Jeremy Smyczek's blog

Anonymous Whispers: Silence and Voice in the Digital Classroom

Jeremy Smyczek — Wed, 10 Jun 2015 19:49:30 +0000

Author:

Jeremy Smyczek

Image Credit:

Halycon450, "Silence!" Deviant Art, n.d. Web. 2 March 2015. <http://halycon450.deviantart.com/art/SILENCE-305428310>

I owe particular thanks for this post to Beck Wise, who gave me the this idea in the first place. This post is also in part a response to Sarah Riddick, who posted to Blogging Pedagogy recently about maintaining a safe space for students to articulate viewpoints with which they disagree.This latter concern reminded me of a more basic problem that I and many other instructors have faced: the reticent class that is, for whatever reasons, unwilling to articulate much of anything at all.

Because teachers tend to be voluble sorts and problem solvers by nature or nurture, we tend to take long silences personally, often suspecting that they represent indifference or hostility on the students' part. We then “solve” this problem through a variety of measures designed to get the class talking: prewriting activities, calling on students directly, or, worst of all, from my perspective, chattering on endlessly ourselves, hopeful that our next sentence will be the magic bullet that invites response, until we are all mercifully saved by the bell.

That my motive attributions are probably wrong is fairly obvious. Students remain silent for a huge variety of reasons that probably have nothing to do with me or my class: personal preoccupations, honest shyness, developing language skills, cultural aversions to drawing attention to themselves, fear of peer disapproval, and the feeling that they just don't know enough or haven't concretized their thoughts enough to make them public.

But the second part—the solutions—may in fact overlook a more pragmatic approach: perhaps the problem isn't silence specifically but lack of communication generally. The question then becomes: how can we communicate as a group without speech? How can we address the impediments to communication in a broader sense, while still maintaining a sense of real-time discussion?

I found a remarkably easy answer in the concept of anonymous, collaborative documents such as Google Docs with open-invite participation policies. It works like this: I build either a totally blank doc or one with specific questions or instructions for the topic under discussion, put it up on the projector screen, and let students write their contributions in a real-time, collaborative exchange. Since the invite is open and requires no Google login, students are represented by anonymous animal (e.g. “Anonymous Antelope”) icons as they participate. The icon follows around their cursor as they respond to various other student comments, creating a visual map of student responses as they literally “move” from one topic to another.

Anonymity can be tricky, of course, and sometimes it seems that the entire internet and its oft-noted incivility testifies to that. But the fact that the students are in the same room with one another seems to exercise a check on rudeness and cheek that posting from home in asynchronous forums does not. At least, it hasn't been a problem so far into this fairly new experience. One principal benefit is that I may compliment a particular contribution and then have the student verbally claim ownership of it.

As such, these silent and anonymous conversations can often drift back and forth into hybrid spoken-written affairs, and managing them is more art than science so far. But what I think that they do is take some of the best qualities of the MOOC without the worst, i.e. huge class sizes and a tenuous access to the course instructor and the particular expertise she or he brings to the table. Also, challenges remain for students with basic or developing written language proficiency, who may be as hesitant to write as they are to speak. But the technique in general promotes group conversations that avoid many of the traditional obstacles and workarounds that occur in the absence of computer mediation.

pedagogy; class discussion

Online Reviews Part II: Reviews as Interpretive Communities

Jeremy Smyczek — Fri, 22 May 2015 17:44:55 +0000

Author:

Jeremy Smyczek

Image Credit:

"A Community Library in Ethiopia" by Robert Joumard, 2010. Reused with permission. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bibliotheque_Awra_Amba.jpg

As many literary archivists know, reading societies were a prominent feature of the 19^th and prewar-20^th century American social scene. They provided a valuable and oft-overlooked service giving women and people of color a voice in literary and cultural affairs in the days before the academy had been more fully opened, and, the story goes, largely faded away once it had.

Or did reading societies just have a technology problem? Anyone with an Amazon account can see that book reviews there don't look much like other product reviews at all. They look much more like what goes on more politely at Goodreads, an online service specifically meant to function the way that reading societies once did: to let people whose cost of membership is no more than access to the book in question debate the form, function, and merit of every literary genre imaginable.

So what does this have to do with pedagogy? I think that online reading societies exist because, academia's romantic ideals about individual relationships with text be damned, they provide a dinner-table form of textual mediation that can bridge the gap between personal experience, classroom discussions, and professional criticism. This service is specifically applicable to introductory literature and composition courses in which students are asked to make the step from summary to response.

