Emerging Technologies Consulting

Last Friday, I referred to Alan Levine’s 50 Ways to Tell a Story as a place to start when looking for new web-based multimedia applications to try.  I had given this site to my students for use in producing their multimedia projects, which were due by 5 p.m. last Friday.  So the results are in, and I have to say, many of them are stunning.  One of my favorites is the following, which chronicles the discussion of the recent Amazon fiasco where all the gay and lesbian books had their rankings removed:

What I liked about it was its clever use of images and text as well as the commentary it made not just on the current event, but how the underlying technology rests on a set of assumptions made by programmers. It really highlighted for me the way that assumptions about gender and technology can be programmed into a site like Amazon, not with malicious intent, but in a way that is still hurtful.

A lot of things came out of our discussion of these projects and the effect of them on our thinking.  We talked a lot about the process of creating them, where the struggle of technological constraints was much more apparent than it is in writing, even though that, too, is a technology students struggle with.  My co-teacher, Anne, wrote up some of our thoughts from the first round of conversations about the projects.  One student felt that the open-ended nature of the projects was like a “get out of jail free card” in that no one had to make any definitive statements like one might have to do in a paper.  Anne says that for her, the quality of the questions is what’s important, though she needs to think about it more.  But I think I agree with Anne.  Most of our students, who in this class range from freshman to seniors in a variety of disciplines, don’t have enough information yet to provide definitive answers to the questions we asked in this class.  But, as these projects showed, the questions students are asking are much more complex than they were at the beginning of class.  When you start with questions about what is gender and end up in a place where we’re asking what is the self, I think you have a successful class.  And I think getting there required this exploration via digital means.

I don’t think that using this media was a “get out of jail free card.”  I think for many students, this process was difficult, time-consuming, and forced them to think about how to represent their ideas in ways that writing a standard paper just doesn’t.  I’m not suggesting that we abandon papers altogether, but I think there’s real value to having students wrestle with their ideas in different ways.  I originally thought the main point of using a project like this would be to encourage less technically experienced students to learn some new technology.  And certainly, that was one thing that happened, but I’m surprised by how that wasn’t the main thing that happened.  I had hoped that the kinds of things students would get out of it were this new way of thinking, but I had no idea if that would be successful.  I would say it definitely was.

Besides the copyright and business tensions inherent in any discussion about Open Access, another conflict I’ve seen arise is the discomfort some researchers have in exposing their work to a broader audience.  They are used to writing for people in their narrow field of expertise, people who understand the lingo, the previous arguments that have come before, and the underlying assumptions in their field.  There is potential, in putting your work on the open web, to have to answer different kinds of questions about your work, questions that might make you squirm.  While it still might be a rare occurrence that a housewife with an interest in ecology will email you a question about your latest paper, your students are already living their lives online via blogs, Facebook, gaming, and other web-based applications.  But they don’t always know how to do that appropriately or how to respond to people outside their circle of friends.  My dissertation was about using blogs to teach writing, primarily because I felt that students needed to learn to write for and respond to a real audience.  The method of simply writing a paper to be read solely by the teacher just doesn’t get to all the nuances of addressing a broad audience, nor does it motivate a student to necessarily make their best effort.

In Inside Higher Ed a little over a week ago, Robert Cummings writes a very interesting piece explaning how he uses Wikipedia for many of the same reasons I used blogs.  It’s an excellent explanation of his reasoning behind the Wikipedia assignments and of how, exactly, the assignment is laid out.  There are over 50 comments on the article, many of which are quite negative, revealing the tensions between those who are attempting to teach students how to navigate the networked environment, part of which is learning to share their work in public, and those who think the networked environment lacks quality and rigor.  That’s perhaps putting the tensions a little too simply, but I think that’s the gist of the situation.  In addition to helping students learn to write in different ways, there is the potential of these types of writing assignments will imbue the networked environment with more quality and rigor.  Further, as part of such assignments, students can learn what constitutes quality, rather than simply relying on their teachers to tell them what quality work is.