Blogging Pedagogy - experiential learning

Hacking (Our) Community

Beck Wise — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 06:00:00 +0000

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Beck Wise

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Beck Wise

This semester, I'm teaching 'Rhetoric of Hacking', an intermediate writing/composition class. The course title is something of a vexed topic; it was chosen to comply with the usual pattern of writing course names at UT, but it started off as 'Hacking Rhetoric', a name designed to imply that we would not just be discussing rhetoric about hacking, but also hacking rhetoric itself, transforming our own work and that of other people. I ask students to engage with the usual range of public discourse and create some of their own but, on the basis that you can't really learn without doing, I also ask them to engage in various hacking practices over the course of the semester. Not only does this give them practical insight into the idea that hacking is itself a rhetorical practice, it offers students a way to understand and experience hacking from a position of some power -- instead of viewing themselves as passive (potential) victims of hacking, they can live out some of the risks and rewards that drive hackers.

We start small and safe: use a technique from Lifehacker for a week; play around with Popcorn Maker, a tool for remixing web videos, and Hackasaurus, a tool that allows you to mirror and hack websites; complete a few lessons on Hack This Site; be a Wikipedia editor for the day (I think the most compelling takeaway lesson from that was 'Don't sign up with your real, full name if your plan is just to deface pages').

And then we go big: hack your peers.

Every student in the class has an account on the course blog, which they've been using all semester to post weekly reflections or compositions, as well as artist statements for their more out-there compositions--and when mid-October rolled around, each student was randomly assigned to hack one other student's account, then compose some kind of rhetorical intervention and replace an existing blog post with their new text. Everyone followed up with a Hacker Artist Statement, discussing their hacking process and the rhetorical effect attempted by their hack, and then a shorter Reflection, discussing the experience of being hacked; both pieces were to be posted publicly on the course blog.

When I dreamt up this assignment, it simultaneously thrilled and terrified me. On the one hand, it guaranteed everyone in the class would be able to think about hacking from a perspective of 'real' 'victimhood'; it also meant that everyone would get to undertake the kind of anonymous, public hacking that exists in the real world, where most of our previous exercises had been personal and private.

On the other ... it was tough to think of a better or faster way to destroy a classroom community and create student paranoia than by setting them all against each other, tasked with anonymously interfering with the work they've spent the semester producing.

The results were more than a little surprising. With my own paranoia about creating paranoia in full swing, I'd scheduled this month-long project quite late in the semester, hoping to establish a strong sense of trust amongst my students before beginning the blog hack. In line with my commitment to student-centred learning, I also offered the students control over the assignment parameters, while sketching out broad strokes ('everyone will hack someone, everyone will write an artist statement and a reflection, nobody will set out to hurt anyone, this is the timeline') and establishing the expectation that this assignment should not be comfortable, but neither should it be terrifying; rather, we should all feel productively uncomfortable. Everything beyond that was up for grabs and the students spent a class session establishing password guidelines, rules for preserving content, adding a deadline to offer their anonymous hackers hints. The results of that discussion -- the final assignment prompt -- are publicly available on the course website.

That session marked a turning point in the classroom environment -- and, surprisingly for me, the start of a very positive shift in the class dynamic. Students leapt to debate the pros and cons of various ideas, including students I hadn't heard a peep out of all semester. They left the class chattering keenly. When I walked into the room for the next class -- and, indeed, when I have walked in for every class since -- people have been talking, where once they were sitting quietly, absorbed in their phones or laptops. After requesting that we eliminate required comments from the course blog because they felt 'forced' and unnecessary, students started having conversations in the comments section. And classroom discussion has been amped up considerably.

Some of this, I'm sure, comes from trying to tease out the information they need to complete their hacks; one of my students wrote precisely that in his artist statement, saying:

As we were leaving class, I struck up a conversation with him regarding the absurdity of some of the password requirements we were assigned. Specifically, I noted that “there are at most 5 unique high school mascots in the entire state of Texas, those would be crazy easy to guess”, an observation with a bit of truth (it made football games in my highschool awkward when it was the bulldogs vs. the bulldogs for the 5th time in a season). As I had anticipated, Sean responded with (to paraphrase): “Yeah, there are like 10 schools with the same mascot as mine, the Wildcats”. Paydirt!

But most of the conversation I witnessed didn't turn on those very specific pieces of information that would allow the hacker access to their target's blog. Instead, students had conversations about campus events, political developments, favourite foods, their looming assignments ... community wasn't destroyed. It was created.

