Blogging Pedagogy - new media

Open… Like a Book?: Writing New Media and the Materialities of Textual Production

Amy Tuttle — Mon, 20 Oct 2014 20:10:16 +0000

Author:

Amy Tuttle

Image Credit:

Amy Tuttle

New ideas give way to new methods. And since new media changes the way we link ideas to ideas and ideas to readers, perhaps our experiences with new media should prompt us to reconsider what we “know.” Specifically, educators might be well-served to consider the ways in which new media writing differs from traditional, humanist prose, as this deliberate differentiation could open up (rather than foreclose) epistemological and pedagogical possibilities for the digital humanities.

With new media, a text’s materiality is enacted through the practices of its composition. Thus, rather than seeing new media writing as an analysis of specific media (or of the broad tropes of formal convention that often guide writing pedagogies), approaches to teaching new media might benefit from a focus on writing as a (series of) material, knowledge-making practice(s). Investigations of material practice as it pertains to new media writing have the potential to offer rich avenues for the exploration of the complex ontological and epistemological relationships among subjects, objects, and identity, which, in turn, could lay important groundwork for understanding the digital humanities’ responsibilities to democratized knowledge and invention/innovation.

A focus on the material meaning-making practices of new media writing introduces expanded understandings of what new media texts mean or can mean. In Writing New Media, Geoff Sirc suggests that a move from prose writing and concepts of metaphor toward more open systems of freely associated “collections” of heterogeneous writing affords new media writers the responsibility to make connections (143). Thus, a new media writer can experience a fuller realm of possibility when he or she is not self-conscious about trying to follow and master formal conventions of style. In other words, some of new media’s libratory potential lies in becoming less concerned with content and more conscious of our materials.

Significantly, an increased consciousness of the material practices of new media writing departs from traditional humanist approaches to writing in that new media methodologies and pedagogies might allow for the critical analysis of both a text’s content and the means of its production. More specifically, in attending to the materiality of texts, new media writers work to collapse the hierarchical distinction between textual analysis and textual production—between reading and writing. In other words, new media writing fosters multiplicity, and the material practices that accompany new media writing might help students identify a range of literacies. Additionally, new media texts trouble the academic and disciplinary binaries of alphabetic/visual, “high” culture/“low” culture, and “real” work/“not real” work. Therefore, by refusing to position textual analysis over textual production, pedagogies of new media writing can demonstrate a resistance to binaries of normalization or centralization.

Methodologies of decentralization can untether writing from its content, and as a result, new media has the potential not only to support existing social and cultural theories and practices of writing, but also to disrupt and change those positions, leading to potentially significant (and sustainable) long-term social change. Both students and teachers (and every combination of the two) occupy a variety of subject positions within a single class setting, and, in the best possible cases, the reconfiguration processes inherent in the material practices of new media have the potential to shift the focus from what things mean to how things mean. Therefore, teachers of writing must consider how pedagogical theories of writing and the “everyday practice” (to use de Certeau's term) of writing work (or don’t work) together in relation to the larger, more systemic issues regarding the nature and value of various kinds of scholarly work.

Technological Nostalgia and the Academic Year to Come

Eric Detweiler — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 18:13:30 +0000

Author:

Eric Detweiler

Image Credit:

Randall Munroe

I feel so out of touch when it comes to video games.

During my time in the Digital Writing and Research Lab, I've worked to incorporate new technologies and media into my scholarship and pedagogy: I've published webtexts, rhetoric podcasts, and--as you might have guessed--blog posts about pedagogy. I've had students in my classes record podcasts of their own, collaborate on wikis, and use digital platforms to create visuals. But despite their vast array of pedagogical possibilities, I've yet to bring video games into the classroom. After all, the most recent gaming console I own is the eight-year-old (eight years old?!) Nintendo Wii, which--let's be honest--I mostly use to watch Netflix.

