Blogging Pedagogy

Scott Nelson of the lab's gaming group had the opportunity to chat with Stanford's Rhetoric of Gaming class. BP caught up with him to see how it went.

In early February, I had the opportunity to speak via teleconference with Christine Alfano’s Rhetoric of Gaming class. In their study of educational video games, the class played the Flash version of Rhetorical Peaks, the DWRL’s game for teaching rhetorical concepts to students. As part of their assignment, the students blogged about the experience and gave us some feedback for improving the gameplay and structure.

Stanford students certainly enjoyed the Flash version of Rhetorical Peaks, but  they were excited about moving the game into Second Life, as this virtual environment would immerse players in the town of Rhetorical Peaks and create more emotional investment in the characters and community. This type of feedback from our intended audience is invaluable.

The meeting with Chistine Alfano's Rhetoric of Gaming class came about because of the DWRL's association with Stanford's Cross Cultural Rhetoric (CCR) program. The Lab now has its own CCR project, has already opened up opportunities for UT Rhetoric graduate and undergraduate students to collaborate with classes across the US and internationally . Christine Alfano is very interested in making connections with other instructors at UT who wish to use Second Life and gaming in their classes, so if this sounds interesting to you, be sure to contact Stephanie, Justin, Molly, or Sean.

By Scott Nelson

Trevor Hoag's Second Life spaces.

Although it is not mentioned in Wikipedia's history of the graphical user interface, for most of literate culture, the book has been the GUI. But even when print reigned supreme, there was a whole ecosystem of non-book GUIs, like pamphlets, handbills, and, of course, maps.

The pedagogical value of maps is seeing a resurgence, thanks to the convergence of the map interface and and the computer interface. (A quick search of the DWRL site with the keyword "maps" supports this notion.) The DWRL's Geo-Everything and viz. projects have both recently directed our attention toward maps as pedagogical interfaces.

But it's not just maps of so-called "RL" that are useful in the classroom. Mind mapping can help learning as well. Tim Turner uses mind maps to conduct peer review in his classroom. This process allows students to see, at a glace, if the structures of the papers they have in their heads line up with the structures of the papers accessible to readers. Students in Turner's class use Nova Mind software. But there are loads of mind mapping programs out there. (Personally, I'm a big fan of the free, open source, university-based VUE.)

It's exciting to imagine all the new types of spaces that can be mapped using mind maps. In addition to terrestrial spaces and head spaces, we are starting to think of mapping as creating virtual spaces and creating virtual spaces as mapping.

Speaking of virtual spaces, Trevor Hoag has created some serious virtual spaces in Second Life to teach rhetorical concepts.

"I have made spaces in Second Life (on the University of Texas’s island) populated with non-player characters and objects that ask students questions relating to unit one (as well as other units)," Hoag writes. "For example, a student can speak to a wolf character who asks them to define rhetoric based on some famous definitions, whereas another character asks them to paraphrase a source, while another asks the student to find and cite a source in MLA format (after simultaneously loading Lexis Nexis or UT’s main library page)."

By allowing students to engage with rhetorical concepts in a GUI other than a rhetoric book, Hoag is helping to reinforce their rhetorical learning. He writes, "By traversing the space and engaging in a kind of scavenger hunt, students reify many of the skills learned in the opening portion of the course."

A screen capture of the Marratech interface used by Stanford's CCR project.

Pearl Brilmyer, Project Leader of the Lab’s Cross Cultural Communication Project (CCR), catches us up on shadowing an exchange between Stanford and a Swedish University, and explains the team’s exciting plans to develop a collaborative project between an undergraduate class at UT with a graduate class at Wayne State University. 

In the last few weeks, the CCR Project has made great headway in its mission to explore how digital technologies can link Rhetoric classes at UT with others both nationally and internationally.  This year, the DWRL began a collaboration with Stanford’s CCR Project, which has fostered connections with classes in Sweden, Egypt and Russia.  Now, the DWRL has its own dedicated CCR team and is preparing to run a pilot project which will explore the potential of Google Wave and Video Chat technologies for cross-cultural communication and collaborative rhetorical analysis.  

