Welcome to The Spaces in Between, a weekly newsletter on culture, language, and technology written by Stephan Caspar. If you’re new here, then welcome, feel free to subscribe.
We enjoyed another escape to the countryside and found a small house in a quiet town a few hours away. The home was comfortable, with everything we needed, clutter-free and clean. Everyone had their own rooms for some peace and quiet, we went for walks in the morning, read and played games in the afternoon, and settled down for films in the evening.
I took a few photos of the neighborhood, there were buildings rebuilt by the town's historic society that seemed frozen in the snow and crystalized in time. The Schoolhouse was built in 1873 was called “Number 3 School” by locals in Wayne County, OH.
News this week has been about Texas which is suffering power blackouts and frozen water pipes, and at a time when people are already suffering the worse public health crisis of modern times, they are joining food lines and filling up water containers. This can’t be right in the world’s richest country. I can’t fathom the lack of humanity of those that meet calls for help with accusations that circumstances are solely of a person’s making, that relief, aid, and rescue are handouts, and that those who in need, are lazy.
I’ve been writing about the idea of Empathy in VR for an upcoming paper and interested in the theory that empathy doesn’t automatically inspire change. In Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy, he instead makes the case for rational compassion. Identifying with someone’s plight doesn’t necessarily stir us into action. Compassion surely is what we need at this time, as it is deeply, deeply wrong to divide people into winners and losers to blame them and leave them to suffer.
Hey, welcome to new readers who popped up midweek. Please feel free to share and invite others to subscribe. You can leave a comment or hit reply if you’re reading this via email. Feel free to rifle through the archive too, you might find some useful bits and pieces.
Stephan
Teaching & Learning
This week I was invited to contribute to the Graduate Seminar Series to talk about technology and teaching. It felt like a good ol’ fashioned tech talk, the sort that I used to give to schools and faculty groups, sharing useful apps and talking about how ways to adopt them in the classroom. It was fun, we powered through a series of smartphone tools loosely grouped into categories of text, story, and audio. I’ll link to them in the Lost and Found below.
Again we talked about the varying levels of control that instructors have over their curriculum and what seems to be limited opportunity for creativity and personalization. The textbook is still dominant, especially for introductory-level language learning, which often seems weighted to acquisition in a traditional sense of memorization, with occasional use of role-play and in-class discussion. It is hard to challenge the effectiveness of these methods with some learners, as measured in tests and assignments; but as learners progress through the levels and pedagogies become more active and learning increasingly self-directed, instructors will often meet resistance and even a disinclination to adopt these ways of learning from the students.
The tension then, between tried, tested, and true, with a little bit of what is unfamiliar and challenging is a constant. Vygotsky’s theory of a zone of proximal development suggests that there’s a sweet spot for stretching students’ learning, but I don’t think we talk enough about the unconscious metacognition that students carry from one class to the next. I feel as if I’m not so much going into combat with comfort zones as battling inflexible thinking and a narrow view of what learning looks like.
Life Lessons
One of my brilliant students joined a hackathon last weekend and I lent her a headset so that she could test out some of the hand-tracking features. The team created a game for learning ASL where you fight gladiator cats by signing appropriate letters. (oh yes!!)
I’m amazed by how much they achieved in just a few days. I was impressed too by a design document that they wrote on the fly, diligently recording the process as they worked, you’d think it would be the last thing on their minds. I see a lot of design documents but only occasionally come across one that is fun to read. Again, the traditional form for a design document squeezes the life out of what should be the story of the project.
Lost and Found
I promised some follow-up info for the graduate students, so here are some of the apps that we talked about.
The first set of apps we looked at were for type and text, in any language that you can add to the iPhone keyboard and display. I have used VideoTyper to create short videos for social media, and Type Loop as an overlay with images. Weird Type is one of Zach Lieberman’s creations where you can explode text using Augmented Reality. Here I am playing with it below.
Finally, we explored audio with Voicestory a great social video and audio creator, and full audio recording and editing apps Ferrite and Voice Record Pro. Beware of the last one as there as ones with similar names, you need to one with the tan-colored icon.
The emphasis on the workshop was one of play and experimentation. Sometimes, if you’re not sure what activity to do with your students it is enough to introduce the app, talk about how it works, and see if they have any great ideas on how to incorporate its’ use in the lesson.
Thank you
I’m hoping to get back into a routine and rather let my daily practice slip, for writing and sketching. I purchased another zoom recording for another life-drawing class, so I’m looking forward to finding some time over the weekend. Let me know if you have any recommendations for other classes that I should take. I was excited this week to learn that one of my favorite illustrators Felix Scheinberger is creating a course for Domestika. I’m halfway through an Urban Landscapes course, so I’ll have to finish that first.
I have a few things on the horizon as always and catching up to do. There’s no class on Tuesday with the first of several “pause” days in the semester which we’re having instead of spring break. I’m avoiding meetings that day so that I can get a few things sorted.
I hope that you’re well and managing to stay positive. Look after yourselves.