July 8, 2009

Twitter Experimenting

It's been a cruel, cruel summer, leaving me here on my own. It's been a cruel, cruel summer, now you're gone.

Wait, that's not right. That's Bananarama.

What I meant was that it's been a busy summer, and I've been leaving this blog all alone.

But no more.

Here's a video about Monica Rankin's Twitter Experiment. Rankin is a history professor at the University of Texas at Dallas (alma matter of my youngest, and most-recently-married brother). Watch the video, then we'll talk.

A little while back I read a blog post by Olivia Mitchell titled, "How to Present While People are Twittering". In it Mitchell lays out the pros for encouraging your audience to participate in the "back channel" while you're talking to them. It's a lot like the old practice of sharing notes while in class. But with Twitter, imagine that every note you write can and will be read by everyone else in the room (except perhaps the teacher -- more on that in a bit). I was, to say the least, skeptical.

I remembered the largest class I've yet taught in a computer lab -- the afternoon section of the CyberCulture Studies course, a 30+ student seminar. There were times I enforced the "screens down" rule (it was a laptop lab -- screens down = computers off) just (I will admit it now) to try to get them to pay attention to what I (and their classmates) had to say. I know they were Twittering and IMing and e-mailing during class. I also knew what they were doing was directly related to the content of the class, but they weren't necessarily aware of that. That was a problem. Plus, I do like being the center of attention when I know what I'm talking about. As I did in that class.

But then I went to this year's Computers and Writing conference. I knew it would be Tweeted and I wanted in. So I joined Twitter (@digitalrhetorVT) and jumped in. I decided the best way to get me to really use Twitter was to use it as my notetaking service. I could then pull up all of my Tweets and have a handy compilation of my thoughts about the important aspects of the panels and talks I attended.

I became one of those students I had tried to shut down.

And I liked it.

Having seen the dynamic from both sides now, I agree that it can be a good thing. People really do Tweet about the things they're impressed by in the talks. It was great reading about the neat ideas going on in the other panels. And it was really nice being able to see what other people in the panels I attended were turned on by. In one session I had a great mini-discussion with Cheryl Ball (@s2ceball) about the points one of the presenters was raising. And while I presented at C&W, I know there were people in the room Tweeting away.

The best use of this I saw was actually one of the most contentious parts of the conference. Barbara Ganley (formerly of Vermont's own Middlebury College, now a freelance consultant to the digital stars) gave a talk that was firey and provocative (though perhaps not as well-calibrated to her audience as any of us would have liked). The crowd started to turn ugly -- all on Twitter. Interestingly, at points in her talk, Ganley had a running feed from Twitter up on the giant screens behind her. So, when things would get dicey, we could all see what everyone was Tweeting -- even those not on Twitter on their laptops or phones at the moment. This kept the crowd much more civil, I think, than they might have been. (Which is a shame. It was a good talk, and important. But several of the notes she hit really soured the audience to her and her message. She should have paid more attention to the kairos!)

So, back to Dr. Rankin and her Twitter Experiment. Would I do this in a large (25+ students) class? Absolutely. And I would, without fail, have something like TwitterFall up on the big screen showing the realtime Tweets from the class. That's just to keep everyone honest.

Would it work for the smaller classes? Probably not. It's hard to have a sustained discussion of complex material with fewer than 10 people in a room. Yes, it can be done and is done, but it's hard. That doesn't give the people in the room time or space to "hide" and mentally regroup or process while others pick up the slack. Diverting the already-strained attention and cognitive overhead of a small group from out-loud conversation and processing to Twitter conversation and processing just seems cruel and counterproductive to me.

Another point, one Rankin doesn't really make in the video, is that when you're having a conversation, you can pause and read the last few Tweets. It's hard to do that when you're lecturing or presenting. But I think it might really help the discussion. Shy students wouldn't have to raise their hand, interrupting the flow, and try to express themselves in front of the group. And yet their ideas could be heard, read, and discussed.

So, do I think this should be SOP? Maybe in large classes, and especially in computer-equipped classrooms. But does the instructor have to make a space for the back channel and then tend to that space just like any other pedagogical space? You better believe it.

The more I think about it, the less worried I'm becoming about students "goofing off" on the computers, and thus needing to have "screen down" days or times in my classes. But I'm realizing I need to channel their computer use (i.e., ADD/ADHD/continuous partial attention) in productive ways.

And really, isn't that why we're all there?

