Used in describing "The Voyage of the Mimi," and how it is a great example of the new methods of education,by integrating television into the curriculum.
"The Voyage of the Mimi" used millions of dollars and the best resources to entertain and grab the attention of students, in order to teach them.
Page 151: Ineptitude(noun) - the quality or condition of lacking skill or aptitude for a particular task or assignment.
Used in describing the linguistic nature of the commercials and programs that air on TV, and how they are being addressed.
Television, as a medium, is riddled with grammatical mistakes that are counter-productive to the educational programs that sought to correct common grammar mistakes.
Researcher #1: How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live research paper
Neil Postman argues that learning through technology makes may teach children things but it is not the same as being involved in a classroom with other children. This argument was made over thirty years ago, since the publishing of this book technology has grown so much further than television. Now in 2013 there are technologies such as the internet which with in this invention brought facebook, twitter, blogs, online news paper and even online news broadcasts. Steve Johnson refutes Postman's argument by saying that in some cases the use of internet networking sites can actually help people learn. Johnson uses an example of him going to a conference and the people in the conference using twitter to post parts of the conversations during the meeting. By posting parts of the conversation on twitter new questions arose from the people that were following the conference posts. There for broadening the topic of conversation further than what was being discussed in the conference. Johnson explains how the use of social networks can broaden the tactics of teaching and make teaching more interesting considering the fact that teenagers and children are on the sites half the time anyway. Also social networks are different from television because yes there is no face to face interaction with others but they can still communicate with other via these internet websites. There for making more of a team work effort than a sitting staring at the television effort.
Visual Representation
I chose a clip from "Sesame Street" where they are teaching kids how to learn the alphabet. This clip is very entertaining for little kids and catchy. This clip helps kids learn the alphabet while making it fun. Postman argues that if a child watches television and learns while being entertained, then that is their expectation, now they need to be entertained to learn anything. While kids are learning the alphabet from Big Bird they also learn to like television because it is fun but when they go to school it is not entertaining. this clip applies to my chapter because it proves a lot of his main points. he also mentions "Sesame Street" in the chapter.
Watching TV Makes You Smarter Outline
I. The Sleeper Curve
- Suggestion that culture is getting more cognitively demanding.
- Far more thought is going into understanding shows compared to earlier shows
- Causes people to pay more attention, make inferences, and track shifting relationships
- Sleeper Curve is the most debased forms of mass diversion
- Video Games and movie violence is nutritional
- New force altering mental development
- The thinking being done to make sure of a cultural experiance is more important than life lessons
II. Televised Intelligence
- Intellectual work is done on- screen, not off- screeen
- Programming on television increased demands on attention, patience, retantio, and parsing of narrative threads
- Includes multiple threading , flashing arrows, and social networks
- Multiple threading complicates thinking
- Increase in narrative complexity and multiple plots
- Audience embraces complexity due to two decades of multi- threaded dramas
III. The Case For Confusion
- Flashing arrow is an exagerrated version of devices stories use
-Focus the mind on revelant details
- Reduces the amount of analytical work
- Increasingly scarce, now there are open questions
- Intelligent Language
- Creates connections with different plots within the episode
IV. Even Bad TV is Better
- Reality TV
- Series of competetive tests
- Involves probing the system for weak spots and opportunity
- Our brain monitors the emotional lives of people around us
V. The Rewards of Smart Culture
- Addition of Complexity
- More money because people are more interested
- As the episode continues there are more complexities
- Culture has improved our minds
- Change in Critea of what we called junk and nourishment
- Test should be on whether the brain has to analyze the show
- Children have to analyze the shows and parents learn from the kids on technological advances
Amusing Our Students To Death: Outline of "Teaching as an Amusing Activity"
1. Typographic education is receding rapidly, quickly being replace with a new education based on the electric image.
The bond between the classroom and typography is decaying while television, "creates new conceptions of knowledge and how it is acquired Postman 145)." Education is no longer in the hands of educators and school administrators, but because of the up-rise of television, in the hands of entertainers and network executives.
Television can control the time, attention and cognitive habits of youth, and has gained the power to control their education.
Sesame Street- educational shows create the illusion of justifying allowing children to watch hours of television. Parents hope the television can actually teach their children something worth knowing, and use television as a babysitter and pre-preschool. Even educators support educational shows, they find new methods congenial, which is why teacher-proof text books, micro computers, and standardized tests have been welcomed into the classroom.
School is centered around the development of language, while television focuses attention to the image.
Sesame Street undermines what the traditional idea of schooling represents. While classrooms are places of social interaction, no interaction is required of a television; you can't discuss with a television.
Sesame street encourages children to love television, not school, or only to love school if it is like television, entertaining.
Because of shows like Sesame Street and The Electric Company , the traditonal classroom has been laughed out of existance.
2. Television is a Curriculum.
"a curriculum is a specifically constructed information system whose purpose it to influence, train or cultivate the mind and character of youth. Television of course, does exactly that(Postman 145-6)."