Asking for response from students is asking them to make a leap of faith: the faith that, in transitioning from finding out what the important bits of the text are to responding to them, they have something appropriate and interesting to say, even in principle—that their experiences and insights contribute anything of worth. Classroom discussion only puts them in a boat with everyone else in the same situation (frankly, a captive audience), and professional criticism puts them in touch with people whose engagement with the primary texts assumes all the knowledge that intro students have yet to acquire—at the added cost of often taking longer to read than the primary literature itself.

I call Amazon and Goodreads “dinner table mediation” because, like conversations at the traditional family dinner, the best reviews assume several things: there will be a range of expertise and maturity in the room, there are rules of decorum, and only certain subjects have the potential to be of mutual interest to everyone. Like the reading societies of old, membership is strictly optional and so the perspectives are of those legitimately interested in the books. For our first-year forum (the required introductory composition class at Texas) this year, we used Emily Brady's Humboldt: Life on America's Marijuana Frontier. A range of Goodreads reviews will demonstrate the range of interests at play in responding to and evaluating the book: geography, economics, law, ethics, and, really, how much people like getting high.

I like online reviews as a research and modeling tool for first-year students because they can contribute to a desirable shift in students' reading habits. Students looking at the bewildering array of means by which they might respond to texts often either conclude that there are objectively valid answers to the question or, just as problematically, assume that anything at all is fair game. Reviews allow people to narrow their options by a definitional shift that looks like the following. Q: What are interesting issues in a text? A: What other people already find interesting about the text. It's something of an intro to what Stanley Fish calls “interpretive communities,” an idea that the meaning of texts isn't hidden within them, but is constructed amongst writers and readers.

Practical downsides to this approach are, of course, that students might just decide to borrow what they see, either outright cut-and-paste plagiarizing or mimicking the structure so closely that they might as well be. Luckily, these reviews rank high on Google's search priorities, so if the students can find them, so can the instructor. All technology, alas, comes with a price.*

*A footnote: when I wrote this, I had completely forgotten that I had already blogged about this topic once. However, I think it's different enough from the first post to justify its own existence, and so let's think of it as a sequel.

RHE 306; epideictic; rhetorical analysis

The Great Beyond: Teaching Technologies from an Inexpert Perspective

Jeremy Smyczek — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 13:31:13 +0000

Author:

Jeremy Smyczek

Image Credit:

Audrius Meskauskas, "Typewriter Hermes"

As a teacher a generation older than most of my students, I begin to increasingly find myself in the role of “digital immigrant” to their “digital native” status. Most of us tend to be more familiar with technologies of our youths, inevitably falling behind the curve a bit as new media resemble the ones of our earlier days less and less. Part of this is social: beyond the convenience of the integration of social media and portable communications, there’s peer pressure towards having what the cool kids have, a pressure that recedes as high school social cliques dissipate and one’s friends in the professional world are more diverse in their purchasing tastes. Lacking a smart phone means I miss a lot of cool apps, sure, but that still doesn’t make me need a smart phone.

This isn’t a defense of technological disengagement (a poor idea, probably, in a digital humanities classroom), but rather accepting that there will over time be more technologies with classroom use potential—particularly forms of social media—that are more familiar to students than to me. Navigating this can be tricky in a class such as mine, a rhetoric course in which a digital advocacy project in response to the course’s theme (rhetoric and animal rights) accounts for the students’ final grade. It’s problematic on two distinct fronts: teaching unfamiliar technologies and evaluating materials made from them.

The first problem seems the easier one: between ubiquitous YouTube tutorials and the instructions imbedded within most new online media, it’s generally not too hard to learn new tools quickly. Most of them are designed to do just that, typically aimed at young users lacking the ability to write code. What has to underlie all this is the willingness of the instructor to learn enough of a given technology on the fly to walk with students through challenges arising during a project. Can’t ask them to do what we won’t, after all.

But online media tools are also designed to prepackage a good deal of imbedded labor, with the effect that hastily created projects can nevertheless be shiny and professional, at least in the production if not the quality of the advocacy. Hence, deciding how much comparative effort has gone into an InDesign poster campaign (an older technology with which I am familiar) or Wix.com page (a newer one with which I am not) can be difficult.

