Blogging Pedagogy - course design

Game Controllers and Course Design

Scott Nelson — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 20:21:56 +0000

Author:

Scott Nelson

Image Credit:

Scott Nelson, 2013, CC BY-NC-SA

So, I've been thinking this week about controllers and controls. The Playstation 4 controller was announced, and there are some significant changes in the design that speak to the changing nature of gaming in general. The new controller has a touch screen and a color-coded light bar to identify different players. Most significant to this post, though, is the missing 'Select' and 'Start' buttons. Since the 1980s, these buttons have been standard on most game controllers, and Sony's decision to replace them with the 'Share' and 'Options' button signals a shift in video games' focus. Gamers have definitely noticed this seemingly small shift, with some making video tributes to the lost buttons.

The earliest computer games were somewhat solitary affairs -- a single human player competed against the computer. Later, with Tennis for Two, two human players could go head-to-head. Competitions in the arcade era focused on beating a high score set by another player at another time. Players had to be in physical proximity to one another to share a game. In the 1970s, though, that changed with the advent of online games where multiple players could compete simultaneously.

However, even through these changes, the basic controller signaled a particular interface with the machine. The relationship between the player and the game was highlighted. You could select from certain options and start the game. Sony's redesign shifts that relationship to one among a community of gamers. With a quick press of a standard button, gamers can share their experience with others through short screencaptures and broadcasts.

So what does this have to do with pedagogy? More than you'd initially think. My particular preferences as a gamer got me thinking about this shift and the design considerations that will surely follow. While pedagogues may not focus on these considerations, video game designers have made it a focus of significant study. Damien Schubert -- the lead designer of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Star Wars: The Old Republic -- made it the focus of his 2011 Game Developer's Conference presentation. In designing for a game genre that by definition brings many people together, how can we still make space for the "lone wolves"?

At least in gaming, I happen to be one of those loners. I have a handful of Playstation Network friends who never hear from me, as I prefer to game alone. And I think World of Warcraft is boring. There, I said it. I'm sure other gamers will say that WoW really gets good after you begin raiding with others, but I just don't prefer that kind of experience. And game designers know that there's enough people similar to me that they should design with us in mind.

The same can be said for our classrooms. Digital Media production invites collaboration, as it can be too complex for a single student's workload. However, not all students thrive with those constraints. We should be careful to nudge students outside of their comfort zones, but also be mindful of the lone wolves out there. Not all students' careers will require them to collaborate often, and some web technologies are allowing us to work together, yet separately.

One way I mitigate these different learning styles is to design unit projects with options -- students can opt for simpler, individual projects, or for more complex group projects. The pull of the larger projects tends to be their "wow" factor. Some students would just prefer to make a video over a static image.

The other way is with something I call "Nelsonslist" (after the classifieds site Craigslist). I ask students to post on the course wiki a brief introduction to both their current digital media skills and skills they'd like to pick up. Students are then invited to network with others of similar interests. Over three years, it's worked quite well. Some students form affinity groups while others express their desire to work alone.

Though Web 2.0 technologies encourage us to share more and more of ourselves online, we can't assume all who participate in these communities enjoy posting their meals, high scores, and random thoughts. Lurkers make up an important part of those ecosystems, and we'd do well to keep them in mind when designing assignments.

Online Archives and the Poetry Anthology

Delacroix — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 07:56:22 +0000

Author:

Julia Delacroix

Image Credit:

Julia Delacroix

The bottom shelf of my bookcase is dedicated almost entirely to anthologies. I’ve lugged them around with me for almost 15 years, through four cities and nine houses, and every time I move I think about tossing them. Like the set of Collier’s encyclopedias I ditched in 2001 or the Field Guides I donated in 2009, the anthologies may have outlived their usefulness.

Yes, I might have to hit up the library if I wanted to reread that excerpt from “A Key to the Language of America,” but when would I need just an excerpt these days anyway? And when it comes to teaching poetry surveys, most of the poems I’d want to teach are already online. I’ll almost certainly keep my Nortons because I’m sentimental and I’ve kept them this long and I haven’t yet mastered the concept of “sunk costs.” But I assume that my students all sell back their anthologies, and if I were an undergrad I’m pretty sure I’d do the same.

