I'm starting to work on my paper for Literacy and Technology class, and I'm focusing on online tutorials. I'm considering presenting this research as a video in the style of the tutorials themselves. Here's a taste...
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
How many ships can a portmanteau?
I spoke to my father on the phone last night. We enjoy quizzing each other on new words, and these word discussions are usually prompted by the same conversational exchange:
Dad: So, how are you?
Ann: Good.
Dad: Come on, you have to start using some better adjectives. You always say "good"!
Last night, the first word on offer was "blaccent." After listening to "Sounding Black" on Studio 360 this Sunday, I latched on to this word: black + accent = blaccent. It's a portmanteau, a word that, like manny or grool (Mean Girls fans will remember that one), is formed by combining two existing words.
The next word up for discussion, of course, was portmanteau.
And finally, we talked about "bacronym," a portmanteau that is itself a language term. A bacronym is a retrofitted acronym: I discovered the word in relation to the term wiki, which originates from the Hawaiian word for "fast," but which has been bacronymed to mean "what I know is." If you're a fan of The Office, you've encountered a backronym before: when Michael talks about the swag he receives at conventions, he backronyms the word to mean "stuff we all get."
Monday, October 5, 2009
Tech Troubles
Can we ever turn off technology?
This summer, I attended the Kenyon Review Summer Writers Workshop (https://www.kenyonreview.org/workshops-wwinfo.php) and told myself I would turn my cell phone off for the week I spent in Gambier, Ohio. I lasted one day.
I arrived in Gambier -- a town so small that the center of campus and the center of town are the same place -- on a Saturday afternoon and picked up my issued staples -- one KR t-shirt, one thin towel, one small pillow -- then headed to my dorm room. By the end of the night, I had gotten back in my car and driven to the nearest Wal-Mart to buy some full-size bath towels and a cell phone charger. I didn't talk to many people on the phone that week, but the feeling of not having a cell phone turned on and with me at all times was just too strange to get used to.
I see an even greater connectedness to technology among the college undergraduates I teach. Texting, for example, is such an omnipresent form of communication in college student life that it seems normal to people in the 18- to 24-year-old generation to be texting while doing other things -- while in class, for example. I've had to come to terms with this as a teacher, to realize that when a student is texting in class, she isn't disrespectful, she is just engaging in a practice that, to her, is just as normal as doodling in the corner of a notebook was for me when I was her age.
As a teacher, I think that educating tech-connected students means meeting them halfway: Bringing technologies that students are familiar with into the classroom can make class more user-friendly for students and can also encourage students to think critically about the technologies they use. What I haven't yet discovered is how to bring technologies into a class without overwhelming students with work. I've taught a class, for example, in which students wrote private blogs on Blackboard and also posted in online class discussion forums. Both of these activities were done in addition to -- rather than instead of -- other class work such as in-class conversation and traditional paper-writing. I don't want to overload students with tasks, but I want to bring multiple modes of learning (or, in the case of my classes, of writing) into a course.
This question of how to integrate multiple technologies into a class without overloading students with work could lead to an interesting line of inquiry for research. If I were going to conduct research in this area, I would certainly want to hear from students. In a former class of mine in which students wrote a reflective blog, for example, I found that students who most needed to reflect critically on their work in the course -- such as those students who were struggling -- were the least likely to be consistent in writing on their blog. There were other students in the group who had no problem fulfilling the requirement of writing on the blog regularly, but their reflection often seemed to be more "what the teacher wants to hear" than indicative of any substantial reflective thought. Only a third or so of the class seemed to benefit from this added technology in the way I hoped they would, which I found discouraging (although a similar rate of success could happen with any new technology or assignment introduced into a class). These students' voices would be important to include in a study of reflective blogging, because only by asking them about their experience could I truly understand what such an added technology offered to the students.
But back to the Summer Writers Workshop... Although I didn't manage to turn off my cell phone, I certainly did talk on it less than I would have in a comparable week at home. I also lived for that week in a dorm room with no television, and the silence -- and the thought it bred -- was wonderful. When I returned home to Pittsburgh, I gave my t.v. away, and I've managed to not t purchase a new one in the three months since. I've discovered more time in my days that I used to waste in front of the television, but I've also filled some of that time with YouTube videos and e-mail. If I ever did decide to try to turn technology off in the way that Eric Brende did (http://www.stlouisrickshaw.com/about.html), I would need to make a considerably greater effort. I'm thinking a small cottage off Walden Pond, and lots of notebooks...
This summer, I attended the Kenyon Review Summer Writers Workshop (https://www.kenyonreview.org/workshops-wwinfo.php) and told myself I would turn my cell phone off for the week I spent in Gambier, Ohio. I lasted one day.
I arrived in Gambier -- a town so small that the center of campus and the center of town are the same place -- on a Saturday afternoon and picked up my issued staples -- one KR t-shirt, one thin towel, one small pillow -- then headed to my dorm room. By the end of the night, I had gotten back in my car and driven to the nearest Wal-Mart to buy some full-size bath towels and a cell phone charger. I didn't talk to many people on the phone that week, but the feeling of not having a cell phone turned on and with me at all times was just too strange to get used to.
I see an even greater connectedness to technology among the college undergraduates I teach. Texting, for example, is such an omnipresent form of communication in college student life that it seems normal to people in the 18- to 24-year-old generation to be texting while doing other things -- while in class, for example. I've had to come to terms with this as a teacher, to realize that when a student is texting in class, she isn't disrespectful, she is just engaging in a practice that, to her, is just as normal as doodling in the corner of a notebook was for me when I was her age.