That last qualifier should indicate, though, that I’m not entirely sold on Marshall McLuhan’s claim that “the media is the message.” It’s true that media often entails audience. (Long-duration megaliths like Facebook, aside, how many people over 40 would follow a Tumblr or Pinterest account?) But rhetorical canons have constancies that make carefully or haphazardly thought arguments transparent enough in virtually any medium. Although iMovie can make anyone a director in a hurry, we need only look to Hollywood to know that slickly packaged films can still be blissfully devoid of much intelligent content.

To Poll or Not to Poll

Jeremy Smyczek — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 16:12:00 +0000

Author:

Jeremy Smyczek

Image Credit:

Screenshot via SurveyMonkey

*The final unit of my RHE 309K: Rhetoric of Animal Rights course features an oral presentation based around a multimedia advocacy project that each student must design. As the major part of the evaluation, I create and use online polls (using tools such as SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics) that the students complete in real time after every presentation. Each poll asks four trait-centered questions, followed by a holistic evaluation, allowing for a variety of data combinations to see how students respond to each other’s work. Polls can be more elaborate than this, naturally, but the point here is to capture initial impressions while the memory is still fresh.

Students are familiar with polls, of course, as they not only complete a course survey evaluating their instructors and teaching assistants, but also are asked to fill out an exit poll for a wide array of campus services. Using polls in the classroom no doubt predates computer-assisted instruction, and could certainly still be done without it, but computers provide a number of services that pencil-and-paper methods would not, such as multiple permutations and combinations of the data. They also allow for total anonymity of response, generally a good thing for any democratic evaluation.

Technological convenience aside, however, using polls in determining grades seems a subset of a larger pedagogical problem: the ethics of peer evaluation. It’s easy to anticipate a response both from students and other educators something like, “well, you’re the one getting paid here; farming out evaluation is at best lazy and at worst negligent.”

But I disagree with this, for three overlapping reasons. First, one of the central problems that we face as rhetorical educators is getting past the single-audience problem. By this, I mean the idea that the only purpose of college writing is to crack the teacher’s code, to figure out what she wants to hear, and to write it. When I tell students that the persuasive appeal of the final oral presentation is aimed at the rest of the class, online polling shows that I mean it.

Second, as Peter Elbow tells us, teachers are not the typical readers that most writing in the world encounters. Fellow students provide a diversity of perspectives and concerns that are far more representative of a typical public discourse’s audience than the one I offer. If activism is more than an academic exercise, then other voices ought to count.

Finally, students are more discerning than I would have initially thought. Sure, they grade each other a bit more kindly than I do, but ultimately the ordinal rankings that they produce in terms of best and worst performances end up looking very similar to mine. They can tell when someone hasn’t done his homework. Hearing that from a peer is, ultimately, probably a bigger stick than hearing from the teacher.

*As many of my blogging ideas do, the idea of crowd-sourced grading grew in part from a conversation with DWRL Assistant Director Beck Wise.

Reading, Rhetoric and Reviews Online

Jeremy Smyczek — Fri, 07 Mar 2014 23:34:52 +0000

Author:

Jeremy Smyczek

Image Credit:

Amazon.com, Inc.
http://www.amazon.com/In-Defense-Animals-Second-Wave/product-reviews/1405119411/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

My Rhetoric 309K class, “Rhetoric of Animal Rights,” features three unequal units respectively emphasizing description, analysis, and production of argument. The second unit culminates in a book review of a text germane to the course topic.

I like book reviews for a number of reasons, but mainly because it shows how rhetorical description and evaluation translate into “real world” texts that have audiences bigger, more diverse, and more diversely motivated than the teacher at the front of the room. It makes the enterprise of rhetorical analysis, I think, feel like less of a purely formal academic exercise. (I’ve heard criticism of my philosophy here, suggesting that it devalues the uniqueness of the classroom and value of academic writing, but that is another post entirely.)

Another feature of book reviews is the sheer availability of models: from the high-style “review essays” one finds in select academic journals to conventional academic reviews and newspaper and magazine versions of the same, there has long existed a wealth of quickly and easily accessible online resources for starting a conversation about what an evaluative book review looks like.

These have been augmented in recent years by the ubiquity of user reviews on sites like Amazon and Goodreads. The immense volume of these (sometimes in the hundreds or thousands for a single work) allows for a kind of investigation that we might typically not have assigned to undergrads in lower-division courses: the reception study.

