{"id":242,"date":"2005-09-09T09:08:51","date_gmt":"2005-09-09T13:08:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/?p=242"},"modified":"2005-09-09T09:08:51","modified_gmt":"2005-09-09T13:08:51","slug":"tablet-pc-congratulations-screencast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/tablet-pc-congratulations-screencast\/","title":{"rendered":"Tablet PC Congratulations Screencast"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s so much inspiration and wonder in what Will Richardson does in his job, and generously shares with us on Weblogg-ed<\/a>, that it feels a little odd to single out one thing. But this little treasure is so compelling<\/a> that I want to try to explain a little bit of its power over my imagination just now.<\/p>\n

Thirty-three teachers at Will’s school are piloting the use of Tablet PCs in their classrooms. I won’t outline the project here for fear that I’ll get the details wrong; consult Will’s blog for more information. I do gather that they’ve got a wireless environment and that they can connect easily to video projectors. So far, so good. What jazzed me this morning, though, is the screencast Will put together<\/a> to congratulate his teachers on their use of the devices. How did it jazz me? Let me count the ways:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \nThe congratulations uses the medium he congratulates them for using, and thus becomes yet another proof-of-concept. That’s elegant, imaginative, and shrewd: a hat trick.\n<\/li>\n
  2. \nAs Jon Udell has argued, screencasts can be very compelling mini-narratives. Will’s a fine storyteller, and that makes the screencast very effective. And by drawing on the tablet as he tells his story, he channels Magic Drawing Board, a favorite of mine from Captain Kangaroo (everything I know I learned from the Captain). The writing becomes a kind of animation. The result is an interesting combination of cartoon and manuscript. Imagine opening a letter in which the message writes itself, in the writer’s own script, as you read it. Perhaps the analogue I’m stumbling toward is that of the voice. Just as what I call the “explaining voice” conveys meaning and dramatizes cognition in the microcues of its own unfolding in time (an expressiveness like that of a musical performance), so the tablet writing in this screencast conveys meaning and dramatizes cognition. I’m reminded that “witness” means both spectator and knowledge. The trick is to get the spectacle right, to convey simultaneously the information and the mind’s experience of the information, and Will does this beautifully. (It is in fact a natural thing to do, but one that institutional education finds difficult to scale or sustain. Easier to ask for reports than for these layered performances of seeking-after-understanding.)\n<\/li>\n
  3. \nDid I say already that the presentation was creative? The awards are funny, well-chosen, and easily recognizable from my own experience in the classroom. I see the classroom vividly, in my mind’s eye. I also see Will there, looking on. Will also has a good speaking voice which he uses well in his voice-over. There’s a sneaky emphasis on production values here, all the more effective because the presentation looks utterly extemporaneous. Perhaps it was, and that’s all the more impressive.\n<\/li>\n
  4. \nNow, imagine an annotated bibliography in which a student narrates her research and comments on her sources in a screencast using a tablet PC. She writes notes, uses graphics, whatever, as she talks about what she thinks about what she’s read. The screencast is then shared with the class asynchronously. What’s happened? Not a gain in efficiency: a standard annotated bibliography can be “consumed” (hate that word) more quickly, and no doubt constructed more quickly as well. But the screencast could well be more effective as a learning tool. The drama of cognition and metacognition for both the researcher and her fellow students is amplified, individuated, and perhaps (uh-oh) made more enjoyable. The explosion of social networking as a cornerstone of Web 2.0 should lead us toward more such tools and media of presence<\/em>. (An explosive cornerstone: what a weird mixed metaphor. Can a rocket be a building?)\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Or so it seems to me this morning. I’m beginning to think the idea of the haptic may be worth exploring in this context. The intimate tool that extends capabilities in a way that feels like an extension of one’s presence in the world. Reach and grasp that establish new baselines from which the next reach-and-grasp will occur. The haptic sense makes the thing grasped into the tool for the next reach, because it doesn’t feel like a tool anymore. I’m not using “haptic” to mean simulating touch. I’m using it as a metaphor to investigate the cognitive metaphors of apprehension and comprehension.The former ties in to Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, the latter into the newly-bootstrapped level above which the ZPD reappears. I’m interesting in this metaphor because its kinetic implications include the idea of use, where “I see,” also of course a compelling metaphor for learning, doesn’t fully activate that idea. I see what is shown to me. I use what I grasp. Or something like that.<\/p>\n

    Thanks, Will. Again.<\/p>\n

    EDIT: This tablet PC screencast<\/a>, though thoughtfully presented on the author’s blog, doesn’t work nearly so well, for reasons I’m still mulling over.<\/p>\n

    \"Play\"\"Play\"<\/a><\/div>\n

    Podcast: Play in new window<\/a> | Download<\/a> (2.5MB) <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    There’s so much inspiration and wonder in what Will Richardson does in his job, and generously shares with us on Weblogg-ed, that it feels a little odd to single out one thing. But this little treasure is so compelling that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4bHwM-3U","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}