Month: August 2018

Taking a step forward or a blast from the past?

Marika SimonAdministrationLeave a comment

Life has a way of going in circles sometimes. I have just either taken a step forward into a new career direction or stepped through a wormhole and warped back in time. I have submitted an application for a position as Part Time Library Assistant at the State Library New South Wales. In doing so, I moved my former library work experiences from the mists of the deep past (1989-1995) to front and centre on the “relevant work experiences” section of my resume.

The job itself sounds quite similar to the positions I held more than twenty years ago, but feels like a step in the direction of my new endeavours. The State Library New South Wales (SLNSW) is something of my dream employer with regards to the Masters degree I am currently pursuing – my dream job within SLNSW would be creating and implementing educational programs for school excursions, incursions and digital learning, such as those featured on the website. Here’s hoping this is a step in that general direction, even if everything old is new again.

 

References

State Library of New South Wales. (2018). Schools and teachers. Retrieved from http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/learning/schools-and-teachers

Post-assessment reflection: literature review

Marika SimonEER5002 Comments

Wow! That was quite a task. I was too broad in my thinking at the beginning of the task – just knowing that I would broadly like to do something related to digital literature and primary school. Because of that, and the fact that “digital literature” may not be the best term for digital literature in the research sphere, I was at sea for quite awhile. That led to my topic narrowing in a way quite different to what I may have originally intended. My path led towards comparisons of reading on the screen vs on paper, but it was not until I had nearly finished writing the paper that I realised that I had never actually used the term “screen reading” in my searches. Ah, for the literature that I might have found had I travelled a different path!

This leads me to realise why actual student research is usually done under the supervision or advisory of someone more knowledgeable in the field than the student, and why regular research projects published in journals are often done in a team and over a longer period of time! I feel as though I poured large amounts of time and energy into the effort and barely shaved the merest shred of slushie-base from the iceberg of potential information. Hopefully that is enough for the purpose, though! Now comes the three week wait for the judgement call on that issue.

Final project feedback plea

Marika SimonOnline Learning / Planning and Organisation2 Comments

Desperately seeking collegial collaboration!

For the final project for my subject on Literature In Digital Environments, we need to create a digital storytelling project that is applicable for use in our professional context. Our proposed project is meant to have collaborative input from colleagues and classmates. To that end, I would love feedback regarding the feasibility, appropriateness and interest factor of some of my project ideas.

My context in brief (or as brief as possible for me):

  • Primary Teacher
  • Currently working as a casual only when Uni is not in session
  • I have a school I do most of my work at – I’ll call it “XPS” – but I have not done much this year because of Uni and they are currently having a major shuffle in the exec as the Principal and a DP moved on in the past 6 months, so the entire Exec Admin level is shaken up.
  • I will be exploring the possible creation of NESA-Accredited PD courses with a colleague who has attended their training session – in the English KLA, likely centering around English Textual Concepts.

Ideas:

“Quarantine Station Stories” – Looking at stories from the Quarantine Station in Manly – basing on a piece I wrote for Historicool magazine with several pieces of short historical fiction based on actual stories related to quarantine at the station. – Look at creating interactivity, perhaps content creation facility… connection to source documents.

  • Links to curriculum – geography – places, spaces, features that suit the site for quarantine, different uses over time; History – local history (reasonably local (45 min drive) to most places I teach); English – authority (primary sources, secondary sources), genre – historical fiction
  • Context – could be used at multiple schools, could be used in PD context
  • Drawbacks – technical skill, might need to coordinate/get permissions from State Library NSW or Q Station for materials

Continue reading “Final project feedback plea”

INF533 Assessment 2 Review 3: Dr Seuss Treasury – The Lorax

Marika SimonAssessment Tasks / Review2 Comments

Oceanhouse Media is the official e-book app developer for the works of Dr Suess (Dredge, 2012). Among their many offerings is the Dr. Seuss Treasury – School (Oceanhouse Media, 2016a), containing fifty-five Dr. Seuss titles, including a version of The Lorax (Seuss, 1971). That particular title was investigated for this review, which will look at the digital features of this enhanced e-book (James & De Kock, 2013) and their efficacy in educational settings (Yokota & Telae, 2014).

