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?
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