Possibly the most interesting topics of discussion in our 885 class this semester have involved the various uses of technology in the composition classroom. This is a topic that builds on some of the things that I have been interested in over the last couple years. As a high school teacher, I spent a lot of time exploring how to implement online technology into my classes, and I had a lot of success not only in my classroom, but also in giving presentations to other teachers on how to implement those technologies in their classrooms. So when we start to consider how the internet can be used as a tool for Clemson’s English 103 class, I really feel that the possibilities are limitless. Clemson has created an environment where computer technology is readily available to all students, and 103 is especially adaptable to experimenting with the new forms of discourse that the internet provides. I’d like to use this project, and the following series of posts to explore some of things that would make up an ideal digital classroom within the confines of the Clemson English 103 program.
Clemson students are in a great position when the first arrive on campus to experience what it means to be digitally literate in an online world. Each new student is required to have a laptop, and many of them are required to take those laptops to class. Students also have access to a number of computer labs around campus, including more specialized labs in each department. For their English courses, the Studio on the 1st floor of Daniel has a wide variety of computer software for students to use. Even with all this technology available to them, our students still may feel lost when asked to complete an assignment involving technology that they aren’t familiar with. And this is often surprising to the instructor, who has come to believe that these incoming students should be “Digital Natives” and are thus much more familiar with computers than they actually may be.
I’d like to examine that term, “Digital Natives,” for a moment. First of all, I like it a lot. I think it goes a long way towards explaining a large cultural shift that is taking place within the realm of technology. I even have a post on this site, also written for 885, where I talk about my history with computers, and how I believe that I am a digital native. Our students, first years, are (most of the time) even more comfortable with using computers than I was as a freshman. So it is easy to give an assignment that requires the creation of a blog or managing a Google doc and assume that our students will know how to do it. In many cases, this is a valid assumption. Our students have their Facebook or Myspace sites, and they know how to use the web for a number of services…much more so than people who would consider themselves “Digital Immigrants,” at least. But as I use more and more types of technology in the classroom, I start to see more than just a black and white distinction between “Digital Natives” and “Digital Immigrants.” There seems to be another category that seems much more applicable to our students: “Digital Tourists.”
Like the map I linked to in my earlier post, students who may be natives of the Facebook nation may not be familiar enough with the Blogipelago, so they have to move slowly through it like a tourist–asking for directions, looking for the current Fodor’s guidebook, and commiting various cultural faux pas. If we, as instructors, are going to introduce our students to new styles of writing and communicating online, we’re going to disregard some of the assumptions that tie into the terms “Digital Native” or “Digital Immigrant.” In some areas of technology, we are neither completely native or completely foreign, we are simply tourists and we all have to learn as we go along, teacher and student alike.
This series of posts will focus on some specific topics that go along with the idea of a digital classroom. I suppose I should define that term, in order to avoid later confusion. A digital classroom is one in which the students are able to cohesively integrate the lessons they learn in their face-to-face classroom environments with an online classroom community, made up of blogs, collaborative writing tools, and other social uses of technology. This ideal classroom would be made up of students who creatively engage the realms of rhetoric and argument using all tools available, both online and off. The instructor’s role in this class would be to encourage students to seek out new and applicable uses of technology to fulfill their rhetorical goals, moderate the ongoing discussion taking place within the online community, and provide the students with physical classroom environment that acts as a staging point for learning and engaging in composition and rhetoric.
And with that definition in mind, this series of posts for this project will discuss some of the issues that come to mind when thinking how a digital classroom can work. This introductory post will also serve as kind of a table of contents for the rest of my work, so without further ado, here are my topics of discussion.
In this post, I will talk about what makes a blogging assignment work, because in many cases, the blogs that are created by students are really nothing more than glorified web pages, because they don’t involve the level of community that good blog writing should.
This post will deal with the varying aspects of multimodal media, and how our students can use the many tools available to them on the web to creatively engage in multimodal rhetoric.
This post will deal with some of the concerns that are present when using technology in the classroom: privacy, copyright, and the whole digital tourist conundrum.
I wanted to close off this discussion with a look at what our students can do when they are at their creative best when engaging their rhetorical abilities with the online tools available to them.
The final element of this project will involve a podcast at the end of each post in this series that details my Jerry Springer-like final thoughts on the topics. That will do it for this post, so goodbye!
