wendydays's blog

http://laughingsquid.com/the-dramatic-reunion-of-performance-artists-marina-abramovic-ulay/

a friend shared with me 

http://www.buzzfeed.com/tabathaleggett/theres-a-youtube-trend-called-pretty-or-ugly

My brother reads IGN avidly and he shared this with me today.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/10/31/kerbal-space-program-heading-to-schools 

I found this film to be fascinating! True to life, and really seemed to hit close to home. I think it portrays how dramatically techonology and social media has already changed the way we are communicating and interacting. 

You can't really fight it. 

Warning: Some segments contain explicit male nudity  

http://www.fastcocreate.com/3017108/you-need-to-see-this-17-minute-film-set-entirely-on-a-teens-computer-screen

A book that presents an extremely critical and negative view of technology that I partially read before I started this course. I have yet to finish it because I think the book is a little repetitive. Nonetheless it is still a different perspective. It is written by Mark Bauerlein an English Professor from Emory University. The book was reccommended reading by an influential English teacher from my High School.

Connecting to our discussion today:

If young kids are spending alot more time being online and playing video games, are they spending less time reading?? 

http://educationnext.org/audio-excerpt-the-dumbest-generation-by-mark-bauerlein/

I feel like this is an interesting NYtimes article that is relevant to our discussion on technology today. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/fashion/step-away-from-the-phone.html?pagewanted=all

I like how this class will require us to actually experience and read the books and video games that the youth are engaged in. Instead of just sitting theorizing or reading what they like about these games and book we actually get to experience it. It will allow us to form a deeper understanding. Technology is something that is affecting us all and I am glad we have a class that can allow us to think critically about its potentials and implications.

The field placements are a way to get experiential learning rather than just textbook learning. I hope we get started soon :)

....

Letting the Little Ballerina Do Her Ballerina Twirls

Black/White Paradigm? What about Asians in America? 

As an Asain, I wasn't quite sure about how I personally related to the discussion of "white privillege" and black opression. How do Asian Americans such as East Asians and South East Asians fit into the picture because the black/white paradigm does not fit the Asian American experience.
As an individual from a privileged background as well, I guess I would probably associatte myself with "whites" but at the same time Asian Americans also had a history of being oppressed when they first arrived in America. In that sense, Asian American can be considered "black" as well because they were also heavily discriminated against, such as the Chinese Exlcusion Act (1882) where the U.S banned Chinese Immigration and the Japanese Internment Camps (1942) where 110,000 Japanese Americans were were forced to live in "exclusion zones". 

It's interesting to see how Asians have been excluded or neglected from all my U.S History text books throughout my education. Despite the fact, I went to a predominantly Asian school with an American educiation system in Shanghai. We learned about White colonization and Black slavery but our curriculum never taught us anything about Asian American (Yellow?) history/oppression. It seems that while Blacks deal with second-class citizenship, Asian Americans are viewed as outsiders whom access is denied.

“I am a ‘conditioned’ being, capable of going beyond my own conditioning”

There were many times while I was reading The Pedagogy of Freedom, where I was nodding in agreement to many of the theoretical concepts discussed by Paulo Freire. The book may have seemed a bit excessive in really “hammering” the main points repeatedly, and some of the concepts could have benefited from more relatable examples to help the readers who struggled with abstractness of his thinking. However, personally I felt that the book really encompassed my perspectives on the pedagogy, duty and the responsibility of what it means to be a teacher.