Posted by reparent at 10:16 PM | Comments (0)

March 30, 2009

Multimodal & Multiliterate

A few items of multimodal, multiliterate interest. First, my laptops are having problems. Ugh. The Mac PowerBook G4 has decided that Firefox is no longer interested in playing embedded YouTube videos. Other videos (mostly) work. But YouTube? Nope. There's a URL-by-URL fix out there, but that doesn't help with embedded videos. And yes, I've tried all of the suggested fixes. No good. So, on the Mac I surf with Firefox and keep Opera open to do nothing but watch videos. How tedious.

And then the sound capabilities of my PC laptop started to go. First the speakers got scratchy, then they crapped out altogether. Now the earphone jack does nothing, either. Double-ugh. Of course, the PC laptop does have its zombie sound moments -- usually involving some irritating system sound or beep that comes out at ear-splitting decibels because I've forgotten to turn the previously uncooperative and utterly silent sound to off.

Second, this past weekend I was working on the PC laptop and I saw that a friend had shared this video on Facebook. When I tried to view it, of course, it played without sound.

Now, at first I thought this was intentional. Watch the video with your speakers off and see for yourself. But then I hijacked the Spouse's nice new desktop computer and we watched and listened to the video.

But I can't stop thinking about the experience of watching a music video signed at me with the sound off. I kinda like it. It really foregrounds and emphasizes the multimodality and multiliteracy of the translation from Brit-squeak into ASL. (And it doesn't hurt when the signer is awfully cute!)

Third, here's a video courtesy of Joe.My.God, of a cover of Katie Perry's song, "I Kissed a Girl." There have been lots of covers of this song, some better than others, and some pretty deeply problematic. But this cover is from out gay Israeli singer, Ivri Lider.

Interestingly, by keeping the lyrics exactly the same, Lider signals his queerness while singing about kissing a girl. I liked the way the dynamic plays here.

I also liked the musical styling Lider brings. He ditches the popiness and frivolity, preferring a more heartfelt, confused affect. The setting was also awesome. I especially liked watching that last couple of guys, and then understanding the sleaziness of the video's ending. Bringing all of these elements together in the music video transforms the Perry song into something else entirely. It's no longer... frivolous.

Finally, check out Alison Bechdel's review of Jane Vandenburgh's A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century: A Memoir in this weekend's New York Times Book Review. Bechdel is an artist and cartoonist, and so composes the review in a milieu that makes sense to her. Highly recommended.

Posted by reparent at 1:43 PM | Comments (1)

February 4, 2009

TED - The Gift That Keeps Giving (Scott McCloud edition)

I've posted TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks here before, mostly because I find them absolutely fascinating. If only every conference were this consistently enlightening and entertaining!

Today's bit of TEDey goodness is Understanding Comics author (he also wrote the graphic announcement for Google's Chrome browser), Scott McCloud.

McCloud (as usual) does a good job presenting smart, interesting material that is also accessible (okay, parts of the Chrome job weren't very accessible, but I already discussed that). And funny. He's surprisingly funny for a comic guy.

Enjoy!

Posted by reparent at 10:19 AM | Comments (0)

February 2, 2009

Literacy Everywhere

Holy crap last weekend was full of literacy-related stuff! Here's a quick run-down.

In the comics we had Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman's Zits talking about childrens' books. Here's the first two cells:

And Bunny Hoest and John Reiner's Lockhorns discussing reading skill and its inverse relationship to TV watching:

And then in the New York Times Mazagine, Virginia Heffernan's "The Medium" column asked "What are kids learning to read when they learn to read online?" As I posted on the course blog for the 21st Century Literacy grad seminar, it's not just that each of these relates to what we discussed last week and will discuss this week, it's as if our classroom is bugged.

Anyway, back to the good literacy-y stuff. Heffernan opens:

“Did you like this book?” asks the computer. It’s a customer-satisfaction question, but it seems more profound than that.

We hesitate. Ben, my 3-year-old son, shoots me a puzzled look. The answer should be yes. Ben enjoys what’s on the screen right now: Starfall, an online medley of free learn-to-read activities. But he doesn’t like the question.

“It’s not a book,” he explains, emphatically, to the laptop. “It’s more like a movie or a video.”

Read the rest -- it's really interesting, especially from a childrens' lit perspective. And super interesting, from a Proust and the Squid perspective, when Heffernan notes that:

I’d like for Ben to sit with One More Story and come away with the impression that he’d been read beautiful books all afternoon. But Ben tends to ask for One More Story when he wants privacy, the same state of mind in which he likes videos. Books, by contrast, are for when he feels snuggly.

As I said, read it all. It's well worth your time. Even if you have to read it on a computer monitor.

(X-posted to 21st Century Literacy

Posted by reparent at 2:24 PM