D-Ped 9/12: New Media

13 Comments

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2. 

   Julie Hawk

   September 11, 2012 at 3:18 pm

   The DigiRhet article has much to say about convergence, something I’ve thought a lot about before, but from the other side of the consuming/producing continuum. That is, in my popular culture class, I teach Henry Jenkins’ musings on convergence culture and how that affects us as consumers of popular culture. Here, they are talking very specifically about convergence in producing digital media. I’d like to dig a little deeper into a sort of mega-convergence, ie the convergence of both of these aspects.
   • 

     Jason Ellis

     September 11, 2012 at 10:16 pm

     Hey Julie,

     Please share your thoughts about convergence in our seminar on Wednesday. I would like to know what you think about Henry Jenkins’ ideas about convergence culture.

     I am interested in the tensions between the technology industry (primary innovators/popularizers of new media technologies), big media (culture producers), and consumers/creators (innovators on the “growing” margins–think about how DragonCon and ComicCon is becoming less marginal). There seems to be a convergence of consuming and producing, but the technology industry seems reticent or cautious of investing too much in consumers’ ability to create. Here, I am thinking of Apple’s strong support of Hypercard and eventual killing of the product after it was spun off under the Claris subsidiary, or the first iPad’s consumption oriented focus versus the iPad 2’s creation focus. It seems like there is something unique about the world wide web’s rapid adoption and growth have something to do with its strong research-academic roots that the great technology products lack or take longer to accept.

     Best, Jason
3. 

   Iuliu Ratiu

   September 12, 2012 at 10:13 am

   Since I’m in a reading/linking/posting mode this morning, here’s a quick thought: how are the new media changing our understanding of issues like intellectual property and plagiarism? Think of Jonah Lehrer’s infamous habits of recycling his work and of disseminating others’ work as his own. Even better, think of sources and resources we can all use to police/prevent such misconduct. [You can also read this as a shameless plug and invitation to contribute to a resource/database The Intellectual Property and Ethics Committee is currently working on!]
4. 

   Mollie Barnes

   September 12, 2012 at 12:14 pm

   The texts we’re looking at this week–coupled with some of the discussions I’m having with my students this week–have me thinking about the issue of distraction. I say issue–and not problem–because I do think distraction can be a really, really productive part of the learning process. There’s some fascinating discussion on the epistemology of distraction among Victorian critics, so I’m interested in it from that angle, too. For tonight, I have three inter-related questions I’d like to discuss:

   1. does/when does/how does social media “distract” our attention from _what_ we’re communicating to _how_ we’re communicating? (I’m not using “distract” with necessarily negative connotations–just that media becomes the subject or the purpose of the discussion as much as the much more obvious content. In 1101 and 1102 classes, this is, obviously, often very useful. I’d still like to talk, though, about whether there are moments when turning to various social media for teaching obfuscates what we’re trying to cover–or when students turn from a Twitter back channel for class to Kanye West’s latest Tweet.)

   2. how are distractions productive? I’m thinking about days when I try to teach students active reading by googling things with them or flipping back and forth between, say, a book and a website. One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is getting students to approach reading as a conversation: it’s hard, sometimes, to get them to talk back to a text, to interrogate a text, to distract themselves by looking up things they’re interested in. I guess I’m wondering if there are ways to use social media to teach students how to distract themselves in ways that will, ultimately, help them feel more intellectually engaged with the material. I’m wondering, too, if there’s a way to apply the sense of immediacy afforded by social media to the ways we teach, for instance, close reading.

   3. how do we teach students to funnel and edit–or aggregate–these immediate forms of communication in professional ways? Several of my students were blogging last week that they felt overburdened by the level of detail in one of the books we were reading, and we’ve since had some good conversations about how producers/consumers of different media (documentary makers, investigative reporters, etc) organize and present information effectively. Ultimately, we had to really address what happens when people take huge chunks of information they’ve gathered and whittle them down into linear (or seemingly linear) narratives. I was struck when the professor in the Twitter video talked about the ways Twitter can teach students to distill their comments, ideas, and questions. Teaching students to distill//edit _is_ a huge part of what we do. At the same time, I often find myself talking with students about supporting distilled/edited points with detailed discussions. I’m wondering how social media complicates this push and pull work: teaching students to refine–and expand–their points.
5. 

   Joy Bracewell

   September 12, 2012 at 12:15 pm

   I’m very excited by Storify. My students are working on their first project now. Each student is producing an essay and artifact that interweaves personal and collective histories, combining analogical sets of tasks that relate to _The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks_. If I use this sort of assignment in future semesters, I think Storify would be a more seamless way to use the WOVEN approach.
6. 

   Leah

   September 12, 2012 at 12:19 pm

   I think the distinction made by several of the readings between what we can learn about our students from their digital literacy and what we can teach them about digital literacy is an important one that frequently gets overlooked in the excitement of trying out new ideas and technologies. The pressure to be “innovative” and “interesting” can be intense, and I sometimes think we forget some of these distinctions as a result. I also appreciate the extent to which access (broadly defined) was addressed repeatedly: should we be assigning Twitter essays if doing so puts some of our students at a serious disadvantage because they don’t have easy access to a smart phone or laptop? Here at Tech, we have the privilege of knowing our students have laptops but this isn’t always the case. And speaking from personal experience, when my students are using their laptops in class they don’t have a lot of space to do much of anything else (like compare or take notes), since the desks are tiny–so design and access is an issue here to a certain extent too!
7. 