I would like to put forth the idea that a blog is not merely a place for the blogger to write his thoughts. In my opinion, the most important aspect of a blog (and there are many) is the ability for the blog to become a part of a community. Hyperlinking, commenting, trackbacking, and other community-based tools are the keys for a blog to become more than simply a website. That level of interactivity inherent in a blogging community is exactly what makes blogs so exciting (and scary). Before we go any further, here is a great video, that explains exactly what blogging is…
There. Its all so simple now, isn’t it? And yet it becomes extremely complicated when we try to establish a blog for a writing class. What I’ve found is that there are a few ways to do this, and the most common are The Corporate Blog, Individual Student Blogs, and the MotherBlog. Each of these methods has something positive going for it, and we’ll spend some time talking about them.
The Corporate Blog
This is one website with multiple student authors. The instructor acts as an administrator, but each student has the ability to post to this one blog. This works pretty well if the students aren’t going to be required to create specific assignments for the class, but may not be individualized enough to really allow students to creatively experience the full potential of blogging.
Individual Student Blogs
Each student publishes and customizes an individual weblog. The instructor visits each student blog to observe and comment on the work done. This is possibly the most free-forming, but students can get lost in this assignment if they don’t have enough direction or if a solid community has not been established.
The Mother Blog
The instructor and each student sets up a blog. The instructor’s acts as sort of a highlight reel for the classroom. The instructor comments on and links to a few student posts each week. Students are encouraged to visit and comment on the instructor’s site. Each student site has a link on the instructor’s blog.
Each method has its positives and negatives, but only the MotherBlog seems to establish both the individuality that a blogging student needs and a central communal location to establish the blogging network. And if establishing a blogging community is the goal of a 103 blogging project, I would take that a few steps further. But that requires a really neat piece of technology called RSS.
What exactly is RSS? Well, it just so happens the folks at CommonCraft have a video for that too!
There, it all makes sense, right? Well, maybe. But what good is an RSS feedreader with class blogs? To give an example, here’s what my public RSS reader page looked like for this past semester. As you can see, I’ve separated my students into their sections, providing a link to each student blog. By clicking on the names in the left-hand column, anyone can view posts made by the students. Trying to encourage a blogging community for my students, I gave them this link so that they could read their classmate’s blogs, comment on them, and link to them. It sort of worked.
I talked about this with my mentor, Dr. Young, and we had a great conversation about the various things that can be done to establish a blogging community. He saw my RSS feed, and almost immediately came up with a way to improve it. The classroom subheadings are too big. Students can easily get lost by looking at a selection of 18 other students, but if that subsection is made smaller…perhaps creating groups of 5 or 6, students will be much more willing to read the postings of their groupmembers and contribute to their discussions. I will most likely take Dr. Young’s advice in the future when I set up these blogging projects with my classes.
I’ve also looked around at some of the thoughts posted by my own classmates, and I’d like to talk about some of them here.
Even though Jonathan was discussing a different topic within his series of blog posts on visual rhetoric, I believe he hit the nail on the head within his reflection post. Jonathan said:
“As a wrap-up to my discussion of visual rhetoric, I would like to consider a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play The Devil & the Good Lord. The character Nasti says: “My brothers, we have no need of priests; any man can perform the rite of baptism; any man on earth can grant absolution; all men may preach. I tell you truly: all men are prophets, or God does not exist” (18). This quote, while perhaps not entirely relevant to the argument I am making about the inevitability of visual rhetoric and its applicability to today’s student, serves as a nice metaphor for the consideration of the rhetor as the one responsible for serving as a “gatekeeper” of meaning. If all students possess the power to construct arguments, if it is not a holy rite reserved only for the elite, then these students must also take responsibility for making sure they are not misleading their audience to erroneous conclusions by setting up arguments based solely on sentimentality and bathos.”
This, to me, is one of the keys to blogging–the idea that students now hold the keys for creation of meaning. That is an exciting and challenging idea for both teacher and student, as it implies a standard of quality in each work that is constantly expected, because students are constantly writing for an audience. Tess also touched on the ideas of blogging and audience in the conclusion to her post from last spring.
“When considering the actual quality of the work the students are producing it seems the most important factor was audience. The atmosphere is what is crucial. As long as a certain standard is set and maintained, there is no real reason to think students would not post quality work. Martindale found that students began to post longer and in some cases extra assignments. Clearly this article demonstrates that Blogs can be an effective learning tool that students may even enjoy using!”
