Blogging Pedagogy - fear

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

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

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Steven J. LeMieux

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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

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James Wiedner

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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.