that we all think about in slightly different ways. But particularly as a field is emerging and when things are changing so quickly, I imagine this fluidity of terms is greater.

IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING

No matter what you call them, do you think the online reading/digital literacy skills, strategies, practices, and mindsets outlined in your readings from Week 5 and 6 are more, less, or equally important for today’s students compared to those related to offline reading comprehension, vocabulary, and/or fluency (as discussed in reading from Weeks 1-4)? Please explain your reasoning. How might your new thinking about these ideas impact the way you design and implement your instruction of digital literacy and/or online reading comprehension?

Wow – what a difficult question! I would love to avoid it and say that I think all of these are important. If I had to choose only one thing kids could learn though, I would have to come down on the side of kids learning offline reading comprehension (as opposed to online reading comprehension). My reasoning is that offline reading comprehension seems to provide a foundation for many, though not all (Coiro, 2003) of the things we do when reading online. I would imagine it would be easier to learn online comprehension skills if you were building on strong offline reading comprehension skills, as many of us have done in our own lives, and I imagine it would be more difficult to be a strong comprehender of online text without skills in reading offline. Although, as we saw in the video from Dr. Coiro’s presentation (2013), the two are certainly not the same.

On the other hand, we don’t really have to choose just one. Online reading presents its own challenges and requires unique skills and dispositions (Coiro, 2003). Given where our schools and teachers are at in terms of familiarity with teaching different kinds of reading, and given the relative newness of new literacies, I think it might be more important at this cultural moment to emphasize the importance of teaching online reading, and to work to help more teachers understand how they can teach reading comprehension in online contexts.

As a teacher, I’ve worked and plan to continue to work to make connections between the two practices (or two sets of practices). I think both offline and online reading make different kinds of reading easier or more difficult, depending on the situation, and have different strengths. Anyone who has ever agonized over the decision to buy an ebook or physical book, or spent hours getting lost on Wikipedia can likely attest to the different processes, associations, and even physical relationships that come from reading in these different contexts and as teachers of reading and literacy, I think we really can’t ignore either one.

References

Castek, J., Coiro, J., Henry, L. A., Leu, D. J., & Hartman, D. K. (2015). Research on instruction and assessment in the new literacies of online research and comprehension, 21.

Coiro, J. (2003). Expanding our understanding of reading comprehension to encompass new literacies. The Reading Teacher, 56, 458-464.

Coiro, J. (October, 2013). Online reading comprehension: Opportunities, challenges and next steps. Keynote presentation in Medillin, Colombia.

Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. Los Angeles, LA: Tarcher Perigee.

Hammerberg, D. (2004). Comprehension instruction for sociocultural diverse classrooms: A review of what we know. The Reading Teacher, 57(7), 648-656.

Johnson, D. (2014). Reading, writing and literacy 2.0: Teaching with online texts, tools, and resources, K–8. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2008). From ‘reading’ to ‘new literacy studies. In C. Lankshear & M. Knobel, New literacies: Everyday practices and classroom learning. Berkshire, England: Open University

Leu, D.J., Forzani, E., Burlingame, C., Kulikowich, J., Sedransk, N. & Coiro, J.(2013). New literacies of online research and comprehension: Assessing and preparing students for the 21st century with Common Core Standards. In S.B. Neumann & L. Gambrell (Ed.) Quality reading instruction in the age of Common Core Standards.

Siegel, M. (2006). Rereading the Signs: Multimodal transformations in the field of literacy education. Language Arts, 84(1), 65-77.

Reading Response #1: Reading Comprehension

STRATEGIC AND ENGAGED READERS
Strategic readers are readers who have and utilize strategies at hand to navigate and make sense of text, even when the text is challenging or confusing; they utilize “the strategies and processes of good readers” (Duke & Pearson, 2002, p. 206). For example, such readers might predict, question, visualize (or use visual representations of text), summarize, or utilize their knowledge of text structure. Buehl (2014) describes processes such as inferring, determining importance, and synthesizing. I might add to these ideas I have used in my teaching: chunking information, re-reading in large and small chunks, personalized annotation strategies, and control of habits surrounding reading. In contrast to this image of a reader with a powerful and diverse toolkit to be used while making meaning from text, a less strategic reader may lack such tools and struggle to comprehend a text. I would situate each of these strategies within an awareness of one’s own comprehension; strategic readers are attentive to their own reading processes, and utilize strategies as needed to help them make sense of texts.

