hyperventilating over learning

Here is a great story about the power of blended learning written in preparation for International Women's Day:

But how can you not hyperventilate? My students, many of them first-generation Americans and the first in their families to attend college, are doing real research. They are doing the research that was previously restricted to scholars who possessed letters of introduction, invitations, and appointments. My students and I have none of these things. We are in a public school during a recession. And yet, we are true researchers.

 In the morning, students knock on the library door, begging to be let in. “We open in five minutes!” I call. I savor the first five minutes of the day alone with my coffee cup and my own research. Currently, I am researching Berenice Abbott, the WPA photographer known for her “Changing New York” photographs of the city. Her work is among 700,000 archived materials in New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery.

You don’t have to live in New York or own a library card to access the Gallery. Like Google Books—which also digitizes historical books—the Gallery is available to anyone with an internet connection. All you need is five quiet minutes in the morning with your coffee cup—or four, depending on the day.

Today I will only have four minutes. Students are rapping on the door, pounding harder. They want in, and come barreling through.     

 “Morning, Miss!” “What new books do you have?” “Can I use a laptop?” “Can I borrow headphones?” “How do I embed video in PowerPoint?” “Where are the Shakespeare plays?”

revolutionary literacy

So what is the state of the debate on whether or not the revolution will be tweeted?

It rages on of course.

I agree with @navalang that a great addition is to be found here in this blog post, Knowing and Unknowing the Egyptian Public, by @zunguzungu.

His argument, if I read him correctly, is that generalizations about how social movements are developed and how they become effective are not helpful in describing the internal rationality of any specific movement or event.

If, as Malcolm Gladwell argues, the success of the American Civil Rights movement can be attributed to strong links among activists and a well-developed hierarchy there is nothing that says that the next, equally effective, civil rights movement could not start with weak ties and a flattened hierarchy.

He goes further to suggest that Western generalizers are reluctant to learn the specifics of movements because they are reluctant about losing their power to create the official story.

We live in an era we can get glimpses of the different ways the stories are being framed. We can read and listen to and watch mainstream media reports side-by-side with what we learn from our fellow "citizen journalists" on Twitter and You Tube. The official analysts can help us organize the information but our own critical literacy skills are forced into high gear as we try to understand the context and the content. These are fine times to be hanging around this little blue planet.