This is spine-chilling.
Tag: internetculture
Man vs. School, Budae Jjigae Studio
(Please note that the video has the English caption, please turn it on!)
Last year, a group of year 2 students in Seoul Broadcasting High School launched a Facebook page (or a YouTube channel) named, Budae Jjigae Studio.
photograph courtesy of chosun.com
As an aside, budae jjigae, which literally means ‘army stew’, is popular food for ordinary Korean people. Budae jjigae is boiled with Kimchi, a best-known Korean vegetable dish, ham, pork and other ingredients according to people’s preference. The origin of the food is derived from the poverty time after Korea war. People who lived near by American army bases used to gather the leftover, like pork and ham, from the bases and boiled them with Kimchi. The taste is amazingly good. The mixture of ham, pork and Kimch cannot fail to be good.
They haven’t clarified what made them compose the group name, ‘Budae Jjigae Studio’, but it seems they extemporally named after gathering for the first time having budae jjigae. (Link) It also seems they don’t aim for a specific purpose, but keep making diverse videos. It is a spontaneous group of people who gathered for video making and they do the activities out of the curriculum. They made a music video, a promotion clip (?), video journals, and etc. The video above won the annual film festival of the school. I expect that they keep up making and the channel is developed to some new stage.
YouTube is a widely accepted platform of new media and, in Korea, there are quite a lot of semi-professionals who operate popular channels, such as, Yoo Junho, Seobi, ChaeChae TV, The World of Dave and Korean Englishman. I will post once more about how high school students use this new platform soon again. Enjoy!
Rethinking about literacy
This is a reflective write up about Burnett and Merchant’s Point of view: reconceptualising literacies through an exploration of adult and child interactions in a virtual world.
Above picture is screenshots taken from a mobile messaging app LINE, extracted from casual conversation of my family – mom, dad, my older sister, me and younger brother. My mom is an enthusiastic user of LINE, while she is not adept at any other app and I and my siblings follow my mom’s leading role in the group. Plus, my dad is usually an unconcerned observer caught in the chatter. Except my dad, with this app, it is absolutely possible for us to spend time in chit-chat without a single (proper) language. In this sense, literacy, it is undeniably a thing to be redefined.
The thing I just wrote above is somewhat related to semiotics and signs, but this reading is more about thinking of danger of a single story. Burnett and Merchant focused on the new notion of literacy in educational settings with a multi-perspectival approach. The platform they used for engageing students in literacy exercises was ‘Barnsborough’, an app designed to offer activities with a relevant context.
One previous work on literacy and technology in classroom contexts has explored relationship between the online and the offline, and the porosity of these in the lived experience of pupils and teachers. (Burnett and Merchant, 2013:36)
Meaning-making is ongoing process. After a meaning is created once, it tells us nothing about what those signs may come to mean for those using them. As Burnett and Merchant indicated, digital literacy is attached to “fluidity, hybridity and the blurring of boundaries between contexts”. This gives different approach to narrative, in diverse spatial and temporal orders, like hashtag offers.
Importantly, when these boundaries begin to blur, some of our own certainties around researching literacy begin to unravel. The influential body of work in New Literacy Studies has used analyses of situated literacy events to illuminate literacies as social practices creating a powerful language of description. Such work has provided rich insights into relationships between literacies and power, identities, discourses and, more broadly, context. However, the very process of locating literacy can imply a certain boundedness or fixity, which is at odds with the more fluid, hybrid landscapes and timescapes of the digital age. (Burnett and Merchant, ibid:37)
Digital literacy makes things get changed, not only the context but also the way and method the pupils express. If there is no fixed meaning, the concept of literacy and its training/education need to be reconsidered. However, if assessment, the flower of education, doesn’t get changed, there is nothing we can do with the process. Assessment has economic logic and, I assume, this is why it’s complicated problem to reach to the actual application. The heart of the idea is valuing diversity and it sounds long way to go, in Korean environment at least, where the ‘fixed’ national curriculum is centred and most of the demander see its primary and secondary education as the preparing and competing stage for the higher education. Here is something we can think about how we assess children in consideration of new literacy.