Except, that is, for a few months last fall when I got my hands on a Wii Classic Controller.

wii classic.jpg

image via Amazon.com

This controller is not exactly a groundbreaking piece of technology. In fact, it's decidedly backwards, a way of retrofitting the Wii's more innovative controller so you can use the console to play games from past platforms. In my case, the game in question was Mario Kart 64, an eighteen-year-old game (EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD?!) and the only multiplayer game at which I've ever been any good. As I lack both the hand-eye coordination required by many newer games and the funds required to purchase newer consoles, Mario Kart 64 still represents--alongside the halcyon days I invested in the Final Fantasy games released for the first-generation PlayStation--the pinnacle of my gamerly achievements. So, following my accomplishment of a key graduate-school achievement, I used the classic controller to descend into a few days of '90s nostalgia. With my good friend Toad, I sped across 64-bit beaches, turnpikes, and boardwalks. I won gold cups and blasted my competitors with heat-seeking turtle shells. I drove, I raced, I karted. And then, eventually, I felt the pull of responsibility, put down the controller, and picked up my copy of Maurice Blanchot's The ~~Racing~~ Writing of the Disaster. Done with krashing karts, I returned to the various spin-outs of scholarly writing.

yahooooo.jpg

image via Fanpop

Which is to say that it's all too tempting for me to shake my head at undergraduates these days, what with their fourth-generation PlayStations, eighth-generation Mario Kart games, Steam accounts, and Flappy Bird victories. Soon, Beloit College will release their "mindset list" for the class of 2018 and surely give those of us who teach them--whether we're 27 or 72--plenty more excuses to panic about students' cultural touchstones.

My hope for myself, though, as I begin academic year 2014-15, is that I can resist such allergic reactions to students' cultural and technological habits. Following the suggestions of John Warner, I'd hope to avoid projecting my own anxieties about and lack of discipline with digital technologies onto my students--at least not without first asking after my students' relationships with technologies new and old. This strikes me as one of the many tensions teachers--perhaps especially teachers of rhetoric, writing, and composition--must constantly balance: Resisting the urge to fume at and dismiss technologies with which we're unfamiliar while also resisting the urge to celebrate technologies about which we know very little for the sake of novelty alone or as part of some dream about the inevitable march of progress.

What excites me about the digital rhetoric classroom--the reason that maybe I should work harder to plug post-millennial video games into my classroom, and that I'm excited about the work the DWRL's new Video/Games group will undertake in the coming year--is how fruitful a place it can be for negotiating and questioning this tension. With any new technology--even the most seemingly ubiquitous--at least a few students in any given class are going to be disoriented by it. And at the very least, perhaps we as teachers will be disoriented by it (or, in the spirit of dissoi logoi, we can pretend to be). The digital rhetoric course, in short, can be a place not for socializing students back into old forms of composition, nor for naturalizing new technologies into institutional structures, but for denaturalizing both our own and our students' expectations about and approaches to various technologies, forms of communication, and ways of being--from the ancient art of Mario Kart 64, to the crystallized realms of academic English, to the technological relations that may only come into existence in the courses we teach this fall and in the future.

On Weather Cancellations and Digital Media Experiments

Lindsey Gay — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 12:20:21 +0000

Author:

Lindsey Gay

Image Credit:

Ralph Hockens

Normally we have very mild minters here in Austin; however, this winter has been colder than usual. As a result, we’ve had a number of days where ice coated the roads, making the region’s many elevated highways and bridges very dangerous. For better or for worse, UT has closed the campus several times and initiated late starts several times more. Normally these delayed starts began between 10am and noon. As my Rhetoric of Death and Dying class runs from 9:30 to 11 am, any weather delays impact the course. In fact, we’ve had two classes cancelled and three others delayed by at least half an hour! For a course that meets only twice a week, every class day is very necessary; therefore, being almost two weeks behind in my curriculum before Spring Break has proven very challenging.

