Blog Post - 3

Before reading Freedman's text I had not considered the ways in which objects from history are divided by modern disciplines. For information on the cultures that came before us, we seek information from art historians, anthropologists, historians, sociologists and more. Each of these groups claims specific objects from history and tries to decipher their meaning.

I am intrigued by Freedman's commentary on time and the way we arrange it in our mind. I often do think of it in a linear sense, however, as Freedman points out, time and things and events and ideas, do not always occur in a linear pattern. In textbooks we structure periods of time together by finding common characteristics that can be tied to periods of time. Time could also be perceived as a multi-dimensional space, from which we can see the collision of ideas and influence. This structure of time shows meaningful connections throughout history, perhaps this is the structure that reflects the synthesizing mind.

I related to Freedman's statement that much of what we teach are remnants of knowledge. It seems like we have so much to cover in such a short period of time that we learn and therefore give our students just a corner of the picture. I hope that I can develop a curriculum that allows my students to learn deeply as much as widely, allowing them to learn in memorable and meaningful ways.

After reading "Transmediation as a Metaphor for New Literacies in Multimedia," I found myself going back to this line in particular, "The existence of multimedia calls for multiple forms of literacy, forms that can represent the world of ideas, emotions, and events with multiple symbols." Simply stated, we must teach our students how to be literate in the 21st century way, not just the way of the past. I find it quite interesting that my computer recognizes the word lieracies as being misspelled. It does not recognize the possibility of a world with more than one form of literacy. And yet, on the very same machine that rules out this possibility, I can access many types of literacy, in the forms of images, video, motion picture, music, video games, etc.

The classroom that Semali describes fits perfectly with the structure of VTS. This line particularly made me think of the purpose of VTS, "critical engagement does not involve only passive reading and writing; rather, it involves an active textual analysis through a multiplicity of perspectives and critical methods." As we ask our students to view and make assumptions about a work of art based on evidence, we are engaging them in active analysis and asking them to recognize multiple perspectives.