Technology and Literacy

Hello teaching composition with digital technology friends! I'm in my first day of my Technology and Literacy class. I'm hoping to summarize any good tips here in the coming days!

Using Communication Technology To Extend the Classroom

I've been attending a series of excellent Academic Technology workshops at Boise State and wanted to share my notes (yes, drafted, saved, and organized in Evernote). The real key will be finding time VERY soon to try some of these tools. Otherwise, I'm afraid they will go the way of all that great information I learned in Excel workshops over the years but never managed to internalize (even now, spreadsheets make me break into a cold sweat!). So, here's what I learned about Piazza.com, NowComment.com and Jing.com:

A common theme: These are all strategies that can augment in-class activity.

Piazza.com: A discussion forum that allows students to answer other students' questions (in a revisable wiki-like entry); it works best with conceptual vs transaction information/discussion.

How do you get students to answer the questions? Seeding some straightforward questions (like when office hours are) so students become familiar. Or start conversations in the class and put the follow up questions on Piazza. Or force students to the site for FAQs on syllabus-type questions or homework clarification or delivery of additional notes.

Other tidbits:

• You can enable anonymous participation -- or anonymous among peers, but known to you. 
• Students can answer/discuss at their own pace.
• It's a way to link discussions among classes.

A caution: It can lead to extra prep time. You really need to evaluate the cost vs the benefit.

NowComment.com: Allows you to upload and discuss a document online in a less messy way than Google docs. It's built along the lines of a threaded discussion with anchor points within the document. Potential uses: For peer review (a way to model and/or take the workshop outside of class); for readings (students can comment on/discuss the text inside or outside of class through this web-based program); for teaching annotation practices.

Jing: The discussion was specifically how it can be used to extend discussion outside the classroom and how it might be used in concert with the other programs. A good question to consider: How can these platforms work in concert to enhance student learning?

Composition+Digital Literacy

Great discussion in last night's ProDev group -- including some important questions that we need to continue to consider in teaching composition. Among these:

• Whose responsibility is it to ensure that students have the digital literacy they need to for success at the university and beyond? Is this yet another role to be absorbed into First Year Writing?
• How can we improve access to technology in our classrooms and campuses? I like the idea of the iPad cart!
• What writing/research activities get squeezed out by digital assignments? How do we know how much in-class time is appropriate for teaching digital literacy skills (and which of these skills count as writing instruction)?

I will admit it: I am dazzled by digital technology. I feel fortunate to be part of these discussions to help me reign in my enthusiasm a bit and replace it with old fashioned critical reflection about my assumptions (that digital technology will save the world!). 

A great site to explore/continue thinking about the role of the Internet in students lives: Imagining the Internet: A History and a Forecast.

Ever-useful Evernote

I’d like to introduce you to my new best friend: Evernote. I’d heard a lot about this handy web-based app, as a miracle worker for the disorganized and a great tool to access and share information quickly. I know I’m about three years behind the curve on this; I find that with technology, unless there is something really tangible, an obvious and pressing need it can fill, I start to feel overwhelmed and shy away, back to the old standbys of e-mail and Blackboard.

For me, this need occurred when I purchased a new Mac Book Pro. I wanted to begin using my shiny new Chiclet immediately (after first giving her a name, of course), but I didn’t have software and I didn’t have any of the files on her from my old, creaking PC. Because my PC doesn’t like to play with Mac, the migration software I downloaded did not work (or did not work quickly enough). My impatience led me to test some features of Evernote related to uploading pdfs and organizing notes and lectures for my class. So far, so good. I’ve even tried out the audio note feature and added some images. I’m working on building mini-lectures directly into Evernote that I will be able to access and tweak wherever me and my iPad may be.

While this isn’t necessarily teaching with digital technology, it is organizing and planning and teacherly composing with digital technology. I am planning to work on my Evernote skills in hopes that I can help students use its features in their writing and research.

Spring!

In a nice combo of old and new technology, I started class last night with a free write/reflection on a series of photos published online by The Atlantic depicting spring around the world.

Using photos as a writing/reflection prompt on the evocations and implied narratives in images trods on well worn ground in the writing classroom. But the images were curated by an online publisher -- and I happened on them through Twitter.

Each week as we explore the uses of Twitter in the research writing classroom, I continue to be struck by its ability to inject a little serendipity into the research process. It's not great for looking up specific answers to specific questions (or finding the piece of information students want to neatly fit into what they think their paper should be about). But if you are in the habit of scanning, and you click that "follow" button occasionally based on whimsy, wonders do await. Really, just take a look at those fabulous pictures and see if you aren't in the mood to write about spring!

(oh, and students came up with some great insights about the uses and limits of images in the composing process)

Mostly Ups!

First, an update: I did finally figure out a way to turn off the projector. And, as a class, we figured out how to lift the blinds to let the gorgeous sunset in during class last week. I’m marking this down as significant technology progress.
 
The Twitter assignment I’m using to promote lateral and creative research also is working well – or at least I can say it is accomplishing one goal: Improving my own Twitter practice. I think I have an easier time deciding what to Tweet and Retweet now that I have a specific audience in mind (and not just the randomly assembled tiny group of followers who have chanced upon my account, and, digging my cowboy hat and hot dog eating picture, have signed on to follow).
 
I have also found a number of tech-related articles that are very helpful to the digital literacy work and research I am doing. And I have to say I find it very cool to check my feed and see my students conversing with one another on their research topics. Yes, they are assigned to do so. But they are doing it – and doing it better than I could have predicted! Feel free to check us out @emilysimnitt and/or #Eng102.

Ups and Downs

I’ve been thinking a lot about technology and limits – that is, how far should I stretch my digital literacy in public, or, put another way, how much can I embarrass myself with digital faux pas in class and still maintain enough credibility and authority to make the evaluative decisions I must as the class instructor?
 
As the last person of the day in the special technology room in the ILC on Tuesdays, I’ve been trying to figure out how to turn everything off. I am not always successful and may be responsible for shortening the lifespan of the projector. Sigh. It would seem that turning things on and off is a basic technology skill mastered by pretty much all humans tall enough to reach a light switch (a skill that can be acquired by some non-humans as is evidenced by smart pet videos on YouTube). Apparently not. I’m adding to my to-do tech list this week: Figure out how to turn the projector off!
 
My inability to perform this simple task is undermining my confidence somewhat in the much trickier digital technology project I’m undertaking: Incorporating Twitter into the research process for an 8-10 page paper requirement in my English 102 class. We began last week with an in-class workshop where everyone present was able to sign up for an account and (mostly) follow each other and try out the format. I will be following up with students tonight to see how researching within the social media network site went on their own.
 
Essentially, students are required to find and follow Twitter handles that appear to be related to their areas of inquiry and/or their service learning agencies. I went through and saw that most students had found a number of accounts to follow. The question remains: Will this yield any useful information? Will this be a useful assignment? Will students be able to transfer this activity to other types of research they will do in their personal and professional lives?