Against Argument; or, 25 Notes Toward a Descriptive Pedagogy by Way of Stephen King and Jacques Rancière

  1) Twitter can be a pretty disingenuous place. The tricky thing is that to call attention to any one tweet, however atrocious, risks making a mountain out of a molehill. But as a teacher of writing, literature, and communication, I’ve found myself returning again and again to one particular… Continue reading

Information Overload; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Social Media

The longer I teach, the more aware I become of a growing ideological separation between myself and my students. It’s not that I’m morphing into an out-of-touch, elbow patch-wearing professor (OK, I do have elbow patches), but there is definitely a widening divide, and over time, I’ve come to realize… Continue reading

Teaching with Twitter: Social Media in the Composition Classroom

When I mention that I use Twitter in my first-year writing courses, I am often met with both intrigue and skepticism by students and faculty alike. If writing courses are supposed to be focused on nuanced thinking, careful research, and rhetorically sophisticated arguments, what can students possibly learn from writing… Continue reading

Pieces of What?

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

Hybrid Pedagogies: Platforms and Tools for Virtual Learning

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

A Midwinter Night’s Teaching Assignment

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

What Should A Hybrid “Classroom” Look Like?

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

Stommel and Champion Produce Georgia Tech It Gets Better Video

The Georgia Tech Pride Alliance and the Writing and Communication Program have joined the community, corporate, and collegiate movement across the country by co-producing a Georgia Tech It Gets Better video. It Gets Better is a national movement to reduce bullying and suicides among LGBTQ youth. The video was produced and directed by Jesse Stommel, Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow and Julie Champion, Student and President of Georgia Tech Pride Alliance, with a musical score by Matt Morris.
Stommel and Champion were inspired to work on this project after seeing the wonderful video produced recently at NC State. Like the NC State video, the Georgia Tech It Gets Better video features personal interviews in recognizable campus locations with nearly 50 students, faculty, staff, administration, and alumni of varying sexualities and backgrounds. Continue reading

Building Citizen Journalist Communities

On Saturday, October 22, I attended the 2011 Media Law in the Digital Age conference, co-sponsored by Kennesaw State University’s Center for Sustainable Journalism and Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. After the morning’s plenary session, I attended a panel on “Online Community Building and Managing: What are the Legal and Editorial Concerns You Need to Know?” Continue reading

Feed: Texting, Twitter, and the Student 2.0

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

Future Media Fest: Recap – Public, Private, or Corporate?

The Future Media Fest emphasized, for me, the increasing tension between the public sphere and private enterprise or, in other words, the struggle between corporate profit and public good over the move to more collective forms of identity. In my first post, on the Startup Technology Showcase, I looked at… Continue reading

FutureMedia Fest: In Defense of Cookies

At today’s panel on the Future of Advertising and Marketing at FutureMedia Fest, panelists noted some public confusion about the infringement of privacy that is incurred when personal information is tracked through cookies and sold to advertisers for marketing purposes. In the long run, they argued, targeted marketing will enhance… Continue reading

Future Media Fest: General Introduction

During the week of October 4, Georgia Tech will play host to Future Media Fest, a conference that bills itself as “an interactive mash-up of talent, ideas, trends and technology.” This event promises to provide a glimpse at some emerging technologies and social formations involving digital media, including social media,… Continue reading