Blogging Pedagogy - technology

Student Comments on Technological Lesson Plans

Deb Streusand — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 19:28:44 +0000

Author:

Deb Streusand

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Screenshot by Deb Streusand

In the middle of this semester, I decided to do a survey of my students, to see what they had found helpful so far and what I could do to help them get what they wanted out of the rest of the semester. One of the things I discovered from this survey was that the lessons I found most interesting were not necessarily those that the students found most helpful. Two of my three favorite lessons to teach, and two of those that most depend on technology, attracted comments that questioned their utility. The “logos of logos” activity did not get comments, but the playlist pathos assignment I posted as a lesson plan and the Facebook ethos assignment I borrowed from another professor both featured in negative responses.

I was very excited about the Facebook assignment, because I felt it used technology in an interesting way, allowing the students to apply something they use on a daily basis to the learning of rhetoric. But the students questioned how the assignment, which required them to explore their Facebook to show what kind of ethos they projected on the site, corresponded to the kind of ethos they use in arguments for class. Facebook often only provided examples of situated ethos, because students could not find examples of themselves inventing ethos within the limited arguments they made on their Facebook walls. The students said that the assignment needed work, not that it should be removed, so I am now looking for a more effective way to make use of students’ Facebook pages in studying ethos.

Similarly, students wondered about the utility of my pathos playlist assignment. They enjoyed using the technology to make the playlists, but they weren’t sure that making playlists helped them learn how to use pathos in arguments, because they weren’t constructing pathos through the use of their own words. In the future, I will pair this technological assignment with a more traditional way of teaching pathos, so that the students can learn to use pathos in multiple ways – I believe that creating pathos through music is still rhetorically relevant for students who have multimedia work in their futures.

The surveys were humbling to read because they made me realize that the assignments that I was the most proud of creating or adapting, and the ones that took advantage of our meeting in a computer classroom, were not necessarily the ones that my students found most helpful. I consider myself, not the technology, responsible for this result. However, the surveys were a useful reminder that just because I work in a digital lab and find digital assignments exciting, it doesn’t mean that these assignments will always be the best, and it’s most important to pay attention to what the students are getting out of them.

technology

Finding the Sticking-Place: Take Up New Technologies and Unscrew the Cycle of Fear

Steven LeMieux — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 16:48:27 +0000

Author:

Steven J. LeMieux

Image Credit:

Eventful Rental

There seems to be a tendency when teaching new technologies to slip into simply teaching the tools. When I’m gearing up to assign my students a multimodal project, rather than teaching students to puzzle over and feel out new technologies, I often—with the semester slipping by—take their hands and rush them through some piece of software. With so few locations of tangible, embodied befuddlement in schools (I hesitantly bracket off conceptual befuddlement as something experienced slightly differently) it’s a real shame to not give students the space to try and fail when the opportunity presents itself. And rather than simply layering new media practices on top of the writing that we’ve been doing for the last semester—attempting a quick bit of transference when everyone is already starting to get a bit worn out—these last few harried weeks of the semester could often be better spent by using the experience of encountering new media tools to open up possible strangeness in otherwise normal environments. The complexity of the tools necessary for new media production—hardware and software both—can be used to remind us how complex the tools (word processors, pens, rhetoric, etc.) that we’ve been using throughout the semester are and that we engage them as embodied subjects.

New media tools, just by virtue of their novelty (their initial, daunting complexity), engage students differently than the old media devices they have been taught to use throughout their schooling. Because they’re new and because they’re full of buttons and layers and unfamiliar work-flows new users have to engage them concretely as things in the world. So they open up a different set of concerns for students. Even if attuned to writing as a process it seems that students look past the material event of writing—the process is built on a series of discrete drafts rather than a long material engagement with texts and tools. When thrown into a new situation, though, there’s the chance that they can begin thinking alongside their materials and tools. If the tools are sticky, if they cause students to slow down and think about their mouse clicks and button presses they can begin to see their products as co-authored. They can think alongside and through the affordances of both the concepts they engage and the tools they use. It is important to spend time with the objects around them, to collaborate with rather than merely use tools and technologies.