Law and Moll (2002) suggest that, in thinking about this multiplicity of experience, we should avoid the temptation to have a sense of some kind of whole but instead acknowledge that we can only ever gain partial perspectives. They suggest we do this by thinking in terms of ‘lists’ (which do not classify but signal different ways of classifying things), ‘cases’ (that disrupt by drawing attention to other ways of seeing things – not as part of a larger whole) or ‘walks’ (where you can never see the whole picture but are always vividly in one place at a time). We add to this by suggesting that producing and ‘stacking up’ stories, or multiple accounts, is an alternative way of approaching or exposing these complexities. (Burnett and Merchant, ibid:44)
This reminds me of doing “exquisite corpse” game with my students for fun. When students get sick of learning techniques (I used to teach sound and lighting stuffs.), I used to seat them in the classroom in rows and let them write up a story in a group without knowing what previous person have wrote. The very last word is given to the next person who need to write up the next following line. The continuous incoherence was quite fun. The exploration on the new approaches makes me so excited and I am looking forward to practicing the upgraded version of the game when I get back to work.
Are my Facebook friends the real friends of my life?
Thanks to the previous episode of a Korean TV show, Non-Summit, I could think more about relationships over social media. Here is some food for think.
- Robin Dunbar
Dunbar’s number is a well-known theory on that people only can maintain about 150 relationship.
The Oxford University psychology professor also notes from another research that people only have, statistically, 4.1 friends whom they can depend on, in emotional crisis, though they have an average of about 150 friends on Facebook.
An Australia man, Matt Kulesza’s project to buy a coffee to more than a thousand of his Facebook friends and he is currently in Chiang Mai.
This is Tanja Hollander’s jorney of picturing her Facebook friends over the world.
References
http://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/k6Fhxdvaj8JFmafui3X?info=0
They call themselves Facebook addicts
About one and half year ago, in 2014, my students in year 2 of Seoul Broadcasting High School (year 11 in the British setting) did a 4 months documentary project. The school spends quite a lot portion of the timetable on the job training, especially in the year 2. The students just finished a short drama project on the previous semester and this following project was for another training, in terms of coverage and documentary. The team consisted of 6 people and the theme could be anything they were interested.
This team did a social experiment with themselves. They took off mobiles from 3 colleagues for 2 days. It is funny that they call themselves ‘Facebook/mobile addicts’. In the video, it doesn’t come into serious conflict, fortunately, but it is good chance to observe how the students spend their time after school.
Please turn on the caption below on the video! This was the first time making external subtitles in my whole video making life and it literally took 3 days to make and put on the 15 mins video. The translation and technique would be clumsy. Please excuse me.
Don’t like my opinion? Deal with it!
Today, passing through the UCL main building, I saw a series of posters attached on the wall about media education which enchanted me. People from UCL Anthropology have developed a research project named Why We Post and there are a few fascinating short films and upcoming free lectures and books on social media and education, especially in contexts of different parts of the world. If you are interested in social media and education, I would definitely recommend to visit. ☞ https://www.ucl.ac.uk/why-we-post
I am sharing one of their short films above, and I love the idea they try to bring up. This reminds me of a British journalist, Jon Ronson, who severally talked about Twitter’s shaming function. Though he mainly discuss the harmful relationship between old media, tabloid, and the social media of which the users replicate the behavior, the similar discourse is going on that Twitter is used as a place of hatred of large groups of people, whether they are anonymous or not. It was an interesting point of view to think about. Comments are welcomed.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/why-we-post
https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/anthropology-social-media/1/
The Act of Blogging
This is my reflective writing of Barrs and Horrocks’ CFBT report, Educational Blogs and Their Effects on Pupils’ Writing (2014).
For weeks, I whined to my friends saying that I couldn’t concentrate on my writing assignment of last term but kept doing this blogging instead. My friends asked if this blogging (yes, this one you are reading now) is also academic and related to assessment of the term, what is difference between the writing assignment and the blogging. My answer was simple as this; It doesn’t demand sophisticated writing structure. However, there would be one more reason why I am so passionate about blogging instead of doing the important assignments; I can have wider range of readers and get instant feedback about what I’ve learned and thought.
Within the blog they gained a wider sense of audience, and they saw their writing as communicative in nature. There were not writing just for the teacher to mark (as was sometimes the case in literacy books) – they were communicating through writing.
Consequently there was a development in the pupils’ sense of their own ‘voice’ as a writer. And, as has been suggested above, they become more conscious writes, more aware that they were writing in order to be read by others.
