Posts that focus primarily on teaching and pedagogy.
In this post, I’d like to write about student posters and start/continue a conversation about the importance of the V in WOVEN. The Rhetoric of Waste and Sustainability: Teaching writing at Georgia Tech, an institution that prides itself with training problem-solvers, I invite my students to use multimodal communication as… Continue reading
In my English 1102 “Digital Woolf” class at Georgia Tech this fall, we began with Howards End (1910), by Virginia Woolf’s contemporary, E. M. Forster, which we followed with Woolf’s novels, Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and To the Lighthouse (1927).[1] We will be concluding the course with her… Continue reading
We were fans of Star Trek. Sure, we thought: people will travel through space, we’ll meet with beings from other planets, we’ll fly space ships, and for work, we’ll hold flat, thin computers in one hand and tea in the other, the simulated daylight shining ever-so-slightly off our bald pates. … Continue reading
I’ve been thinking lately about one of the many useful comments my adviser made about the failed novel I submitted in the last semesters of my MFA program. She told me I’d shown bad manners. Instead of organizing the book into chapters, I used stick figure drawings to mark breaks… Continue reading
In the spring of 2011, Georgia Tech started a “This I Believe” project in partnership with the Writing and Communication Program. The campus reading series and student contest are unofficial off-shoots of a popular radio series, originally hosted by Edward R. Murrow in the 1950s, and then resuscitated on NPR… Continue reading
I use the personal “This I Believe” essay as a means to develop and appreciate oral language skills in the classroom. My students script their essays keeping in mind that they will be submitting their essays in an audio-visual format. I have found that this project has a profound impact… Continue reading
One of my challenges in teaching students is that they often don’t get a lot of my references. I’m sure many teachers have had this problem: jokes that you think are hilarious fall flat, or mentions of pop-cultural figures that you assume are common knowledge end up getting blank looks…. Continue reading
In an earlier post, I explained why I think interactive fiction (IF) computer games can drive valuable experiments in the multimodal composition classroom. You can check out Part One for an overview of what IF is and what I think it can do for students. In the present post, I’ll… Continue reading
This weekend I participated in a panel on “Teaching Multimodal Literacy with Comics” at DragonCon here in Atlanta. The panel was part of the Comics and Popular Culture Conference which is held concurrently with DragonCon. Other panelists included my Brittain Fellow colleague Noah Mass and Andy Runton, an Eisner Award-winning… Continue reading
My English 1102 “Modernism: Technology and Communication” course last spring asked how people around the world communicated before the internet. Starting with the advent of the telegraph, we addressed written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal forms of communication through the nineteen thirties. We began the course with Tom Standage’s The… Continue reading
Regular readers of TECHStyle may remember my mentioning, back in September, my plans to use interactive fiction (“IF”) computer games in my multimodal composition classes. After two semesters of teaching students to read, play, and write IF games, I can say that the experiment was mostly a success. While we… Continue reading
I recently read Cathy Davidson’s “Let’s Talk about MOOC (online) Education–And Also About Massively Outdated Traditional Education (MOTEs)” on the HASTAC [the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory] blog. I agree with her argument that talking heads do not a MOOC make (nor do they help digital pedagogy in… Continue reading
In a previous post, I reflected on the successes and failures of a project I assigned in my Spring 2012 course on copia, and assigned again with some minor changes this semester. Students spend the first month of the semester gathering an eclectic mix of material, organizing it into categories,… Continue reading
Students rarely glide or gambol into a campus communication center. There is no samba line to sentence reconstruction. The run-up to their appearance at the door is pretty simple: they have an assignment looming that entails stringing words together; they need coaching to create a presentation that won’t lead to… Continue reading
Plans for THATCamp Southeast, to be held March 9th & 10th, are moving right along. The organizers (myself included!) are very happy to announce two things: It’s time to Propose a Session! Please check this link and think about what YOU want to use THATCamp to accomplish. Then propose something… Continue reading
Even though the course I am teaching this spring semester has the same name and number as the one I taught in the fall—LMC 3403: Technical Communication in Theory and Practice—the two classes couldn’t be much more different. For starters, last semester was my first at Georgia Tech and also… Continue reading
1079 pages. 388 footnotes. 2 lbs 10 oz (and that’s the paperback). David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is nothing if not formidable. It languishes on many a “to-read” shelf alongside Joyce’s Ulysses and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Despite its intimidation factor, Infinite Jest can be a pretty accessible read, and it is absolutely… Continue reading
Happy New Year and New Semester! My fellow teachers won’t be surprised to hear that I didn’t get a chance to finish another post last semester. But that delay turned into an opportunity to reflect at the end of my first semester teaching in a highly digital environment. What follows… Continue reading
James Gregory and Christina Van Houten will lead discussion on service learning and technical communication; in this seminar, we’ll also open up our discussion to issues of case studies, portfolios, and pseudotransactionality. Required Reading includes: Chris Ritter’s TechSTYLE post: http://techstyle.lmc.gatech.edu/?p=3841 Ann M. Blakeslee, “Bridging the Workplace and the Academy: Teaching Professional Genres… Continue reading
For many instructors, teaching about the past can be problematic, especially to Georgia Tech students who may have little interest in any time period that predates their existence, or who may have the interest, but don’t see how such topics can aid them in their pursuit of a STEM degree…. Continue reading
Jason W. Ellis and Olga Menagarishvili will lead a discussion on digital literacy and social media issues for technical communicators in this week’s seminar. How does digital literacy in general and social media more specifically figure into the Technical Communication classroom? Should we challenge our Technical Communication students to be more… Continue reading
Hi D-Ped folks, this Wednesday, we’ll be discussing using digital and other pedagogical methods to work with ELL students and otherwise defined “at-risk” students in our classes. We’ve provided some very short readings we’d like you to read before Wednesday. Fair warning: we’d prefer that everyone be “devices down,” or… Continue reading
Jason W. Ellis and Rachel Mahan will lead a discussion on single-sourcing and user experience issues for this week’s seminar. While technical communication often focuses on software technologies, those same technologies influence and shape what technical communication is and how technical communication is done. A specific area of pedagogical interest… Continue reading
What is hate, and how do we combat it? Recently, I attended a symposium organized by Gonzaga University’s Institute for Hate Studies and American University’s Washington College of Law. The symposium was on “Hate and Political Discourse” and was organized by John Shuford and Robert Tsai in honor of the… Continue reading
On Wednesday, Drs. Mollie Barnes, Joy Bracewell, Leah Haught, and Jon Kotchian will present on designing, incorporating, and assessing multimodal portfolios in our courses. As you recall, the portfolio assignment allows our students to demonstrate certain competencies: With these outcomes in mind, our presentation will consider how student portfolios can… Continue reading
