Teacher 2.0 » cccc

CCCC Presentation: A(Re)mediating Social Technologies

dcadams — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 01:44:41 +0000

A(Re)mediating Social Technologies

Laura J. Gurak (Chair), Dawn M. Armfield (“On the Go: Mobile Technologies and Literacy”, Daisy Pignetti, “What are you doing? Teaching with Twitter!”, Kimberly A. Schultz (“Social presence in the online writing classroom: is student customizable content an answer?”)

At the next panel now, and I am pretty excited. Looks like a good group of presenters up front. Armfield is talking about mobile pedagogy. Scott Campbell is writing on using mobiles in the classroom, and research shows this is not an uncommon occurrence. We’re talking about mobiles & iPod touch/iPhones. She’s talking about how a one time fee to buy an iPod touch then wifi is used to connect wherever you are. Olga Cariff said that a well done cell phone with a keyboard may replace laptops in classrooms. Using laptops in classes is less engaging than mobiles because the monitor screen is between student and teacher. How else do we engage the students and make meaning of pedagogy with their phones? An argument is that students may be writing more, but are they writing well. Armfield asserts that they are, and I would agree. Albeit I personally teach AUDIENCE so they know how to write which ways when they write in those ways. When using all attributes that mobiles have, we have a full mulit-modal tool. (Texting, Image, Video, etc…) These lead to great mashup projects just using these small devices. “Digital kids” are creating a new digital literacy by trying out new online identities and really do consider what they’re doing in online spaces. Here the learner is also the teacher & producer. This is really important for the students as owners of their creations.

Pignetti is talking Twitter now. Awesome. Love the stickers on her computer. She’s interested in Twitter in crisis situations (e.g. post Katrina). She uses Twitter for public journaling with her students. At her university, it’s a laptop campus. She said her students are also FB addicts. With Digital Natives, these kids do not any other way of life albeit Pignetti said many of these students are returning students who are not DN. She uses LeFever’s video and the Daily Show to teach Twitter, and, tongue in cheek, she said Twitter is blogging for lazy people. She has some great information and I will have to wait for the electronic version.

Kimberly Schultz is up now, and I swear I know her. She’s talking informal social media to enhance pedagogy. The key is “informal” here. Schultz is talking about “spoken text” and the intersection between speech, writing and technology. Laura Gurak is beginning a discussing with Schultz about iTunes U at their university. They’re talking about universities who are trying to make their own “itunes u” rather than using the real thing, and how they don’t work very well. They’re suggesting that 75% of students today have online presences somewhere.

Overall great presentation!

CCCC Presentation: Emerging Technologies, Cyborg Futures? Human Rights & Literacy.

dcadams — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 01:40:17 +0000

Emerging Technologies, Cyborg Futures? Human Rights, and Literacy

Melissa Knous (Chair), Beatrice Quarshie Smith “Identities, Literacies, and Cyber Work”, Liz Canfield, “Cyborg Theories, Meatspace Realities: How Technology Can “Make Waves” in the First-year Writing Seminar”, Bonnie Orzolek

Smith (bbsmith@ilstu.edu) is working on identities and literacies and has been in Uganda for 5 years, and she’s looking for online and offline identities and what they mean for literacy technologies. So far she’s sharing information about Ugandan women working in transnational companies, and, in that workspace, how do these women use literacy? The medical transcriptions they make holds to a certain specific language that they need to use to do their jobs. Also, they have aglicized their names for their work on call centers. Smith said that “relationship between the materials and the imagined. The works are far removed physically from the transnational “home site” of companies.” These virtual identities force them to become more than one person: their offline and online identities.Through the call center they appropriate a western culture even though they never leave Uganda. Most of the learning comes from experiences only in Uganda and no formal education.

Next up at Orzolek and Canfield on Cyborg Theories & Meatspace Realities. So what the heck in meatspace? Now Bonnie’s talking Donna Haraway. Cool. Biology in technological. There’s no entological separation between biological and technological. She’s talking about Katherine Hale’s idea of posthuman, and I think she’s lost a lot of people in the room. It’s ok because she’s not lost me. By using blogs in first year composition, the issues with dominant discourses have seeped through. One of them is the social connections online and with these communities they hoped to increase self-esteem of students. She mentioned an article on Viewing Class division through Facebook and said that FB is cleaner and more esthetically pleasing. Some people use both FB and MySpace because they can have a dichotomous identity. (e.g. SciFi Geek Nerd on FB and dominatrix on MySpace). An analogy: FB is like IKEA. MySpace is like what…. KMart, maybe?)

Now the other lady’s talking and she said by connecting online via blogs is to establish friendship networks. By prodding she tried to encourage weekly writing online and hoped those connections would spill into the traditional classroom. She had several assumptions about classroom versus social online, which were many times inaccurate. At times talk from classes spilled into the online space, though. Recently, a Chronical of Higher Ed author (missed the name) said we needed to give more guidelines on how to blog for class. What?! This is crazy. If I assess a blog, they they write for ME, the professor. If I don’t assess it, they write for THEMSELVES. This is better for me. It’s like the student in my class who will read everything as long as I don’t assign it; when I tell her to read something, she won’t.

She’s telling us how a lot of students won’t think they’re writers because formally they struggle, but online in blogs and FB, they’re prolific writers! Kids don’t like to write in high school or college, but they’ll post online all day long. How can we connect between online writing and offline writing? Do we really need to connect them, or not?

