Have you seen that weird "Nannerpuss" commercial before? You know, the one that announced the free breakfast at Denny's? Well, here's a mildly academic discussion of it via video ant. If it's hard to see, I apologize. I can redo it in a new format if this doesn't work out well.
This scene comes from what I would call the second turning point of Michael Mann’s “Heat”. Much of the affects come from camera angles and shots as there is not much dialog to speak of.
As the scene opens, we see Neil McCauley and his crew in a nice 3-shot as they go over a plan, presumably, for their next heist. One gets a bit frustrated watching this shot because we don’t yet know where the crew is. In a film that has been very up front about the characters’ activities, this doesn’t sit well with a viewer.
We get a bit of a hint in the next 3 shot, which includes shipping containers. McCauley begins pointing out escape routes to his fellow thieves but we as viewers don’t yet know what’s going on here until the quick medium shots of a prone photographing, and listening detective break into the scene. It is now clear that this scene is here to show us that the crew if thieves is being tracked. The first sequence of this scene ends with a 2-shot of the detectives leaving their hidden post and a shot of the crew leaving in their vehicles.
The turn of events begins in the next sequence when the entire team of detectives walks onto the scene, taking the same path that McCauley and his crew did in the previous sequence. This suggests a possible change in positions between these two teams in a game of cat and mouse. However, the detectives are presented here in a series of establishing shots. This is the first time we can see exactly what the thieves have been casing; a bunch of shipping containers, a scrap yard, and an oil refinery. During the dialog between the detectives, we get an enhanced feeling of frustration and confusion through a series of close up shots of each detective as they attempt to discern what the next heist is going to be.
The close up shots of Detective Hanna have a slight difference to them. He is the only character with sunglasses on, which suggest he knows something the others don’t. As the sequence progresses, we see more close up shots of Hanna than the other detectives, which leads us to believe that we will also know what he knows. The other characters in the scene continue to look confused and frustrated.
Suddenly, the mood of the sequence changes as we are presented with a series of slower establishing shots from Hanna’s point of view. It’s at this point that he suggests to his fellow detectives that he might know what the thieves were looking for. At this point, the shots seem to “digress” as we get establishing shots of the detectives paired with low angle shots of Hanna suggesting his superiority over the others.
When Hanna finally says that the thieves are looking at “Us, the LAPD,” the shots of the detectives are shown only from high angles. In one case, an over the shoulder shot from McCauley, who has found a high perch from which to photograph the detectives. The entire sequence ends with the detectives in a subservient position (high angles and wide shots) and McCauley in a dominant position (low angles, high over the shoulder shots, and a close up of his grinning face). All of these elements come together to show us that the thieves are now in control. The second turning point of the film has occurred.
With the exception of one brief line at the end of this scene, I think it could serve as an excellent introduction lesson into the use of camera angles and editing to move plot and communicate ideas. Since the dialog is so sparse, a viewer has little choice in paying attention to the technical aspects of the scene.
As part of a larger unit or class, this scene would serve as a jumping point for a more comprehensive look at technical choices in media production for desired effects. Primetime TV shows constantly show us things that someone wants us to care about whether it be terrorists, certain products (a great scene in the 3rd season of "24" has a ridiculously large Ford truck grill in the foreground with the action happening almost as an after thought in the background), or even certain ideas of beauty. Learning ways in which producers, directors, and editors force our attention to certain things will help students start to question why we are to pay more attention to one thing over another in a media presentation.
Will this debate of whether or not digital literacies and media studies are a waste of time ever end?
Our current curriculum focuses on reading texts such as poetry, short stories, and novels; writing expository essays with evidence and commentary; and effectively telling personal narratives in print format. As usual, our current method of teaching these skills comes down to paper, pencils, and the occasional trip to the computer lab to simply type up what we have already handwritten.
To ignore the untapped resources available with our fabulous computers is a sin. All of the things we have been teaching our students are definitely useful, but given everything that has happened with technology in the past 20 years, we owe it to our students and society to start utilizing these things in the classroom so that our students can actually understand, analyze, and use them.
Reading and Analyzing Texts: No one would argue that this is important. However, there is more than one way to go about doing it. The internet is full of short stories, poetry, news articles, how-to writings, and various commentaries on endless subjects. Rather than simply reading and discussing what we have in our textbooks, we can send students on “missions” to find both effective and non effective examples of poems, short stories, news articles, etc. We would be teaching them how to first find information and then how to analyze it looking for deeper meanings, hidden agendas, and overall correctness. We would fulfill all the same goals as before, but we would do so with a 21st century method, for which local and national employers will praise us once these students hit the work force.