This semester I’m teaching Introduction to Rhetoric and Writing, and with my students I’m reading Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble. One of the more interesting arguments we discussed last week was the idea that the Internet has unbound the news, that most readers now get their news from articles that have been completely removed from their original context. My students and I discussed the ramifications of such decontextualization as it applies to news and civic engagement, but I’ve been wondering how it might apply to poetry as well. The Internet is packed with poems these days, and not just contemporary work. Right here at UT, professors and graduate students have built and continue to work on resources like the audiobook of the 1855 Song of Myself and The Walt Whitman Archive.¹ The Poetry Foundation maintains an impressive online collection, as does Poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets. When students access poems through these sites, they are provided with an entirely different experience than when they read poems in the chronologically-arranged Norton.

The Poets.org page featuring Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” for example, directs readers to “Related Poems” by John Ashbery and Nicky Finney that engage the tone of Bishop’s villanelle. Scrolling down the sidebar, readers find a predictably long list of “Poems about Breakup and Divorce,” and a similarly long list of “Poems About Difficult Love” before they reach a list of “Other Villanelles.” Search for “We Real Cool” on the website of the Poetry Foundation (maintained by Poetry Magazine), and you’ll find not only a recording of Brooks reading the poem (required listening for any intro. student – the “we”s that end each line getting softer and softer until, by the last stanza, they’ve disappeared entirely) but also a picture of the cover of the 1959 issue of Poetry in which the poem first appeared, along with links to other poems published in the same issue. The interesting thing is not just that these sites recontextualize individual poems, but that they do so in several ways at once. Students can find the work in different forms: draft, magazine publication, book publication, audio recording. They can see the context of first publication, or easily access critical or poetic responses to a given poem. These sites provide a useful introduction to historical, cultural, and formal criticism by encouraging students to think about the myriad ways of contextualizing poems.

My favorite aspect of the contextualization offered by these websites is that instead of locating poems on the tissue-paper thin pages of an anthology, they place them in the context of a vibrant, contemporary poetry community. Yes, you can see the cover of the June 1915 issue of Poetry that contained “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” but you can also see this month’s issue, and read Laura Kashiske’s “You’ve Come Back to Me.” You can absolutely read “To My Dear and Loving Husband” at Poets.org, but to get there you have to pass an interview with Mary Jo Bang about use of poetry in American culture, and once you do get to Bradstreet you find at the top of the screen a menu bar that with one click will locate poetry events near you.

Pariser makes a convincing case that the unbinding of news is a bad thing. Even if we flip past the front page to get to sports, we still get a quick flash of what’s going on in the world. When we read about Lance Armstrong’s doping charges on Facebook, we miss out on that. But the unbinding of the anthology might actually result in a better understanding of the world – or at least the poetry world – around us. I’ll admit that I’m not quite ready to get rid of my Nortons yet – not the ones in my house or the ones on my syllabus. They’re reliable, and they include the big names I need for a survey, and I can always supplement anyway. They’re stable, and they don’t present the same problems of access that (outside of a computer-enabled classroom) would attend a syllabus that drew its texts from the Internet. And in part it’s because, when it comes to poetry, I fall somewhere between cheeseball and luddite and I want my students to be able to read outside without adjusting their screen tint. But it is worth considering how my students will find these poems if they don't hang on to their anthologies, and how my own syllabus and individual lessons might be informed by the way these websites juxtapose poems, encouraging conversations about and between poems and poets that the chronological arrangement of the anthology keeps firmly apart.

¹I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention the amazing Paradise Lost Audiobook.

Hidden Collaboration: The Internet, Syllabi-Making, Assignment-Planning, & YOU!

