Affordances and Apple

Affordances-

         Very rarely has one term been embraced by so many and redefined by almost every discipline that uses it. The concept of affordance is very important in all areas of design- whether it is design for a computer interface, design of a commercial building, or the design of a writing course. These areas often use the term affordance with different meanings, but underlying it all (in my humble opinion) the basic concept of affordance is essential to successful design of everything. To me it is much like Einstein's Unified Theory, there should be some basic principle that holds everything together in successful design. However, like the Unified Theory- it should be there, but somehow it hasn't been found yet. Even though Norman's interpretation of Affordance is quite different from Gibson's, they both have important elements of truth that shouldn't be overlooked. And because of their importance I wanted to offer a few more thoughts on the subject, even though our major focus on this topic was last week- it should be in the back of our mind in all the technological choices we make.

      In Donald Norman's article, “Affordances and Design”,  the goal of the educator- their affordance- should be apparent to the student (or user). If the affordance of the activity is to encourage interactivity among students with a group writing assignment, then the tool that is chosen to accomplish this task should not only really do the task, it should be apparent that this is the way the task should be accomplished. This is especially important for educators preparing the environment for our students. The technologies we use should facilitate the learning and not offer barriers and frustrations that are not necessary to the learning process.

Norman's guidelines-

1. Follow conventional usage, both in the choice of images and the allowable interactions
2. Use words to describe the desired actions
3. Use Metaphor
4. Follow a coherent conceptual model so that once part of the interface is learned, the same principles apply to the other parts.

      The tools that we use to accomplish our goals should be following a “coherent conceptual model” to make sure that our real goals are met. Unified interface helps tremendously in allowing the student to focus on the learning task and not be distracted by simply struggling with the interface.

         This philosophy of User Interface was fully embraced by Apple in their products. Their philosophy is that users should be able to accomplish their task in a way where they don't really feel like they are interacting with a computer, it should flow intuitively. For many years I was a whole hearted Windows person. I programmed with Windows products, I understood what was happening in my computer, but it took years of serious study to get to the point where I could load a program and be able to find out what was happening when the computer got slow, needed to be reformatted, or just needed to be taken apart to fix. Finally I tried a Mac because we had to use it for my computer graphics class, it was amazing. Within a few minutes I was able to figure out the interface and adjust. Drawing with it was so smooth, and the user interface responded effortlessly to me. After my new Windows laptop broke down three times in the first year I had it, I started getting all Apple products (along with the rest of the world). I grew to really love the ease with which I could accomplish my tasks.

       As we choose technology and design interface- it should DO what we want it to do, and it should be intuitive in usability. As with any writing project, I always ask my students- WHO is the audience. If we don't write in a way that speaks to the audience, then we need to rewrite. If we design and choose technologies that the students can''t understand or use, then we need to redesign and rethink our choices. Each item we choose should make sense and be accessible for the users. Learning a new way to do things will always be resisted, unless the user sees a benefit in learning this new task.

This adds a new layer to get to our affordance, we need to convince the user that it is worth the effort to learn how to use this tool to get the goal accomplished. This is where metaphors and storytelling can help people adapt to new technologies. Much like the Apple iPad ads- “This is what we believe. Technology alone is not enough.  Faster, thinner, lighter -- those are all good things.  But when technology gets out of the everything becomes more delightful, even magical.  That's when you leap forward.  That's when you end up with something like this." (Apple, 2011, iPad2 commercial).

Hopefully we can get to that point, where our classes become "delightful, even magical".

Quick Thought on Peer Scaffolding & ZPD

Bill's Note: I've gotten a lot of mileage from this post, but especially the picture. How can peer learners calibrate and course correct in *your* classroom?

Vygotsky's concept of the Zone of Proximal development is a powerful one when it comes to thinking about how people learn. The ZPD acknowledges that we learn differently - and maybe we are capable of learning more and achieving more - when we learn together. The secret is to coordinate effort with a more capable peer in the learning environment; this is the process widely known as "scaffolding." It's how social beings build knowledge, confirm hunches, course-correct when trying out new procedures, etc.