Writing Expository Essays: Rather than just throwing down some point/proof/commentary on a piece of paper that a teacher is going to read, why can’t we have students use blogs and wikis? When students write for an actual audience, they are more likely to put increased effort into their final product as opposed to a piece that will only be read by their Language Arts teacher. In addition to publishing work on the internet, students could search other blogs and wikis to see examples of similar work. This would both help feed their minds in approaching assignments and show them how wide of an audience they can potentially reach by posting online. Students could also see and comment on the work of their peers in a helpful manner thus yielding an even more positive product. In many cases, debate on the assigned/chosen topic of each essay may result, which would only increase student learning.
Personal Narratives/Short Stories: This aspect of the curriculum would be enhanced by all the reasons in the “Writing Expository Essays” suggest, but would also provide a way for students to build community in the classroom by sharing and commenting on each others’ experiences. The entire process would be improved even more if teachers included some of their own work on a class blog or wiki.
In short, digital literacies are only gaining importance in today’s world. Multimodality is the way of the future as indicated by Beach, MTV, VH1, The Disney Channel, and even our new president with his fancy Blackberry, Twitter account, and other web communication tools. If we want our students to compete on the world stage, we must embrace these new modes of expression in order to teach our students how to use them effectively and responsibly. To not do this would be unethical and detrimental.
To accomplish this rather intense goal, it will be necessary for current teachers to undergo professional development experiences that will teach them how to present media studies and digital literacies in an effective manner. We need to know how to present media as a text rather than a passive experience such as watching a movie and answering a few questions. A shared process and language to this effect is the first step in preparing our students for a 21st century society.
Teaching media to my students has always been a rather daunting task because I can never answer the question: Where do I start?
Looking at the materials for this first week of class (Beach’s writings, the companion website, the videos, and relevant bits of previous classes) didn’t really help me answer my ongoing question, but it did reinforce a lot of the thoughts I have about why this is so important. In fact, the Language Arts Department in the Hopkins School District (where I work) has been discussing these issues with each other as we consider from where we will purchase our updated course materials. There seem to be two camps forming on this one: The “Web People” and the “Publishing People”.
I think that the video about media conglomerates actually fits into this quite well. The arguments in the discussion of course materials always come down to the same couple of points. The “Web People” like the fact that there are infinite resources available for low cost; mostly written by independent teachers in other districts. They seem to think that subscribing to whatever a big publishing company decides is a good idea is like selling out and makes us look like lemmings. On the other side of the argument, the “Publishing People” feel that using a published set of materials adds credibility to our program because names=notoriety. They claim that by using web resources, parents will start to lose confidence in what their children are learning because our program won’t look like that of neighboring districts. This debate has been going on since before I arrived in the district and, as one long time participant sarcastically suggested to me, won’t end any time in the next ten years.
I find this rather amusing, actually, because when we (teachers in general) ask our students to conduct research for projects and papers, we always tell them to look in just a few places such as academic journals and indexes while completely rejecting any websites they may come across because, “it may not be credible”. But we don’t know for sure, do we?
Being guilty of the afore mentioned phrase many times, I sound a bit hypocritical when I say we should stop doing this and start teaching students how to critically analyze what they find. Rather than just tell them something isn’t credible/reliable, we should teach them how to track down the creators of content so they can independently decide how to take the news, arguments, proof, etc. that they find. I like how the video about media conglomerates points out that the news stations in town are owned by one main company. It’s very similar to radio stations in the Twin Cities. It also accentuates the idea that these few companies that own the media have gotten their fingers into the education system because teachers actually do prefer their students to pull facts about the world from these companies rather than independent websites because the companies have people that review the content before publishing it whereas the independents have no filter in place. To quote a graphic novel, soon to be made into a movie, “who watches the watchmen?” It makes you wonder…
I thought that the major media outlets’ coverage of the Presidential Inauguration served as a great example of how all these things can get jumbled up. Here we have our first African American president being sworn in so, naturally, nearly all the media outlets were all over it. Fox News, however, had an interesting way of covering it. They spent a lot of time watching what former President Bush was doing; even after he left Washington. This company touts fair and balanced coverage in an industry that has been accused of leaning too far to the left. Just because they’re different, doesn’t mean they’re balanced or better, but many people believe so. I guess it all depends on who you have filtering the content that decides what the public sees. It makes you wonder if you can really believe anything. I suppose we have to take “everything with a grain of salt, even this” as the video states.
Having taken multiple classes with Beach and O’Brien, I’m no stranger to their thoughts and opinions on media literacies. Perhaps that, alone, is reason enough to discount everything I say here (that, and I watch John Stewart religiously). I don’t think it’s an accident that these two are a writing and a reading expert respectively because it’s very hard to teach one without the other. It seems natural that in order to teach students to effectively analyze media we should also teach them how to express themselves using the same media we want them to analyze. How can someone have an understanding of something if they don’t understand how it works? Images, sounds, and text can be combined in different ways to achieve different ends even if the source material is identical. I’ve embedded a youtube video below that shows this in action using a State of the Union speech given by former President Bush. Although clearly done for entertainment, it mimics what happened to the girl in the media conglomerate video.
