Blogging Pedagogy - public

Researching Public Issues with Twitter

Kendall Gerdes — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 17:21:41 +0000

Author:

Kendall Gerdes

Image Credit:

Class Twitter account, @rhetoric306, with Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students (5th ed.) as background

I ask my RHE 306 class, Rhetoric and Writing, to focus their writing for the semester around a single public issue. I want students in my class to concentrate on the kinds of disagreements that, however intractable, demand a response. So I ask them to frame their issues as policy questions. As we near the time when I ask students to begin researching their issues in earnest, I've been looking for ways to improve my lesson on library research.

I usually tour students around the library website, walk them through different resources, databases, and ways to search the library site. I also like to give them an article that cites it sources and show them how to track down these sources' originals. They tend to come away from this exercise as big fans of Google Scholar—probably because it's not too far away from what for most of them is already their primary research tool: Google.

Incorporating Your Own Research

Because I allow my students to select their own topics for the semester, I often get a wide range of mostly current public issues. I'm not a news junkie, but I could be, so I restrict my news intake to my favorite cable news podcast and to Twitter. That usually gives me some broad knowledge about the kinds of topics my student choose. As I set my students to in-class exercises like practicing summaries, I like to bring in articles I find that relate to students' topics and maybe challenge their established ways of thinking.

Where do I find those kinds of articles? Well, Twitter. I've been on Twitter (@kendalljoy) for about 5 years, and because I like to read everything I've missed since the last time I checked Twitter, I like to keep the list of people I follow relatively small and manageable. That means I unfollow people I don't read carefully and add new followers only when they have consistently interesting tweets.

Twitter for Instant Research

I only just realized I've been depriving students of one of my own main research tools: Twitter. Yes, they need to learn to do scholarly research using the library resources, but this kind of research often leads to useful finds on an issue's background and history, or to relatively refined opinion writing that's been through a slower editorial gatekeeping process. They need all that. But sometimes they can't distinguish it from anything else they'd find online: daily news, blogs, etc. But that kind of up-to-the-minute material is useful, too, especially when students are writing about issues that are even now the subject of public debate and new policy proposals: gun control, immigration reform, abortion restrictions, and the like.

I'm developing a lesson plan to teach my students to conduct research with Twitter. (In a few weeks, I'll post it to the DWRL's Lesson Plans site) What I envision is a class Twitter account (@rhetoric306) and an initial requirement of a professional Twitter account (I'll allow students to use personal account but invite them to create a fresh start if they'd like); a proposed hash tag for class tweets that is short, unique, and informative; and a tweet introducing one high-quality Twitter account relevant to their topic that they'd like the class to follow. The goal will be to get students to help each other conduct current research even as they learn to distinguish between the kinds of material they'll find informally online and the more academic resources they'll need to get through the library.

Twitter Dreams

I've been looking for ways to incorporate more digital and social media into my classes, but I can be choosy about fitting the form to the lesson. I'm excited about using Twitter to teach public issues research because it feels both a little technologically adventurous and because its germane to the classroom topic. My hope is that my students will invent ways of using our Twitter network to help each other and to write that I haven't been able to anticipate.

Meanwhile, I'm drawing up guidelines to help them formally learn to use the medium and to maximize Twitter's research potential. I can already imagine the conversations we'll provoke about commonplaces, expertise, journalistic reporting versus opinion writing, and invention in 140 characters. Are you using Twitter in your classroom? What are the issues you'd want a lesson plan to address? What resources have you found for students using Twitter in class? Tweet your answers to me @kendalljoy!

Student PUBLIC-ation

Megan Gianfagna — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:55:10 +0000

Author:

Megan Gianfagna

Image Credit:

Vitaminsea

I’m teaching RHE 309K - Rhetoric of Going Viral this year, a course dedicated to the study and design of digital texts in the public realm. The final project asks students to create a digital text designed to participate in a particular online conversation and publish it in an appropriate venue. Last semester, I had a student with the digital composition skills to create any number of smart and engaging final projects. Instead he opted to write a product review and post it to an online retail site. The review was thoughtful and tailored well to the rhetorical situation. But the reasons he gave for not creating a video or visual meme—that this was the only opinion and format he felt comfortable making public—has had me thinking about what I’m really asking of my students when I require them to send their projects into public digital spaces.

This semester I noticed an opposite but equally thought-provoking behavior among my students. I gave them the option of using Storify to create and publish their first essay for the course, a platform I used last semester to help them outline their Mapping a Meme essays. It struck me that every student that used Storify set up a profile that included a username close to their full legal names and uploaded a picture to their account. When I opened their stories, the first any of them had every created with the platform, I was greeted with glimpses into some very “personal” moments captured in the profile images.

The Storify platform made for such successful essays that I’m considering making it a mandatory composing and publishing platform in the future. However, I’m wondering if the amount of discussion around privacy issues and ethos I already have built into the course is sufficient. In addition to examining students’ ethos in online venues like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, I try to demonstrate for them the lasting imprint the texts they post have on the all-knowing Internet—how they can’t necessarily take back the things they post, even the most personal images. After all, publishing online demands that they understand what they can control and what rights they are giving up in the digital space. I find Chris Clark’s blog post “Taking Steps to Respect Student Privacy in Public Work” useful in meeting this goal, as he outlines some key strategies that students can use to address privacy concerns.

I do believe that having students publish work online provides an excellent opportunity to discuss privacy and connect those discussions to their personal online activities in immediate ways. Through my editorial work with The Journal for Undergraduate Multimedia Projects (TheJUMP), I am lucky to read other instructors’ multimedia assignment descriptions regularly and see the work their students produce, and often publish online, in response to the prompt. These kinds of assignments can work beautifully, particularly when they are accompanied by rationale for rhetorical choices and reflections on the production process. If I’m going to continue to require my students to participate in public, online conversations through their coursework, I need to give them more robust opportunities to reflect on and react to what that means for them both personally and professionally.

The truth is that I don’t want to give up these kinds of assignments. If anything, I’m working to make them a more integral part of my courses. I think that teaching rhetoric through the lens of civic and cultural engagement is valuable if not unavoidable, and digital composition offers some exciting ways of engaging students and helping them develop twenty-first century literacies. Having students write to a “real” rhetorical situation is a common pedagogical practice based on the belief that it helps students see the implications of their work on an audience outside the classroom and helps them see how they can apply their analytical and writing skills more broadly. But requiring digital publication is arguably different than having students send a letter to their Congressperson or write a letter to the editor for a local paper. The Internet keeps a record that we can’t necessarily edit later, though there are ways to make ourselves more or less visible. I don’t know that most students get a chance to discuss these issues in their other courses, and in that way rhetoric and writing courses can fill a unique and necessary role. As Google and others implement new privacy polices, I hope the conversation around student privacy will continue to evolve. Staying up to date on these changes can be challenging, but keeping a dialogue going among educators and having open discussions with our students about the implications of the assignments we’re designing are important steps.