This month, undergraduates at UT in Amanda Moulder’s “Expository Writing” (RHE 310) and students in Professor Jim Brown’s graduate seminar on “New Media Interfaces and Infrastructures”  at Wayne State University (Detroit) will come together to analyze gubernatorial advertisements in a real-time exercise intended to elucidate the cultural values embedded in political ad campaigns targeted to local and statewide audiences.  Students will be asked to reflect on their own, situated knowledge of the states of Michigan and Texas and to engage with their collaborators to analyze these TV advertisements. Prior to the real-time exchange, students will communicate via Google Wave, sharing ideas and  web-based research of Michigan and Texas and their gubernatorial races.  The real-time exchange will consist of small-group video chats and  the production of a written rhetorical analysis of an ad using Google Wave as a platform for simultaneous collaborative writing.  

UT CCR researchers Todd Battistelli, Amanda Moulder, and Noah Mass have worked to develop lesson plans and goals for the exchange.  This pilot interaction draws on the DWRL’s  experience shadowing a Stanford CCR exchange with Örebro University, Sweden in February.  Stanford currently uses a professional web-conferencing software, Marratech, for their CCR exchanges. Marratech allows for real-time collaboration on a whiteboard as well as the ability to conduct work in small groups, save this work through the whiteboard and present digitally to both classrooms.  The UT team hopes to develop some cost-free alternatives to this software, as well as address a host of issues which tend to arise in the arena of cross-cultural, digital communication, such as: access to technology; technological fluency; linguistic and cultural power dynamics between students and instructors; and varying expectations and goals for the CCR exchange.  Invaluable to the group’s development, experimentation and ethos has been close communication with Professors working in the field of Intercultural Rhetoric such as Rasha Diab (UT Austin), who has served as a mentor for the team throughout their first year, and Linda Flower (Carnegie Mellon), with whom Pearl met in December in Pittsburgh. 

By Pearl Brilmyer

Rare is the student who, like Cathleen Schine, reads too much. Instead, instructors are more likely to encounter in the classroom students who don't like to read. Getting these students excited about analyzing a text, be it literary or rhetorical, can benefit from the new kinds of technology being made available up all over the web. DWRL instructors have been working with their students to think beyond the text, using different online resources, as a means of enriching the close reading and analysis students do of the texts themselves. 

Lauren Mitchell uses google maps in her literature course, Banned Books (E314K), to help students to think visually and spatially about analyzing a novel. By having students map the movements and locations that appear in a work, students gain digital literacy skills as well as close reading practice.

When teaching the Rhetoric of Performance (RHE309K), Shelly Manis combines a wiki with UT library web resources to get students excited about conducting outside research that they then use when rhetorical analyzing an assigned play. She has had good reactions from students:

They found all kinds of information ... for instance,
that they may not have *needed* to engage with the play, but that
enriched their engagement with it and allowed them to begin to move
from literary analysis to rhetorical analysis. They also really enjoyed
sharing their findings, which gave them practice not only in writing up
summaries/synthesis, but in talking through how it was useful and what
else it might accomplish.

Additionally, for instructors looking to use technology to facilitate classroom discussions, Manis's technique of having students post their research findings to the wiki makes it easy for students to instantly share their information with the rest of the class.

For his Rhetoric of Church and State (RHE309K), Todd Battistelli uses mindmapping softward (such as NovaMind) to get students to analyze the multiple audience to which a particular text might be appealing.  To give students greater incentive for this assignment, Battistelli has each student submit his or her mindmap along with their other pre-writing materials when turning in a paper draft.

It has been said many times that it is easy to take the environment and resources around you for granted. In the most recent crop of DWRL lesson plans, Catherine Coleman and Tekla Schell nicely show that this is the case.

Catherine Coleman’s MyTexas Google Earth Project, developed for her class on writings in and about Texas (309K), encourages students to analyze artifacts within a geographic territory (in this case, Texas) and, as a class, develop a Google Earth patchwork of locales and analyses. By doing so, instructors can reaffirm the sheer number of local and regional texts that are worthy of attention. Also, as an early-in-the-semester activity, this project can give classmates a sense of their collective and disparate experiences.

