Tomorrow is my next meeting about English 101. Ugh. Tonight I was planning on working on reviewing this book we think we’ve chosen for the class, and I had these notes from my last session I planned on incorporating into the document I have shared with my instructor and grant liaison, but then I could not find the file anywhere. It’s not like I have a PC where everything gets lost and is hard to search. I own a MacBookPro. I hit a couple keys and can find ANYTHING…except what I needed tonight. I came home sick today from work with what could be the flu, and so I already felt terrible when I began working after I woke up.
I’ve been reading about multimodal literacies and curriculum, and adapted some information into working course outcomes for me:
To provide students with the opportunity to develop skills for access to new forms of knowing through the language of technology.
To provide students with the opportunity to develop the capacity to speak up, to negotiate, and to be able to engage critically.
To provide students with the opportunity to negotiate a social order where cultural & national differences complement one another in an expanded cultural & linguistic repertoire through better access to a broader range of technology tools.
To provide students with the opportunity to recruit the different subjectivities, interests, intentions, commitments, and purposes that all learners bring to the composition course.
To provide students with the opportunity to understand reading and writing in multiple modes.
Right now I think they are a bit vague and may not even be easily measurable, but they are better than the direct college outcomes, like “write 3,000 words yadda yadda….” This class is less about “Writing” than it is about “Composing!!”. It’s a composition course with official outcomes that seem to have been written pre-Web 1.0. Anyway, I found the printed version of this file finally after looking for 2 hours and driving the wife crazy. Tomorrow morning I will have my TA (Thank God for TAs!) type the damn thing, and I sure I feel better than I do now so I can head over to that meeting at 5. Today I cancelled my 2-5pm meeting, which I now have to reschedule.
Today Shelley and I spent a couple hours fishing through theory, trying to build application and keeping the luddites in mind for our English 102 course build. We’ve spent almost two weeks searching for the perfect text book, but a lot of these reps don’t seem to understand “multimodal” or “Web 2.0″. They want to show us these fancy E-Book pages their publishers have made to try to get the students more interested in their books (or us more interested in trying to sell their books?). Then this week I was cleaning off my bookshelf behind my desk at work and came across Beyond Words Reading and Writing in a Visual Age. I stuck it in my bag and dragged it home. Today I pulled it out, and Shelley began flipping through it. She shoved aside the book we were considering and became very excited. This may just be the book for us!
I’ve been very interested in being to apply the theory from places like The New London Group & NCTE to some sort of framework for the course, and this book will help us do just that. The beginning chapters frame the theoretical framework of dealing with argument and rhetoric in a visual space and then we move into everyone’s favorite topic: themselves. This would lead them to first non-traditional composition, and the project in the book can be used for our module. Other modules we’re considering that fit with this idea of multimodality are on visual argumentation and mapping mashups. During a traditional online (is that oxymoronic?) course I required a portfolio toward the end that culminated their work, with some sort of reflection element.
Coming up…. Begin building the course framework in Google Docs. Share with Peggy. Begin building strong student examples we can use when discussing the course with colleagues & students. Begin fleshing out the modules, building in process steps (Web 2.0 tools anyone?), generating some assessment tools for everything.
I came across this photo while reading Liz Davis’ technology education website, and it struck me that there’s this mutation of communication online; I wonder how this fits into the framework of my class. There’s this overlapping between forums, blogs, and wikis, and I guess my reflection on each before combining them all would be in order.
When I began teaching online it was all about the discussion forums or discussion boards that I set up through MyPhpBB where my 120 high school students loved to write to one another about everything under the sun. (I lost my own Internet virginity by dialing into a local BBS when I was a kid.) Sometimes I would give very specific topics that I expected answered while other times I just let them play. I would even make areas called “This and That” that I promised to never grade. I of course lurked for my own job security and their safety. Over the next two years they would post an average of 100 posts daily. Yes, daily. This was an average of every single student posting every single day. Now that didn’t happen, but some kids would sit there all night writing and dialoguing while others would only hop on when I threatened their grades.
Then I graduated to blogs, I think that was mostly for my own narcism. I created my own blog and promised myself I would never censor it, and then after a year I asked the kids to journey with me by creating blogs for our Creative Writing class. Most did set these up, but we could never work on them at school because of the filters. Some kids stuck with it while others never ever posted. Looking back, I should’ve used RSS feeds to better monitor them. My own blog use moved back and forth between obsession and rare posts when my mother bugged me (yes, my only reader at times). I began reading a blog by Heather Armstrong who’s a former Mormon with a potty mouth and small child. She and her husband lived the life of professional bloggers. Yes, they were paid for sitting on their laptops at home all day. I loved it. I wanted it. I made a new blog. I sat around with my wife trying to pick a name, and we finally settled on Nooccar, raccoon backwards and still quite clever. It was going to be the best ever! And I’d make money, and Heather Armstrong would comment on MY BLOG! It never happened. Yes, we made the blog and we post..err I post way more regularly than my wife does, and our niche market has been diffused with all the other cool blogger parents out there. We still post and will continue to do so (Yes, Mom), but I decided I wanted to write more about the cool tech stuff I do. I have owned dcamd.com for a couple years, and it’s just been a static, rarely used Web 1.0 webpage for my work. I wanted something new, dynamic, something to be proud of. I would redo the whole thing as a Web 2.0 WordPress site! So here it is. I don’t know how many of my students actually realize that I redid the whole thing and if you go to other pages here, you will see that most of them are pretty empty. I try to post daily or every other day, but I am still learning WordPress.