(Barrs and Horrocks, 2014)
However, still, seeing the statistics on the visitors provided by WordPress, I notice there are few people (or no people) come and see my blog, except the tutors and the colleagues, who access through the link I put on Moodle, the e-learning site of the Internet Culture module.
Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that, at different levels, something like this is going on in very large numbers of social media spaces and that distribution and publication of these media are switched on and off regularly, managed and shown, to some, to all, or, possibly, not at all. (Potter, 2012)
Then, if the audience is just same, what is difference between this blogging and writing things up on my Moodle, like usual? One thing would be that I have authority to modify and to save as drafts, the feature is not provided by Moodle. Another things is that this blog can be an archive of my learning on Internet Culture in chronological order and the same posts can be seen in categories and tags, so that I can navigate it better. I am not saying about the convenience. I might have to say, this blog reflects some part of my identity so I feel more attached. The blogging space is academic, but has more freedom in terms of tone of voice, range of thoughts, and authority.
Also, a thing I like about blogging is that it is a random collection of thoughts, interest, and, sometimes, learning, so that I can call my thoughts back after. Sometimes, as like as I had lived with Cyworld for years, I think to myself that I am writing letters to my future self doing blogging, like writing diary.
Barrs, M., & Horrocks, S. (2014). Educational blogs and their effects on pupils’ writing. Reading: CfBT Education Trust.
Potter, J. (2012). Digital media and learner identity: the new curatorship. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Are social media a trap?
On the last seminar of Internet Culture module, an interesting article was introduced by my tutor. Here is the link: Zygmunt Bauman: “Social media are a trap”
Most people use social media not to open their horizons wider, but to lock themselves in a comfort zone.
This is a very interesting point of view. I partially agreed with him. I do have strongly tied friends whom I met on the Internet initially. Even some people meets their spouses on the Internet. So let’s say, it widen the boundary. However, it is so true what Bauman said.
The question of identity has changed from being something you are born with to a task: you have to create your own community, but communities aren’t created, and you either have one or you don’t. What the social networks can create is a substitute. The difference between a community and a network is that you belong to a community, but a network belongs to you. You feel in control. You can add friends if you wish, you can delete them if you wish. You are in control of the important people to whom you related.
Yes, I think the comfort that controlling power gives us is the significant difference between online and offline. Twitter, Facebook as such allow us that power but consequently we loose abilities to create communities.
Here I post a clip that David Bowie predicted the power of the Internet in a skeptical point of view in 1999. The most interesting part for me is when he said that the initiative has been broken down by the Internet.
Cyworld, Networked Public
Why do teenagers flock to these sites? What are they expressing on them? How do these sites fit into their lives? What are they learning from their participation? Are these online activities like face-to-face friendships or are they different, or complementary?
-danah boyd (2008)
I briefly mentioned on the other post that the way the kids’ election campaign has been shifted to online rather than offline. Boyd (2008) researched on young people who are between the age of fourteen to eighteen, questioning why social networking is so important in their lives. Yes, social network matters, and even more to the younger generation.
Since 2010, when Apple’s iPhone reached my country, social network services has been more and more popular platform to contact with others rather than MMS or phone call. The portion of social media users of whole population has been reached to nearly 40% in 2014. Mobile data traffic per a person ranked first in the world. Because of the high developed Internet culture in Korea, we always have had our own popular social networking service; for instance, Kakao Talk, Cyworld, Kakao Story, and Naver Band.
- Mini Hompy
Cyworld is a dying social network service in Korea, but it used to dominate the Internet culture for about a decade, coincidentally like MySpace. When it get sensational among young people, the networking was based on the use of digital cameras and personal computers. I saw a number of young people bought digital cameras to take pics and to share on their social network. I started using it when I was 17. I’ve just checked out my Mini Hompy account (of Cyworld) to see if it is alive or not, and it is still alive. (I imagined what would I feel if those old posts has been removed.) Anyway, most of the old post were turned to ‘only me’ setting, except a few. I asked to myself, for what have I put my all the efforts on making my profile, posting the contents, and networking? It is not used more at all and I didn’t see it coming. It have been a priceless artifact, but it was kind of most important part of my life at the moment. I posted film reviews and evaluated with the friends. I shared music videos of Michel Gondry, Spike Jones and such. I had dreamt of being a movie director with my Mini Hompy.
