"Multiculturalism, Appropriation, and the New Media Literacies: Remixing Moby Dick" (Jenkins)

I thought this article was a super interesting read, although I have no idea what to say about it here.  It's not about a specific technology so much as it is about the "participatory culture" that technology fosters, one where:

there are relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, where there is strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others, where there is some form of informal mentorship whereby what is known by experienced community members is passed along to novices, where each member believes their contributions matter, and where they feel some degree of social connection to each other. This description captures what is striking about a world where more and more people have the capacity to take media in their own hands and use powerful new tools to express themselves and to circulate their ideas to a public beyond their immediate friends and families. (99)

It was, however, a riveting discussion of appropriation and remixing (this one, I think, would have been good to read before the other article about remixing.)  I really appreciated Pitts-Wiley's remark, "before you take something, understand it" (110).  It was in line with Jenkins's first piece of advice, "to stay honest to the original text. Put a value on that, understand it, appreciate it, and then start the remixing process" (111).  The idea that in order to create an effective remix requires a deep reading and understanding of the source, that remixing falls within the literary tradition of allusions was for me extremely worthwhile.  I loved the idea that:

Seeing remix as another way into thinking about allusion suggests an answer to a question we often receive from teachers: How can you tell if a remix is good? How can you tell if an allusion is good? An allusion is good when it is generative, when it extends the original work’s potential meaningfulness, when it taps the power of the original source to add new depth to your emotional experience of the current work. The same claims would hold true for other kinds of remix practices: as a general rule, a remix is valuable if it is generative and meaningful rather than arbitrary and superficial... (109)

I also appreciate the dialectic between critique and creation that Jenkins puts forth.  He writes: that:  

Schools have historically taught students how to read with the goal of producing a critical response. In a participatory culture, however, any given work represents a provocation for further creative responses...we look at the world differently in a participatory culture; we look at it through the eyes of someone who can participate. Just as ...we read for different things depending on our goals, we also watch for different things depending if we want to use the experience of reading as the starting point for writing criticism or as a springboard for creative expression. At its worst, reading critically teaches us to write off texts with which we disagree. At its best, reading creatively empowers us to rewrite texts that don’t fully satisfy our interests. (112)

I know I'm going crazy with the block quotes (which, for the record, I was unable to indent) but I just found all of these KERNELS so compelling!  I was also really interested in how subtly they shifted from talking about the tradition of allusion and the new aesthetic of remix as creation or response into writing as a fan.  The idea that we might encourage our students to approach canonical texts as fans rather than critics blew my mind.  There was really only one mention of how we might use this approach in our practice but I definitely want to try it. Fans, Jenkins writes, "generally focus on characters and their relationships as their point of entry" and "look for worlds that are richer, have greater potentials, than can be used up within a single story. They are particularly interested in back story—the untold narratives that explain how the characters became the people we encounter within a particular story" (114-5).  That we, as teachers, might "find that students respond well" to looking at literature through this lens got me itching to try it.  Here's how Jenkins suggests approaching it:

-Encourage students to find examples of Kernels, Holes, Contradictions, Silences, and Potentials.

-Ask them to consider what purposes these elements play within the original novel.

-Invite them to speculate on how these elements might provide the basis for additional stories.

-Tell them to find other passages that shed insight into the core character relationships here.

-Discuss what elements would need to be in place for a new story to feel like it belongs in this fictional world.

-Have students write stories reflecting their insights.

-Share stories between students, especially those working with the same elements, so that they have a sense of the very different ways writers might build upon these same starting points. (115)

This is not only super rad, but hella rigorous.  Such metacognition would definitely require A LOT of practice, but if you worked to support students in using this lens from the beginning of the year, I think it could be enormously beneficial to our students' attitudes and approaches towards literature. 

“English Teacher Learning for New Times: Digital Video Composing as Multimodal Literary Practice” (Miller)

I really appreciated this article for getting to the heart of why digital literacy is so important and how to go about encompassing it within an ELA curriculum; it’s another one that I think would be useful to read at the beginning of this class.  Miller argues that pedagogies which stress new literacies “are necessary because the new times of digitally accessible multimodality for designing text is part of evolving social purposes and practices…facility with interpreting and designing multimodal literacies will increasingly be required by human beings to communicate, work, and thrive in the digital global world of the 21^st century.”  I know this has been the implication of most of the literature we’ve read, but for some reason Miller’s argument that that is indeed the case seems especially compelling.  It’s true that “students urgently need opportunities in schools to develop new literacies, performance knowledge, and multimodal learning strategies required for new times and social futures,” and Miller makes a good case for exactly how teaching those skills through Digital Video Composing (DVC) falls under ELA’s domain.