As a teacher, I think that educating tech-connected students means meeting them halfway: Bringing technologies that students are familiar with into the classroom can make class more user-friendly for students and can also encourage students to think critically about the technologies they use. What I haven't yet discovered is how to bring technologies into a class without overwhelming students with work. I've taught a class, for example, in which students wrote private blogs on Blackboard and also posted in online class discussion forums. Both of these activities were done in addition to -- rather than instead of -- other class work such as in-class conversation and traditional paper-writing. I don't want to overload students with tasks, but I want to bring multiple modes of learning (or, in the case of my classes, of writing) into a course.
This question of how to integrate multiple technologies into a class without overloading students with work could lead to an interesting line of inquiry for research. If I were going to conduct research in this area, I would certainly want to hear from students. In a former class of mine in which students wrote a reflective blog, for example, I found that students who most needed to reflect critically on their work in the course -- such as those students who were struggling -- were the least likely to be consistent in writing on their blog. There were other students in the group who had no problem fulfilling the requirement of writing on the blog regularly, but their reflection often seemed to be more "what the teacher wants to hear" than indicative of any substantial reflective thought. Only a third or so of the class seemed to benefit from this added technology in the way I hoped they would, which I found discouraging (although a similar rate of success could happen with any new technology or assignment introduced into a class). These students' voices would be important to include in a study of reflective blogging, because only by asking them about their experience could I truly understand what such an added technology offered to the students.
But back to the Summer Writers Workshop... Although I didn't manage to turn off my cell phone, I certainly did talk on it less than I would have in a comparable week at home. I also lived for that week in a dorm room with no television, and the silence -- and the thought it bred -- was wonderful. When I returned home to Pittsburgh, I gave my t.v. away, and I've managed to not t purchase a new one in the three months since. I've discovered more time in my days that I used to waste in front of the television, but I've also filled some of that time with YouTube videos and e-mail. If I ever did decide to try to turn technology off in the way that Eric Brende did (http://www.stlouisrickshaw.com/about.html), I would need to make a considerably greater effort. I'm thinking a small cottage off Walden Pond, and lots of notebooks...
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Bacon is the new cupcakes
I’ve been reading some 1995 Clifford Stoll ranting against technology and have to laugh at his—and my own, at times—grumpy resistance to all that is new and cool. Stoll is grumpy in general about technology: kids don’t need computers, he says, they need to get outside and play. In his words, “Sensation has no substitute” (Silicon Snake Oil, p. 138, http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Snake-Oil-Thoughts-Information/dp/0385419945). But if we create a virtual simulation that feels real to a user, haven’t we found a substitute for “real” sensation?
Technology works on trends, on social and cultural waves I won’t pretend to know anything about (because I haven’t yet read The Tipping Point, http://www.amazon.com/Tipping-Point-Little-Things-Difference/dp/0316346624). Not only do we stick with trends that work—that make life easier, education more effective, economy more efficient—we stick with those that are catchy. In short, we stick with what’s cool until something cooler comes along.
In this week’s Newsweek, Jennie Yabroff talks about the cupcake trend that, over the last five years or so, has brought an American individualist ideology to the dessert sector (read Yabroff’s column at http://www.newsweek.com/id/216053). Yabroff identifies our collective latching-on to childhood icons as laughable, calling dessert an undeserving leader of a cultural paradigm shift. The cupcake, after all, is just a trend, and Yabroff identifies bacon as the next “it” food to follow.
She’s right. I’ve had at least three conversations in the last month that involved the question “Have you heard of Baconnaise?” followed by simultaneous shouts of “Ewww!” and “I would so eat that.” (Check out the latest spread at http://www.baconnaise.com/). I’m left wondering, at what point in a trend does latching on stop being trendy? At this point, cupcake shops are so overdone that opening one would be passé. Baconnaise will have no conversational cache by the end of the year. And, on a completely separate subject, I’ve waited so long to join Facebook—As of early 2008, numbers indicated that clued-in college students were moving on; read more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7257073.stm—that to give in now would be like opening a cupcake store. That trend has sailed.
Technology works on trends, on social and cultural waves I won’t pretend to know anything about (because I haven’t yet read The Tipping Point, http://www.amazon.com/Tipping-Point-Little-Things-Difference/dp/0316346624). Not only do we stick with trends that work—that make life easier, education more effective, economy more efficient—we stick with those that are catchy. In short, we stick with what’s cool until something cooler comes along.
In this week’s Newsweek, Jennie Yabroff talks about the cupcake trend that, over the last five years or so, has brought an American individualist ideology to the dessert sector (read Yabroff’s column at http://www.newsweek.com/id/216053). Yabroff identifies our collective latching-on to childhood icons as laughable, calling dessert an undeserving leader of a cultural paradigm shift. The cupcake, after all, is just a trend, and Yabroff identifies bacon as the next “it” food to follow.
She’s right. I’ve had at least three conversations in the last month that involved the question “Have you heard of Baconnaise?” followed by simultaneous shouts of “Ewww!” and “I would so eat that.” (Check out the latest spread at http://www.baconnaise.com/). I’m left wondering, at what point in a trend does latching on stop being trendy? At this point, cupcake shops are so overdone that opening one would be passé. Baconnaise will have no conversational cache by the end of the year. And, on a completely separate subject, I’ve waited so long to join Facebook—As of early 2008, numbers indicated that clued-in college students were moving on; read more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7257073.stm—that to give in now would be like opening a cupcake store. That trend has sailed.
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