As my students are posting their artist statements and starting to finish their own reflections, I find myself reading and re-reading them, and thinking about my class design for next semester. Do I trust this assignment to build community again, rather than undermine it? To what extent was community there to start with? (I'm honestly aghast at the number of artist statements that lead with 'I had no idea who ... was', in a class of 18 that meets twice a week, in which I go out of my way to address people by name.) How can I administer this project differently? Can I make it MORE student-centred? MORE experiential? How can I extend that (very) productive discomfort to the semester as a whole? The only thing I know right now is -- hell yes, I am keeping this terrifying and terrific assignment.

Can I Take Your Picture? Reading Susan Sontag’s "On Photography" and the Rhetoric of Photographing Strangers

Sarah Sussman — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 11:38:17 +0000

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Sarah Sussman

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Photo for "Photographing Strangers" assignment by Josh Guerra

Coupling a reading with a hands-on lesson plan like the one that I am about to share can be tricky, and I wouldn't advocate using this particular pedagogical strategy for all texts, but Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977) seems to work well as part of an experiential lesson plan because peering into the lives of others through photographs on social media sites is what the overwhelming majority of college students spend their time doing already. The main injunction of my course, “Rhetoric of Photography,” is to put an end to passive scrolling through critical analysis, so I like this lesson plan because it asks students take up a tool that they carry every day, the camera, and to use it deliberately, mindfully, and with a cultural critic as their guide.

Preparation for this activity begins one week in advance, when I provide a carefully curated 30-page excerpt of the text. While handing out the reading I tell students that in addition to preparing to discuss the excerpt they should also select one passage in particular to write about in a blog post which will be due the following week. I tell them that I’ll give them more specific instructions the following class, but that for now they should sketch out some general thoughts and reactions to the reading. At this point, I also tell them to bring cameras to the next week’s meeting, saying that I’ll reveal what the cameras are going to be used for on the day of the activity. The mysterious call for cameras is useful for cultivating excitement about the upcoming activity.

For Sontag’s particular text, I find a de-centralized atmosphere, in which the students are made to feel like the teacher, to be most useful. To facilitate this environment, I’ll start with a broad question, like, “would you say Sontag is generally a pessimist, or an optimist when it comes to photography?” and we’ll delve into more nuanced questions from there. Once we've all shared our thoughts and students have shared their chosen passages (this is usually a 30 minute conversation), I’ll explain why they brought their cameras. They’re to go wherever they want in the space of 25 minutes, I tell them, and to use whatever strategy they devise, in order to procure a picture of a stranger. At this moment, they usually express some excitement at the open-ended possibilities and begin brainstorming strategies like so many contestants on a game show. Will they ask nicely? Use a zoom lens? Many liked the idea of pretending to be texting on their iPhones while snapping photo surreptitiously. Some form alliances, while others prefer to go it alone. The only caveat, I tell them, is that they must write about the entire experience and relate it back to a chosen passage from On Photography while incorporating what we’ve learned about rhetoric so far. Finally, their meditation is to be uploaded to our class Tumblr.

For obvious reasons, however, an assignment like this also poses numerous challenges to the instructor and the students. A lot can go wrong when you tell 23 college students to photograph strangers and upload them to Tumblr. Will they be respectful? Will they be conscientious? Is the whole process inherently voyeuristic? It’s a difficult position to be in, but according to On Photography, taking photographs is itself a precarious, and at times, an outright violent pursuit. For that reason, I try to do this assignment towards the end of the term so that students have already taken part in guided conversations about the topics of surveillance, voyeurism, and objectification that we find in On Photography. In this way, rather than giving them space to say or do something that becomes a teachable moment (read: a moment in which they might be disrespectful or hurtful to others knowingly or unknowingly), I give them tools to demonstrate their savviness to conversations we’ve already had about ethics, civic discourse, the gaze, body image, gender and sexuality, race, the precarious nature of ethnographic photography, and other subjects. Essentially, I’m inviting them to think further about social norms, culture, and how (or if it’s even possible) to photograph strangers in an ethical way.

When they have finished with their snapshots, they return to the classroom before or at the appointed meet up time with a lot to say. They’re usually eager to talk about their experience and each other’s photos. Depending on the length of the class, I will have them continue the discussion on Sontag in light of their experience (usually for about 20 minutes). The most important thing I’ve found with re-introducing students to the classroom environment is to remind them of where we left off in our discussion of the reading. A technique that I’ve found useful for connecting their experience to the reading is to immediately have them get out their notebooks and review their chosen passage from Sontag, and begin drafting an outline of their blog post (perhaps for 5-10 minutes). After they’ve done that we’re able to return as a group to the discussion in a more focused manner. In the past, when I had a 45 minute summer class, I had the students write their blog posts at home and then share them during the following meeting – I found both methods were equally efficient.

