Postcards And Other Knowledge Nuggets



(i) Postcards  

A postcard holds tangible memories with pictures and words to amuse and delight.  ‘Networking Nature With Postcards’ is a hybrid analogue/digital version of classical postcarding. It is part of a social platform that utilizes the mailing, networking technology of the 21st century to preserve the old-fashion handwritten bought postcard, but illustrating it with a unique handcrafted personalised image. These postcard pictures aren’t squashed versions of bigger, bolder artworks and photographs, like Twitter and Instagram. They are public works of art and you can display the pictures you make in your own gallery.  Also, postcards are valued because we can hold them and look at them over and over without the need to open a computer screen to search and scroll. It is Instagram and Twitter in one and every bit as lovely and keepable as the art we frame and hang on walls.  On the other hand, any kind of picture/text on screen package is a powerful tool for classroom learning and communicating between classrooms, particularly where it brings art and science together, to apply arts reasoning to express sustainability.


As an individual sending and receiving postcards all you have to do is to compose an information package, consisting of a picture and some text, to make a postcard and send it to the recipients saying how nature makes you feel, why you enjoy nature and what you are doing locally to put nature first in all that you do.  As a teacher you can make nature postcards as a classroom exercise and post and receive cards from other classes on behalf of your class. Initiating or joining a topic forum allows ideas and achievements to be presented for discussion and development by attaching a picture/text package to a post.  


(ii) Tweets


Digital platforms for making knowledge nuggets are exemplified by Twitter.  Twitter is a really a microblogging platform that allows individuals to communicate by sending short messages of up to 280 characters. Although it enables people to be in constant contact, its value in an educational context is less clear.  Twitter as an educational tool is able to open up totally new worlds for students and allows Tweeters to collaborate and participate in meaningful hashtag chats..  The advice given today by Twitter to increase your reach as a twitterer is to ‘add a picture; people like pictures!’.  Additional information is accessed through an URL link.  An entire suite of Tweets is extractable using #-tagged filters. Feedback is available using ‘Twitter Analytics’, which displays day by day  ‘impressions’ and ‘engagements’ for each Tweet. An ‘impression’ is a Tweet that has been delivered to the Twitter stream of a particular account.  An ‘engagement’ could be a click to a landing page, a reply to a Tweet, or a comment on a Facebook post. Either way, the record of an engagement means that someone has the Tweeter’s attention and they have become engaged in a positive way. In Twitter-speak, a ‘Moment’ is a set of Tweets curated in a sequence that tells a  story. It is a personal linear narrative; a mind map incorporating the personal Tweets of its maker. It can also include other people’s Tweets. ‘Moments’ have their own URLs and can be shared and developed with others.


To summarise, Tweets are sight-sized pieces of information that are turned into a body of knowledge when they are packaged as a Moment.  Here is an example of two year’s tweeting on the topic of Climate Change.


(iii) Flashcards


Making flashcards in a classroom is akin to making postcards. The former can be considered as virtual postcards because the act of making flashcards is a way to “work” the information of picture and text,, challenging students to think about which picture to have on one side and the related description on the other.   Like postcards, flashcards can be swapped between classes to establish a network.


Flashcards are small note cards used for bite size information retrieval which can then be used for improving memory through practiced information retrieval. Flashcards are typically two-sided, with the prompt on one side and the information about the prompt on the other. This may include names, vocabulary, concepts, or procedures.  A flashcard is the ideal medium for a visual learner, because it presents the essence of an idea or concept in a clear and precise image. Whether a flashcard contains text, pictures, or a combination of the two, it is in an ideal format for visual learners.

Comments

  1. A decade’s worth of digital postcards from the University of Liverpool

    https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/category/featured-postcard/

    ReplyDelete
  2. A digital postcard from the Isle of Mull

    https://www.wildernessscotland.com/blog/wildlife-mull/#golden-eagles

    ReplyDelete

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