When my class was full-on canceled the first time, I was already on campus. UT officials made the call rather late, to the ire of many, but I decided to make the most of the situation. Since I had a quiet DWRL room, a computer with a webcam, and several hours at my disposal, I decided to record the day’s lecture and part of the lesson. I figured that not only could I reduce the amount of catch-up my students would have to do, but I would hopefully familiarize myself more strongly with the same digital media projects I’ve been asking my students to create.

I created a video in Windows Movie Maker by combining webcam footage of me lecturing with screen captures of the readings and other course material I had planned to discuss that day. Using the screen-capture tool Camtasia, I attempted to navigate through the material as if I were showing it to the students in real-time. There were several drawbacks: the lighting wasn’t optimal (thanks, fluorescent overheads!); I struggled with the audio capture (for some reason, about half of my sound files recorded but were incompatible with Camtasia, resulting in me having to record some portions of audio two or three times); overall the video ended up being VERY amateurish (to my eyes!). Nevertheless, at least my students had something to take away from an otherwise throwaway class day. After emailing them the video link and cautioning them that they’d be responsible for viewing it, doing the activities discussed, and knowing the material for the next class, I hoped they’d watch it.

Polling them the next class day, I found that only about one-third of them had watched the video. I warned them that we didn’t have enough time to go over the material (important stuff about ethical and pathetic appeals) so if they fell behind, it would be their own fault. Needless to say, I also found their scanty participation a poor repayment for my efforts. Cue hurt feelings.

The second time the university decided to cancel morning classes, it at least gave everyone plenty of notice, so I didn’t make an unnecessary trip to campus. This time, I thought I would turn my lecture on definitional arguments into a PowerPoint, and I wanted experiment by adding a voice-over. This would add important discussional elements into the presentation by making me write less and talk more.

Writing the PowerPoint took only half an hour. Then, I tried to use the audio recorder function built in to PowerPoint, because I hoped to avoid having to merge audio and PPT files in some other program. Unfortunately, once again, audio recording was my downfall. Though I made several test runs to ensure the sound was recording AND that I could advance through bullet points and slides in sync with the audio, the recording ultimately failed. I spent 40 minutes talking at my computer, only to find when I played back the whole presentation that the audio cut out about halfway through each slide. I was too frustrated to troubleshoot the problem, and I had afternoon meetings to keep, so I just rewrote the slides to be more text-heavy than I’d usually prefer. I sent it off to my students with instructions to view the PowerPoint and my apologies that I couldn’t get the sound to work. On the plus side, when I polled the class the next day asking how many of them viewed the presentation, about three-quarters of them raised their hands. It seemed they learned a lesson from the first cancelation, and the other shortened classes, AND from my lamentations about these course-shortening problems.

By the time Spring Break rolled around I was still about a week behind in my syllabus. Over the break, I reworked the rest of the term’s schedule slightly. This resulted in the next few weeks emphasizing skill development and leaving less time to luxuriate in discussing the many arguments around death and dying. The main lessons I learned—besides keeping my syllabus somewhat flexible—is that I have a long way to go before I make a really solid foray into the realm of the audiovisual. These experiences gave me a greater respect for my students’ efforts making their final projects (in various multimedia formats). My failures also gave me some ideas on how to better prepare my students for frustrations they may encounter as well.

Field Report: Eighteenth-Century Literature Meets Twenty-First Century Tech

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 11:27:20 +0000

Author:

Rachel Schneider

Image Credit:

Emily Friedman / Prezi

The weekend of March 21st, I was able to attend the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. While I always enjoy attending panels on subjects related to my academic research, another delight is seeing how other eighteenth-century scholars talk about teaching. Far from being stodgy or leather-elbow’d, the scholars on the SHARP panel “Wormius in the Land of Tweets: Archival Studies, Textual Editing, and the Wiki-trained Undergraduate” showed off projects and classroom pedagogies for teaching students about scholarly genres and book history practices.