Across readings, particularly in Swan’s (2003) chapter, strategic reading overlaps with conceptions of engagement and motivation. It is easier to employ a strategy and work through challenges in reading when we are interested in the topic and motivated to learn more. Swan emphasizes the multifaceted aspect of engagement when she describes engaged reading as “the dynamic, recurrent process of combining motivation, strategies for reading and learning, social interaction, and knowledge about a topic” (2003, p. 1). She identifies numerous aspects of engaged reading: active learning, goal setting, asking questions, reading for information, finding answers, gaining information from others, sharing information, and using strategies, and ties engagement to both motivation and the search for conceptual knowledge, highlighting the ways in which teachers, by supporting students in their own learning goals, can help foster engaged readers.

Certainly, teachers and librarians can create environments and experiences that support engaged reading. To the extent that success in reading comprehension and self-efficacy support engaged reading, each of the pedagogies described in Duke and Pearson’s (2002) chapter: transactional reading strategies, reciprocal instruction, and questioning the author, could support engaged reading. Moreover, employing aspects of the CORI framework such as autonomy support, strategy instruction, and interesting texts, could work in overlapping ways to foster engaged reading and create a culture of engaged reading in classrooms.

Under the 3rd question heading, I have included more detailed questions and discussions about how we define both strategic and engaged reading.

CONNECTIONS
Taken together, there seems to be a common focus in discussions on reading comprehension on metacognition and control: the ability to maintain awareness of one’s own reading comprehension and take action (by employing strategies) to be able to comprehend. Moreover, while we might discuss engagement and strategic reading separately, they appear to overlap in powerful ways: it would be difficult to function as an engaged reader without the ability to comprehend text, and the teaching of strategic reading could certainly support students’ self-efficacy (Swan, 2003). This seems particularly important given the extent to which success and engagement in any learning endeavor entail an overlap between the learner’s identity and the identities that are recognized by the learning community (Gee, 2004). In considering identity in relation to engaged reading, we might ask to what extent students feel that their identities are valued and respected by the teacher, the curriculum, and the school. Feeling confident and competent (Swan, 2003) could certainly play a role here. For example, employing the types of instructional practices described in Duke and Pearson’s (2002) chapter could help support readers in developing the strategies needed to comprehend text, which could help readers feel that they place in the endeavors of the classroom. Perhaps more directly, the support for student choice, interests, and autonomy that are so important to pedagogies like the CORI framework (Swan, 2003) could create space for students’ identities and interests to drive the curriculum.

In my own classroom, I have mixed strategies pulled from research-based practitioner texts (e.g., Bomer, 2011) with instruction built on what I have observed my students doing. In the context of a reading workshop in which students’ interests and text choices drove their reading, I would lead conferences and mini-lessons focused on reading strategies. The changes I observed in my students’ reading through these pedagogies aligns with the broad conclusion of Duke and Pearson (2002): “we can help students acquire the strategies and processes of good readers...this improves their overall comprehension of text” (p. 206). As I have shifted my practice more towards comprehension and strategic reading, I have seen what I might almost be inclined to call miracles in students’ reading as they learned to slow down, monitor their awareness, and employ specific strategies to support their comprehension. At the same time, I still feel like I’m just beginning in my journey to understand a topic as complex as the ways in which students make meaning from the world.

IMPLICATIONS/QUESTIONS/CRITIQUES

What implications do these ideas have for your work in education?
While I have experience incorporating these types of pedagogies in my own classroom, my current roles with my local school district and university lead me to wonder about the best ways for supporting strategic and engaged reading while working with inservice and preservice teachers. There is a great deal of overlap between the CORI framework and two of our district’s current emphases: problem/project-based learning, which incorporates many of the same principles, and literacy across the school day (an emphasis on reading and comprehension instruction across subject areas). I work with a team of ELA and social studies educators on an ongoing PD series focused on incorporating reading and writing across disciplines; in this respect, there are places in my work to explicitly incorporate many of the ideas and texts I am learning about/with into courses and conversations with teachers. (In fact, I’ve been kicking myself for just now getting to some of these pieces that I want to share with teachers because I really would have loved to have already shared them!) Looking forward, I am interested in looking into the research not just on these pedagogies themselves, but on teachers’ experiences shifting their practice and learning new instructional paradigms, and the ways in which teacher educators have incorporated these ideas in classroom settings.