But it is also a fairly innocuous and mundane process at the operational level. And I think many who talk about the ZPD and peer scaffolding tend to overthink it. So let me give you what I consider to be a straightforward example that puts things in perspective.

Used by permission of Flickr user Travis_Warren123

Imagine a dance recital with kids performing on the stage in a small group. They are close in age, close in height, but there are differences that are obvious to the audience. For some of the dancers, this is their first performance after weeks of class and a few technical rehearsals. For others, recitals have become a seasonal event and this is just the Spring show. As the number begins and the house lights come down, the stage glitters with sequins and bright smiles. The sound cue comes from the piano, and the group moves in unison. But the synchrony only lasts for  a few bars before one of the dancers - far stage right - sneaks a peek at the others in line to see if she has the steps right. She doesn't. But she gets on the right foot pretty quickly just in time for the group to begin forming a circle...

That little peek - that's a move made by one of the children to coordinate with a more capable peer. That more capable peer isn't permanently ahead of her, developmentally, nor is she necessarily a mentor. She's engaged - for the moment - in the same activity at the same time and under the same conditions. But she's been on the stage before and maybe has a bit more confidence in the routine. She'll do. And, along with the other veterans, they make a robust ZPD in which all the dancers can learn what it is like to perform in front of a real audience.

How do you build in opportunities for learners to be the social creatures they are and to engage in peer scaffolding in online & hybrid learning?  Do you sense the ZPD operating in our AL881 group?

Introduction: Neal Klomp

Hi, I am Neal Klomp.
While my area of research emphasis is early modern literature, I have - as I mentioned in chat last week - dabbled in programing beginning in the early days when Atari made desktop computers. I have coded in old 80s BASIC, Pascal and Cobol (circa 1986), and in the 90s I learned a bit of C++, and more recently picked up some HTML and Java Script. As an amateur computer-nerd I've played around with various Linux distros, but have yet to get around to taking up Python. All of that might be impressive except that about half of that knowledge is ad hoc and now quite atrophied from disuse - however much the remnants might percolate up from my sub-conscious from time to time.

Within my research I am interested in early modern political culture, practices of governance, and theories of service within the literature of the period. As someone with a fascination for technology, I am keenly interested in how tech, say the distributed network of the internet, can be deployed as a metaphor for new ways of conceiving of something like early modern social structure. Or, how early modern grain riots are like and unlike hacker groups.

Pedagogically, my interest in technology obviously promotes a curiosity for the possibilities of online teaching and a desire to explore those possibilities in practice. In face to face teaching over the past 5 years I've taught freshman composition, IAH, and literature courses here and at Illinois State University where I earned my MA in 2009.  However, like some others in this class, academia isn't my first career. For me teaching begins with the nearly two decades I spent managing restaurants in upscale/fine dinning. It is in the restaurant world that I honed my teaching style -- it is not as big a stretch as one might expect. As a manager I taught my employees and mentored my assistants in much the same way that I teach my students today.

My first year in graduate school I read a great deal of articles on pedagogy, absorbing immediately practices that I felt would match my style, filing away others that I might make my own, and discarding anything that I knew wouldn't work for me. One of the more empowering things I read that first year was from someone who would later become a mentor of mine, Ron Strickland. The article was titled "Confrontational Pedagogy and Traditional Literary Studies." It was the very idea of confrontation as productive and useful pedagogically that captured me. I have ever since sought to produce in my classroom an atmosphere of "confrontation with it all" including each other and ourselves.

Recent technology reads: Jermey Rifkin's pop. press Third Industrial Revolution and Alexander Galloway's Protocol. I am fascinated by emerging tech in things like quantum processors, organic hard drives, driverless cars, 3d printing, computer chips connected to the brain, and the efforts to stave off old age (a new area of interest that I thank my 40th birthday for).

Critical perspectives on technology: on subversive rationalization & symmetry

When I wrote my dissertation on the ways experienced teachers adapt and, inevitably, resist technological spaces as they teach in them for the first time in 1998-'99, I was deeply influenced by the thinking of Andrew Feenberg's work on processes he has come to call "subversive rationalization," a concept that emerges from but is not exactly fleshed out in his seminal work Critical Theory of Technology. I still believe CTT to be a valuable perspective and subversive rationalization to be an interesting articulation of resistance, especially in the context of formal educational institutions (with curricula, programs, built environments, and online learning spaces designed in line with institutional goals).