I was struck by Miller’s suggestion that “the gap between multimodal literacy practices and print-based schooling…helps to explain increasing student disengagement.”  She mentions how traditional school literacy practices foreground “the view of knowledge as propositional claims held/provided by the teacher and supplied to the student to be committed to memory” which is everything all of the theory we’ve read since beginning MUSE has warned us against, but I never really thought about how technology could be the perfect means of pushing back against “schooling.”  Miller makes a pervasive point that today, the most essential knowledge is “performance knowledge—knowing how to find, gather, use communicate, and create new ways of envisioning assemblages of knowledge.” 

Miller describes DVC as “a quintessential multimodal literacy that allows orchestration of visual, aural, kinetic, and verbal modes electronically,” pointing out that “digital video makes it difficult to stay in the comfort zone of print-only texts.”  It is also “a composing activity, similar to writing text, but often more engaging.”  One teacher noted that she “’needed an introduction, body, and conclusion.  I had to proofread and spellcheck, sped up some footage, slow down some other.  My process of creating a final product asked me to use a critical lens on myself, scrutinize my work, spatially, musically, socially, emotionally, and technically.’”  This is really quite awesome, as is the way in which flow is achieved and “knowledge is created through the mental action of those involved in the high-demand work of all the arts; its creator engage by ‘looking and thinking, seeing and planning, viewing and responding,” and Miller moreover notes many incidences of flow being achieved. 

“Cool,” you might agree, or perhaps your interests are “in technology’s utilitarian benefits;” you are still anxious that your “hard-won knowledge about print-text is antiquated,” and you wonder “what should count as English.”  Well, I was quite convinced by one teacher who “had trouble getting (his students) to be persuasive and authentic.” With DVC, he was able to address what he (and I) feels are “two neglected and ‘essential elements of savvy citizenry—media literacy and political/social awareness.” For his senior class’s final unit, they “read short stories, studied the film Bowling for Columbine, and discussed issues and problems in society.  They analyzed commercials, attending to the unifying concepts, persuasive techniques, and characteristics of the genre.”    Soon, Miller found that the teachers in the class she observed “began to broaden their notions of school literacy from only reading and writing print to also composing visual and auditory ‘texts’ addressing issues related to their readings of literature.”

She also found that students were “drawing on their lifeworlds as resources in their DV composing, but also critiquing those lifeworlds, reframing neighborhood identities, and using their collaborative work as a persuasive move aimed at change” and that in urban schools in particular, “students often became ‘active designers of meaning.’” For me, it was also very promising to learn that DVC fosters “student agency and engagement as learners and higher school achievement, including success on the state high-stakes writing tests” and that “as students orchestrate visuals and music and printed text (on-screen and in narration) in DV composing, the process creates and embodied link from print to lived experience.  In profound ways, students may develop new eyes with which to see the world…”

Project 2: Planboard Tutorial

Hello all!  For my project, I am writing a tutorial for a very useful website to which Sean pointed me, planboardapp.com.  It's a lesson planning platform and teachers are pretty much its sole intended audience/consumer.  Planboard looks like any other online calendar, but it has a few other very simple features that make it much more aligned with our needs.  For one, you put in your class schedule (and start and end dates for the semester) and then Planboard breaks up your days by section rather than by hour.  You can also upload any lesson plan template you want to your planner one time and then it will be there for you to fill in each day.  I love this because it's customizable, you don't have to use whatever their format is.  And possibly the coolest part is that you can pick a set of standards (or, I believe upload your own) which then turn into a formidable checklist.  As you add standards to your individual lesson plans, they are marked as "taught" on your list, which is rad.

My guess is it will take 20-40 minutes to get started with Planboard--create an account, set up your class schedule for the semester, and familiarize yourself with the website.  I found the interface to be weirdly user-friendly and counter-intuitive at the same time, so give yourself a chance to explore it.  Fortunately, though, there's not as much to explore as I was anticipating.  I thought there would be a million features, but it's just your calendar and standards list.  I appreciate this simplicity, because I often get overwhelmed by too many options and, also, because I can't think of anything else we would need for planning.  This website is essentially supposed to take the place of your paper planner, and it really doesn't try to do anything fancy aside from allowing an entire lesson plan template, should that be your style, and keeping track of standards for you.   I'll discuss these and other affordances after I run through the tutorial.

Getting Started

1.) Go to planboardapp.com

2.) Sign up!

I just entered my email address (which I now realize was not my school email address, but that didn't impede my progress so don't worry) and hit "Sign Up!"  You could also log in with Facebook or Google+ if that's what you're into.

3.) Check your email for a link form Planboard (I imagine you wouldn't need to do this if you logged in through one of those other accounts).  Click on it, and it leads you through 4 steps for setting up your account, which I have documented in this video:

               If you don't feel like watching my video:

-First, you set up your class schedule by selecting a weekly rotation (unless you're on block schedule), creating a class for each section you teach, and dragging and dropping them onto the calendar. 

-Then, you enter the start and end dates of the semester you're planning.  

-On the next page, you enter your own name, find the school where you work (or enter it if it isn't on the list) and create a password.  Then you're ready to plan!

Using Planboard

4.)  In this video, you can see me monkeying around with navigating the site, editing the schedule I just created (which was not easy mind you), entering a lesson plan, and exploring the standards feature:

5.)  I had mentioned in my video that the space for lesson planning seemed oddly free-form, so after a bit of investigating in the help section, I found Planboard's tutorial on how to upload templates, which is great:

When I tried copying and pasting my template, though, the results were less thrilling:

I think to get the most out of this site, it's worth it to take the time to create one awesome template with less text and more boxes, either in the text box here or in word, so it's ready for painless daily use after. Here's a video of my second attempt:

Further Resources

That's pretty much it for getting set up with Planboard!  Their help section has lots of answers to more specific questions, and according to users they're also great with responding to questions--they even have live support.

Affordances

One of the biggest advantages of Planboard is (1.) the ease of lesson/standards alignment.  Planboard is designed specifically for that purpose, and forces you to make sure your lessons are aligned with standards on a daily basis (rather than assume they are).  It's a pain to constantly look up and sift through standards; with Planboard, not only are they in the same place as your lesson, but they also function in checklist form.  Apparently there's 41 things we need to teach, and this is an easy way of (2.) ensuring we cover all of them rather than just the same four or five over and over.

Planboard is also (3.) teacher planner-meets-lesson plan template.  This is pretty rad because most teachers I know stop bothering with all the finer points of a Marco-approved lesson plan and just start writing down what they're going to do in a notebook.  Unfortunately, though, I have also seen such flippancy lead to neglected goals/catalysts/closure/logistics, etc.  With Planboard, you can insert a simple template for every day in one step, thus forcing yourself to stay on point!

Another thing all the teachers I know do is keep planners from bygone years.  By having your lesson plans online, you can stop being such a hoarder with such (4.) easy archiving.  Plus, you'd be going (5.) paperless!  Yay, Earth.  On a related note, you can (6.) access Planboard from your school and home computers, so you don't have to lug planners (or computers) back and forth.  You can even (7.) attach files to your lesson plans (handouts, yo!) and (8?) embed videos and images in them (as opposed to just links... I don't really see why that matters since you wouldn't show your students a tiny video embedded in your lesson when you could just click on it, but it's touted as a benefit, too.)

The last element of Planboard that I didn't really touch on in my tutorial is the (9.) ease of sharing.  If you "publish" a lesson plan, Planboard says "it can now be discovered by other teachers."

However, I couldn't find any mention on the website of a Planboard community, or a place to browse existing lessons.  In the top left corner there's a search bar that says "search for lessons, standards, and more" but when I tried searching by content I got no results--the only hits were based on standards. I think this feature is still in development, because coming soon are platforms for gradebooks and attendance that you can access with the same account (!).  And over at chalk.com (which I also logged into using the same account) things look more collaborative, although there was nothing for me. I believe sharing is by school, but since I had to enter Oakland High School myself, I'm the only one there.  Perhaps if you could get a group of teachers from your department on Planboard, you would be able to see what everyone's up to.

Nevertheless, that link works even without a Planboard account.  Thus, the final affordance for me is still ease of sharing.  Now if you and your BFF teacher don't have the same prep, you can easily send each other your lessons for the day rather than drifting apart.  Really easy way to co-plan remotely!

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System Requirements:  I couldn't find any mention of this on Planboard's website, so I imagine it doesn't require anything special and if you have internet, then you're good to go. And, as I guess I didn't mention at all, Planboard is free!  That's all I got for ya, thanks for reading!

(The videos for this tutorial were made with Jing.)

Synthesis: "Weblogs and literary response: Socially situated identities and hybrid social languages in English class blogs"

Kathleen West’s research question is: “what is the nature of literary response via weblog,” which, as Ally points out, seems like a hard thing to discern.  However, in grounding her examination of students’ socially situated identities in Gee’s framework, most of us agreed that she was successful in determining how these newly constructed identities positively influence students’ interactions with texts.   Eric reminds us of the value of the data she pulls out, noting that knowing students' assumptions about literature can help us in unit design as well as in making why we approach literature the way we do more explicit to students. 

            As Tygue so eloquently puts it, literary response via weblog is  both “normative and creative, thus representing an assignment where technology enhances what we want our students to do without eliminating the original academic purpose…(It enables students to be) both "serious literature students" and "web-literate communicators.”  In this hybrid genre, West finds her students making original arguments, interacting with characters, and engaging in meta-cognition while simultaneously taking advantage of the informality that “web-speak” allows.

 ----------------------------------------

            As a class, although we still can’t seem to move past our mixed feelings about web-speak, we did agree that the change in participant structures—or remix, if you will—that blogging affords is promising.

Remixed Participant Structures

            Turns out we all love Lucy, the student who  "never participated in large-group discussions, [but] was a prolific blogger, frequently writing more posts and more comments than I required" (594).  Ally was unequivocally pleased to read about the potential of blogging to “provide students who do not participate in class with an avenue to contribute to the discussion,”  and for Sean, it was Lucy’s inclination to comment on her peers’ posts that made her stand apart.  This is an example not only of re-constructed relationships with a texts, but with each other.  Thoai, too, can see how blogging could “lower the emotional stakes of failing,” and wonders whether it could really encourage her own shy students to “Step up to the plate.”  Arianna can also see the space blogging could create for shy students, but once again wonders whether it would keep them “in the shadows” during in-class discussions.  To this, I think we would say: imagine a student who always strives to remain in the shadows during in class discussion, no matter how hard you work to include them.  If throwing blogging into the mix helps them find a space they’re comfortable in, is that going to make them more shy in class?  Probably, it will either boost their confidence in class because they’ll be beginning to forge a new identity for themselves online that they could translate to the classroom, or it will have a neutral effect and it will be on us to continue trying to help them find their voice in class.

Indeed, as Ally points out, blogs could be a great way to “prep students for in-class discussions as it gives them time to solidify their feelings before speaking.”  I really identified with her observation that:

Writing a personal blog as a reaction to a text gives each student a chance to

have his/her own interaction (or transaction!) with the reading before

having to discuss it or hear other people's opinions. At least for me, it

provides me with a deeper understanding of how I am interpreting the

text and what information jumps out at me.

When I tried to go from reading the article directly to synthesizing your blogs, I acutely felt the missing step of compiling my own thoughts first.  As I was reading everyone’s blogs I kept thinking, wait what was my opinion?  This synthesis would probably be much more coherent has I taken the time to write my own reaction to the article first.

Do we think that blogging actually has the capacity to participant structures? 

To Standard English, or not to Standard English

At the heart of West’s research is the idea that the informality offered by an online space—as well as the ability to forge a new identity in it—might, as Sean put it,  “enable students to more naturally enter into conversation with the text.”  I would agree with this, as I think it defeats the purpose of a “fun/informal/novel/web-literate” assignment to then enforce standard writing conventions.  Arianna points out, however, that “permitting” un-academic registers “might compromise the value of Standard English conventions in the view of the students.”  I’d like to think that students are better able to compartmentalize than that, but Sean raised an issue that I’ve noticed in my own classrooms as well.  He pointed out:

I find my students partaking in the very same linguistic conventions in

their non-digital homework assignments and in-class writings.  Aside

from formal essays, the student writing I come across tends to be far more informal that I remember…I wonder if the linguistic practices of the internet are actually now informing their handwritten work and classroom discourse.

Thoai wonders if “teachers should only allow this ‘relaxed stance’ via internet writing venues if they are confident that their students already have a strong command of standard English grammar.”  On one hand, I think sounds logical, but also means that we would then be depriving our students of lowered stakes, a sense of play, a forum for constructing a new socially situated identity (and thus the promise of a new attitude with which to approach a text), and web-speak expertise.  As Tygue puts it:

Most students understand the informal social identity of a blogger (perhaps easier than when we assign "low-stakes writing") and can be more "playful" in this type of assignment… play [lowers] the "emotional stakes of failing" which thus offers a place for students to grab onto the discourse who otherwise might not have one. It represents a place to experiment and try appropriating a new discourse, like we read about way back in the summer.

Informal Language (including abbreviations and other web-speak conventions) seems to be at the heart of West’s research.  Are we okay with that?  Do we want to push back?  What about Thoai’s suggestion?  How good are students at compartmentalizing what registers are appropriate for what situations?

Sense of Audience

Sean, Tygue, and Ally also all noted the impact of a wide audience on student engagement (even just the potential of one.)  It is of course to her sense of audience that Lucy’s blogging prowess is attributed.  This dialogic interaction, in my opinion, is what most sets these digital formats apart from print-based ones.  Even beyond this, though, Sean and Tygue are agreed: “even the potential for …puts the author in a different position with respect to voice, tone, claim, and intention” and “ can encourage students to engage in authentic writing.”

So it’s the potential of public writing (and not writing for classmates) that triggers authenticy and voice? I certainly don’t imagine a broader audience for my blog.  Am I lacking in adolescent idealism?

Critiques and Further Questions

Thoai brought up several critiques, writing that West’s data collection and presentation/analysis of said data was not “a good demonstration of how the blog form inspired students to respond to literature in a way that would have been radically different from traditional pencil and paper,” noting that it “might have been helpful was to compare these blog responses to ‘traditional’ in-class, written responses…I don’t feel that she has answered her own question: does blogging change the nature of student’s responses to literature?”  

In the same vein, Eric’s main criticism is that the article “didn't really show students' growth throughout a unit or longer period of time from using blogs to conduct literary analysis. West does a good job of proving that her students indeed forged academic and online identities that resulted in deeper engagements with the text and their peers' ideas, but it’s less clear what kinds of skills and concepts they learned throughout the unit.

Sean, I imagine, speaks for all of us in wanting to know WHY/HOW “Our trip to the computer lab to write and maintain weblogs (blogs) became the highlight of the week for many of the students in my 11th-grade American Literature class.” (588)  Is it the novelty? Something else? As Sean succinctly puts it, “In order to hope for such enthusiasm about a project, I need to have a better understanding of what exactly fuels it.” 

Last Question: What about blogging would prompt a student who constructs an apathetic identity in the classroom to create a different one online?  (I didn’t really see the difference between any of the focal students’ avowed socially situated identities on- and off-line.  Would Evan not, for example, have showed the same “tempered rebel” identity in a written response?)

“Classroom Remix” (Callahan & King)

I really enjoyed this article.  I think Callahan and King did a good job of presenting the issues underlying integrating technology into the classroom.  The actual unit/project of study wasn’t explained very clearly and I would like to know more about what as being produced by these students, but it was thought-provoking as well.  The techno-literacy remix is students using PowerPoint to interpret (as opposed to analyze) poetry, and as such they are encouraged to incorporate visuals, sound, and all the other effects that PowerPoint affords.  I can’t really envision what this would be, but I was interested to see that while one of the poems for interpretation should be one the student’s had written, “Mr. Crane clearly indicates to the students that poetry composed on a PowerPoint slide is not the same as poetry composed in their journals… (and) seems more comfortable with using PowerPoint as an interpretive tool, rather than as a digital production or composition tool. In his mind, the word must precede the image, and the image is only supportive in value.”  Rather than embracing the “challenge to consider composition elements,” and “skills needed to command” a new media world, such assignments are relegated to the background, perceived as “‘add-ons” and ‘distractions’ from the serious work of classrooms.”  I appreciated the authors’ nod to the “positioning of this study in a creative writing program within an arts-based high school.”  I would already be one to decry the “notion of hierarchy in English education” which, “in the current climate of budget cuts,” is reinforced as the arts are cut, but I think that pushing digital design into that undervalued realm could be detrimental to our students’ success.

I was also glad to see Callahan and King acknowledge the “exhasperating lack of ‘fit’ when the student (or teacher) merely tried to translate from one medium to another.”  As I’ve mentioned before, I think this is an extremely counterproductive way to incorporate technology into the curriculum, and I was pleased to see it brought up, however briefly, in this article.  Their attention to the “remixing” of classroom hierarchies was also refreshing.  Teachers position their students as experts and ask authentic questions, as we’ve seen in other readings, and Callahan and King further note that “students typically did not wait for the teachers to invite collaboration; they took initiative to consult with each other quiet frequently.”  That “the classroom hierarchies, consisting of those who ‘do school’ well and those who do not, were challenged and remixed by this project,” was another valuable point that I don’t think we’ve spent as much time explicitly considering.  in our other classes, we’ve considered learning styles and differentiated instruction.  Here is a chance for “inclusion students, who have certain kinds of learning disabilities” to really come alive; “because it wasn’t merely linguistic…There was so much hands-on, visual, auditory, tactile stuff, kinesthetic—the sense of movement and sound,” there was room for these students to “really engage with their own poems, and poetry of others, in ways that they never did, when it was just in a book.”  Using technology is a great way to provide entry points for students who are easily deterred by print-based work.  As for the students who traditionally do well, but are very concrete and didn’t take immediately to this project, I wouldn’t be too worried about them.  I think it’s equally important for these students to have practice with other mediums, and to have to confront frustrations. 

Project 1: Voicethread

Here's the link to my project: 

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B8nFquYNsDRDVGhfV3YxYkxzajA&usp=sharing&tid=0B95edAai0DRELTVOMEUtcXRpdHM

I chose to create a learning artifact.  I updated a project I had done in my own classroom to incorporate digital storytelling.  The artifact is a Voicethread narrative: https://voicethread.com/share/5473742/  The profile was written by a student of mine last semester, I just recorded it and added the visuals and sounds.

The goal of the project is for students to practice making authorial choices with the added dimension of audio, visual, and digital materials.

"Friending Atticus Finch" (Lewis)

I think it is so funny that this article was published in 2011!  Even if you read the whole thing and substitute "Facebook" for the word "MySpace," it's still kind of a yawn.  Creating a Facebook page for a character from a book is one of the few ways we knew of for using technology with our students before we started this class ("uhh... show them youtube clips... use powerpoints... have them submit essays on google drive and give them feedback that way... have them make a powerpoint for a project... oh! have them make a facebook/twitter/blog from a character's POV!" we said.)  The thing I found most surprising in this article is that the teachers used a MySpace page in lieu of an essay, which I would be extremely hesitant about.  In addition to, sure.  I do think that such an assignment would both engage students and get them thinking about their characters in more complicated ways.  It's awesome that Barb and Caitlin noticed that in their students, and this article certainly got me jazzed on the possibilities of such an assignment.  I guess the main reason I don't think it's interchangeable with an essay is because I don't assign essays about character analysis.  Thinking deeply about characters is certainly an important component of an essay, but essays are for exploring broader themes, and/or author's craft, so in my mind a character profile is not an adequate substitute.  

Regardless, here are nuggets I appreciated in addition to the tales of highly engaged students:

-Don't operate under the assumption that everyone is familiar with the social medium in question.  You can still do the assignment, but be very explicit about the format (e.g. if I'm asking them to tweet on paper, tell them it has to be 140 characters or less.)

-Choosing '"self-representative' multimedia texts for their webpages (songs, blogs) reveals complexities in communication and representation that surpass print-based composition."  I do think this is true, when character analysis is the goal.  Doing the networking for your character (figuring out who they would friend, what groups they would join, what their status updates would be and what they would list in their "favorites") is certainly much more complex than, say, making a poster or writing a paragraph about them.

I do think, though, that Barb's point that "contemporary assignments designed to address students' out-of-school new literacies could generate apathy rather than interest" is very likely.  I'm glad they addressed the novelty of this assignment in this article, because I do think that contrived-feeling uses of technology often seem disingenuous to students, and this would likely be the case if they had 1-5 "fun! social media projects each year.  I think the best thing to take away from this article is that if you can find a way to use technology that will get your students excited, do it!  Their interactions with the text will probably (hopefully) be increasingly complex and authentic for it.  However, don't take that engagement for granted.  Watch to see if it's really taking place.