What questions do you have?
While I am passionately in support of the concepts and pedagogies described across these readings, I do have a number of questions I am interested in exploring, small itches that are highlighting for me places that I might be interested in diving into more research:

Do we need more sub-categories when we talk about reading comprehension strategies?
I wonder about the ways in which we think about the differences between some of the reading comprehension strategies described across articles. Some focus on features of texts themselves, while others involve activating mental actions or simply being aware of comprehension and attention while reading, while others emphasize physical activities or artifacts students could use to assist their comprehension. Should we consider all of these as reading comprehension strategies or should we endeavor to more specific categories as well? I’m imagining something like mental actions, collaborative activities, knowledge of text features, etc.

On the other hand, the overlap between these categories is important to recognize: perhaps the mix of activities categorized as comprehension strategies stems from the what the RAND report (2002) has categorized as the interaction between reader, text, and activity. Reading comprehension is such a complex and multifaceted activity that it is perhaps best to use one umbrella term. Similarly, if reading comprehension “relies on mental construction that assimilates what is on the page with what is already known” (Buehl, 2014, p. 7), then reading strategies would inherently involve actions across categories. In both descriptions (RAND and Buehl), comprehension comes from the interaction between different aspects of the reading situation, and so comprehension strategies might include several different kinds of activity.

Should we and/or how can we add nuance to our image of engaged reading/readers?
I’ve been thinking a lot about engagement over the last few months, particularly the extent to which we don’t always define it as well as we could. I recently read a collection of articles about multimodal writing, and while over twenty studies mentioned engagement as a key aspect in the classrooms they described, none gave definitions or were very clear about what they meant by the term. As I read Swan’s (2003) chapter, I appreciated the specificity with which she described engaged ready. At the same time, I had some questions about the ways in which she defined engaged reading and intrinsic motivation. While I am completely in agreement with the broad picture she paints of how teaching, reading, and learning can function in classrooms, I still feel that there is a lot more to explore. She lists numerous motivational features of engaged readers:

They read because it is fun and interesting
They read to learn something new
They read to find answers about a topic
They are reading for the sake of learning
They are reading just to read
They are reading for their own purposes
They participate in school activities
They put forth the effort to do a good job
They stick with a project until it is completed

This collection of descriptions paints an image of an engaged reader, but I wonder about readers who do not fit all of these descriptors or who may be engaged readers in ways that are not reflected in school settings. Readers may have multiple purposes for reading: some may engage in reading “for its own sake” (Swan, 2003, p. 5), while others may read because they want to bake the perfect cookie or beat the boss of the level on a Nintendo game, even if they don’t read just for the sake of reading. While these readers have differing purposes, I would see them both as engaged. While I understand the picture Swan paints and realize that it is a general image of what engaged reading could look like in a classroom, her elaboration on the concept still raised questions for me about how teachers can conceptualize engaged reading, particularly given the diversity of their students and the increasing diversity of texts and purposes for reading. Should we consider engaged reading as having multiple variants? And how is or should our ideas about engagement change as the way we think about classrooms changes (Ivey & Johnston, 2013)? I’m excited to continue exploring this topic this semester, both as it applies to offline and online reading.

Reading with multimodal texts
Lastly, I want to touch on the opening chapters of Denise Johnson’s (2014) text, even as her larger focus is on digital reading. He discussion of cueing systems across different textual forms raised questions for me about about how the research on reading comprehension applies to multimodal texts, even if they are analogue ones. How, for example, does the research described in Duke and Pearson’s (2002) report apply to the reading of picture books or graphic novels? Do we need to identify different strategies to support readers of these texts or do the same processes apply? What research has been done on reading comprehension in (offline) texts that include a mix of communicative forms? Of course, this question only becomes more important when we add digital texts in to the mix, but I’m curious about it even with offline reading.


Additional References
Bomer, R. (2011) Building Adolescent Literacy in Today’s English Classrooms. Heinemann,
Portsmouth, NH.

Gee, J.P. (2004), Situated Language and Learning: A critique of Traditional Schooling,
Routledge, London, UK.

Ivey, G. & Johnston, P. H. .(2013). Engagement With Young Adult Literature: Outcomes and
Processes. Reading Research Quarterly, 48(3), 255–275.

Creating a Syllabus with Canva

The end of summer is always a period of mixed emotion for teachers. Excitement, curiosity, and anxiety all blend together as we wonder where the time went and look forward to shifting our lives one more time. As part of this process, many of us are probably starting to consider new ideas for curriculum, and new ways to support students as they engage in exciting experiences. And always, we revise our syllabuses (or syllabi if you prefer). The syllabus is nominally for students, but it’s also the place where we do much of our initial thinking about the year to come, considering what texts to include, what rules to put in place, how to describe our courses to students for the first time, and how to welcome them into our classrooms.