Because SHARP is the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing, many of the academics on the panel discussed what kinds of digital editing projects their students had accomplished. The digital edition is a great place to teach all kinds of scholarly labor: researching textual histories, deciding on a copy-text, making editorial and style decisions, writing footnotes and scholarly introductions, locating and incorporating contextual documents and academic research to provide background, as well as considering how to address and direct their work for a particular kind of audience.

On one hand, Dr. Stephen Gregg of Bath Spa University showed off online scholarly editions of Defoe’s The True-Born Englishman and A Hymn to the Pillory that his students created. What’s nice to see is that Gregg’s students themselves considered questions of accessibility: how can more people access high-quality editions? What kinds of audiences should the text and notes be prepared for? His students chose online delivery systems for their texts and even considered how the coding itself is a separate kind of text. They considered how to remix the eighteenth-century page online: one student opted to preserve the catch-words while the other used hyperlinks for the notation system. Each text includes a critical apparatus to explain its methodology as well.

On the other hand, Dr. Emily Friedman of Auburn University had her students create a proposal for a new critical edition of a text. They examined first editions of various period texts and discussed and examined critical editions like Broadview’s edition of Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers to think about what an edition could include. Her students then produced PDFs with sample statements of editorial style, critical introductions, and contemporary textual elements like book reviews. They also designed cover illustrations for their editions and wrote reflection pieces on how the cover represented the book. Her Prezi shows not only pictures of the completed projects but also the students from the class who successfully won a research award for their work.

Interactions with physical books weren’t limited to research archives. Dr. Evan Davis of Hampden-Sydney College discussed how he taught students book history by asking them to take blog posts they had written for the class, revise them, then actually produce a physical book of them. As his course covered Gutenberg to Google, he forced students to embody a variety of experiences from book history, whether reading a book in different formats (iPad, Kindle, and book) or in different situations (by candlelight). What interested me in this was not only the consideration for how format and design affect the reading experience but also how students played around with the low/high tech concerns: one student printed his book with QR codes inside, so the reader could move from physical object to mobile browsing.

Finally, Wayne State University’s Dr. Lisa Maruca teaches the eighteenth century through media events like the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela or the début of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. Maruca then connected her concerns with public events with the students’ own public personas, encouraging them to choose a blogging platform like WordPress or Tumblr and develop their professional identity on the blog. Maruca got even the digitally resistant students thus to consider questions about design, intellectual property, and publicity through their own created persona, linking the past with the present.

As an eighteenth-century scholar myself who is likewise interested in increasing my students’ digital literacies alongside my own, joining the historical study of communication technology with how to conduct it in the present, such work is deeply inspiring. If you’d like to learn more about the kinds of ideas exchanged at the conference, feel free to delve into the Twitter archive created by Ben Pauley.

Multimodal Writing: How Do We Assess New Media?

Rachel Mazique — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 00:35:39 +0000

Author:

Rachel Mazique

Image Credit:

"Multimedia Message" by rockcreek on Flickr

"Students should be able to both read critically and write functionally, no matter what the medium" (William Kist).

Last semester, I gave a presentation to a class of new Rhetoric and Writing instructors on my "Disability in Pop Culture" class proposal, experiences, and syllabus. Professor Mark Longaker introduced my class as one that works with disability and new media. Although I hadn’t thought of it that way, I realized that my pedagogy most definitely incorporates not only disability theory but also “new” media: whether within my lesson plans and clips pertaining to rhetoric/disability, in the design of my course—with our PbWorks wiki platform, or with the final major assignment I had students write: a multimodal argument. I was apprehensive about assigning this type of new media writing project, but, fortunately, resources abound. This blog post offers some of those resources I drew from and shares my method for assessing my students’ projects.

