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
The Special Events Committee of the Writing and Communication program invites all LMC faculty and administrators to the first of our Fall 2013 events: “Teaching the 20th Century: A Colloquium on Digital Pedagogy and 20th Century Literature and Culture.” On Tuesday, October 29th, from 11AM to 12PM, in Hall 102, three third-year… Continue reading
Fellow Britts: Welcome back to DevLab. This post, made on behalf of the DevLab Committee, has four purposes: to invite you to attend an Open House event next week; to provide some basic information about the DevLab space; to tell you about some of our hardware and software resources; and… 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
It’s a busy first few weeks of the semester, but I hope you can find some time to attend the first professional development speaker series of the term. Title: First Year Reading Programs: Georgia Tech and Beyond Description: Georgia Tech has a dynamic and growing First Year Reading (FYR) program,… 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
Iuliu Ratiu’s essay “Land Surveying as a Poetic Exercise in Walden and ‘Walking’” appeared recently in The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies, N.S. Vol. 21, 2013. Ratiu’s study contributes to recent scholarship analyzing the importance of land surveying to literary studies and shows that Thoreau’s interest and expertise… Continue reading
The editors of TECHStyle welcome new and returning Brittain Fellows to a new semester! We want to share with you our goals and objectives for the continuing development of the site. New Britts will contribute regularly to TECHStyle through their participation in weekly Digital Pedagogy seminars (see a sample post… Continue reading
It always seems self-contradictory to proffer sage career advice to fellow teachers and academics. I am not too far removed from the realm of the Brittain Fellows, having been one from 2007-2008. Like you, I walked among the hallowed halls of Skiles and watched the ever-fluctuating stream of students, many… Continue reading
The moment Diane Jakacki showed me a picture of the Bubble Girl being chased by a bent but strangely menacing Prince Charles, I knew I had to write something about memes. That’s probably an exaggeration. I did laugh a lot. And I did do some investigating. Turns out Chubby Bubble Girl… Continue reading
We are pleased to present the second podcast in TechStyle’s podcast series! Our second episode features Colonel Stephen C. Hall, USAF Retired, 1967 Graduate of Georgia Tech, and the namesake of our new home, the Stephen C. Hall Writing and Communication Building, on the Georgia Tech campus. The podcast… 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
On April 12, the second annual Student View exhibition, on display at the Ferst Center for the Arts during March and April 2013, served as the backdrop for the opening reception for the new campus-wide celebration of the arts, the TechArts Festival. An estimated 200 guests including students, parents, faculty, and visitors… Continue reading
The Writing and Communication Program has an ongoing initiative to provide mentoring to first year post-doctorates looking to further professionalize as they make their way to full time positions. As a new Brittain Fellow, I – Peter Fontaine – was paired with LMC faculty member, Dr. Krystina Madej. I had… 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
We may not think of future scientists, mathematicians, and engineers as artists and storytellers whose work appeals to our aesthetic sensibilities. Student View, an annual exhibition of artifacts launched in 2012 as part of a collaborative effort by the Writing and Communication Program and the Ferst Center to promote innovative… Continue reading
Brittain Fellows Amanda Golden and Margaret Konkol will deliver a presentation on digital pedagogy to the faculty at Oglethorpe University. See the poster and abstract for their presentation below. Abstract: Hybrid pedagogy, digital pedagogy, and multi-modality are all terms that roughly describe an approach to teaching that integrates technology with… Continue reading
Amanda Golden published two pieces in the third volume of The Ted Hughes Society Journal. “Ted Hughes and the Midcentury American Academy” addresses Hughes’s teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in the spring of 1958. While many critics assume that Hughes did not annotate his books, Hughes underlined and… 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