As many have already stated on their blogs, digital literacies are becoming more important as we continue to embrace technology in society. I think I only know one or two people that get their information from news broadcasts and/or newspapers anymore. Most find their information on websites, emails, and (rather surpisingly) twitter updates! If this really is where things are going, we need to do a better job at not only teaching our students how to dissect this information but also to create a profession in which this is all universally accepted as a viable way of teaching reading and writing. I don’t discount the “old school” way of doing things but rather argue that we need to add something to it. I grow weary of this all or nothing mindset some people grab onto when someone suggests a focus on digital literacies. It’s akin to calling a pro-choice person a “pro-abortion” person. Just because I support digital literacy instruction doesn’t mean I oppose traditional print instruction. It may be hard to believe, but we can do both. I know, I know, I’m naïve, right?
I remember back during my post bac days I created an efolio, which served as a resume and teaching portfolio. I included lots of links, documents, web pages, and the like, all highlighting my teacher preparation. At the time, efolio was about the only thing that was out there for this purpose, but since then blogs, wikis, and nings have come onto the scene...
I'm thinking that I will eventually take my own efolio material and convert it into a wiki. I'm planning on doing something similar with my students as the year progresses.
At the moment, we're working on a unit wiki around the novel "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry". This is going to be a bit of a warm up for the "big show". Right now, we're adding chapter summaries, comic life adaptations of key points in the story, and down the line we'll add some voice thread and imovie files that they will work on, all based on their own narrative writing.
The "big show" I reference will be individual (hopefully) wikis that include each of their large writing assignments, transcripts of their online feedback and critiquing, and some of their online collaboration work that they will be doing over the next few months. I'm hoping that this will serve as a map of where they've been that can be useful to both my students as a reflection piece to help them decide on where they want to go, and myself as an instructor so I can have an easily accessible record of assessments and instructional pieces for my future planning. I've always had access to all kinds of numbers based on state assessments, but to have constant access to a year's worth of tangible performance assessments will be so much more useful to me. It's one thing to see mathematical representations of a student's ability, but another to actually see the influence of the instructional process. Of course, it's possible that the push to meet standards will eat up more of my time than I can spare, thus making my utopic vision impossible. I'll try anyway.
Looking back on my blog posts was a good idea. I hadn't realized it, but I've gotten a lot more specific in my reflections on using these digital tools in writing instruction.
Early on, I focused most of my thoughts on how and when I might implement these different tools. Over the past few weeks, I noticed that I focused a lot more on some of the possible pitfalls of using these technologies, which then made it possible for me to anticipate instructional problems as I pushed my students forward.
I'm sure that a large part of this change in focus was due to my incorporation of the blog, wiki, and a bit of a chat session in class. A year ago, I would've been too scared to attempt these things, but in the past few months, the class has forced me to learn more about things like blogs, wikis, comic life, voice thread, etc. Granted, there have been a few disasters as my students and I stumbled though some technical difficulties, embarrassing mislinks, and a few hilarious misuses of our new tools, we have begun to reach a point where the technology is now working for us rather than being beaten into submission by a bunch of Neanderthals. It's really been an exciting professional development experience.
As far as feedback goes, I’ve been doing the tired old written comments and small conference setup that has worked well for so long. But I’m not happy with it. Ultimately, I would prefer to do all audio feedback, but at the present time, my students’ lack of technology expertise and access has made that rather difficult. I’ve done word comments before, but I find that even getting my students to email a copy of their paper I can actually read can be a rather daunting task. Some of them don’t even know how to compose an email unless I show them.
In their defense, they’re making progress. A science teacher and I have ganged up on our common students and are both using the same technologies in class in an effort to increase the students’ level of exposure. Our collective goal is to get our students to a point where we use very little paper, if any. We have a long way to go, but we’re going to try our best…and probably fail miserably. Oh well.
I learned pretty quickly in my teaching career that if you actually want students to engage in your power points, they have to be engaging. What I mean is, they have to be set up in a way that makes the students DO SOMETHING! Taking notes doesn't count.
In the embedded presentation below, I include links to websites, a few questions to ponder, and a short clip of a stand up comic routine about the pagans and christians. I used this in class back in my days of high school teaching and it was a big success. We used it as a precursor to Beowulf so that the students would understand the presence of so many contradictions in philosophies.
As of late, I've had to compromise a bit with the power points because my students have limited access to computers when not at school. When they are at school, so many of the teachers are using web 2.0 technologies that it can be quite difficult to get the necessary resources to make a really interactive presentation...at least by my own personal standards.
Therefore, I've also embedded an example of a power point I use in vocab instruction. The interaction comes from me. I act like a game show host and draw names out of a hat to address each of the slides because each one has them doing something with the word. In fact, the only thing they are supposed to write down from the slides is the word and definition at the end of the process. They will ultimately write and discuss much more than that, which is the goal and compromise I've made to try and make this technology work for me.
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