Post 3: Concerns with Technology
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.
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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.