Now they’re talking about how if blogs are assigned, they don’t want to do it. But they will write on their own all of the time. They resist the pedagogical nature of blogging. These presenters seem to be talking about how to teach Web 2.0 rather than how to teach their CONTENT in that frame. I’m note sure they’re quite where they’re suppose to be, and there’s a fine line between content and tool that needs to be addressed.

A question from the audience is how do they handle private versus public in the frame of the university. One presenter “requires” them to blog 2x a week (I put requires in quotes because I’m not down with this idea of force). Blogging is 20% of her course grade. How do you assess this, is asked? They say they do different types of assessment. Self-assessment, peer-assessment (peer reading groups), and instructor assessment). Mostly they want the students to engage online.

My problem I think is that these instructors are trying “to give students agency”. How the hell can we give agency? We can’t, and this is bothering me. And with that, sorry but not the best session.

Presentation: What is Web 2.0?: Innovate, Assess, Sustain: Writing Pedagogy and Web 2.0″

dcadams — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:45:02 +0000

Presentation: What is Web 2.0?: Innovate, Assess, Sustain: Writing Pedagogy and Web 2.0″

Presenters: Tony Atkins, Alisa Cooper, Matt Davis, Kate Hagopian, Susan Cochran-Miller, Colleen Reilly, and Shelley Rodrigo.

First workshop of the Conference for College Composition and Composition in San Francisco, CA is about applying technology applications and their use and connection within pedagogy. Reilly is introducing the workshop and operationalizing “Web 2.0″ now according to Murugesan (2007): “defies a widely agreed-upon, concise definition-perhaps because the underlying phenomenon is huge.” Web 2.0 is all about “remediation”. For example, dictionary taxonomy is now tagging, personal websites are now blogs, mp3.com is now Napster, Brittanica Online is now Wikipedia, according to the slide. I don’t necessarily agree with some of the tool comparisons here; it’s less about the NOUN of the tool. Rather, it should be about the VERB of the tool. I wonder if there’s a more recent example than O’Reilly’s from 2005 (per the citation). Now she’s talking about “mashing”, which we do. Mash-ups creates new portals/interfaces combining resources and feeds from a variety of sources. This allows the user to program the web itself. Check out Programmableweb.

Web 2.0 is a challenge, as the “privileging of non-foundational knowledge construction challenges conventional about the nature of knowledge, learning and academica’s role as the supreme arbiter of ‘truth…” (Eijman, 2008)

Go2Web20.net shows a list of various Web 2.0 tools that includes the the logo. You can click an see the tags, popularity, links (add to tags?), etc…

Another thing I thought was interesting was that this lady requires her students to write for Wikipedia. She makes them find stubs (really short wiki articles). Students begin with stubs and begin to research and synthesize the material into a neutral Wikipedia article. Students are required to cite sources or Wikipedia will delete their work. They have to use online and books. They analyze the features of Wikipedia, what makes an article “good”, they need to use the Wikipedia parenthetical citation code. They need to learn Wikipedia’s writing style.In their post, they need to justify how they wrote what they wrote and why to should not be deleted (“reverted”). There are guidelines about why they are reverted or how often they are permitted to revert an article. A month later they have to write a report on what happened to their article. Is it still there, edited, etc…? By responding to their own writing at a later date, they’re able to really see how their writing is reacted. Check out people.uncw.edu/reillyc/314.

Break out session time. I am sitting with Kate and Tony Atkins to talk about wikis. I hope to talk more about my students use of wikis. Kate’s talk about what a wiki is and how to make one in Wetpaint.com. North Carolina State University requires all students in a class to sign a FERPA consent form. NCSU takes a hardline on FERPA. Kate used her wiki as a tool towards a final project outside of the wiki.

Wikis allow for collective pedagogy, and as using group work people can still do the work wherever you want. If the student can’t make the group meeting, it’s ok; they can work on the Wiki whenever. Tony Atkins is now talking about how to use wikis for CMS.

Alisa Cooper is now talking about microblogging, but most of what she’s saying I already know. I was asked to sit in on this session to support this. One thing I got out of this was a Posterous account. Mine is now nooccar.posterous.com. Cool. I am going to keep using Posterous for CCCC.

Tony is now talking Video, and I am pretty excited because this is more of what I want to be doing. He’s talking Animoto and RockYou.com. I’ve nvever heard of RockYou, so I want to check that out soon. In these you dump your images, choose your music, and sit back! It builds a music video for you from your images and the music. The music is Creative Commons free songs on Animoto are great, and the last Animoto video I made used “Beautiful Life” which worked very well.

I was telling the group here that we use Animoto the first week of classes to take a “blink” snapshot of the students and who they are. The only real requirement was that they use at least one image of themselves. This gives us an idea of who these students are, especially since we usually will never see them face2face unless we do conferences of some sort.

He’s talking Camtasia now, which would be cool if they made it for MACs. It’s still just PC, but now he’s moved onto Whordle. In Whordle, you feed something like a blog, text, etc… and the program then calculates how often certain words are used and then creates and image of that words cluster.

Tony’s talking Video composition and discussing the differences between video editing applications in Windows and OSX. He’s talking iMovie, Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Express, Windows Movie Maker, etc… J Anthony Blair’s article is in a book on challenging visual rhetoric, and that brought up a discussion of advertising over the last 8 decades.

When using any new technology or composition type, we need to know WHY we use these tools. What are the philosophical, pedagogical, etc… underpinnings of these tools. We, as educators, need to answer that.