Tekla Schell’s Talk to a Librarian, developed for RHE 306, helps students contact a librarian and acquire research for longer term projects. Although professors and graduate students are often familiar with the librarians dealing with the subject, Tekla writes that students are often reluctant to contact them despite their accessibility: “When I opened the window to chat with the librarian,” Tekla recounts, “the students actually gasped. One of them said, ‘I thought that was fake!’ They were *very* impressed with the level of service provided, and the hours the librarians were available.”

In the most recent film adaption of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, the title character swoons at the dinner table under the burden of noticing too many details around him. For the famous sleuth in Guy Ritchie's version, noticing everything and privileging nothing is a way of life: well suited for solving crimes but not conducive to happiness or healthiness. Teachers find themselves walking a tightrope with their students when it comes to approaches to noticing every and privileging some details. We discourage students from making sweeping generalizations based on one or two examples. Equally unproductive is for students to list details without a organizing them into a bigger picture. Instructors in the DWRL have approached this balancing act by implementing technological platforms that not only increase students' capacity for noticeable detail but also improve students' abilities to organize that increased volume in meaningful ways.

If you missed the Google Earth workshop, you can still read about it and download the materials on the DWLR site Google Earth page.

For those of you who are interested in using Google Earth in literature classes, Jerome Burg has put together an interesting resource: Google Lit Trips .

This site provides a directory of downloadable Google Earth "trips" that have been developed for students of all ages. These presentations provide an interesting way of looking at the geographical aspects of narratives and the places that have shaped the lives of authors and their characters. In addition to offering materials related to a text you may be teaching, the site also includes a number of tutorials for developing a literary trip. Perhaps more importantly, however, this site can also give you an idea of how such trips can be used as compelling tools for teaching.

Illustration by Mike Rohde.

Most folks these days—avid and casual users of technology alike—are probably aware of the myth that online readers have short attention spans. However, that myth may be, shall we say, "problematized" by recent research. It's also getting a bit of pressure from classroom practices. At an eComma workshop last fall, Kate Buetner reported that her students spent a lot longer doing close readings using interactive online tools than they did with print. Likewise, some DWRL instructors are pushing back against this myth by using teh onlines to teach close reading and analysis.

For her Rhetoric of Social Documentary course (RHE309K) Andrea Gustavson created a lesson plan that helps students with the collaborative assessment of blog postings. The assignment gets students to start thinking and writing analytically using informal language. Gustavson writes, "Although the purpose of the blog is to allow students to begin to generate analytical responses to course content without the pressure of focusing on formal writing, this exercise helps students become comfortable with the loose parameters of the assignment without the instructor placing constraints on creativity by handing down a set of criteria."

In his Banned Books and Novel Ideas class (E 314L), Ty Alyea has created an in-class approach to developing close readings. Aleya writes that "most beginning students have difficulties determining which elements of a given text are worth analyzing and constructing interpretive and analytic arguments." His assignment, then, "helps students identify how rhetorical/literary devices work to deepen and/or tweak the superficial meaning of the text in question."

The DWRL is hosting a Google Earth Workshop at 1 p.m. Friday, Feb. 5 in FAC 7.

The workshop will focus on:

• Downloading, installing, and navigating in Google Earth
• Making basic and customized placemarks
• Working with data templates
• Embedding text, images, links, video, and audio
• Creating collaborative maps
• Incorporating Google Earth into the rhetoric and literature classroom

Google Earth is a free and easy-to-use software program for building
maps and spatially representing many kinds of data—text, images,
audio, video—that can be aligned with a geographic location. These
maps are three-dimensional and dynamic, and readers can interactively
zoom and rotate as well as add layers of information in order to view
the mapped locations, called placemarks, from a variety of
perspectives, from the local to the global. Within the rhetoric and
literature classrooms, the software is useful for many kinds of
writing. It facilitates invention, as students visually identify
intriguing linkages; acts as a medium for visual writing, as students
transform words into images; and encourages collaboration, as students
work together to chart and connect meaningful locations, thus
organically and/or deliberately synthesizing arguments.

Join the Geo-Everything project for this unique event.