Ultimately, this hands-on approach is appealing to me because it turns what might have been an otherwise inert text into a more deeply impressed memory. When I look back on my time as a student, the lessons that I remember were the ones which I engaged with on a personal level. In particular, this assignment is designed after a photography class that I took with the inspiring Professor John Grzywacz-Gray who would lead his classes in group photo shoots and art critiques which inevitably led to remarkably productive, free-ranging discussions about the personal interests of students in the class. Because civic discourse and photography will remain with students throughout their lives, I hope the discussion that the “Photographing Strangers” activity engendered will give them the tools to continue this conversation after the semester has come to a close.

Field Trips in the College Classroom

Lindsey Gay — Sun, 29 Sep 2013 05:00:00 +0000

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Lindsey Gay

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Lindsey Gay

I can remember taking only one field trip after I left the K-12 system. Between three universities in my undergraduate and graduate career, only one lone little undergrad geology course featured an off-site learning experience as a standard part of the curriculum. Therefore, when I realized that I had the chance to take my own RHE 309K students on a field trip, I jumped at the opportunity.

Some background: I am teaching The Rhetoric of Death and Dying, a class which combines the analysis of public discourses about death with cultural and personal study. The past few weeks have comprised our unit on rhetorical analysis, and just prior to the field trip the students had been preparing for a group presentation analyzing a notable public memorial somewhere in the world. I knew when I developed the course that I wanted to combine analysis of a large-scale public memorial with analysis of small-scale private memorials, so I planned on taking my students to Austin’s Oakwood Cemetery. Oakwood is one of the oldest public cemeteries in Austin, with gravesites dating from the 1840s. It is also conveniently adjacent to east campus. My class period is also 75 minutes, which was a good length of time in which to accomplish this trip.

My students were very excited about the field trip, but I quickly found that this trip would be as much about learning how to be a responsible citizen in the world as it would be about the arguments that tombstones and cemeteries make. The week before our trip, I polled the class to see how many students had ever actually been to a cemetery. Only about half raised their hands, and of those most said they had just gone for a graveside service and had not walked elsewhere in the cemetery. They essentially had no practical experience of how to conduct themselves in such a space. We talked about constructing the ethos of a mourner as opposed to a visitor, and what it meant to maintain a respectful vocal volume and physical presence in a cemetery.

The other thing that most of my students had no experience with was taking the city bus. There is a bus stop near to our classroom on campus that takes riders directly to the cemetery in a mere 7 minutes, so I encouraged my students to take the bus with me rather than drive their own cars. When I mentioned in class that Capital Metro bus service is free for students, there were a lot of open mouths! I described how swipe one’s student ID in the payment station on the bus, and how to follow bus etiquette about not hogging two seats to yourself. I sent out an email with information about which stop and when we should meet and which bus we should take, and about half of my students (10 out of 21), accompanied me on the bus. Afterwards, the same group caught the same bus back to campus. I noticed that some of those who rode the bus with me were the same ones who expressed concerns about never having used a city bus system before, so I was glad that they stepped out of their comfort zone into this real-world activity.

At the cemetery, students split into assigned groups and I gave everyone a Cemetery Scavenger Hunt worksheet I created. I wanted this assignment to be about more than just finding interesting things at the cemetery, so I designed the worksheetto reflect on the types of arguments students found on tombstones and in the general situation of the cemetery and its parts. While I wandered on my own taking pictures of the groups and the cemetery, I kept an eye on my students and checked in with each group every now and again. Everyone was working their way through the scavenger hunt; no one littered, engaged in horseplay, or moved any personal objects lefts at gravesites; every group I checked in with had their own favorite tombstone or family plot. They enjoyed speculating on the histories of some of the families buried in Oakwood and hypothesizing why some grave markers were so much smaller and closer together than others. When they saw the stark difference between the white section of the cemetery versus the “colored” grounds, they discussed what arguments were created by the lack of durable gravestones and non-central placement of that section of the cemetery.

Overall, my first foray into fieldtripping was a success. I wanted my students to interact with rhetoric in the real world and on a smaller, more intimate scale than indicated by their group projects. They considered not only the written rhetoric of epitaphs and inscriptions and the visual rhetoric of common figures and images carved into the stones, but also the rhetoric of experience. Walking around a quiet, grassy, semi-wooded space filled with other people’s memories creates a rhetorical situation in and of itself. I was glad not to lose track of anyone in the cemetery or on the bus, and it turned out to be a good lesson for everyone in rhetoric, planning, responsibility, and appropriate behavior. Learning does indeed continue outside of the classroom.