After hours or days of careful planning and thinking though, the syllabus can often become an uninspiring list of requirements, rules, and course descriptions that, however carefully they may be crafted, are quickly skimmed over by students looking for more meaty information about big assignments or grades. In this post, I’d like to discuss how we might use digital tools to enliven these first documents our students encounter in our classes, at the same time teaching ourselves a platform that can later be used by both students and teachers to compose and share material in aesthetically engaging ways.

I’m talking here about Canva, a web-based design program that allows even total novices to create beautiful pages for the web or for print. Certainly there are many such tools available, but I’ll keep the focus limited here. We have enough to worry about as the year begins without pouring over a thousand different graphic design engines. And Canva is a pretty solid choice for a teacher or student – you can quickly create materials that are engaging and informative without needing to invest a graduate degree’s worth of time to learn it. 

But before I move on, some brief examples. Have you ever handed out a syllabus that looks like this?

What about one that looks like this?

A syllabus cover sheet for my English 9 class. Image from Journey

This one was created on Canva. It’s a wonderful way for any of us to consider the aesthetics of the information we share with others. Increasingly, as publishing materials to the web becomes more and more a standard mode of communication, even in schools, tools like Canva allow us to think through the materials we share with students on an aesthetic level and to consider the immediate effect they might have on students. This is especially true of a syllabus; our students receive this document with little knowledge about us or our classes. And yet, so often, the unintended message, beyond whatever we want to convey, is that this is a class, perhaps a required one, and it will be filled with  requirements. There will be rules and grades and things kids have to do. Of course, much of that information is important! But we can also convey it in ways that might grab someone’s attention, that might spark their curiosity or invite them to engage with a subject. You might even use a syllabus as a text or a tool for inquiry and discussion!

To use Canva, you simply choose from a number of provided templates or start fresh, dragging and dropping elements (text box, image, background, etc.) from a menu on the left side of the screen. The easiest way to create a cool design is to start with one of Canva's templates and adjust it until it fits your purpose, replacing placeholder text and images with ones relevant to your course. 

You begin by choosing a template or starting from a blank one. You can design materials for print or for the web. Any document you create can be downloaded as a PDF or JPG file that can be sent to students, printed, or embedded in a website.

The image above highlights different textual elements that can be included. Notice how much of the design work has been completed already, with different fonts and text sizes ready to be added.

Now, of course, you can't print this in any remotely cost effective way. I've distributed these to my students digitally, but I've also taught in schools in which technology access was an issue. Still, color and full page images are not the only ways to create well-designed documents. Here is an example of the front page of a syllabus in black and white with no images.

This document was designed for a senior creative writing elective and includes a short prose poem from internet phenom J. Raymond. Here, the front page becomes not just informational, but also serves as a classroom activity. A text is embedded in the syllabus itself and serves both as an invitation into the course and material for a classroom activity. 

In this post, I've focused exclusively on the use of Canva as a tool for syllabus creation. However, using it for a syllabus is only one of many applications. At the very least, by playing around with this tool yourself, you gain familiarity with the program and could create materials for your classes down the line or help your students learn to use this tool for their own projects or applications. Kids in my classes have created posters to promote their classroom magazine, designed their own creative projects, and created covers for collections of their work. The possibilities are as unlimited as the creativity of you and your students.

At the same time, there are some limitations to be aware of. As I mentioned above, there are few schools that could afford to print these materials and of course you need access to technology to work with them. On the other side of the equation, as you get more involved in web-based design, you may want to create more interactive, elaborate materials or ask your students to create them. For such activities, I would suggest website creation tools such as Wordpress or Weebly. Lastly, while Canva provides a variety of designs, templates, and images for free, and allows you to upload your own, there are some images, fonts, or designs that cost money. If you are using this with students, you'll want to cover this in class before discovering that some excited student has spent two-hundred dollars downloading new templates.

The Anxious Productivity of 'Temple Run'

My post on Temple Run and the productive logic of video games is now up on Popmatters. I chopped a section from it to include here below.

Certainly, collecting coins and points isn’t anything new in video games, and such practices are not limited to casual games. Achievements and trophies for console games seem to serve much the same purpose: providing a psychological sense of reward for playing, imbuing the player with the feeling that they are doing something useful, as if the games themselves were unworthy of our time. The accumulation of coins and achievements (or even the photographs in a game like Pokemon Snap) appears to function something like Susan Sontag’s notion of the tourist with a camera: he desperately desires to possess the world, to bring something back to his colleagues, to show to himself that “my time in leisure has not been wasted.”

That site is now the home for some of my video game writing, though I'll still be updating this page with stuff on books, education, movies, and other art, most imminently with a post on Waiting for Superman. Do hold breath.