The  app would fall under Maureen Walsh’s (2013) broad category of traditional literature re-presented in digital form, Unsworth’s (2006 as cited in Walsh, 2013, p. 182) electronically augmented literary texts, and Lamb’s (2011) interactive storybooks. This places it in what could be termed a “comfort zone” of digital literature – not particularly innovative, like transmedia or extended reality texts (Breeze, 2018), but situated in a safe, popular, and comparatively commercially competitive (Dredge, 2012) niche.

Dr. Seuss is a well-known author of children’s literature whose books meet the threshold of demonstrating quality literary elements (Walsh, 2013; Yokota & Teale, 2014). One key area to evaluate in the digital versions are what Walsh (2013) describes as the “synergy” between the literary elements and the digital features. Research findings suggest that while multimedia features can have a positive effect on story comprehension and expressive vocabulary development, interactivity, broadly speaking, does not (Takacs, Swart, & Bus, 2015). However, specific types of interactivity, when congruent with the storyline and aligned with effective reading pedagogy, can increase story comprehension and engagement (Kao, Tsai, Liu, & Yang, 2016). Continue reading “INF533 Assessment 2 Review 3: Dr Seuss Treasury – The Lorax”

Literature search… trying to keep afloat and find my way to shore

Marika SimonEER5001 Comment

I had hoped to make my life easier by choosing a research area that tied in with my other subject for the session “Literature in Digital Environments”. While I have found some leads in my subject readings, it is striking me as a difficult topic in which to find the type of literature for which I am searching. Hopefully as I strike some promising veins I will find enough (and not too much) to move forward with.

I am definitely feeling adrift!

Picking literature to review

Marika SimonPlanning and Organisation1 Comment

I had really hoped to have my first review done for the second assessment task in INF533 by this past Friday. The thing that is holding me up is the question of what to choose.

I would really like to have my three examples cover not only three different digital literature categories, as specified in the assignment, but also to cover the breadth of my K-6 teaching context. If possible, they would represent different genres and/or text purposes as well. Therefore, I am hesitating to commit myself to a review until I am sure which items will be part of my suite of reviews.

One issue I am struggling with is what to count as “literature” as some examples I find stray more towards music, visual art or performance art (Andrews, 2000-2018) and other fine examples of works with digital affordances that enhance quality text are informational (Field of Mars Environmental Education Centre, n.d.) or journalistic(News Corp Australia, n.d.) in nature.

Another area of struggle is that many of the really interesting web-based works or born-digital works using app or online platforms that I have found seem most appropriate to only the highest level of primary school or, truly, to high school or beyond.

The Boat Interactive Webcomic – Matt Huynh. (Huynh, n.d.). A bit too intense for Year 6?


Device 6 – one of the most enjoyable text-based experiences I have had in months! (simogo, 2013)

I think that I am narrowing down my list, though, so hopefully a review post will be hitting the aether soon!

 

References

Andrews, J. (2000-2018). Oppen do down. Retrieved from http://vispo.com/vismu/oppen/index.html.

Field of Mars Environmental Education Centre. (n.d.). Multi-touch books. Retrieved from http://fieldofmarseec.nsw.edu.au/digital-learning/multitouch-books/.

Huynh, M. (n.d.). The boat interactive webcomic – Matt Huynh [Streaming video]. Retrieved from http://www.matthuynh.com/the-boat/.

News Corp Australia. (n.d.). Kids news: News for kids. Retrieved from https://www.heraldsun.com.au/kids-news/news.

simogo. (2013, July 31). Device 6 – reveal trailer [Streaming video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/KrpAzVcebhg.

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