Posts that focus primarily on teaching and pedagogy.
Or, Why Teach Shakespeare to Georgia Tech Undergraduates? This is the third term I’ve used early moden drama as the theme for my 1102 classes. In fall 2011 I taught a course on London City Comedy (The Shoemaker’s Holiday, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Bartholmew Fair); last spring I… Continue reading
James Gregory and Rachel Mahan will lead Monday’s Tech Comm Seminar discussion on visual literacy, visual design, and information design. We would like you to read and watch the following: “What is Information Design?” Janice C. Redish (pp. 211-17 in Teaching Technical Communication) From “The Vocabulary of Comics” Scott McCloud… Continue reading
In the first weeks of my 1101 course, The Allure of the Unreliable Utterance, I introduced my students to Socratic irony and to Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. We watched snippets of The Colbert Report and The Daily Show—programs which rely on irony for their satirical humor—and we read Plato’s Symposium—a… Continue reading
In this seminar session, Dr. Patrick McHenry and Dr. Andy Frazee will lead discussion on the “soul” of business and technical communication; in so doing, the seminar will also discuss the “soul” of academia. What is our responsibility as teachers and academics to the workplaces our students are going into?… Continue reading
An ongoing series by new Brittain Fellow, Rebecca Weaver I am a new Brittain Fellow in Digital Pedagogy at Georgia Institute of Technology, where I teach a 21st Century version of First-Year Writing. This class focuses on the WOVEN curriculum, a broader curriculum of communication than that of traditional writing… Continue reading
About a thousand years after everyone else, I came across Feminist Ryan Gosling, and despite having seen only one Ryan Gosling movie—Drive, in which he “Hey’s” nary a girl, but does assault someone with a hammer—I enjoyed reading through the entries. But I knew I was late to the party when… Continue reading
As a client-based course, my technical communication class at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta functions like a hybrid between a college class and a consulting firm, with the students working in teams to compose websites, marketing strategies, reports, manuals, and a variety of other artifacts for local nonprofits and small businesses. Continue reading
As the editor of TECHstyle this year, I’ve exhorted my colleagues on a regular basis to “bang out a post – it only takes 15 minutes”! Yet here I sit, mulling on this “end-of-the-year” reflection post and I find I have nowhere to start and no idea how to write… Continue reading
On April 26, 1478, as part of a plot against the Medici, conspirators attempted to assassinate Lorenzo de’ Medici and his brother Giuliano in the Duomo at high mass. Giuliano died but Lorenzo escaped. The reverberations of this daring plot, known as the Pazzi conspiracy after the family who… Continue reading
Being a teacher can be incredibly rewarding. I feel fortunate to work in an environment where I can focus on becoming a better teacher and collaborate with other progressive pedagogues (couldn’t resist that). It is easy to get caught up in the prepping and marking and research and committee meetings… Continue reading
Two weeks ago, my students displayed their final projects in the third floor gallery space in Clough. For the final installment of my “Myth in the Classroom” column, I thought I’d reflect back on what I learned, what I enjoyed, and what I struggled with in putting the exhibit together… Continue reading
One thing that stands out in our conversations these past weeks is just how amorphous the term “hybrid” actually is, both pedagogically and methodologically. In the past few weeks we’ve talked about tools and platforms, shared successes and failures in our own intentional and un-intentional forays into hybrid pedagogy (however… Continue reading
Pushing for Definitions along the Fuzzy Boundaries of Hybridity Last week in our Brittain Fellow research seminar on Hybrid Pedagogy, we discussed definition and documentation. What would an Encyclopedia of Hybrid Pedagogy look like? What kinds of entries would be necessary? These were the questions that prompted our discussion. We… Continue reading
After a longer-than-anticipated hiatus, I return to discuss something relatively far afield from myth. Instead, I want to share an assignment that my students recently completed, because it was relatively painless for me to teach and grade and relatively productive at getting students to learn the difficult skill of close reading.
I often tell (read: nag; cajole; harangue) my students to pay attention to all of the little details of language, to notice how the most seemingly insignificant choices that the author makes have significant effects on the text’s meaning. I’ve found in the past that teaching close reading with poetry is often the best approach, since poetry (at least good poetry) is able to jam as much meaning as possible into the smallest amount of space. So I often begin my courses with poetry and a discussion of close reading: what it is, why it’s beneficial—even to aspiring engineers. (Being able to discern the tone that their email is conveying if they write it in ALL CAPS, for example, is a useful skill for them to have.) Continue reading
This week’s seminar picked up where we left off, revisiting the usage of Twitter in a classroom setting with two instructor demonstrations of Twitter backchannels, including one for an in-class film screening. Another instructor demonstrated how the Piazza platform had stimulated classroom discussion in similar ways to Twitter, which led to the first of two main questions of the night: What we want from using a hybrid pedagogy? Possibilities included more student engagement, or a better quality of student work and responsiveness, but we also voiced the desire to create a classroom space that had a different sense of community that is somehow different from that created by face-to-face interaction. Once our goals were articulated, we were faced with the more difficult question of how we can assess to what extent we get what we want. It is this second question that this blog post will focus on.
