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DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning With New Technologies
Schools remain notorious for co-opting digital technologies to business as usual approaches to teaching new literacies. DIY Media addresses this issue head-on, and describes expansive and creative practices of digital literacy that are increasingly influential and popular in contexts beyond the school, and whose educational potential is not yet being tapped to any significant degree in classrooms. This book is very much concerned with engaging students in do-it-yourself digitally mediated meaning-making practices. As such, it is organized around three broad areas of digital moving media, still media, and audio media. Specific DIY media practices addressed in the chapters include machinima, anime music videos, digital photography, podcasting, and music remixing. Each chapter opens with an overview of a specific DIY media practice, includes a practical how-to tutorial section, and closes with suggested applications for classroom settings. This collection will appeal not onl
266 pages, Paperback
First published March 28, 2010
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June 28, 2019
The book DIY Media: Creating, Sharing, and Learning with New Technologies is an educator’s guide to navigating the use of new technology in the classroom. DIY Media offers a user friendly perspective on ways to incorporate current technologies into modern education by providing the reader with step-by-step processes.
The authors are Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear. Knobel has worked in several countries within teacher education and digital literacy. She has written several other texts focusing on the specific literacy of the world’s youth and is currently and professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Knobel began her work in education as an elementary school teacher invested in the development and literacy of young children. This interest later evolved into a passion for strengthening the relationship between literacy and digital technologies.
Lankshear is also a professor and teaches in both Canada and Australia. He has worked closely with Knobel in researching literacy changes involving technological innovations and has written two other books with her aside from this one. His investment in digital literacy stems from his undergraduate interests in educational freedoms and revolutionary change which he later applied to the explosion of technology in the classroom.
“DIY” meaning “Do it Yourself” is the perfect title for this book as it is quite literally an instructional manual for educators of all technological backgrounds to create a fun digital learning environment for their students. DIY tutorials within the book include: photoshopping and photosharing, podcasting, machinima, and stop motion animation. Each tutorial topic within the book begins with an overview of the method. For example, the machinima chapter begins:
“In simple terms, machinima is animated filmmaking which uses 3D game engines as the source of the video material to be edited together.” (Knobel & Lankshear, 2010, p. 136).
This sentence sums up the overview of the topic about to be described and explained. After a brief description of the type of media, the book gives a step-by-step tutorial of how to manipulate and create with that media. Specific tools and apps are recommended throughout the text, and several pictures and diagrams that show you what to click and what to change are included. This part of the text is quite dry to read, but incredibly useful to someone who is performing the DIY project themselves. Due to this nature of the text, I would probably not recommend the book to someone interested in doing some light reading. It is designed more for “do-ers” and less for “readers”. For example:
“The file: Lame_enc.dll (You will only have to access this file one time, when you create your first mp3. It comes in a zipped folder with documentation.) Available from: http://lame.buanzo.com.ar/” (Knobel & Lankshear, 2010, p. 59).
To get the most out of this text, you must be interested in following the instructions and advice to create on your own using the book as your manual. Otherwise, reading through instructions is not useful, nor is it engaging to the reader. I wouldn’t sit down to relax and pick up the instructions to a piece of IKEA furniture unless I intended to build it that very minute. With this text, I often felt like I was reading sections of the book that could be incredibly useful to me someday, but only if I was prepared to follow along step by step as I was reading to accomplish the DIY task concurrently with the reading.
The final part of each chapter is what I found to be most inspiring. After the DIY portion of the chapter is complete, the authors begin to describe the potential educational applications of such technology for all levels and subjects within the classroom. For example, the exerpt below which details the possible uses of photoshop and digital photo enhancement in a classroom setting:
“A class of 14-year-olds explored how the use of different syntactic elements in their digital images influenced interpretations of their work. These were then shared with a partner school using Flickr in order to collect comments and test the effect of different images.” (Knobel & Lankshear, 2010, p. 98)
I believe the text was successful in fulfilling its intended purpose of helping educators who read it to understand how simple (or difficult) it may be to incorporate some of these technologies into their classrooms to enhance the learning of their students and create a more digitally literate generation. I learned a lot about possible applications of different types of media in my classroom and ways in which I could apply them. I even tried to create a couple podcasts after reading the chapter on how this could be beneficial for my students learning. In this regard I think the book achieved its intended goal stated below:
“Hopefully, however, it may help to encourage at least some readers to throw themselves into ‘mucking around’ with one or more of the cultural practices and associated digital media described, according to personal preferences and interests.” ((Knobel & Lankshear, 2010, p. 5).