Gulessarian — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 20:34:00 +0000

Author:

Lisa Gulesserian

Image Credit:

"Hidden Fire" by Azi-Isobel on DeviantArt

We’re a few weeks into the fall semester now, and I’ve just finished hammering out my assignments for E 314L: “Banned Books” using lots of in-person feedback from my peers and my teaching mentor, along with tons of help from resources on the internet. While talking about assignments and syllabi over a hot beverage with friends and colleagues is my cup of tea, the online resources I used were absolutely indispensible for coming up with the specifics of my assignments. As I planned my course, I was floored by the sheer number of pedagogical resources posted online—my post today is about this hidden collaboration amongst instructors and professors who use the internet to share and borrow lesson plans, syllabi, and pedagogical advice. In my post, I’m going to talk about my own experience in the “hidden collaboration” realm by sharing a few of my favorite sites— the English Department’s eFiles collection, the DWRL’s Lesson Plans site, and a smattering of personal instructor sites and outside-of-UT webpages.

Since eFiles is the site that we’re directed to from the very beginning of our time at UT, I won’t discuss it in detail. I’ll only say that it’s full of fantastic advice contributed by faculty, teaching assistants, and assistant instructors over the years. I used eFiles to get a feel for how much reading and how many major assignments I could feasibly assign to my students. Try it! I searched for “close reading” and I got 21 pages of results! Filtering, by course or by resource type, is the only way to navigate the site to get pertinent resources. I ended up filtering for only those results that were marked as syllabi to get an idea of how previous instructors structured their courses. After looking at the 28 contributions, I knew I could assign at least five novels to read and two essays to write. I was able to confidently move on to planning my assignments with help from instructors of years past (some whose names I didn’t recognize because they’d left the halls of UT before I was even admitted to the graduate program here!). Without even knowing it, these instructors were integral to my course’s development.

Of course, the instructors who post innovative and exciting lesson plans on the DWRL’s Lesson Plans site have helped me just as much. After a swanky redesign and the addition of archived materials from the old LP site, the new site is more user-friendly and searchable than ever. You can browse plans by type of assignment—whether it’s an in-class activity, a semester-long project, or a unit-long writing assignment—and by lesson plan content—ranging from analysis to writing process. I found it most helpful when I searched for general terms under “lesson plan content.” Under “Literature,” for instance, I found plans on blogging close readings, historical approaches to literary criticism using Internet Archive videos, and collaborative annotated bibliographies. I ended up tweaking a few of these lesson plans to create my own close reading and annotated bibliography blog post assignments (which will soon be posted on the Lesson Plans site!). I know without Pearl’s detailed explanation of the steps necessary for close reading a passage or Emily’s instructions for collaboratively writing an annotated bibliography on PBworks, my assignments this semester would have been haphazard experiments that would have taken at least another semester to hone and perfect. With the help of lesson plans posted by instructors in the DWRL (who don’t know who they will help once the assignment is posted online), I was guided through the process of creating two assignments.

Along with eFiles and the DWRL Lesson Plans site, I made use of many academic sites all over North America. At the beginning of my assignment planning, I Googled for terms like “Annotated Bibliography Assignment” and “Close Reading Paper.” Through my many searches, I found useful instructor sites and departmental resources from universities (and some high schools). The “Writing Resources” page at Harvard’s Writing Center site was one source I used to give my students practical style advice. I navigated to the University of Toronto’s Writing site to get advice for summarizing sources while identifying arguments. And of course, I used the Purdue OWL to provide students with sample MLA citations on their assignment sheets. But, surprisingly, I received a good amount of help by visiting the course sites of many instructors. From an instructor at Seton Hill University, I learned how to articulate what kinds of passages merit close reading. From a professor of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, I was introduced to books that were criticized for their historical imaginings (and which I promptly read and decided to assign in my current course). And from UPenn’s TeachWeb (a site that compiles teaching resources for English and Comparative Literature instructors), I learned about integrating peer review into my writing assignments. Without the help of savvy instructors in far-flung areas of North America, I would not have been able to craft my assignments.

Unbeknownst to the instructors that posted their lesson plans and syllabi online at the English Department’s eFiles collection, the DWRL’s Lesson Plans site, and academic sites outside of UT, I have benefitted from the information that they so freely shared. I hope that you—instructors at the University of Texas and beyond—will use and contribute just as much advice as I have!