Tag Archives: technology

Wikis and Hypertexts, Oh My!

I’m really not sure what to say here. I recognize the value of reflection. It forces us (hopefully) to look closely at what we have done in an effort to improve or understand. The problem with this reflection is that I really like the wiki/hypertext assignment. I tried to explain, more in the paper than in class, the pedagogy that I think supports the assignment, so I guess I’ll start there.
Students learn better when they are actively involved.
Students are actively involved in the annotation, small
group discussions, and the web creation.
Collaboration encourages learning.
Collaboration is necessary to format the web page.
The discussion involved in negotiating ideas leads to deeper
understanding.
Negotiation takes place when the differing ideas are
discussed.
Students are more attentive when the learning is fun.
Most students view web pages and wikis as fun
Learning should be student centered
The students are responsible for their own knowledge
with only guidance from me.
Diverse opinions are valued.

I believe the assignment is pedagogically sound and helps students meet the stated objective.

Now to turn to the actual presentation. I felt very short of time. This is obviously an assignment that takes more than one class period to complete. However, I knew that when I decided on this lesson. But… I didn’t expect the time to pass as quickly as it did. I should have planned that a little better.

This is not the way that I actually teach this assignment. Though I do tell students what the goals are for an assignment, they are not usually voiced in the way that I did last night. I would not tell my students that I want them to negotiate and articulate. I would tell then to discuss and come to a workable solution, to agree to disagree.

I would have prepared the students ahead to use the technologies. These would be practiced in class. The wiki work and class discussions would take place well in advance of the due date for the assignment so that students have the time to become familiar with the web authoring. I did not make this clear last night.

I wish I had a copy of a student web page that I could have shown as an example. I used to have an absolutely beautiful one but cannot find it. (Must be that absent minded professor thing.)

Overall, I am pleased with the presentation. I made a couple of mistakes, but I think that I did explain and demonstrate the assignment.

Now I have a question for you. Should I offer an option for students who don’t want to/feel they can’t create a web page?

Please make lots of comments/suggestions!

Edith

Musings

For this week’s entry I will borrow Blau’s alternative assignment of “a collection of loosely connected notes or comments on a text or topic, each identified by a heading or number, requiring no transitions between them.” I choose to do this because I had disparate reactions to the readings and because I have never tried this type of writing. It is engrained in me that my writing must meet the standard criteria of academic texts: have one central point that is fully developed through a series of well organized and interconnected paragraphs. So in the spirit of exploration and taking risks, I will try something new.

1. Elbow’s argument that writing should precede reading because filling student’s heads with the ideas of others stifles their own creativity sounds like the no-content curriculum that was popular in the 1990’s. As Elbow’s article was published in 1993, there is little wonder that there are similarities. The concept of a no-content curriculum was that the psyches of children would be damaged by telling them things, even things such as basic math facts and sentence structure (Breed). So teachers were expected to teach students how to do things without teaching them any facts. Imagine teaching a student to read without being able to assign them a text because it might inhibit the student’s development as an individual. Luckily, this theory of teaching fell out of favor and we moved on to other ideas.

We also need to remember that students do not come to our classes as empty vessels that need only be filled with wisdom. Instead they come to our class rooms filled with their own ideas and experiences. Sometimes this is a good thing; other times it is not. Remember the film we watched the first night of class? Those students not only had mis-information, they refused to give up on the ideas they had. It is sometimes painful to read student essays in which students are assigned to argue their side of a belief. While I will readily defend a person’s right to his belief, I will also insist that person be able to defend that belief. Students often have firm beliefs. The believe things because it is what they have been taught, it is what they have heard, it is what they want to believe, or it is what is beneficial to them to believe. A little bit of reading often changes their minds.

In an ideal world, emphasizing writing over reading would be marvelous. However, in the real world, how can we expect students to discuss something of which they are not even aware? If we assign readings to students to give them new view points, we will encourage them to examine their own beliefs along with the ideas in the reading.

2. Blau mentions several assignments that sound like some of the things that I already do in other formats in my classes. He mentions others that I would like to try. (I wonder if I can change the assignments in the middle of the semester. Perhaps not) I am particularly interested in using technology to teach literature and composition. Some of Blau’s assignments could easily be transferred to on-line assignments that could be used in hybrid of DL classes to enhance either F2F meetings or discussion boards.

