Apr 2012
Memes are the New Canon
April 30, 2012 | Filed in: Literacies
by Sean Michael Morris
Because the Internet is everything, it has always lacked coherence for me. More available than things in their entirety are blurbs about things, captions, dialogues about things; or more removed, dialogues about blurbs about things. I’m a nontraditional educator who was educated traditionally, so I tend to think about things in their entirety, and the relationships of coherence created between those things. I canonize, holding up certain works of literature as both cornerstones and harbingers of academic dialogue. The works of Shakespeare and Dickens converse with the works of Woolf and Hemingway and give them meaning. But a quote from Shakespeare tossed into the muddle of all the quotes from all the books in English loses its lucidity and relevance. And this is exactly what the internet does.
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Because the Internet is everything, it has always lacked coherence for me. More available than things in their entirety are blurbs about things, captions, dialogues about things; or more removed, dialogues about blurbs about things. I’m a nontraditional educator who was educated traditionally, so I tend to think about things in their entirety, and the relationships of coherence created between those things. I canonize, holding up certain works of literature as both cornerstones and harbingers of academic dialogue. The works of Shakespeare and Dickens converse with the works of Woolf and Hemingway and give them meaning. But a quote from Shakespeare tossed into the muddle of all the quotes from all the books in English loses its lucidity and relevance. And this is exactly what the internet does.
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Net Smart: a #digped Discussion
April 27, 2012 | Filed in: #digped
by Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel
Hybrid Pedagogy will be hosting a Twitter discussion group on Howard Rheingold’s Net Smart: How To Thrive Online in both synchronous and asynchronous formats. Start by reading the introduction and join us on Twitter for a conversation about its implications next Friday, May 4 from 12:30pm-1:30pm EST (9:30am-10:30am PST) under the hashtag #digped. Net Smart’s introductory chapter is free for PDF download on MIT’s site for the book; however, since we hope to continue our discussion over the next few weeks, we encourage you to get the whole book. If you aren’t able to join us at 12:30pm EST on May 4, feel free to jump into the discussion asynchronously anytime on or around that day. We will conclude by capturing the content of the discussion via Storify a few days after the event.
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Hybrid Pedagogy will be hosting a Twitter discussion group on Howard Rheingold’s Net Smart: How To Thrive Online in both synchronous and asynchronous formats. Start by reading the introduction and join us on Twitter for a conversation about its implications next Friday, May 4 from 12:30pm-1:30pm EST (9:30am-10:30am PST) under the hashtag #digped. Net Smart’s introductory chapter is free for PDF download on MIT’s site for the book; however, since we hope to continue our discussion over the next few weeks, we encourage you to get the whole book. If you aren’t able to join us at 12:30pm EST on May 4, feel free to jump into the discussion asynchronously anytime on or around that day. We will conclude by capturing the content of the discussion via Storify a few days after the event.
Read More...The Four Noble Virtues of Digital Media Citation
April 24, 2012 | Filed in: Literacies
by Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel
In digital space, everything we do is networked. Real thinking doesn’t (and can’t) happen in a vacuum. Our ideas about pedagogy, teaching practices, and scholarship don’t just burst forth miraculously from our skulls. The digital academic community is driven by citation, generosity, connection, and collaboration. The work we do as hybrid and critical pedagogues, digital humanists, and alternative academic publishers depends on our sharing ideas as part of a much larger project or conversation.
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In digital space, everything we do is networked. Real thinking doesn’t (and can’t) happen in a vacuum. Our ideas about pedagogy, teaching practices, and scholarship don’t just burst forth miraculously from our skulls. The digital academic community is driven by citation, generosity, connection, and collaboration. The work we do as hybrid and critical pedagogues, digital humanists, and alternative academic publishers depends on our sharing ideas as part of a much larger project or conversation.
Read More...The Dark Knight Vs. The Ivory Tower
April 17, 2012 | Filed in: Digital Pedagogy
by Kat Lecky
An all-too standard lament these days is that teachers have been slow to adapt to students’ new modes of learning. This disjunction persists because so many of us have been trained in traditional pedagogical systems that privilege narrow foci and a top-down model of disseminating knowledge. We stand in front of a classroom and lecture, while they assimilate information by immersing themselves in a dynamic, constantly changing technological space. We ground our pedagogy in textbooks and preset lesson plans; they fly freely through the living, hybrid textual space engendered by texts, blogs, open-source databases, tweets, and hashtags. We are static; they are mobile. We are the past of education; they are its future. As teachers, we must broaden our pedagogical horizons to accommodate our student 2.0’s open-ended ways of collecting and processing information.
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An all-too standard lament these days is that teachers have been slow to adapt to students’ new modes of learning. This disjunction persists because so many of us have been trained in traditional pedagogical systems that privilege narrow foci and a top-down model of disseminating knowledge. We stand in front of a classroom and lecture, while they assimilate information by immersing themselves in a dynamic, constantly changing technological space. We ground our pedagogy in textbooks and preset lesson plans; they fly freely through the living, hybrid textual space engendered by texts, blogs, open-source databases, tweets, and hashtags. We are static; they are mobile. We are the past of education; they are its future. As teachers, we must broaden our pedagogical horizons to accommodate our student 2.0’s open-ended ways of collecting and processing information.
Read More...How to Storify. Why to Storify.