While discussion mainly centered on practical and logistical questions, as well as anecdotal successes and failures, the underlying assumptions that shaped our inquiries are both methodological and epistemological. Epistemology and methodology are inextricably linked. The purpose of this post is to review the reasons why epistemology and methodology are so contentious among researchers in composition theory and technical writing, as well as create a space for further discussion. Continue reading
This week, in our weekly Brittain Fellow Research Methodology seminar on Hybrid Pedagogy, we discussed using Twitter as a tool for creating a “back-channel” of conversation at conferences, lectures, and in the classroom. Our conversation constituted the “face-to-face” component of our own hybrid classroom; our session technically began last week when we all attended the Emory DISC lecture “Seeing Time” by Edward L. Ayers during which we used a twitter back-channel (#discayers) to have a synchronous discussion about the talk. We then continued our conversation asynchronously on TECHStyle by commenting on Robin Wharton’s write up of the event “What Should a Hybrid Classroom Look like?” during the week leading up to our Wednesday evening Research Methodology seminar.
In our “face-to-face” discussion, we shared our experience using the Twitter back-channel during the talk, and many of us expressed feeling distracted by the effort to listen to the speaker … Continue reading
In early January, I made the trek to Seattle for the 2012 MLA convention. I was excited to be there, not only because Seattle is a very cool town, but because I was participating in an “electronic roundtable” devoted to digital pedagogy along with some very cool people. The roundtable,… Continue reading
Well, last night our hybrid classroom looked very much like the Jones Room and the new Research Commons at Emory’s Woodruff Library. Every spring, a number of Brittain Fellows choose to participate in an optional postdoctoral seminar on research methodologies. This semester, because the Writing and Communication Program is piloting hybrid pedagogy in our first-year composition and technical communication classes, we are using the design and assessment of hybrid pedagogies as a lens through which our examination of method is focused.
For those of you who may be wondering, hybrid pedagogy (also known as blended learning) combines face-to-face and distance or virtual learning strategies. Some thought-provoking recent studies have suggested hybrid instruction may–at least in some situations, for some students–create a more optimal learning environment than either traditional or wholly-online classes. Continue reading
For my third soundbite-related post, I’d like to talk some pedagogy. This semester I’m teaching a course on copia, which in some ways would seem to be the opposite of sound-biting.
Copia is about abundance, variety, superfluity, excess, accumulation—words not normally associated with soundbite culture. The latter conjures very different terms: truncation, abbreviation, superficiality, redundancy, speed, spin. Continue reading
Rebecca Burnett and I had a conversation about the nature of commenting on student blog posts. As instructors, should we have the option of making a private comment – viewable only to the student author, or should all comments be viewable to all students? There is an argument to be… Continue reading
To cap off my introductory week with my new 1102 students I decided to do a field trip. The general trajectory of my first week was a sort of “show not tell” conceptual introduction to the course (with the incredibly important yet always boring syllabus day in the middle). In… Continue reading
Last semester, I am glad that I decided to hold a class in the CommLab. I gave my class five in-class projects to work on related to our novel for this semester :’Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’ by Jonathan Safran Foer. I divided the class into five groups. One of… Continue reading
Since I’m awash in grading, I’d like to wrap up the semester with a meditation on final projects and cultural studies. I asked my ENGL 1101 students to create websites that perform a cultural study of a chosen artifact of American culture in terms of its relationship to race and technology. Overall, I think the assignment went quite well. Students appreciated the opportunity to share their ideas with an audience beyond me and even beyond their fellow classmates. And they especially enjoyed playing around with Dreamweaver, html, and iWeb. (Or so they tell me in their reflection papers.) An additional enticement was that they got to select artifacts of American culture that were important or relevant to them, including the Ford Mustang, the iPhone, and the NFL.
The greatest challenge students faced when making their arguments about these artifacts, though, was to bridge the issues of race and technology. Most of their websites ended up devoting one page to race and one to technology and not tying them together… Continue reading
A collage of sounds composed to reflect what we learned as Marion L. Brittain Fellows this semester at the Digital Pedagogy Seminar: dped_mix. Topics and Songs: Assessment – REM That’s me in the corner Digital divide – Aesop Rock’s 9-5ers Anthem Privilege and exclusion – Holidays in the Sun Texts… Continue reading
This week we’ll cover the issue of visual rhetoric in technical communication. We begin with an article by Greenzweig who discusses “the ways in which visual composition contributes to a user’s aesthetic experience and why such an experience is important when designing information structures.” We continue with McCloud’s chapter in… Continue reading