Television's most important contribution to educational philosophy iss the idea that teaching cannot occur without entertainment, that the two are inseprable.
Plato and Dewey emphasized that reason is best cultivated in robust emotional ground.
3. Education's purpose is to set the student free from the tyranny of the present, which ca be a difficult concept for those who are only just becoming acco=ustomed to it. It is to this conundrum the television offers an enticing alliterative. Television has three observable commandments, or rules, that it follows:
Thous shalt have no prerequisites
Anyone can join into a television show at any point in it and still have to minimum amount of information to watch it.
Because of this, television undermines the idea that sequence and continuity have anything to do with thought.
Thou shalt induce no perplexity
perplexity is bound to get low ratings on a television show.
A show must not require anything to be remembered, studied, applied, or endured.
The growth of the learner is not important, but the contentment.
Thou shalt avoid exposition like the ten plagues of Egypt
Educational shows always take the form of a story.
Reasoned discourse doesn't transfer well onto television, it becomes at best a radio show and at worst third rate writing.
Nothing will be taught on television that cannot be visualized as well as placed into theatrical context.
Entertainment is the name we give to an education the lacks prerequisites, perplexity and exposition.
4. When television becomes what takes up a lot of our time, a massive reorientation of how we learn takes place. The consequences of this reorientation are observable in the decline in the potency of the classroom and in the refashioning of the classroom into a place where both teaching and learning are intended to be entertaining activities.
Teachers are including into their curriculum more visual stimulants, and less exposition in an attempt to make their classrooms into 2nd rate television shows
Television viewing as far as many refutable studies are concerned, does not significantly increase learning, is inferior to and less likely than print to cultivate higher order and inferential thinking.
From entertainment, students learn that learning is a form of entertainment. That anything worth learning can be entertaining, and should be.
Citations
Johnson, Steven. “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live (in 140 characters or less).” Time. 15 June
Vocabulary
Researcher #1:
How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live research paper
Neil Postman argues that learning through technology makes may teach children things but it is not the same as being involved in a classroom with other children. This argument was made over thirty years ago, since the publishing of this book technology has grown so much further than television. Now in 2013 there are technologies such as the internet which with in this invention brought facebook, twitter, blogs, online news paper and even online news broadcasts. Steve Johnson refutes Postman's argument by saying that in some cases the use of internet networking sites can actually help people learn. Johnson uses an example of him going to a conference and the people in the conference using twitter to post parts of the conversations during the meeting. By posting parts of the conversation on twitter new questions arose from the people that were following the conference posts. There for broadening the topic of conversation further than what was being discussed in the conference. Johnson explains how the use of social networks can broaden the tactics of teaching and make teaching more interesting considering the fact that teenagers and children are on the sites half the time anyway. Also social networks are different from television because yes there is no face to face interaction with others but they can still communicate with other via these internet websites. There for making more of a team work effort than a sitting staring at the television effort.
Visual Representation
I chose a clip from "Sesame Street" where they are teaching kids how to learn the alphabet. This clip is very entertaining for little kids and catchy. This clip helps kids learn the alphabet while making it fun. Postman argues that if a child watches television and learns while being entertained, then that is their expectation, now they need to be entertained to learn anything. While kids are learning the alphabet from Big Bird they also learn to like television because it is fun but when they go to school it is not entertaining. this clip applies to my chapter because it proves a lot of his main points. he also mentions "Sesame Street" in the chapter.
I. The Sleeper Curve
- Suggestion that culture is getting more cognitively demanding.
- Sleeper Curve is the most debased forms of mass diversion
II. Televised Intelligence
- Intellectual work is done on- screen, not off- screeen
III. The Case For Confusion
- Flashing arrow is an exagerrated version of devices stories use
IV. Even Bad TV is Better
- Reality TV
- - Series of competetive tests
- - Involves probing the system for weak spots and opportunity
- - Our brain monitors the emotional lives of people around us
V. The Rewards of Smart Culture- Addition of Complexity
Amusing Our Students To Death: Outline of "Teaching as an Amusing Activity"
1. Typographic education is receding rapidly, quickly being replace with a new education based on the electric image.The bond between the classroom and typography is decaying while television, "creates new conceptions of knowledge and how it is acquired Postman 145)." Education is no longer in the hands of educators and school administrators, but because of the up-rise of television, in the hands of entertainers and network executives.
2. Television is a Curriculum.
3. Education's purpose is to set the student free from the tyranny of the present, which ca be a difficult concept for those who are only just becoming acco=ustomed to it. It is to this conundrum the television offers an enticing alliterative. Television has three observable commandments, or rules, that it follows:
4. When television becomes what takes up a lot of our time, a massive reorientation of how we learn takes place. The consequences of this reorientation are observable in the decline in the potency of the classroom and in the refashioning of the classroom into a place where both teaching and learning are intended to be entertaining activities.
Citations
2009. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1902818,00.html