For instance, I already assign reading journals in my classes. Students are to record first impressions, areas of interest, questions, or any comments they would like to make. These journal entries could be done as a class blog, allowing classmates the opportunity to share difficulties or perhaps offer answers in follow-up comments. This would also make grading easier because the students would never know which entries would be read by the teacher on a specific week. It is also easy to simply count the number of entries made by each member of the blog. This would not necessarily check for content, but it could certainly satisfy the collection portion of Blau’s portfolio assignment.

We will return to the idea teaching literature with technology in my teaching presentation. I look forward to your comments on what I finally come up with. This is something that I probably can introduce into my current classes. Perhaps I should practice on them?

3. Okay, so I wrote two completely unrelated sections in this paper. I edited the transition between them several times because I kept putting in a transition. Old habits are hard to break. If there is no connection between the sections of my paper, do I need a conclusion? I think not. BY!

Edith

Works Cited

Breed, Jerry and Mary Breed. “No-Content Curriculum.” The Washington Post 1995, May 14. Retrieved February 16, 2008, from National Newspapers (9) database. (Document ID: 19564506).

Rip Van Winkle Predicts the Future of Literature Studies

Reading about New Criticism this week provided me with a poignant and sentimental stroll down memory lane. Back in the 1970s when I was an undergraduate majoring in English/Literature, New Criticism was literature studies. For those of you who came into literature studies after this period (and that’s pretty much everyone in our class), I can tell you that those were glorious days. We felt we could tackle any piece of literature armed with a trusty set of skills, a literary vocabulary, an enthusiasm for close readings, and our sheer wits.Imagine what it was like for me to return to formal literature studies in the late 1990s when I decided to pursue my master’s degree in English/Literature here at Mason. I was a stranger in a strange new land. Now, theory reigned. Feminists had things to say. Marx somehow had crept into the picture. Historical constructs mattered. And, new voices were included in the literary canon, voices previously marginalized and entirely off my radar screen. The “world” of “world literature” got a whole lot larger in my 25-year hiatus from the academy. Dead white guys now would have a lot of company on my bookshelf and close readings would no longer cut it as the be all, end all of literature studies.

I am Rip Van Winkle. I fell asleep and woke up to a new reality. But why? What happened to my beloved field? What made the tides turn as they did?

Actually, those tides turned long before even I got into the mix. There was a time – before New Criticism – when literature studies meant something entirely different. Students studied classics, and I’m not talking about Herman Melville here. They read the writers of antiquity and they had to know Latin to do so. Memorization was king. The idea of reading more contemporary works and discussing them was unthinkable in the academy. That wasn’t literature studies.

New Criticism was born after World War I but came into its heyday after World War II. Suddenly, thanks to the G.I. bill, we had an influx of college students the likes of which our academies had never seen before. These weren’t the privileged, well-prepared students of the past; they were servicemen. Now literature professors were confronted with students who had no clue about Latin and never heard of Ovid. What were they going to do with them? The answer was to teach them skills and vocabulary and set them loose on English language texts. New Criticism was the perfect solution to the practical challenge at hand. Now, anyone who could read and who was smart could be taught to study literature – no years of upper crust preparatory school education needed.

Reader Response Criticism speaks of its time, too. It would have been pretty difficult for us to have feminist readings of literature before we had feminists. Pop culture and social politics were fertile ground for baby boomer English professors who cut their teeth in the 1960s. The academy once again kept pace with what was going on in the world.

So where are we headed next? I have a prediction. I believe that the next wave – the one students will read about in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism in the year 2050 or so – will be what I’ll call Technology Criticism.

We’ve been up to this point wed to the notion that literature is linear; we start to read a text with the first word and end the text with the last word. But take a careful look at the Johns Hopkins entries we read this week and you’ll see that text need no longer be linear. Hot links can take us on a hypertext superhighway anywhere the author wants to send us and where we want to go. That means that each of us is free to experience hypertext in our own unique and nonlinear way.

Literature, inevitably, will harness this technology and the creative freedom it offers. Authors growing up right now will think in hypertext. They’ll write poems, novels, short stories, personal essays – our future literature — without the limitations of linear text. Sound, animation, images – all of that will become part of their texts, embedded in them, giving birth to new genres. The production and consumption of literature as we know it will change, as it always does. And, the academy will follow suit, as it always does, too.

Am I crazy? Maybe. Time will tell. Let’s just see where we are 25 years from now. This time, though, I promise you that Rip Van Winkle won’t be taking any hiatus from the academy. From now on, I’m staying wide, wide awake. – Laura Hills