Students Generating online communities

November 22, 2008

Students Generating online communities: How they teach us & how that shapes pedagogy by js Miller. (Check out her LBST 499 @ english.iup.edu/sjmiller)

Miller began by having us examine the spaces in which we inhabit. The room we were sitting in was very neutral and drab. Moving into her discussion, she began discussing how she sends her students out into the world to find culture to which they can respond. (Side not: she seems pretty savvy, but she uses overheads?!)

How can students effectively synthesis classroom learning in groups in an online environment? What is the efficacy of such skills to first space (Soja, 1996), the read and concrete spaces, in their lives? Online communities are third spaces. She has students develop abilities to critically read spaces through color analysis, archetypal analysis, spatial mapping, critical literacy, literary criticism, and the application of course discussions and readings. She begins by defining pop culture with the students. She’s at IUP, so one of the groups on which they focused was sports fans (Steelers, Penguins, etc…). Another was Bar Culture, including gay bars & rural bars.

She said we live in a “remix culture”. They all have wikis, and they have to go online and rework each other’s spaces. She’s talking about the makeup of the class, and how it mutated in the class itself. The students were required to go further and further into certain spaces, and explore how popular culture creates subcultures such as raves, goths, punks and counter cultures. The students became cognizant of relationships among disciplines and consider the advantages and disadvantages of both.

The class required students to create a blog, complete observational reflections, attendance at 5 popular culture events, build a wiki, write a synthetic essay, and obviously attend and participate in the course.

She showed us the course blog (blogger), and how she would post blog questions, and then the students would post comments. The next site was a geocaching wiki from her students; and some of that work is found under “placesspacesandposers” through pbwiki.com. Someone in the audience was worried about students “breaking” each other’s wikis. Miller said the expectations are laid out earlier in the class. The second wiki she showed was from Pegasus, a gay dance club in Pittsburgh and discussed the group of students who were comparing the economy of bar culture and contrasting that space with a rural bar in Indiana, PA.

Curricularly, she uses Baudrillard’s Simulacra & the Encyclopedia of Youth Culture. Now it seems like they’re moving into a Q&A, and some people look like their heads are popping off.

Posted in NCTE, conferences, culture