Housekeeping, Conferences and the Significance of Journey

Howdy everyone,

Sorry for the long stretch with no posts. I've been working on a paper on Argentina- the one I posted about way way back in July- to present at a few conferences. The paper still isn't done, but I presented it once already and am headed off to do another presentation this weekend. In the mean time, I have a post on PopMatters about my favorite game of recent memory, Journey. Here's a clip below:

For some time, critics, myself included, have struggled to find ways to interpret games through artistic parameters that we are familiar with, to apply our understanding of what is meaningful in other art forms to a new and developing medium. Video games do not, at least not yet, do what literature or movies do. On the surface, they have little to offer in terms of cultural criticism and their stories are for the most part god awful. The heralding of Heavy Rain, with all of its absurd melodrama and B-movie plot twists, as a hallmark of storytelling should tell us all that we need to know about the current state of the medium in this respect. And yet, those of us who play video games know (and know with a passion) that there is something significant here, something more to playing a game than just… well, playing a game. 

Enjoy! I'm off to sunny Boston, MA!

Qualms About Mountain Lion

Like millions of other people, I've become a Mac user and fan over the course of the last 5 years. From about 2007 - 2011, it seemed like Windows couldn't touch a thing Apple was doing with its operating system (I'll try to stay away from phones and tablets for the moment). Leopard seemed to be almost perfect when it was announced, and Snow Leopard built on that core functionality. Whoever was designing these systems seemed to know how to build a program that got things done without a bunch of fancy crap that complicated the experience. But starting with OS X Lion last summer, the focus has seemed more on redirecting consumer spending back towards Apple than on improving the user experience.

Lion launched in the summer of 2011 with new features like Mission Control, the Mac App Store, Launchpad and inverted scrolling. All of them mimic or borrow from iOS software that was designed to function effectively with limited controls, small screens and direct hand gestures. And none of them really have a place in a desktop operating system. Writing for Gizmodo last summer, Jesus Diaz put it better than I can: "The OS X team has produced an incongruent user interface pastiche that won't satisfy the consumers seeking simplicity nor the professional users in search of OCD control." In the same editorial, Diaz's contends that Apple had gone askew by "attempting to appeal to everyone." With the announcement of Mountain Lion yesterday, I'm thinking that Apple isn't trying to appeal to anyone, but to create the type of simplified, restricted environment on Macs that already exists on iPhones and iPads.

The new "features" highlighted as part of Mountain Lion include Messages, a supercharged chat program, Notification Center, exactly what it sounds like translated directly from the iPhone, iCloud integration, Notes (this is a new feature?), Game Center, the most annoying of the forced apps in iOS, Twitter integration, and Gatekeeper, a program that forces you to buy all of your software from Apple provides upgraded security. Combined with the updates in Moutain Lion, OS X (the "Mac" moniker has been dropped) is now a powerful operating system with a ton of decorative iOS crap all over it. I'm sure a lot of this stuff is useful to some people, but in general, I'm not enticed. Where is the sleek, natural-feeling control, the machine that will do what it's told with smooth user control? If I wanted an idiot-proof Christmas tree of a system, I'd use AOL or surf the internet on a Wii. 

And AOL is the apt comparison here. A few weeks ago, Adam Pash artfully decried the attempts of Facebook and Google to be what AOL once was: the be-all end-all of the internet, closed architectures whose design is meant to keep you within their system and only their system. As they've grown up, the services offered by Google and Facebook have only gotten bloated and creepy in a corporate-totalitarian sort of way. And the same thing seems to be happening to OS X.

Gatekeeper is perhaps the most telling feature of the new OS. By default, any program that you attempt to install that has not emanated from the Mac App Store or been registered by the developer with Apple is labeled as dangerous. A window pops up warning the user and suggesting that the offending program be deleted. These settings can be changed to become more flexible, but for many users, all software not approved by Apple will now be considered off limits. Gatekeeper is being touted as a security feature, one that coincidentally happens to direct users to Apple's own software (or software it profits off of). The direction this is going isn't hard to see: a computer architecture in which all software must go through the actual gatekeeper: the App store. And with every other feature seemingly designed to integrate iOS and OS X, Apple is moving towards full integration of all aspects of tech life into its own software and hardware, with all of the money going one way. Apple doesn't yet have the market power to do this, but it seems to be what they're gunnin' for. They are following the path that made Windows a progressively shittier product for a good 10 years: focusing on monetary domination more than user experience.