Because star-rating reviews on both sites can be viewed as both means and distributions, each accompanied by a reader’s written opinion, students are given instant exposure to both quantitative and qualitative cross-evaluations of any given text. In addition to getting myriad examples of the huge number of ways that readers slice and dice the texts they evaluate, they can take two additional points away. First, the onus of having to perform rhetorical analysis in a vacuum is lifted. Many students tend to exhibit an unhealthy reverence for the printed word, thinking that they have little constructive to add to the opinions of a writer who, despite whatever faults, has achieved publication from others—something most of the students will have not thus far done. By studying a text’s reception, they can see that amateur reviewers can and do bring cogent observations and judgments to bear on professional writers.

Second, the high readership volume explicitly commercial context of these reviewing services lets students understand the immediate pragmatic payoffs of engaging in criticism—it is read by a public, generates positive and negative replies, is evaluated for usefulness, and, ultimately, may sway the opinion of an actual person about to spend money on something. The reward for shrewd analysis is seldom so blessedly immediate or concrete.

In a world in which Netflix and Facebook are assiduously individualizing what we are exposed to through the use of personalization algorithms, it is important that students realize that they get something less obvious than tailored content in exchange for the loss of privacy: a critical voice that can and will be heard by others who are themselves making very practical quotidian decisions about whether to read a book, buy an album, or visit a restaurant. Using online reviews as a reading tool in the classroom helps students to understand that humans evaluate things as social beings, and that, even if they are not yet sold on the power of their individual voices, as members of a critical community they have the power to inform, persuade, and entertain other members of the public—the very goals of a rhetorical education.

Bad Searches and Cultivating Healthy Ambivalence

Jeremy Smyczek — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 19:54:34 +0000

Author:

Jeremy Smyczek

Image Credit:

DianesDigitals

Students seem to arrive in my rhetoric classes (RHE 306 and 309K so far) with a polarized understanding of how to use the internet's two most common research tools: Google and Wikipedia. They've either not been clued in (or at least pretend) that both resources are problematic in terms of reliability, or they've been told that both are the devil, to be avoided by any serious scholar.

As is so often the case, my main concern as an instructor is to get students to realize that the whole story is complex: the internet provides tools, and like traditional tools such as saws and hammers, they provide tremendous saved labor if used with caution and training, and, in much the same regard, have elevating sequences of consequences (e.g. inaccuracy, plagiarism, libel) when used carelessly or naively.

An exercise that points this out—I call it the “bad search” exercise—is to have students perform a Google search for Martin Luther King, Jr. (This specific example isn’t hugely important, as search results change and there are many instances of the kind of problem illustrated.) Depending on the day and the level of personalization software on each student’s computer, somewhere in the top ten (after the MLK Wikipedia page, of course) will appear “Martin Luther King: A True Historical Examination.” It appears at www.martinlutherking.org.

Many students have been taught that .org, which often reflects nonprofit status, reflexively grants reliability. So imagine their consternation to realize that they have, in this case, stumbled upon a libelous hate site hosted by Stormfront, a white supremacist group. This fact isn’t apparent without some poking around on the page itself, so in all likelihood, some student somewhere has used this site as an informational source. Errors of this general category doubtless occur daily.

The takeaway point is that search engines are unmediated by human editors: they can save labor on the front end by amalgamating awesome sums of information, but can then restore it by causing users to misevaluate any given source, since it has typically not been vetted for accuracy.

The same applies to Wikipedia. We want students to consider that group editing, while reasonably reliable, lends itself to all manner of exceptions ranging from deliberate spoofs and hoaxes to idiosyncratic fan pages. A “bad search” exercise that provides working examples of the latter are searches for pages devoted to pro wrestlers: while they’ve gotten better since I started performing this exercise, they still weave “in-universe” narratives into attempts at legitimate biography, making it near-impossible for students to figure out which events occurred historically and which as part of the scripted wrestling narrative.

And yet, virtually every major Wikipedia article features a long list of references representing a great deal of embedded labor to pool information on a given topic in one place. Many of these references themselves link to reliable articles, and so Wikipedia is actually ideal as a place to get started. Even if the articles themselves are not academically viable resources, we need not reinvent the wheel by beginning searches from scratch.

This loops us back, recursively, to the problem outlined at the outset: how do we get students themselves to evaluate individual sources, like those found using Google, such as might be found in the Wikipedia article reference list? It’s a much harder task than saying “Wikipedia and Google bad” or that of unconditional endorsement of the internet as a labor-saving tool. Use of academic databases is one way of screening in advance, of course, but is still a kind of argument from external authority that merely repackages the problem of evaluation for credibility.

The simplest answer is to teach students to evaluate all sources both internally and contextually, and to view quick internet seraches with healthy ambivalence. Teaching that, however, takes longer than a day.