I think Tess nailed it with that thought. Students will write better when they know they have an audience waiting to read their work. Jonathan’s take supports this with the notion that students must also be considerate in the nature of their arguments, making sure to present fully balanced ideas to their audience, and not resort to cheap emotional appeals.
And thus we get to the crux of the situation. Blogs in the classroom are useful in a number of ways, but in the end it boils down to a few significant aspects–audience and community. By establishing a community of discourse, in which our students know that their work will be read by their peers, students will have a sense of purpose to their online rhetoric and argument, hopefully improving the quality of their writing. I look forward to seeing how I can improve what I’ve done with blogging in my classroom next semester.
Something that I have pondered over ever since the final project was assigned was this term “multimodal.” And as the dictionary, rather helpfully, provides “having more than one mode,” I suppose I’m on my own to solve this puzzle. What I’ve tried to do with this blog is to be multimodal in style and content, and by that, I mean I’ve tried to use multiple styles of discourse including text, hypertext, video, and audio. And if that’s the definition, then I believe I’ve succeeded.
So what?
Does writing a piece of multi-modal discourse help my students? How does this apply to what they can accomplish within the 103 classroom? Well, the short answer to that last question is that it universally applies to what they can accomplish. In 103, we are encouraging our students to form arguments and write in multiple literacies, and projects that are multimodal in nature reflect that. I’ve tried to show my students multiple examples of multimodal literature, ranging from creative advertisements to movie trailers, and I think that they get the idea. But what I wanted to do with this blog post was look at some of my personal favorite examples.
I am becoming increasingly fascinated with how people tell stories. I’m an avid reader of Neil Gaiman, and I appreciate the way that he describes himself as a storyteller first, comic book writer and novelist second. His work absolutely reflects that idea, and I completely respect it. Telling stories is an important part of nearly all human cultures, and I find it especially interesting to see how that has changed in the digital age, where we have what amounts to a kind of interactive storytelling. This interactive storytelling may take many different forms, but the two that I have the most experience with are ARGs and videoblog storylines.
The ARG that I played was part of an advertising campaign for the movie A.I. It turned into a wide-ranging and very addictive online game. I still remember the strange feeling of receiving a recorded phone message from one of the game characters, and helping solve the clues that advanced the game to its final conclusion. The trailer was posted on Aintitcool.com and within a couple days, a Yahoo Group had been formed (I read in the group for a few days before joining, but was still among the first to really take part, joining within a week of its creation), and a few other web sites had been created for those of us attempting to solve the murder of Evan Chan. The site Cloudmakers.org provides a detailed analysis of the game itself and how it all went down. But it all started with a mysterious credit in the first trailer for the film A.I., where they listed a phone number and the rather odd credit for a “Sentient Machine Therapist” named Jeanine Salla, and the search was on.
While I’ve spent some time in my classroom discussing inventive forms of advertising as a method of rhetoric, this Alternate Reality Game devised by the promoters of A.I. changed the way web advertising worked. And while the game rarely even touched on the events of the movie, it did take place within the film’s world, and it helped build word of mouth and excitement for the film. It also was successful on another front, as the game company that created “The Beast” (as the A.I. game was later known) were also preparing to release an ARG of their own, that would require participants to pay to play. But I think what interested me most in this project was how it was so involving for the audience, and it really felt like what we were doing was changing the story. And according to the puppetmasters of the game, we actually were. As an answer to the question on how significantly the players changed the game, the puppetmasters responded:
Tons. Players spotting typos were responsible for two entire characters (Jeanine’s crabby AI and the elusive Jason Fertors). Players spotting a re-used stock photo forced us to write The Step-Self thread.
Players also voted with their interests. The Red King was a random GK flunky as outlined and wasn’t supposed to be mentioned past the first week. But the web developers threw in a cool sound file on the Shado Paj, the players reacted, and a star was born! (The down side being of course, that we had to rewrite the story each time RK had a part.)
We had a variety of ideas about how the Loki problem might get solved, none of which involved a dream database, but once it was there, what a resource!
Our original plan for the game was quite different from the final product, which was written on the fly (in between marathon bug fixing-sessions and orange juice binging). That wonderfully dynamic interplay is entirely due to the players.
I just think that is incredibly cool, and it really opens up a lot of paths for true multimodal storytelling. I’m not sure how it can be adapted within the realms of a classroom, but it does make for an interesting study.
