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
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
I’ve been a member of the digital humanities community here at Georgia Tech for the past year and a half (+!) and yet here I am, THATCamp-less. It’s a shame. I’m ashamed! THATCamp is one of the hallmarks of what we at the Brittain Fellowship try to do on a… Continue reading
1079 pages. 388 footnotes. 2 lbs 10 oz (and that’s the paperback). David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is nothing if not formidable. It languishes on many a “to-read” shelf alongside Joyce’s Ulysses and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Despite its intimidation factor, Infinite Jest can be a pretty accessible read, and it is absolutely… Continue reading
I came across this piece while planning an 1101 assignment that will require students to analyze web texts through Voyant. “Could we imagine a world in which ‘Here is an ordered list of the books you should read,’ gives way to, ‘Here is what I found. What did you find?’ via… 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
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.
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The final project for my ENGL1102 course “London City Comedy” is a collaborative digital edition of Tarlton’s Jests, a 17th century collection of anecdotes about the Elizabethan clown Richard Tarlton. The assignment consists of five parts: Continue reading
(Seminar by Sipai Klein, Julia Munro, Michael Tondre) 1. The meaning-making process writers face has been historically determined by the “technology” of paper. The integration of electronic communication has arguably changed writers’ meaning-making processes and the discourse produced by writers. In other words, the material contexts of writing have influenced… Continue reading
I had an “a-ha” moment in first-year composition class last week. I was preparing for a conference, writing job letters, preparing my classes, and trying to keep up with grading. In short, something had to give. But what? And then it hit me – Blog Post of the Week! Every… 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
Last Monday, I attended one of the Workshops on Digital Scholarship being offered through the Emory Digital Scholarship Commons this semester. This series offers workshops on a variety of topics ranging from “Creating an Online Presence I: Take Control of Your Online Personality” to “Hack Your Theme: Customize WordPress Themes… Continue reading
I’ve been using blogs for a long time in my classes as a place for informal writing and reflection. I originally used the blogs as simply an online repository to store weekly response readings but the more I’ve used them, the more I find that the actual medium creates a particularly dynamic… Continue reading
It’s that time of year and we’re all thinking “syllabus.” At least we were about a week or two ago – now with classes underway most of us have finalized our syllabi and distributed them to our new classes. Or did you? I didn’t. Well, distribute them that is. I’ve… 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
On November 18, the Georgia Tech Writing and Communication Program hosted the Fall Communication Colloquium in which two Brittain Fellows presented on work their students have been doing in class this semester. The presenters did such a wonderful job generating discussion during the sessions (a link to an archive of… Continue reading