I'm also not writing to harp on Apple in particular. In "old media" as well as new, and across brands and products, this type of control is becoming more and more common. What worries me as much as the devolution of Mac OS X is the degree to which the internet and computer experience are slowly congealing around several huge companies, all of them working to make their products worse through a focus on control and commerce. We have a Google search enginge that redirects you to its own products, a Mac that tells you non-Apple software is dangerous, a phone that tracks everything you do on it, a social networking site which slowly removes its own privacy controls and sells your information all over the internet. I'm not saying that using Google, Facebook, a Macbook or an iPhone is currently going to stomp your freedom in some horrible way or that any of them are horrible products you shouldn't use (I use all of them); it's because I thought they were all so fantastic for a few years that it bums me out so much that they've all gone in the direction of gimmicks and control. I'm saying that as these things progress, there's a creeping feeling in my mind that all is not right, that the democratic aspects of the internet and the "tech revolution" are being increasingly rolled back by traffic directed to a few sources. Just as 90% of the media is the United States is owned by 6 companies, I guess the internet, and the programs we use to access it, are now the spaces being colonized.

In the Realm of Greatness: Notes on Norwegian Wood

Last night I went for a second time to see Norwegian Wood, a fever dream of a love story, written and directed by Vietnamese/French film maker Tran Anh Hung and adapted from Haruki Murakami's 1987 novel of the same name. It follows Watanabe, a college student living in Tokyo in 1967. He has moved there after the suicide of his best friend, Kizuki. In Tokyo, he runs into Kizuki's old girlfriend-since-the-age-of-three, Naoko. Things get a bit crazy after their relationship develops and she takes a turn for the worse psychologically. Also in the picture are Midori, a cute, enigmatic fellow student with a crush on Watanabe, Nagasawa, a suave womanizer and friend of Watanabe, and Hatsumi, Nagasawa's mistreated girlfriend.

I don't want to do a review of the film; my opinion isn't clear enough for me to make a judgment or evaluation yet; even after two viewings, I feel ambivalent about the film, unsure exactly what to make of it. It's certainly gorgeous, easily one of the most visually stunning films of the year, but I couldn't quite penetrate it. Perhaps it's the foreigness of the culture, both in time and geography, or maybe it's that it's an adaptation, not only of a fairly long novel, but of a Murakami novel- which often means quiet, tricky characters and dark mystery. A tough project for any film maker. Or maybe the film is just puzzling and enigmatic, to its credit or from lacking some greater vision. Regardless, I've compiled my thoughts and questions in the notes below, hoping that writing about them will illuminate some issues in the film.

1. I said it above, but, Holy Lord is this movie beautiful. Certain scenes, such as the one in which Watanabe is caught between two groups of student protesters running through a corridor, are so well constructed and well shot that they give me the chills. Cinematographer Ping Bin Lee does a beautiful job. I'm eager to take a look at his or at director Tran Anh Hung's other films...or whatever either one has coming in the future.

2. Speaking of those protesters, though, what the hell ever happened to them? There are 3 scenes involving student protests at the beginning of the film (all of them wonderful) and then...nothing. I wonder if they play a larger role in the novel or what, but there was a whole other dimension here that was teased and then...poof. Nothing.

3. This leads to one of the central issues I have with the movie- there are so many intruiging elements to the way it's filmed- the beautiful protests, the endlessly lingering, Terrence Malick-esque shots of nature, the long, uncomfortable sex scenes, the opium-den apartments that every character seems to live in- all of this wonderful stuff, but much of it never really seems to play into the plot in a more meaningful way. I was so adoring of the film the first time I saw it, especially for the first half, because there is so much potential here, but the only thing the film seems to care about are the particular relationships between the characters. Perhaps that's the point, that all of the world is opaque and unimportant in the face of this love, or at least this imagined version of love, but...well, maybe I just wanted a different film than the one actually on offer.

4. On the other hand, one of my favorite things about it is the way it unfolds slowly like some sort of fantastical dream. Nothing other-worldly happens, and yet, the mood of dark enchantment, of power and emotion, is present in every second of the film. It's slow-paced as all hell, and yet, EVERYTHING IS INTENSE. As Naoko and Watanabe walk through the park, the leaves shiver and, if you're in the right mood, so do you. Perhaps the atmosphere of the film is meant solely as an expression of their desires and emotional states, but none of the characters command enough sympathy to roll with them the entire film, and so such skillful construction of mood seems a bit wasted.