I would have enjoyed the reading more if the instructional “DIY” piece was removed from the rest of the prose and could be looked up when the time was convenient for me to incorporate it into a project. Instead, it was embedded between the summery of the media and the applications of the media, and was somewhat distracting from the overall message of the text.
Overall, I appreciated this book, but would selectively recommend it to educators who are driven enough to incorporate the media into their classroom and are looking for a textual manual on how to do so.
The authors are Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear. Knobel has worked in several countries within teacher education and digital literacy. She has written several other texts focusing on the specific literacy of the world’s youth and is currently and professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Knobel began her work in education as an elementary school teacher invested in the development and literacy of young children. This interest later evolved into a passion for strengthening the relationship between literacy and digital technologies.
Lankshear is also a professor and teaches in both Canada and Australia. He has worked closely with Knobel in researching literacy changes involving technological innovations and has written two other books with her aside from this one. His investment in digital literacy stems from his undergraduate interests in educational freedoms and revolutionary change which he later applied to the explosion of technology in the classroom.
“DIY” meaning “Do it Yourself” is the perfect title for this book as it is quite literally an instructional manual for educators of all technological backgrounds to create a fun digital learning environment for their students. DIY tutorials within the book include: photoshopping and photosharing, podcasting, machinima, and stop motion animation. Each tutorial topic within the book begins with an overview of the method. For example, the machinima chapter begins:
“In simple terms, machinima is animated filmmaking which uses 3D game engines as the source of the video material to be edited together.” (Knobel & Lankshear, 2010, p. 136).
This sentence sums up the overview of the topic about to be described and explained. After a brief description of the type of media, the book gives a step-by-step tutorial of how to manipulate and create with that media. Specific tools and apps are recommended throughout the text, and several pictures and diagrams that show you what to click and what to change are included. This part of the text is quite dry to read, but incredibly useful to someone who is performing the DIY project themselves. Due to this nature of the text, I would probably not recommend the book to someone interested in doing some light reading. It is designed more for “do-ers” and less for “readers”. For example:
“The file: Lame_enc.dll (You will only have to access this file one time, when you create your first mp3. It comes in a zipped folder with documentation.) Available from: http://lame.buanzo.com.ar/” (Knobel & Lankshear, 2010, p. 59).
To get the most out of this text, you must be interested in following the instructions and advice to create on your own using the book as your manual. Otherwise, reading through instructions is not useful, nor is it engaging to the reader. I wouldn’t sit down to relax and pick up the instructions to a piece of IKEA furniture unless I intended to build it that very minute. With this text, I often felt like I was reading sections of the book that could be incredibly useful to me someday, but only if I was prepared to follow along step by step as I was reading to accomplish the DIY task concurrently with the reading.
The final part of each chapter is what I found to be most inspiring. After the DIY portion of the chapter is complete, the authors begin to describe the potential educational applications of such technology for all levels and subjects within the classroom. For example, the exerpt below which details the possible uses of photoshop and digital photo enhancement in a classroom setting:
“A class of 14-year-olds explored how the use of different syntactic elements in their digital images influenced interpretations of their work. These were then shared with a partner school using Flickr in order to collect comments and test the effect of different images.” (Knobel & Lankshear, 2010, p. 98)
I believe the text was successful in fulfilling its intended purpose of helping educators who read it to understand how simple (or difficult) it may be to incorporate some of these technologies into their classrooms to enhance the learning of their students and create a more digitally literate generation. I learned a lot about possible applications of different types of media in my classroom and ways in which I could apply them. I even tried to create a couple podcasts after reading the chapter on how this could be beneficial for my students learning. In this regard I think the book achieved its intended goal stated below:
“Hopefully, however, it may help to encourage at least some readers to throw themselves into ‘mucking around’ with one or more of the cultural practices and associated digital media described, according to personal preferences and interests.” ((Knobel & Lankshear, 2010, p. 5).
I would have enjoyed the reading more if the instructional “DIY” piece was removed from the rest of the prose and could be looked up when the time was convenient for me to incorporate it into a project. Instead, it was embedded between the summery of the media and the applications of the media, and was somewhat distracting from the overall message of the text.
Overall, I appreciated this book, but would selectively recommend it to educators who are driven enough to incorporate the media into their classroom and are looking for a textual manual on how to do so.
January 13, 2015
The book has some good foundational and core concepts, particularly at the beginning and end, but many of the chapters are about mechanics of doing a particular type of DIY media project. E.g., they spend a good deal of time walking the novice user through a particular video editing software.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews