Perhaps the nicest parsing of the term “suck” I’ve ever read. Kudos. Sucky content means all those things. For me, it’s in the interplay of content and eventual product. Some content inherently lends itself to interesting product. Examples abound, so take your pick; there’s no need to belabor this point.

Intrinsically low interest content can be made meaningful and exciting by:

1) improving and making interesting the process (which is increasingly accomplished by appropriate tech use)
2) improving and making interesting the product students deliver (which is increasingly attempted by inappropriate or at least unjustifiable tech use)
3) some combination of the two

What does sucky content *mean*? It’s demonstrably important and necessary, but not intrinsically interesting to 14 year olds? It’s not linguistically or developmentally appropriate (as so much is in ELL instruction), but you’re required to teach it? It’s actually decent content with potential, but you’re too lazy/stressed/uncreative to figure out how to connect it to your kids’ lives?

I know you’ve got a good answer for this. But I don’t think everyone does.

While we righteous font-snobs and typophiliacs are busy heaping abuse on poor Comic Sans, we should pause to reflect on the spooky ways in which reality mirrors irony:

http://www.helveticafilm.com/blog/2008/02/19/a-font-we-can-believe-in/

The font featured in Obama’s CHANGE campaign signage was envisioned by its designer as “something that would look very fresh, yet very established, to have a credible voice to it. . . . It also needed to look very masculine and “of-the-moment.”

To a certain extent, the content is what the content is (i.e. standards) and everything else is form. Oh, I guess you could make the argument that changing the books you read to analyze character or the work kids do to demontrate understanding of mark-up and discount demonstrate alterations in content, but I would argue that these are alterations in product. You’re still analyzing character no matter what you read, and you’re still doing discounts and mark-ups, whether you worksheet it out or have kids build web sites of fictious stores, and analyze different pricing approaches.

Content (standards) –> form (how they’re taught) –> product (what kids do)

(Please clean up my design. No really, please).

I say this because a lot of the time my content ain’t that great. I’m teaching 14-year-olds short vowel sounds. That content sucks. But I can change the form to make it engaging, change the product so you don’t feel like you’re dumb when you’re 14 and still spitting out short-e, and so on.

The real discussion we ought to have w/r/t to technology, is not how it is used or misused in form, but its role in product. Why are kids making powerpoints? Why are they blogging? Why are they using responders? Quite often there are strong, well-thought out and valid answers to these questions. Quite often there aren’t.

(It actually is true, though. I learn something every day on this blog.)

H, I see your point. (laughter)

…there exists no tool, no shortcut, nothing else to do the job but the blunt application of profound creativity in the direction of challenging content standards.

Sure there is. I call it Google.