I often err on the side of feel-goodery when it comes to new possible engagements with technologies, but it is important to remember that there is a danger here, though. Instead of opening up new possibilities there’s always the danger of getting caught in a rut. What if students, perhaps intimidated by their new tools, learn how to use them just a bit, just enough to get a project whipped up by the end of the semester; they begin to internalize that single constrained relationship. In the move to collaborate with the tools and materials we engage it’s easy to shy away from a fully figured collaboration and instead simply work within the supposed confines of the material. This often arises in the structured or institutionalized creation fostered by the long process of school, and it is made all the more pernicious when those confines are invisible as is often the case with different forms of writing. In my writing classes I often have to coax students (students that have been vigorously taught that there is a ‘good’ writing and that they aren’t doing it) into moving beyond the structures of the five paragraph essay. With something like image manipulation it’s easy to get caught up in flashy effects and basic, layered collage. By not spending enough time teaching my students to engage new technologies I might be sending them down the same path of rote use that is often taken with PowerPoint.

More dangerous than holding a student’s hand through the rocky first brush with new technology is modeling a fear of both failure and possibility. Looking back on the ways that I have been introduced to new technologies in the classroom, I can’t help but notice that fear has been a common thread throughout. I very clearly remember the first time I saw an overhead projector. It was rolled into my kindergarten class one day, brand new to both me and the school. And while we were allowed to draw on the overhead sheets there was a constant refrain of “be careful, don’t touch anything.” Upon reflection, I don’t think that the overhead projector was particularly fragile, but I can see that my teachers were worried more about breaking the machine. When I finally encountered computers there was that same fear, amplified by all the different ways they could fail. These fears can quickly become internalized, and students learn that they might break the machine by pushing too hard, by trying out new things, by playing around, so now there’s fear surrounding both the structural integrity of the thing and its possibilities. I can’t really blame my kindergarten teacher for being afraid, nor my students (maybe not myself, either), because we’ve all been taught to avoid failure at all cost. By squeezing multimodal projects in as a final afterthought, I have done a disservice to my students; I’ve put them in a bind where they aren’t allowed the time to fail. Instead of introducing new tools to students as something they should figure out and produce with, we might trouble the cycle of fear by opening up these concrete technologies as a place to fail and reflect.

Teaching the (Not So) Tech-Savvy, or, Why My Students Wouldn't Get This Meme

James Wiedner — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 03:09:54 +0000

Author:

James Wiedner

Image Credit:

www.quickmeme.com

When I was informed as to what text we would be engaging in our introductory rhetoric classes this year, I was simultaneously heartened and shaken. I was heartened because the subject matter of the substantive material we would be engaging was of tremendous import to everyone- as students, as individuals, as participants in the flow of e-commerce. The issues we would be examining were being addressed and discussed right now, by everyone from politicians to niche nerds with alarmist blogs. (I was actually halfway through "The Filter Bubble" for my own interest before I found out that it would be the text I'd be working with for the next semester. What that says about me, I care not to speculate).

Almost immediately after this moment of enthusiastic anticipation, however, I was hit with an equally powerful punch of anxiety. It occurred to me that I would be walking into a room full of students who- as much as it pained me to admit it- were a full generation younger than me. The internet was something that had been part of the everyday lives of most of them for as long as they could remember. They had long ago eschewed the landline at their houses for the texting, IM'ing, posting, tweeting, and probably a whole litany of other means of communication that my old ass hadn't even heard of. No matter how much I read up on these subjects, I was going to be in front of 20 kids half my age, with twice of my knowledge on the subjects being examined. Having been assigned a classroom with state-of-the-art technology suddenly seemed less like a chance to enhance learning, and more like a chance for me to demonstrate my comparative cluelessness as to the technological devices and subject matter we'd be engaging.

I had flashbacks of my sister and I laughing hysterically as we watched my dad try to figure out the remote control for that newfangled VCR he'd bought. I had a flash-forward wondering what other awful surprises Karma had been waiting to pay me back with...