I have been working with The Journal of Undergraduate Multimedia Projects for over two years now, in a variety of positions, and this work served as my primary resource. The website includes information on the students’ project assignments and on the course. Professors often share their class websites, which means that this journal becomes a pedagogical resource as well as a publication venue. Professor Tanya Rodrigue’s class website inspired me to create a YouTube channel for my own class—even though my multimodal assignment prompt did not restrict the shape of the project to videos (as you can see from the links on the left of our homepage). From Rodrigue's class Tumblr, I came across a helpful article, “Between Modes: Assessing Student New Media Compositions.” I also drew on assignment descriptions and prompts from Professor Justin Hodgson and Scott Nelson.

The National Council of Teachers of English has a “Position Statement on Multimodal Literacies” including statements such as Kist’s, which begins this blog post. Another quote that I took to heart and found exemplified in a TED talk by a 12-year-old was:

"In digital forms, students, even very young students, are often more literate in the technical aspects of digital production than many of their teachers. Many students are frequently exposed to popular technologies, have the leisure time to experiment with their own production, develop the social connections that encourage peer teaching and learning, and may have access to more advanced technology than is available at school. The 'definitions' of multi-modal composing may be written by educators, but they will most likely have first been pioneered by these young people."

Hence, I strongly encouraged my students to collaborate on these projects, to learn from each other, and I happily learned from them. Working in the Digital Writing and Research Labs also means that I had our Visual Media Specialist, Scott Nelson, for support. He came to one of my classes and led an iMovie workshop; he also addressed copyright flags and takedowns on YouTube. Thanks to all of these resources, I felt much more confident about assigning this multimodal project; I also planned for three weeks of class time so students could work together. This time helped alleviate the concerns of the “low-tech” students who were anxious about this project. All of my students proved to have a tech-savviness that they (in some cases) did not know they had. Most were excited about writing in multiple modes. In short, they all relied upon/developed their digital literacy skills.

Teaching and assessing student work via The Learning Record portfolio system (which I explain more in-depth in previous blogs and lesson plans) allows me to assess work not solely based on the final technological project, but on how well it meets the requirements of the assignment, shows development and research into writing in new digital modes, and effectively presents an argument.

After the revision stage, I commented on student progress by synthesizing the comments of three of their peers on how persuasive the project was and whether the revisions following peer review were substantial. The instructions were as follows:

If you have reviewed this project during peer review, answer both questions below.

If this is your first time viewing the project, only answer the second question.

1. Did your peer substantially revise the project? Or, did your peer attend to your feedback and improve the overall project? What improvements stood out and were effective? What still needs improvement?

2. Were you persuaded by the argument? Describe how the argument persuaded you to think or feel a certain way. Or, does it successfully convince you to do something? How did the elements of rhetoric (logos, ethos, and pathos) work to persuade you? Or, how did a lack of attention to certain rhetorical elements (logos, ethos, and/or pathos) result in an unconvincing argument?

This method proved effective because it allowed me to see common threads in feedback and to elaborate on points where students left off. Following the advice of Madeleine Sorapure in “Between Modes: Assessing Student New Media Compositions,” I evaluated projects not only on how well they met the requirements of the assignment, but also on how well they created rhetorical impact via “productive tension” between modes (from the visual, to the textual, to the auditory). In sum, my evaluations via the Learning Record grading system strove to avoid imposing a method of assessment from print essays and, rather, to connect evaluation to “everything else in the course, from the assignments themselves to the readings, the class activities, and the software we use” (Sorapure 2). In my classes, the course goals for development in research, the writing process, presentation, argumentation, and digital literacy all came together in this final project--allowing students to display their skills and to work through the essential learning dimension of confidence and independence.

The Pedagogy of LOL

Hala Herbly — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 03:00:23 +0000

Author:

Hala Herbly

Image Credit:

Cheezburger

Like most writing teachers, I like incorporating informal writing assignments into my class in order to make my students comfortable with writing casually and in the moment, without the the threat of a bad grade stifling their process. One way I've done this in my Banned Books class this semester is by requiring them to post a blog entry on the day's reading at least once during the semester. (The post is graded pass/fail, which also enables them to stretch the parameters of the assignment in any way they like.) This semester, the blogging assignment has created some interesting, and I think helpful, resonances between our material and popular culture.