Let me try to explain the transformative idea that Feenberg advances in CTT very simply here. Too simply, no doubt, but you can always follow up and read the full work. I recommend it. Here goes:

Technologies that we use have a set of values, intentions, and embedded assumptions that accompany the physical or logical (in the case of software, for instance, or complex systems like public transit) components. The values, assumptions, etc. are called the "technical code" by Feenberg. They can't be split apart. Both can be designed, and designed well or poorly. And they are mutually constitutive of one another (more on that in a second). The technical code is special, though, for several reasons. One is that it is invisible. Talking about the affordances of technology is a process of making some of the technical code explicit: the ways that features of a design enable or constrain activity as it relates to users' goals and motivations.

Another reason the technical code is special is even more transformative. Changes to the technical code can re-write and override the physical artifact, or cause ripples in a complex technical system that dramatically influence how a technology is used, who can or does use it, and who benefits from it. Think of the ways that twitter was used in the Arab Spring uprisings, for instance, as a way to re-write the technical code of a service characterized as "microblogging" or disregarded (practically) as solipsistic nonsense. Feenberg gives the name "subversive rationalization" to the deliberate re-writing of the technical code to resist and/or refigure oppressive social conditions bolstered by a dominant technological order (where that consists of artifacts and code used, generally, in concert to maintain power).

Ok, so how did I do? Still with me?

Subversive Rationalization & (A)symmetry
Curiously, I was equally influenced in my formative years as a researcher by the work of Latour & Woolgar, whose book Laboratory Life I thought (and still think) is one of the best studies of writing I've ever read. "Writing?" you ask? Well, yes. In that book a research laboratory - the Jonas Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA -  is rendered as a writing machine, or perhaps more accurately a writing system, wherein people in various roles and machines are coordinated to produce writing in the form of peer-reviewed scientific articles. The scientific community and even the science studies community is, even to this day, not so sure about it all. As the blogger I linked to confesses, it's a deeply mundane look at what folks who work in a science lab do routinely. So mundane, that the detail of the description may seem uninteresting (or, I should probably argue in a seperate post) threatening for what it reveals. But my point here is that if you are interesting in writing and studies of writing, my goodness it is anything but boring. It is fascinating.

What makes it fascinating is the research stance that Latour & Woolgar had to adopt (and invent) to create the portrait they present of the laboratory.  This stance has since come to be known as actor-network theory. And it famously adopts a position vis-a-vis its object of inquiry (a system) that treats human and non-human components of the system with analytic symmetry. The reason for doing this is a choice made for research purposes and is a conscious trade-off of looking at components of the system in different, more conventional ways. One of these trade-offs is that factors we associate with human agency like "motive" and "learning" or other forms of development are not in focus. At times, and this is especially true of later works by Latour and other ANTs, the research account is deliberately uninterested in development-over-time as something to tune into about humans in a given social system.

Adopting this perspective of symmetry between humans and non-humans when examining technologies - especially complex technical systems - turns out to have some real benefits. (Clay's series on this is really helpful, btw, for those who want examples). For one, it enables researchers to render the "logics" of those systems in ways that demonstrate how multiple and even competing logics can co-exist. Doing this has become a signature of ANT, in fact. See Annmarie Mol's The Body Multiple for one of the most well-written and fascinating examples in which her object of analysis - the condition known as atherosclerosis - is explored in the physical and social space of a hospital wherein multiple "ontologies" of atherosclerosis are not only present, but interdependent on one another.

This ability to make clear the tensions that constitute "the technical code" is something Feenberg's analysis in CTT predicts but cannot really deliver on in the same way. The reason goes back to symmetry. Feenberg's approach begins with humans designing into technologies - non-human actors - a set of values and assumptions that become modified as artifacts are taken up and used in the world. But these objects don't make people do things in Feenberg's world - they either serve the will of their designers (or the regimes of technopower that the designers knowingly or unknowingly work to maintain) or they are reappropriated by users who use their features in ways that subvert the designers' vision.