After much fretting, I resigned myself to the fact that there was simply no way I could hope to be as tech-savvy as a group of students who would struggle to even remember what it was like to have to use a phone line to get online. And, given that their demographic is always the first to know about the latest video trending on YouTube or the new social networking site, any teaching examples I found on the web were going to already be so woefully dated that my students would have to stifle laughter at the luddite that was supposed to be the one imparting knowledge to them.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that I was utterly amazed at the apathy, inexperience- and (frequently) downright ignorance- that my students displayed on so many technology-based matters. This was true both with respect to their lack of knowledge regarding the ins-and-outs of the technology that was so central to their lives, but also with respect to their ignorance and apathy regarding technology-based policies and politics that were on the tip of everyone's tongue (or so I thought). Having been a beer-swilling undergraduate myself, their lack of interest or knowledge of larger policy-based matters didn't throw me into shock. But the complete lack of knowledge about the technology that they were using virtually every minute of every day astounded me. Not a single one of them had any grasp of what Wordpress was, much less how to use it. Embedding videos in a WYSIWYG window was a new one for them. Conducting online research was overwhelming and pointless. Completing the most basic tasks on the course wiki was something at least half of them never did get a handle on (which I guess is a failing on my part as their instructor).

As for privacy issues, they were even more in the dark. SOPA, personalized search results, user tracking, electronic scanning of their gmail accounts, questionable data collection policies of the phone carriers--all of this was more or less new to them.

Naturally, I've spent the past 12 weeks trying to explain the reasons behind this ostensible obliviousness. I've arrived at the conclusion that this generation of students knows nothing about things that I consider fundamental to an understanding of the present state of technology for the simple reason that they've never had to understand. I never had to figure out the science behind my dad's VCR remote, I just had to know how to use it. These students don't need to know how online tracking works, they just need to know how to enter address A and address B into MapQuest on their iPhones. As for programming languages, that sort of thing was not even on their radar.

For every stride forward in human-computer interfaces, there is a certain amount of cognitive offloading that takes place. Things are the way the way they are and they work the way we want them to--does it really matter how google knows to give you advertisements for overstock.com at the same time you've been emailing and gchatting with your "bros" about what sort of cologne you should wear on your date tonight in order to achieve your desired ends?

In the end, their profound lack of knowledge on these issues was gold for a rhetoric class. They were exposed to eye-opening ideas about matters that impact them personally and profoundly. Some found themselves content with the state affairs even after being exposed to these new ideas, others were ready to burn Mark Zuckerberg at the stake (which is especially amazing when you consider that 95% of them had no idea who Mark Zuckerberg was a couple of months ago). There were always plenty of issues to debate, and there was (and is) an endless stream of "texts" to pay a little more attention to. They became much more adept (in class, anyway) at watching commercials, reading articles, and listening to political pundits with a critical eye and ear.

To the extent this is the case, I think that using "The Filter Bubble" in teaching students about the what's going on "behind the scenes" with the technologies that they take for granted left them a little more informed and a little less susceptible to blindly following the stated positions and policies of the people presently determining what our future will look like. And if they did, indeed, walk away with (1) newfound factual knowledge regarding internet privacy, (2) a desire to become part of the discourse at large, and (3) armed with the rhetorical and critical thinking skills to be productive voices in that discourse, then I cannot imagine a rhetoric course with more appropriate subject matter than that which we engaged this semester.

Negotiating Student-Instructor Relationships on Facebook

Michael Roberts — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 02:03:51 +0000

Author:

Michael Roberts

Image Credit:

"facebook" by pshab on flickr

All young instructors know it: that dreaded moment when a student, former or current, adds you as a "friend" on Facebook. We encourage students to call us by our first names, and cultivate a sense of informal comfort in the classroom. As young people closer in age to our students than our advisors, we also realize that Facebook has become a near-universal social networking outlet, filled not only with friends but cousins, colleagues, and (gulp) parents. But besides the obvious privacy issues, the friend request from the student brings up another social negotiation: is it appropriate, or desirable, to become friends with a former student, in any sense of the word?