I should add here that even though I believe that informal writing assignments are important, I also take care to reiterate to my class that the informality of the blogging assignment doesn't carry over into their midterm, final, and assorted short papers. These I grade pretty strictly. That's why I like the blog so much--it provides what I think is a needed counterpoint to the finality of the writing assignments. Writing doesn't always have to be fraught with anxiety.

That said, the blog posts also allow my students to incorporate other kinds of media into their thoughts on the day's reading. The assignment asks them to write a post before class summarizing the day's reading. In addition I also ask them to incorporate critical observations about the reading, connecting it to themes we've already covered, or even to our other texts. They are also required to post three to five critically substantive discussion questions to guide the day's discussion. These questions can be conceptually or thematically oriented, or they can ask the class to pay special attention to a particular scene or passage in the reading, encouraging the class to perform, together, a close reading of the passage in question. The blog posts are assigned at the beginning of the semester, and it usually works out that there is one scheduled blog post per class day. This way, each student gets to lead discussion for one day during the semester--the day's blogger has to walk us through his or her post, and explain the discussion questions.

Since they are writing in blog format, I expect them to follow "blogging conventions," which for me includes incorporating other forms of media--mostly images--into the posts. It was about halfway through our reading of The Island of Dr. Moreau that I began to notice an interesting confluence between the reading and, in particular, the images that my students chose to use in their posts.

First, some background. As most of you probably know, H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau is an early science fiction novel that dramatizes the horror of the proximity of our cruel animal natures. Dr. Moreau, an island-bound exiled vivisectionist, performs "experiments" on animals, attempting surgically to instill in them human physical and mental characteristics. The result is a grotesque menagerie of half-human, half-animal beings who both manifest the cruelty of their natures and inspire similar cruelty in their holders--Moreau and the two men who are trapped on the island with him. The idea, of course, is that it's unclear whether cruelty is inherently a human or animal instinct, and by the end of the novel we are left questioning the utility of the nominal boundary between "human" and "animal."

Here's where it gets interesting. The students assigned to blog about The Island of Dr. Moreau tended, apparently organically, to incorporate LOLcat images into their posts. Though the gesture is perhaps a bit flippant (an attitude that I don't frown upon in class, if it's in response to the content of a text--I take it as a sign of engagement) to me it suggested some kind of affinity between our cultural obsession with the comically illiterate cats and the horror of the just-barely human animals in the text. Below, a couple of examples of their images.

The first image refers to the twisted biblical allusions that the Beast-men make in their attempts to comprehend morality, and the second, whcih in our blog was captioned "A Drunken Beast," humorously reinterprets Moreau's epithet for his creations. Despite their levity, the lolcat images seemed weirdly appropriate for the text, and to me demonstrates that, even perhaps unconsciously, my students were processing the humanity/animality theme. Seen this way, their use of images suggests to me a sense of creative play with the ideas in the text, resulting in a digital archive of their personal, vernacular responses to the reading. I like to think of these posts as a collage of popular references around the complex themes in the text.

Their images were not always lolcat related. They also referenced other pop-culture phenomena, including body modification, plastic surgery, and cosplay. These images, some of which are rather shocking, emphasize the tenuousness of the human/animal divide. All depict people who, in some way, want to appear as animalistic or not human. Which led us to the question: what is the attraction of animality? In what ways can it be attractive, and in what ways can it be distasteful or even repellent?

The blog also allows them to insinuate their own political views into the post (though I don't generally tell them to do this). Below, an image in a post about The Handmaid's Tale. Needless to say these kinds of images tend to inspire interesting discussion.

At the very least, these images have led my class to make strong and unexpected connections to the popular culture they are immersed in, and allows them to make these connections in internet vernacular, in which they are very well versed. Indeed, this is a form of engagment that we teachers and writers often exhibit ourselves.