April 14, 2012 | Filed in: Tools
by Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel
Storify describes itself: “Storify lets you curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative. We are building the story layer above social networks, to amplify the voices that matter and create a new media format that is interactive, dynamic and social.” It’s a beautiful description and yet we’re not sure we buy it. For us, Storify feels more like the layer beneath social networks. The layer where the archiving (not the “amplifying”) happens. Story doesn’t “drive” or “build” thinking. Story organizes and maps thinking. The power of Storify, then, is in its ability to cohere and preserve, to create a blueprint for a much wilder and more disparate conversation happening on the web.
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Storify describes itself: “Storify lets you curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative. We are building the story layer above social networks, to amplify the voices that matter and create a new media format that is interactive, dynamic and social.” It’s a beautiful description and yet we’re not sure we buy it. For us, Storify feels more like the layer beneath social networks. The layer where the archiving (not the “amplifying”) happens. Story doesn’t “drive” or “build” thinking. Story organizes and maps thinking. The power of Storify, then, is in its ability to cohere and preserve, to create a blueprint for a much wilder and more disparate conversation happening on the web.
Read More...Pedagogy as Publishing
April 12, 2012 | Filed in: Profession
by Charlotte Frost
Publishing and teaching can both terrify new academics, often to the point of paralysis. Their mutual support for one another is often frustrated by institutional demands. For example, the traditional workload split for full-time faculty at R1 institutions in the US is: 40% teaching, 40% research, 20% service. This division and its usual inflexibility highlights the ways that teaching and scholarly production are kept separate and distinct as forms. Yet, by looking at how publishing is teaching and teaching is publishing, we can lessen the anxiety around these activities and begin to notice how they are, in fact, co-constitutive practices. More than that, we can start to think about the open ends of these aspects of our work. The word “publishing” often implies some sort of finality, research that is finished or complete. This misses something vital about academic work.
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Publishing and teaching can both terrify new academics, often to the point of paralysis. Their mutual support for one another is often frustrated by institutional demands. For example, the traditional workload split for full-time faculty at R1 institutions in the US is: 40% teaching, 40% research, 20% service. This division and its usual inflexibility highlights the ways that teaching and scholarly production are kept separate and distinct as forms. Yet, by looking at how publishing is teaching and teaching is publishing, we can lessen the anxiety around these activities and begin to notice how they are, in fact, co-constitutive practices. More than that, we can start to think about the open ends of these aspects of our work. The word “publishing” often implies some sort of finality, research that is finished or complete. This misses something vital about academic work.
Read More...We Are All Made of Web Sites
April 09, 2012 | Filed in: Digital Pedagogy
by Sean Michael Morris
To be certain, I feel no discomfort at the notion that “Encouraging learning is an act of subtle manipulation.” Rather, I admire the honesty of that. Being a teacher has always reminded me of the character Columbo, the bumbling -- yet genius -- private investigator of TV legend. In front of the classroom, one appears the way one appears in order to evoke a specific response from students, whether that be awe, wonder, fear, self-authority, curiosity, &c. When I write a lesson plan, it is like writing a drama: here are the characters, here is the plot, here is how we shall use the setting to illuminate the drama, and this -- this part here -- is the climax. I believe it’s important to bring a sense of theatre to the classroom. “The play’s the thing”, after all.
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To be certain, I feel no discomfort at the notion that “Encouraging learning is an act of subtle manipulation.” Rather, I admire the honesty of that. Being a teacher has always reminded me of the character Columbo, the bumbling -- yet genius -- private investigator of TV legend. In front of the classroom, one appears the way one appears in order to evoke a specific response from students, whether that be awe, wonder, fear, self-authority, curiosity, &c. When I write a lesson plan, it is like writing a drama: here are the characters, here is the plot, here is how we shall use the setting to illuminate the drama, and this -- this part here -- is the climax. I believe it’s important to bring a sense of theatre to the classroom. “The play’s the thing”, after all.
Read More...On Pedagogical Manipulation
April 09, 2012 | Filed in: Critical Pedagogy
by Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel
Encouraging learning is an act of subtle manipulation. When we enter a classroom, we’re stepping onto a stage. This is true no matter how student-centered our classroom is, because our students are also stepping onto a stage (or into an audience). Even in the most open learning environments, we all play roles: the teacher, the student, the devil’s advocate, the reporter, the questioner, the dictator, the grader, the teacher’s pet. It’s in the careful modulation of these roles that we can actively control a learning environment. [Jesse writes this last sentence fully aware that his co-author and much of his audience will balk at the word “control.”] This issue of control is a delicate one, because the work we do in classrooms (as both teachers and students) depends on a very deliberate attention to how we manage the space and how we express ourselves within it. The work we do in classrooms depends on us finding a careful balance between asserting control and ceding it.
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Encouraging learning is an act of subtle manipulation. When we enter a classroom, we’re stepping onto a stage. This is true no matter how student-centered our classroom is, because our students are also stepping onto a stage (or into an audience). Even in the most open learning environments, we all play roles: the teacher, the student, the devil’s advocate, the reporter, the questioner, the dictator, the grader, the teacher’s pet. It’s in the careful modulation of these roles that we can actively control a learning environment. [Jesse writes this last sentence fully aware that his co-author and much of his audience will balk at the word “control.”] This issue of control is a delicate one, because the work we do in classrooms (as both teachers and students) depends on a very deliberate attention to how we manage the space and how we express ourselves within it. The work we do in classrooms depends on us finding a careful balance between asserting control and ceding it.
Read More...