I don't know if, as Chris Ortiz y Prentice suggests, “you could describe the entire social apparatus of modern-day public schools... as the protection of the adults from the students' sexualities, and vice versa,” but a certain amount of anxiety lingers regarding student-teacher interaction, even at the college level. Even as we encourage an egalitarian camaraderie among our students, we work to maintain a clear distinction between instructor and student. We dress the part, we present strict-sounding policy statements, and we speak with authority even we discussion ventures into unsure territory. Unfortunately, it is all the more important for women and young instructors to maintain this authority. If students see the instructor as a friend, mother, or object of lust, the educational relationship could become confused or compromised, which could create problems for both teacher and student. Most instructors I know are therefore (sometimes painfully aware) of the negotiations involved in creating a classroom ethos. Be informal but professional; encourage participation but not over-sharing; be available to discuss coursework but not ex-girlfriends; be friendly but not a friend.

In terms of negotiating social relationships, though, Facebook is the Wild West. The near-universality of the website also brings with it serious confusion as to its role in the social lives of its users. Some people use Facebook as a professional networking tool, while others use it as a venue to publish their most intimate thoughts and feelings. So what does it mean when a student friends an instructor on Facebook? Is she trying to make a professional contact similar to networking sites like LinkedIn? Is he curious about the instructor's private life, and wanting to start and informal friendship? Is the “friending” the beginning of a flirtation or romantic courtship? It could mean any of these, and additional, more complicated possibilities abound. “Friending” on Facebook is an interesting topic of cultural semantics; the relative novelty of the interface means that the significance of the act is still in flux in our culture, and has diversely rich meanings for different user communities. While interesting, though, this cultural confusion is dangerous for student-teacher relationships, and most of my colleagues wisely avoid Facebook friendships with students.

This social networking issue gained particular relevance for me last year, though, when I taught Rhetoric 309K: The Rhetoric of Facebook. In the class we studied some of the social issues I describe above, as well as issues of privacy, accessibility, and marketability that arise on the website. Not only did the class use Facebook as its object of study; we also used Facebook as the medium through which much of the class was conducted. Each student created a new class-only Facebook profile, and friended class profile as well as each other. They had to update their profiles week by week, updating research, posting screen shots and analysis, and commenting on their classmates' progress. In general this ad-hoc Facebook network worked so much better than my previous forays into class blogging or discussion boards; the students were already fluent with the technologies of writing, sharing, and commenting, and could focus more on the content of the class, which happened to be rhetorical analysis of those very technologies.

The Facebook networking of our class had unintended social consequences, however. The students had to write at least one Facebook post a week, but were free to share more if they chose to. Some students did, and their posts were not always related to the coursework. Some would invite the class to their a capella concerts or basketball games; others would post their articles in The Daily Texan. When a student had a birthday, many of her classmates wrote on her Facebook wall wishing her a good one. A few students even posted funny videos that were borderline inappropriate for a college classroom. In short, some students used Facebook like their audience was their friend group.

The student interactions with me also became more and more informal. Since I distributed assignment updates on Facebook, most of my students contacted me via Facebook message instead of email. These messages were, predictably, often less than formal, and occasionally used the misspellings and abbreviations common to text messages. In fact, many of them were probably sent from smart phones. Embracing the technology, I held office hours on Facebook chat from my usual office in Parlin. I had record numbers of students ask questions on the chat program, but the interactions also veered into the personal, funny, or inappropriate in ways that had never happened in face-to-face conversations. In short, I was delighted at how comfortable my students with communicating with me in this novel format, but also a little concerned about maintaining the distance and authority required to conduct the class.

I addressed these issues by bringing them to the forefront of our in-class discussion. Both semesters, in the second unit on rhetorical analysis, I discussed both my classroom ethos and their interactions with me and each other. I chuckled at a few anonymous students' misspelled messages, but then moved on to how the technologies might affect their self-presentation even in the classroom. These conversations were very productive, and did not shut down student participation. By the end of the year, most of my students had a pretty sophisticated understanding of what the social and rhetorical stakes of Facebook actions are, including posting, liking, and, of course, friending.

That said, I still do not accept friend requests from students, current, or former. In my class on Facebook, we had the time to discuss the nuanced social jockeying that accompanies the Facebook friendship. In my previous and subsequent teaching experience, I have had neither the time nor the inclination to discuss the implications of social networking. And frankly, some things are better left private.