5. Adding to the visual element here is the music. Damn! What a job, Johnny Greenwood (of Radiohead and There Will Be Blood fame). Half of the move is accompanied by period songs that are employed effectively and at times, are even meta-textually wound into the plot (on several occasions the music stops abruptly, as if controlled by the characters' actions). The other half is soaring violins and orchestral peices that slowly move into warped, demented Kubrick/Walter Carlos territory along with the direction (Watanabe's greiving scene is straight out of The Shining). Even the sound editing is wonderful. The woods, the city, the scenes that are strangely silent. Like above, really a dream of a film they put together.

6. Why does EVERYONE want to have sex with Watanabe? Every fucking female in the film wants him bad and wants to talk, constantly, about how much sex they want to have with him. This struck me as a bit mysogonistic and male fantasy-esque. Kind of killed some of the vibe.

7. The character development is truly stunning here. Their paths in the film are not a straight trajectories. Apropos for a bunch of 19-20 year olds, and strangely lacking from many films about this age group, is the degree to which all of them are genuinely confused. Characters frequently contradict themselves and seem to switch off between different types of emotions for each other, without necessarily being aware that they are doing so, and without making it so obvious to the audience. Their paths are wandering. Just as conversations are often set while walking and pacing and shaking in torrents of emotion, so too are the paths of the characters semi-dialectical and wandering.

8. The moving is very Wuthering Heights. Think Catherine and Heathcliffe crying and moaning on the moors. There is a lot of crying, some screaming to the heavens, a lot of emotional torment set amidst wild scenes of harsh nature.

9. At the same time as the characters develop fluidly and in unsettled ways, there is an air of fate about the film, reinforced by the repeated violin track that plays over dramatic scenes as well as the way that the characters discuss their lives in such absolute terms: love, responsibility, forever. Of course, part of this is the intensity of nineteen-year-old love. But part, I think, is the direction. The film, through some of the visual and musical aspects mentioned above, has the feeling of a dark fantasy playing out, as if these young lovers are Shakespearean mind-giants. Several 19th century European works come to mind most heavily- of course Wuthering Heights, but there's also a lot of Madame Bovary and Great Expectations going on here. We're certainly in the land of high fiction. But perhaps that is the fiction in which the characters are living and we are mere guests on their emotional journey.

10. Oh, the travails of adapting a book. In some ways, it works for this film. You can't include everything from a 400 page novel in a two hour movie, and so some of the clarity is gone. Sometimes, this adds to the mysterious logic that plays with your mind. It works some of the time. Events happen with ambigious cause and effect- to us and to the characters. One short scene opens with Watanabe in a record store, his hand covered in blood. Store patrons stare at him aghast. He stares down at his hand, as shocked as they are. The manager runs up with paper towells to cover his hand. The scene ends. What the fuck just happened? But it works. Events unexplained can work. And doesn't this happen in real life anyway, and especially when there is intense love and longing? Maybe not bloody hands, but there is certainly more  feeling than there is understanding, more confusion about events and actions, even your own. This is rarely so well represented as in the dream-logic of this film. On the other hand, the mystery detracts from the film's overall impact. I left the second screening with little to think about but atmosphere and vibe. For a film that presents so many enigmas, that seems to push you to unwrap its meaning, there didn't seem to be a whole lot to unwrap. Some vague statement about living life to the fullest, perhaps? But still, no one ever seemed to enjoy life very much in this story. By the end, the film felt both too long and too short. It could've used another three hours and it also could've cut about 40 minutes. A shorter cut may have been more effective in slow-building the emotional landscape without becoming cumbersome, or a longer cut could have really given us a fuller sense of the world of these characters and some more of the substance of their thoughts.

11. In the end, I'm left agreeing with the quote on the film's poster: this movie seems to be "in the realm of greatness." But I'm not quite sure it ever makes it all the way there.

Notes from The Ghibli Retrospective Part 1: Ocean Waves

Studio Ghibli's Ocean Waves (1993)

Set in a small town outside of Kyoto(I think, it was hard to keep up with the Japanese geography, which features heavily in the film's plot), Tomomi Mochizuki's Ocean Waves ("Umi ga kikoeru")  follows the developing relationship between two high school friends, Taku and Yatuka, and a mischevious and beautiful newcomer from Toyko, Rikako. Their story is set at a private high school in a small seaside town. The rhythm of adolescent life there really comes alive in the film: the slowness, the cloistered feeling, the closeness and at-times oppressiveness of going to a small school in a small town. All of these feelings are encased by the narrative device of Taku's reminiscing. The film begins and ends with him heading home for a high school reunion one year after leaving for college. This bookending serves well as an means to enhance the springtime-of-youth vibe that Waves seems to go for.