Then we get to our third circle: Wikis. Okay, I will admit that as a research writing teacher, a website that the kids can just log into and change pisses me off. It makes publishing a joke, but even as I say that I know I need to make a change to my idea of publishing and of information in general. Information has become this gossamer web of philotics weaving and flitting through the atmosphere of thought. The ever changing and ever self-correcting, so I made a Wiki. I am required to use WetPaint wikis for several of my projects, so we made one for a conference. A colleague & I were presenting on online FanFiction, and we were looking for a new way to present to our colleagues. I suggested we make a Wetpaint wiki and she agreed. But she wanted to know what we print & copy. I said “Nothing!”, and after a few seconds she began to smile. She got it! We make it, add our theory and examples, and then we let our baby go out into the world. The presentation was well received. Another communication tool has worked!
In the 21st century our students mindset is that online they can be whoever they want, while at the same time they censor nothing! They are out there for anyone to see, but they hold nothing back. While discussion forums are more static, direct and anonymous, I see these linked more and more to the bottoms of wikis so people can discuss how they are collaborating, and then I see another aspect to all of this, which you are about to see, too. Pulling wiki information into a blog to generate a recorded, snapshot elsewhere on the original information. (Yes, I plan to post this to my blog AND submit it to my class Wiki). I have the above Venn Diagram open in Photoshop next to my post as I write it, and I wonder what’s in the center. What communication device goes there? What tool can we place in the very middle? And I almost want to take a simple out and talk about the learner. And then I realize that this isn’t a cop out. It is really who we need to be and who we need to help lead our students to be.
The 21st century students is the one who can take the various communicative philosophies and tailors them to their own learning by using the plethora of Web 2.0 tools that pop up on the internet every single day. Our students are more and more multi-tasking, task shifting creatures who reach out with electronic tendrils to snip pieces of information from a variety of different places simultaneously to (re)create their own meaning from everything around them all-at-once.
Our English 101 course needs to search for the medium between Student 2.0 and Student 1.0 (and of course Teacher 2.0 and Teacher 1.0). (Teacher 2.0? Ooooh, I make myself feel like a cyborg! Or a terminator! Cool!!) How do we create the course we know we need to make while still keeping it approachable to our 1.0 worlds? Something to sleep on (or in the care of my student teacher last week, on his keyboard!), I suppose.
In the Gabcast for this week a question arose about the platform for the course we’re building. Let me disclose that I wrote a grant for the course I am building, and I am co-developing it with a colleague. With that said, I prefer Google Apps as my platform (like this course), and not because I own a Google shirt (or two).
I am beginning to get better use to using Sakai, which is being piloted as an open source alternative to WebCT. During my doctoral degree at ASU I was using old school Blackboard and really liked it. I hated old school WebCT, but new school WebCT isn’t that bad. There are definitely things WebCT does that Sakai doesn’t do, like letting me see my own student login stats.
I used Google Apps last semester when I had 4 sections (Eng 101, Enh101, Eng 102 online, and Eng 102 hybrid) and Google as a search and sort engine was my friend and kept me sane. I miss my friend this spring, but people like Dr Coop at South really keeps me grounded.
Google Apps allows me to tie together gmail, gtalk, blogger, google reader, google docs, gcal, etc… and I love that it gets better everyday I log in. How Google just ties together my entire world rocks. It make like streamlined. I have no idea why anyone would not want to have a gmail account. One thing I will say though is that we’ve been asked to use Picasa for this class, which is Google’s photo database program. I have always been a Flickr man, and since I have over 2,500 pictures already there, I won’t be changing. I have also been developing in WordPress for a few months now, and, to me, Blogger rocks (and yes, I have the shirt), but WP is my new friend. Hence the site here.
My desktop is always cluttered like my workspace, and I typically have whatever I am currently work with all over the desktop. I love this picture of my 2 1/2 year old, Claire, so it’s there too. It’s almost like being naked by screencasting my desktop without editing it or cleaning it. My workspace is my coffee table, sitting on a leather green love seat. Very boring. Sometimes I sit at the dining room table or in bed.
My name is Devon Adams, and I currently teaching AP Language & Composition, American Literature, English 101 dual enrollment, Eng 101 online, Eng 102 hybrid, concurrent, and face2face here at Mesa Community College and at Basha High School. I’ve been interested in technology since 1992 when I would dial into local bulletin board systems in my parent’s basement. After completing my English degree and graduate work, we moved to Arizona and I began to blend my two loves of English & technology.
My goal here is to develop an English 101 multimodal course that can be taught face2face, hybrid or completely online, but I am interested in moving away from a traditional composition course where we no longer just “write” in a composition course. This is a course where the students will compose, and as 21st century students go that rarely concludes in formal typed papers.