   Emily

   September 12, 2012 at 2:15 pm

   Since I’m teaching Tech Comm this semester, I’ve talked a lot with my students about presentation, reception, and perception in communication online through various social networking sites and through simple online presence (Googling, Google Image-ing, etc.). I had my students engage in an online reputation assignment in which they each had to spend only 15 minutes researching a fellow student (who, in turn, was assigned to them) and then do a short write-up as to what they found, how they found it, and what potential employers might think of such information. It was funny to see students candidly call their actions “stalking” and fascinating to find out how comfortable many of them were to share aspects of themselves online with the public and yet be slightly uncomfortable talking about them face to face. They enjoyed finding connections with each other they didn’t know they had, too. Still, they seemed to appreciate the turning of the “stalker” eye to themselves in order to more clearly know what was out there and up for consumption by potential employers (for instance, class projects on YouTube).

   I’m interested in talking about trends, too, but particularly past trends that may have seemed future-forward, but turned out otherwise. What technologies or social trends from the past have like-minded folks toyed with and what do their experiences have to teach us about our present? How do we avoid picking the dud technologies?

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9. 

   Margaret Konkol

   September 12, 2012 at 4:22 pm

   New Media, specifically different forms of social networking offer new levels of interaction for the student and her professor, among students, and for students and the world outside the classroom. I asked students today what digital social networking sites they used and we made a big list. We tried to categorize them and students, in each section, seemed to view them mostly in terms of the audience —is it one that the “publisher” already knows and can limit or is it one that is unknown and beyond the publisher’s control? Since successful communication is based on knowing one’s audience. I wonder, what advice, words of caution, etc. would others give me in shaping an assignment in which, say, students create Yelp reviews of Atlanta restaurants—reviews that speak only and specifically about how the restaurant matches up to environmental justice standards (locally produced food, organic ingredients, access to dietary information, work conditions of the employees)? What could go horribly wrong?
10. 

    Jonathan Kotchian

    September 12, 2012 at 4:45 pm

    I was especially interested in a particular moment in the Buck piece: when Ronnie mentions his desire to be a net contributor on Twitter (and other social media), to have more followers than followees. I always try to get my students to think of themselves as authors rather than mere receivers, but hadn’t thought of quantifying it in that way. Buck has an admirable focus on how Ronnie and other users can “stake out” their identities — this suggests a real fight over the space of digital existence, something that might motivate students to think of their digital literacy and multimodal composition as weapons in a very real struggle over who gets to make culture and define identity.

    What I’m struggling with right now in my 1102 class: publicity/privacy issues. Each student is creating her own blog, and (partly because of privacy issues) I’ve encouraged them to experiment with a persona different from their usual online self, so some of them are highlighting a particular aspect of their current writerly personality, others are inventing radical new identities, etc. But I can’t help feeling that I’m missing out on the amazing power of their already-existing digital identity and networks; their development might proceed much more naturally if the class could somehow tap into that.

    On Mollie’s point #3: I was talking with one of my classes today about what makes them want to read composition (on the theory that they should compose things they might like to read), and I was surprised by how thoughtfully they talked about distillation — it wasn’t just that they wanted short readings; there was an overwhelming desire to read only “meat” (or marrow, or quintessence) and a seemingly firm belief that everything is distillable. They were willing to allow that sometimes expansion (why isn’t there a good antonym for “distill”?) is a good thing, but only in the realm of pure entertainment. So I’m trying to collect texts and assignments that will allow the students to see some of the value of expansion in a wider variety of contexts.
11. 

    lmatthews

    September 12, 2012 at 4:49 pm

    The self-other/communicator-audience relationship and the way that technological literacies impact our conceptions — and our students’ — conceptions of these relationships is clearly a concern for the writers in the pieces we read for today. Conversations about audience that we have had my 1102 sections reveal that my students are very savvy about audience and that they connect that audience awareness to their use of a variety of social media. Conversations about audience turn into conversations about self-presentation, which quickly become conversations about interpreting the other, which morph into conversations about visual rhetoric. I’m fascinated by this interpretive cycle, the making and remaking, the reading and reading, the intersubjectivity and/or self-fashioning that our use of these technologies lets us as rhetoricians study. In a way, do we resemble Castiglione (our classrooms are the conversations at the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino; our scholarship on mindfully constructing our web presence and interpreting the web-based artifacts of others is the _Book of the Courtier_)?

    And that (odd? bizarre?) connection leads me to the issue of access (because the whole self-fashioning issue was a way to control access to social mobility – a way to interpret/judge people – and at the same time a tool that opened access to social mobility – as readers mastered the issues of audience expectations and how to present their artifacts (themselves) to their readers). The articles wanted to privilege online communication as broadening access to the creation of information, thereby spreading power to more individuals beyond the intellectual elite. But is there a way in which this greater access actually just shifts the power to a different sector of individuals rather than helping to remedy the problem of centralized power?

    And to connect to what Emily mentioned about dud technology: I loved the repeated reference to a privileging of PDAs in the digirhet article.

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