Saeko Himuro's story manages to avoid cliches or the tendancy of teen stories (at least western ones) to devolve into unrealistic adventures. Because we care about the characters, there is no need to send them to the moon or to have them crash a car. Fitting for a movie about high school, small events becomes big ones in the lives of the young protaganists. Although there is some action, the story doesn't really go anywhere. An illicit trip to Tokyo between Taku and Rikako doesn't result in sex or even a little smooching- just Taku sleeping in the bathtub of the hotel and Rikako having a rum and Coke. The films unfolds more through the characters and their relationships with each other than through external events, which figure here mostly to allow the teenagers to learn more about each other.

The retrospective at IFC was my first chance to see Ocean Waves and I was pleasently surprised. Some of the lesser-known Ghibli films, The Cat Returns for example, can seem childish and derivative, overdoing the melodrama that all of the studio's films contain on some level. Ocean Waves mostly avoids this trap through underplayed action, slow pacing, and a character-driven script. On first viewing, I enjoyed it more than the more promoted, more popular, Miyazaki-directed Ponyo. If you get a chance to see it (and I didn't in the 18 years since it's release), it's definitely worth a look.

*image from omohide.com

Slacker Utopia

Richard Linklater's Slacker (1991)

It's Christmas day and I'm home for the weekend from New York. I think for most people, there's an air of emotion and nostalgia to coming home, seeing your old friends, getting away from your usual life. For me, it sets a reflective tone and by the second or third day here, I find myself engaging in more creative, inspired, maybe even spiritual ways of thinking.

Anyway, I was getting a cup of coffee at 7-11, the only store that seemed to be open. Christmas, like any holiday, bestows a certain feeling of calm to the streets. People move slower. There's less of them out. It's one of the rare times that there is quiet in a public space. Any conversation, whether with a store clerk or a person you know, can take on an intimate quality, even if the content of the conversation is casual or trivial.

So, as I was walking out of 7-11, there was a guy standing by the trashcan, maybe 35, balding but with long hair, in a sweatshirt and jeans, a giant pair of headphones around his neck. He was opening up sugar packets and putting them into a coffee. He looked a bit crazy, and as I walked by, he shouted out "Hey there!" with a big smile and an expectant look on his face. I responded back in kind and picked up the pace of my walk, a bit leery of a conversation with someone who seemed odd. I've had too many random, confrontational, or scary interactions in New York not to be timid about the chatterings of strangers.

I walked on and down the street, then doubled-back to go a different direction. I was wandering a bit, and as I crossed the parking lot diagonally he walked past me about 5 yards away. The way we moved reminded a bit of the camera movement in Slacker, Richard Linklater's 1991 experimental film in which the camera follows from person to person as dozens of characters conversations between friends and strangers flow with little to no tension. People pour out monologues and delve into intellectual topics with the same ease that they would discuss the weather.

And in thinking about Slacker, which admittedly, has been on my mind a lot lately, I realized that I had just had a bit of a Slacker moment. But a real Slacker moment, not a filmic one. An impoverished interaction, laden with hesitation, fear of the unknown, and a host of invisible social boundaries. There was no monologue. There was no intellect. There was only "Hello" and an unsaid goodbye. In the film, we would have walked for several blocks, with the man rambling on about some intriguing conspiracy theory. In reality we parted immediately.

And it got me to thinking more on just how utopian the film really is. It envisions a world in which the inner yearnings of our consciousness are expressible at almost any time and to any person, in which our isolation from each other is almost non-existent.

I picture myself waking early on a Sunday morning at age 19, brimming with excitement over some line of poetry or song lyric, bursting with thoughts and musings too broad to be articulated, and waiting for someone who I felt close enough to that they might understand to wake up so that I could at least attempt some expression. But even when they did wake up, and even when we try to express those inspired inner ramblings, a host of other walls are erected, immediately and invisibly, always already keeping us from communication. To exchange a greeting (which rarely happens in Slacker), to ask how someone is doing, what they've been up to, to engage in established social practices, is to move from an inner, personal world, into a social world that is always the same- at least at first. And in this movement, we are cut off from a communication so direct, so dream-like.

In that sense, Linklater's film, along with its companion, Waking Life, seem to present a sort of dream communication, a world, whether realist or fantastical, in which the words flow freely, in which the poesy of our thoughts is able to be articulated with immediacy.

***

I'm going to be writing my thesis on the idea of utopia in Richard Linklater's films this spring. I'll be using this blog as a platform to jumpstart  and explore my thinking on his movies and subjects related to them.