Christine Hoffmann’s paper—”Nothing to See Here, Folks: Milton’s Art of Disappearance”—explores the ways in which disappearance gives the impression of vitality in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton broadly realizes the possibilities of fallibility, failure and fallenness through his own illegible posture as the poet vainly presuming to write Eden, and he… 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
Jennifer Holley’s prose poem, “First Words,” appears in the recent edition of Indiana English, the journal of the Indiana Council of Teachers of English. The poem about learning penmanship appears in a special issue on “Nurturing Reflective Writers.” Continue reading
After a successful run at the Ferst Center for the Arts, the Student View exhibition will move to the Woodruff Arts Center for Georgia Tech Student Night this Thursday, February 16th, from 5 to 8 pm. This event provides another chance to see exemplary student work in a gallery setting…. 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
This term Tom Lolis and I are jointly teaching an 1102 course entitled “#DigitalBard: New Media Approaches to Shakespearean Drama”. By jointly I mean that we each teach three sections, but we are both focusing on the same plays (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Richard III, and Titus Andronicus); while we bring our own research background and interests to class lectures, several major assignments are shared across all six sections. These assignments are all rooted in some form of digital media: blogs, wikis, suites that incorporate several tools and platforms (I’m thinking specifically of Google here). But media as we are applying the term also refers to performance and video. One of our goals is to break students of the tendency to shy away from Shakespeare because they believe the plays are hard to read and therefore boring and a waste of their time. Continue reading
Michelle Gibbons has a recent publication, “Reassessing Discovery: Rosalind Franklin, Scientific Visualization, and the Structure of DNA,” which appears in the current issue of Philosophy of Science.
Gibbons, Michelle G. “Reassessing Discovery: Rosalind Franklin, Scientific Visualization, and the Structure of DNA.” Philosophy of Science 79 (2012): 63-80.
Continue reading
Malavika Shetty’s book for children, The Sweetest Mango, is forthcoming from Tulika Books as part of their Wordbird Series. The book will published simultaneously in English, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, and Bengali. 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
Bob Blaskiewicz’s article “Engineering Truth” was published in the magazine, Skeptical Inquirer, in September 2011. An expanded version, “You Can’t Handle the Truthiness: A Night Out with the 9/11 Truth Community” appears on their website. Also read Bob’s new regular column — “The Conspiracy Guy” — for Skeptical Inquirer‘s website. Continue reading
In September, Regina Martin, second-year Brittain Fellow, had a new article published: “Specters of Romance: The Female Quixote and Domestic Fiction,” The Eighteenth-Century Novel 8 (2011). Continue reading
Congratulations to our colleagues who designed and taught the classes in which students developed the artifacts selected for the Student View exhibition, now in the Ferst Center for the Arts (until January 31) and then moving to the Woodruff Art Center (1280 Peachtree Street NE, Atlanta, GA 30309) for one… Continue reading
The Student View exhibition currently on display at the Ferst Center for the Arts is entering its final week. Last Wednesday, January 18th, students whose work was selected for the exhibition were honored in a private reception followed by a public screening of student films. We had an impressive turnout: More than 50 people attended the reception, and more than 100 came to the screening!
As a collaboration between the Writing and Communication Program and the Ferst Center for the Arts, Student View is, to our knowledge, the first exhibition of its kind in the country, displaying student works produced in composition and English studies classrooms in a professional art gallery that’s open to the public. The exhibition features a wide variety of artifacts displayed in five categories: Collage, Mosaic, Digital Media, Poster Art, and Film. 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
As a multimedia instructional librarian, I am continually amazed at how much more engaged and excited students become when they have to challenge themselves and break away from using what they consider to be the traditional modes of communication in an academic environment. For example, this can occur through having to create a website, a visually stunning poster, designing a three- dimensional model, or masterminding a feature film.
So often, the necessary emphasis placed on the message content may cause us to forget the importance of choosing the best method for delivering that content. The way information is transmitted has the potential to either obscure or enhance the message content.
Continue reading
Where can you see a film protesting lint, a new vision of Monet’s beloved Giverny, a self-portrait made up of thousands of tiny images and words, a concrete poem that turns Zadie Smith’s White Teeth into an enormous pair of lips, and the ferocious grace of local skydivers? MOMA? The Tate Modern? The Musée D’Orsay? Look no further than the Ferst Center for the Arts, just around the corner from Skiles. And the artists? No, they aren’t here in residence from other institutions; they are our students and they rock.
How many times have we been blown away by our students’ creativity and talent when we ask them to do work that pushes the boundaries of traditional first-year composition assignments? Each year, more than 4,000 Georgia Tech students enroll in our English 1101 and 1102 courses. Many of them create artistic pieces that not only satisfy the written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal components of communication, but far surpass our expectations of a given assignment. Continue reading
Almost 600 students from 32 different majors had walked through the doors of and used the services of the new Communication Center, by the end of the Fall 2011 semester. To put it mildly, it has been a hectic, but heady, semester at the CommLab! For the five Brittain Fellows… Continue reading
As a way to bring the year to a close, I asked the Brittain Fellows to answer the following question: “Looking back over the fall semester, what are you most proud of?” Here’s a round-up of their answers:
Leeann Hunter: This semester, I actively transformed the classroom into a space where innovation could thrive. I found that students largely benefited from the experimental nature of the course and what I called “Invention Mobs” and “Professional Interventions.” It’s the first class that I’ve taught that I would teach again and again. For more information about the course, visit my website at www.leeannhunter.com/invention.
Julia Munro: I’m proud of, and impressed by, the creative work that the first-year Gatech students (in my 1101 classes, and other 1101-1102 classes) come up with to meet the challenge of our multimodal assignments.
Aaron Kashtan: I’m proud of having gotten my students to notice typography. 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
