Intro: What can we expect from the digital 103 classroom?
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