Over the last year or two, another example of online interactive storytelling has taken youtube and the current web-going community by storm, and that is the story of LonelyGirl15. What started out as seemingly another in the long line of teenage videobloggers on Youtube evolved into a video series of over 370 episodes, each adding to a story involving a terrifying cult and some innocent teenagers trying to escape it. This story took on a life of its own as viewers started noticing small clues in the videos that this wasn’t actually a real girl, and that there were some pretty strange things on the walls of her typical teenage room, including shrines to Aleister Crowley and various other symbols. As Bree explained her situation in regards to her religion, strange things started happening to her in regards to a ceremony she would need to be a part of. The forums of the site had people trying to figure out more and more info related to the show, as well as the ARG spinoff, until the finale of season one when Bree was killed by The Order.
Similar to the A.I. game, the audience influenced the direction of the video through their interactions with Bree’s Youtube account and the forums at lg15.com. All of it added up to an exciting interactive storytelling experience.
These are just a couple of interesting examples of how the internet can be an almost limitless tool in the realm of storytelling. And what is even more interesting for the 103 instructor is that these ideas can be translated into the field of argument and rhetoric, especially with the development of an online writing and blogging community.
When creating a digital classroom, a few concerns with the use of technology obviously come to mind, and I want to talk about some of them here. And for me the big question revolves around how we actually introduce our students to the forms of technology they will be using in class. Are we teaching rhetoric and argument or are we teaching the technology that our students will use to create their arguments? After all, this is English 103, not CompSci 103.
But there is something to the idea that our students need to have at least some level of instruction in the confusing realms of the Internet Social Network world, but is that to come at the expense of valuable writing instruction and rhetorical practice? I’m not sure. I think it is important that my students are as prepared as they can possibly be to contribute to whatever online activities that the class involves, but I also think that the best way to learn how to do something is to simply do it. There are probably limits to this sink or swim thought process in regards to using technology in the classroom, but there are definitely ways to get around them. Involving groups of students, combining those that may not be as comfortable with technology with those that are is at least one thing that I’ve done in the past when presenting students with an assignment involving computer technology that students are unfamiliar with.
And so this question of digital tourists, immigrants, and natives is something will continue to be a problem within the classroom. All students are not going to have equal access to computer technology, and so the chance of asking a student to do something they have no experience with is pretty close to 100%. But students can adjust and learn and a lot of that responsibility rests with the instructor. So what is the balance? I’ve found that I can be pretty constantly available for technical questions from my students through email. We do the basic things in class, and through office hours and email communication, I can provide whatever support my students need to get their projects off the ground. This balance can really only happen when there is a valid digital community present within the classroom.
Another area of trouble can easily arise in the classroom when the issue of copyright comes up. We’re encouraging our students to create pieces of visual rhetoric, and they may not always use copyrighted material correctly, and this conversation inevitably comes up. The issues related to Copyright and Educational Fair Use is something that I’ve started to pay attention to recently, and it is a topic that is important for our students to learn about and address. One of the ways I’ve done this is by showing this really impressive video done by students at Stanford University.
This video proves its point through both the form and content. By creating the video with short clips of Disney cartoons, the creators exhibit their own interpretations of fair use, and they do it in a pointed manner. Disney is a company that aggressively pursues any copyright violations, almost to the extreme. And so this video tackles the argument right at its very heart. My students loved this video when I showed to them, and I think it helps teach an important lesson…something that is needed when they start to do their own projects that may need to use copyrighted material. They know that they can be protected with educational fair use for parodies and various other reasons, leaving them free to contribute to the general idea of a mashup culture that is becoming popular these days.
Without the exceptions for parody and educational fair use, students would be unable to do work like these two excellent parody videos.
and
As great examples of video mashups, these two fake trailers reflect a growing trend in digital rhetoric: creating something new from something old. This ties in with some of the oldest ideas of literary theory, as Roland Barthes said in his essay on “The Death of the Author,” that “a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” With this in mind, this concept of “remix culture” is something that is as old as literature itself. Explaining this idea to our students is important, but they have to understand it within the context of the current overaggressive copyright environment.
That should do it for this post. Next time, I’d like to talk about what our students are actually doing, and what they can aspire to do.
Hi! Welcome to my Blog! My name is Scott Bevill. I'm an English grad student at Clemson University, and I'll be using this blog to write about some of my experiences from teaching, studying, and whatever else comes to mind. Thanks for stopping by!
