listening to repeating

I just want to send a quick thank you to Bryden McGrath and Catherine O’Donnell for chatting with me about things related to technology, teaching, literature, and the AAC&U.

Bryden’s written a piece for the UW’s Daily, and Catherine’s done the same for the Graduate School.

I like that both of the conversations focused primarily on the material histories of technologies, rather than becoming preoccupied with cutting edge digital tools and gadgets.  These experiences make me want to drag my typewriters, rotary phones, cassette tapes, and record players into the classroom.

Writing and the Digital Generation: Essays on New Media Rhetoric is now out on McFarland.  You can get it there, or at Amazon, among other locations.  In it, I have a short piece, “Novel Cartographies, New Correspondences,” which just so happens to be the last chapter (#27) in the book.

What’s up with the oblique title?  The chapter’s a gesture toward thinking of how the production of new media can foster community-based learning and engagement with one’s local institutions (such as universities).  Put another way, how does web-based new media correspond with people’s actual, everyday practices (as opposed to simulating them or rendering them virtual), and how might it enable social change?

And so the chapter describes how neogeography is one such vehicle for correspondence.

Thanks to Heather Urbanski for being a fantastic editor.

I’m in the process of fleshing out the course I’m teaching during the spring quarter at the UW: English 242, “Modernism Now: Digital Platforms for Studying Fiction.”

Essentially, the course will be a survey of literary modernism, with an emphasis on the novel.  Three class meetings per week will be dedicated to discussing novels and modernism, and one class per week will be dedicated to learning digital tools and platforms.  The final papers will be web-texts (equaling roughly ten to fifteen pages of words, plus media).

I’m sticking with WordPress for this one, but it will be the first course where I’m including Zotero and Twitter in the curriculum.

Below’s the working course description.  As always, suggestions and comments are welcome.  The course site will go live in late February/early March.

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I’ve just finished the course site, including the syllabus, for BISIA 213, New Media Production: “Animating Print Texts,” at the University of Washington, Bothell.  Last year, in the spring, I taught a similar version of the course, which essentially asks students to use Adobe Flash and Audacity to animate selections from a literary something’s print version—to make text move, with sound.

Learning from a few mistakes during my last go at the course, I’m thinking of adding more constraints to the students’ animation process, especially time-based constraints (e.g., how long the animation should be).  I also want to spend more time on audiovisual synchronicity, since I only spent one module on it in 2009.  After all, persuasively synchronizing moving text with sound is one of the biggest challenges in the class.

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Photo by Steven Byeon

Sara Grimes and Steven Byeon at The Daily (of the University of Washington) have composed an article entitled, “Reading 2.0.” I dropped a few quotables in there. Here’s a clip:

Jentery Sayers can pin his growth as a teacher on one specific book.

Silence by John Cage is the work that inspired the English doctoral candidate to use collaborative teaching methods in his English 111 classroom. Sayers never comes to class prepared for a lengthy lecture anymore. Instead, he comes equipped with an open mind, ready to engage with students in an interactive setting.

“Cage says: ‘There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound,’” Sayers said. “With those two sentences in mind, I’ve tried to listen to students more and talk at them less.”

Read the rest . . .

Ah… November, when everything’s due except for blog posts.  Indeed, I’m not blogging at the moment,  but there’s a great forum over at HASTAC on “Grading 2.0: Evaluation in the Digital Age.” Here’s a brief description:

“As the educational and cultural climate changes in response to new technologies for creating and sharing information, educators have begun to ask if the current framework for assessing student work, standardized testing, and grading is incompatible with the way these students should be learning and the skills they need to acquire to compete in the information age. Many would agree that its time to expand the current notion of assessment and create new metrics, rubrics, and methods of measurement in order to ensure that all elements of the learning process are keeping pace with the ever-evolving world in which we live. This new framework for assessment might build off of currently accepted strategies and pedagogy, but also take into account new ideas about what learners should know to be successful and confident in all of their endeavors.”

More over there…