Blogging Pedagogy - kairos

On Weather Cancellations and Digital Media Experiments

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

Author:

Lindsey Gay

Image Credit:

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.

Mapping Community

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:38:54 +0000

Author:

Matt King

Image Credit:

Augustus Koch

In my RHE 309S: Critical Reading and Persuasive Writing course at UT Austin, my students are spending the semester studying communities of their choice. The first paper asked students to "map" their community, charting the people, places, events, social practices, and issues that help the community define and organize itself while also examining arguments made about the community. This assignment resembles one of our main first-year writing assignments which asks students to map the arguments made in response to a specific critical situation or issue. Focusing on communities, however, students might examine multiple relevant issues and also texts that aren't primarily argumentative.

One of the main challenges of the paper was arrangement: how can students demonstrate the ways that the constiuent elements of a community shape and respond to one another and the ways that arguments circulate within and around the community, further affecting its contours? Stasis theory was helpful in terms of organizing the arguments made about the community, and we also spent time in class creating mind maps to conceptually organize the various aspects of our communities (the Digital Writing and Research Lab has several lesson plans outlining specific mind mapping activities and assignments). These tools were helpful but abstract, and students ultimately found another component of the assignment more helpful in terms of getting a sense for the organization and development of their communities in time and space.

In addition to the written analysis of texts by and about the community in the paper, this assignment also asked students to produce a map or a timeline using Google Maps or Dipity (you can find the assignment description here). Google allows you to overlay content onto its maps, marking locations of interest and adding annotations, links, and embedded media, and Dipity's timelines offer similar opportunities for composing multimedia texts. These digital writing environments allowed students to engage their communities and relevant texts in new and often more productive ways. Many students felt that, after working on their maps and timelines, they were better prepared to map the broader contours of their communities in prose.

For example, one of our most challenging concepts for this assignment was kairos, attending to shifting contexts over time. Students could develop a sense for ways that an argument might respond to a recent event, but beyond this, kairos was difficult to wrap our heads around. The timeline activity proved particularly helpful here, as students were able to create representations that captured how their communities had changed over time. In a quick glance, we could see how different events and developments led to shifts in a community's priorities, its place in the public sphere, its sense of stability and cohesiveness, and its broader orientation toward the world.

Looking at some of these projects in greater depth gives a sense for the opportunities made available by mapping community in multimedia spaces. A student considering the remix artist community charted a history of recording technologies, the rise of the DJ, and the spread of dance halls going back to the phonograph. What would have taken up too much time and been too broad for the perspective of the paper became an insightful overview that placed remix artists in a long tradition of social practices organized around recorded sound. A student focusing on human trafficking explored global responses to this human rights violation by attaching policies to specific locations. In her paper, this student produced the most sophisticated analysis in the class, demonstrating a nuanced understanding of the relationship between specific groups within the community, their mode of response, and place, an understanding facilitated by her ability to map these relationships on a map. A student looking at the community invested in nanotechnologies traced relevant advancements back to the use of Damascus steel in swords, a practice whose techniques "created carbon nanotube fibers within the blades, giving the swords unparalleled strength and flexibility."

Maps and timelines offer students different logics and processes of engagement, translating communities from static entities to assemblages unfolding in time and space.