Except a few kids, because of its little reflection of their ethnic and economical background, social network sites provide lower barrier for social connection. Interestingly, According to boyd (ibid), there are two major reasons for who doesn’t participate in the flow; one is submissiveness to their parents’ rules and the other is belief of their superiority. Some kids think they are too cool to join in. I wish I were that cool.
- See and show
I have this experience; maybe about 5 years ago, one of my students didn’t come to school. I had known he was troubled with his domestic unhappiness. Of course, he didn’t answer my phone. I accessed to Cyworld and noticed he was goofing around, viewing his friends’ boards, replying. So I posted a reply to his reply, ‘when are you coming?’. Other students thought the incident was hilarious, so his friends’ ridiculing comments followed after my reply. A few minutes later, he arrived to school and apologized for his absence. A tale of monitoring.
Boyd (ibid) indicated that it is networked public. It also reminds me of Buckingham’s (2001) new notion of public sphere, originated by Habermas (1962/1989). However, this might be compared to frigging around town, putting their hands in the pockets. They may have no strong opinion, and just wander and watch thing happening around them. At the same time, they can be witnessed by someone who has authority, like a teacher. This is one of the reasons that I open and connect my Facebook account with my students. Consequently, I lost some of my right to share my interest and the full right to express my political opinion via my account. I am monitored by them, too. Nowadays, thanks to Facebook, I can regulate the audience for each posts. However, maybe because I get older, or maybe because of my occupation, I still do self-inspection comparatively a lot in fear of being observed by ‘invisible audiences’.
boyd, danah (2008)., “Why Youth Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.” Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. Edited by David Buckingham. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. 119–142.
Buckingham, D (2001)., The Making of Citizens: Young People, News and Politics. By David Buckingham. London: Routledge, 2001. 235 pp. Journal of Communication 51, 841–843.
Election campaign (1)
This is the first half of the whole review.
The video I post today is made for the school election in 2014 , when the competition got quite wild. As far as I remember, actually, it always have been somehow so competitive. As a teacher, it is good to watch the kids focus on something passionately, but sometimes, with too much passion, they fight over no important things on social media, and accordingly the evidences of abuse, usually the mobile screen shots, get submitted to the election board. By the way, the intensity reminds me an American movie, Election. …Meh, never mind.
I will explain more about the election. The election is held annually and the candidates stand as a team; one leader from the 2nd grade, one vice-leader from the same grade, and another vice-leader from the 1st grade. But as you can see, a range of students get involved in the campaign. (In this video, a rage of grades, from 1st to 3rd which means from year 10 to 12 in the UK system, appears. But it is not so common to mingle with different age groups in Korean culture because we have quite strict age order. So I can say it is a quite extraordinarily big event. Trust me!) As the number and the chances to speak in front of colleagues are restricted by the authority, they more focus on the online campaign instead. And the video here is a part of online campaign, shared through KakaoTalk, Facebook, as such.
For people who don’t use Korean, it would have been better to attach English subtitle on the video. My apology.
(0:00-0:51) The story goes along a grandma tells a folktale to a girl, about the long-time-ago legendary figures in Seoul Broadcasting High School. When the days were not so good, the pledges (on the poster) were not kept.
(0:55-1:12) The student council, represented by the student leader, checks other students for inappropriate dress or hairstyles as they assigned, but the way they work seems somewhat wrong. You can see a boy who has a tattoo on his arm is pointing out a flaw from another girl; abuse of power. And a teacher is happily smiling on this.
(1:12-1:25) The water fountain, one of the pledges, doesn’t work so the kid gets deadly thirsty. So as all was shown, the pledges on the poster were empty promises.
…So the rebellion gets started.
(1:29-1:34) “They impose penalties because of our ugliness!” shouted, victims come out to rebel.
(1:35-1:44) “This is not make-up but cream!” (By the way, it is girls’ most common excuse for cosmetics in schools.)
(1:45-1:56) “This is not make up! Give us freedom!”, “Yes, I agree!”, “(Shriek)”
(1:57-2:09) The canteen, where students can get chilled-out with snacks in-between lectures, is closed.
And the rest of the plot doesn’t need to be explained, as you can see.
(4:45-4:54) The grandma, we remember him, no, her, says the heroes are coming back. So, this was a frame story, a story within a story.
Hope you enjoyed watching and have something in mind after. I will post more about this video later on. Comments, requests, and especially questions on the video are all welcomed.
mojowaejo 