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 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
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
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
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
Normally, I would sit down to write a blog of this sort saying I’d “just returned” from a particular conference. However, that language doesn’t really work this year as I was lucky enough to move to Atlanta just before this year’s National Women’s Studies Association annual conference. This year it… Continue reading
In this article I wish to reflect at more length on the topic of “archaeology of digital media,” which happens to be the topic of discussion this week for the weekly Digital Pedagogy Seminar for first-year Brittain Fellows. Although many literary scholars are certainly well-versed in historical approaches, myself included,… Continue reading
Check out this great video on infographics (and y’all know how much I love infographics): The Value of Data Visualization from Column Five on Vimeo. Continue reading
In Jade Simmon’s discussion on the necessity of rhythm in human interaction to the Brittain Fellows on Monday, October 10th, I was reminded of a Radiolab podcast from a while back on how two physicists explained the nature of urban life based on the rhythm created by its inhabitants. For… Continue reading
Moods on Twitter Follow Biological Rhythms, Study Finds – NYTimes.com. I wonder how this approach to parsing Twitter usage extends to the classroom. I have observed that many students groan when I tell them at the beginning of course that they will be using Twitter for peer feedback and evaluation… Continue reading
Ever since Baudrillard found his way into my dissertation (I have no memory of inviting him—suddenly he was there, like Jack Nicholson in that picture at the end of The Shining), I’ve been curious about how he’d fare in an undergraduate classroom. His postmodern and Nietzschean sympathies make him entertaining… Continue reading
This semester, I am teaching an honors section of ENGL1101, aka first-year composition. The students are awesome, and I am really enjoying the experience. Recently, though, I discovered that in addition to providing an opportunity to work with great, motivated students drawn from a close-knit learning community, Georgia Tech’s honors… Continue reading
The first week of never-completely-successful classes always prompts some serious, not necessarily helpful reflection. No harm in reflecting electronically, I guess. I don’t know how many others of you do this, but when I’m introducing myself to new students as their teacher of writing and communication, I become increasingly aware… Continue reading
Hello! I’m joining y’all at Tech from Eugene, Oregon. I just finished a two year postdoc at the University of Oregon, which is also where I received my PhD in English in 2009. Prior to that, I earned an MA in Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures from the University of… Continue reading
I’m thrilled to be joining a group of teachers and scholars from whom I can already tell I will be pilfering many valuable ideas and resources. In fact, the pilfering has already begun. Fellow Emory alums and current Britts Katy Crowther and Michelle Miles have been very generous with their… Continue reading
The temperature is hovering around 95 and we are hurrying to put the finishing touches on our course syllabi. Yes, it’s that time again: a new school year at Georgia Tech. And with it comes a new cohort of Brittain Fellows. They may not yet realize it, but they are… Continue reading
As we prepare for the new semester, we asked two Brittain Fellows to reflect on their teaching experiences during the last semester. Regina Martin Teaching Modernism at Tech Modernism lends itself really well to teaching multimodal communication at Tech because much of modernist art is heavily influenced by technological advancements… Continue reading
We asked Brittain Fellows who will be moving on from the program to reflect upon their experiences. Four Britts rose to the challenge; as you’ll see, the perspectives of Jo Anne Harris, Crystal Lake, Melissa Meeks and Paulette Richards are varied but share an enthusiasm for the time they have… Continue reading
“We already have an UnPress and it is called the internet” – Trevor Owens THATCamp Prime, at George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, taught me that a word does not make a new publishing model. The UnPress session was, surprisingly perhaps only to my naive… Continue reading
On the eve of his return to Canaan, your biblical namesake, Jacob, wrestled with an angel until daybreak. What force is your greatest challenge on your journey to “The Promised Land?” You walk into the room and take a seat before a firing squad of six interviewers. For an arduous… Continue reading
‘Write a reflection piece on this last term.’ That sounded like a reasonable task and one I would be able to knock out quickly – in the midst of trying to finish marking and prepare to fly home for the holidays (if anyone has any suggestions what I can get… Continue reading
This semester I taught a course on collaborative consumption. According to Rachel Botsman, who coined the phrase in What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, collaborative consumption has emerged from “digital interactions” that have enabled consumers to “experience the concept that cooperation does not need to come at… Continue reading
At the end of the semester I like to take some time to look back at the classes I just taught and evaluate how they actually turned out. It always feels like a leap of faith to me, trusting that the syllabus I created in the quiet summer months and… Continue reading