Feenberg's analytic stance, in other words, also involves a tradeoff. By viewing humans and non-humans assymetrically, he's able to craft a call for intervention and frame a strategy for technological change: subversive rationalization. This strategy follows from the Frankfurt School tradition of theory that does a particular kind of work in the world. According to Horkheimer, theory should be an act to reduce oppression by disrupting abusive systems of power.

And so now I come to a suggestion. This one goes out not just to folks in the Teaching with Technology course, but to all of those folks in my field who do research on technology, writing, pedagogy, etc. Here goes:

Don't confuse an analytic stance with a committed ideological one (this may mean making far less of Latour's book We Have Never Been Modern than many who approach Latour by way of English Studies seem to do).  Let's not make more of a researcher's choice - one made with painful realizations of limitations as well as potential benefits in terms of what one pays attention to and does not - than it deserves. Radical symmetry is not a terribly useful composite view of the social world. It's a way to carefully examine a carefully selected and painstakingly prepared sample of the social world. It is like a gas chromatograph: good for telling you what elements something is made of, but you wouldn't want to look through one 24/7 as you go about your day.  A gas chromatograph disintegrates the bits of reality it produces an analysis of - literally. That's one working definition of analysis, btw. So do most analytic schemes. They disintegrate what they are used to "see." The resulting view can be useful. But so can other views of the very same object of inquiry, even simultaneously.

I understand subversive rationalization as a heuristic for inventing technological change. It may overstate the agency of humans in a given technological order to call them to action. I understand radical symmetry as a way to map possibilities to feed a heuristic like Feenberg's. It may imply agency at the level of a technological system where there is no such thing. These are known distortions that accompany each perspective. Use them with care. But use them both.

On Affordances

Note from Bill: great talk about affordances at yesterday's meeting! Here's a post I wrote about affordances last year that might be helpful!

Affordances are Relationships
Gibson's concept of "affordances" was introduced to provide an ecological view of interaction among living things and objects in the natural world. Taken up by Norman in The Design of Everyday Things, the concept has become very useful for user experience designers and usability specialists. But Norman, as some have pointed out, focused more on the way affordances map to features of objects - he was talking about things, after all, and their design. Gibson's development of the term clearly indicates that an affordance is not a feature of a thing so much as a relationship between things and an organism. Derek at Earth Wide Moth does a nice job summarizing Gibson.

I like to think of affordances as an accounting of what kinds of interactions are a)possible and b)likely given the known constraints of the whole system (organism, thing, environment). Norman is especially lucid when talking about what interactions are likely, concerned as he is with effective design. The less obvious an affordance, the less likely a possible interaction will occur. Much of Norman's design advice is about making affordances visible and understandable so as to reveal the range of possible interactions between a person and a particular object. Sometimes "visible" and "understandble" clash and so one of them has to go, but I won't go into that too much here.

Affordances and Learning
For our purposes in Teaching with Technology, the concept of affordance is useful because it helps teachers to design and stage learning situations. This typically involves trying to create the conditions favorable for certain kinds of interactions to happen among students, among students and course materials like readings, etc. It is helpful, then, to discuss in concrete terms how we understand those learning situations to include affordances for learning.

Used by permission of Flickr user Dru Bloomfield

Gibson likes to use the suffix "-ability' to indicate affordances, appending it to a verb that represents a shared, goal-oriented action in a given environment. For example, if we are talking about a primary grades classroom where our learning goals include helping students to become comfortable listening to their peers' views, we might choose a room with good line of sight (see-ability) to allow everyone to engage one another in spontaneous ways as the discussion unfolds. We also likely want a quiet space. Carpeting and a low ceiling provide good hear-ability. Otherwise, despite an engaging topic and an enthusiastic group of children, our activity might fail because the physical space simply doesn't afford making interpersonal connections the way we had hoped might happen.

We can also talk about negative consequences of affordances, again as a kind of relationship that exists among organisms, things, and the environment they share. Consider the way cell phones with on-board memory have contact lists that allow you to call a friend by selecting a name from a list rather than dialing a number. This is great as long as you have *your* phone. If we remove that object from your immediate environment, though, you may not be able to remember a close friends' number required to place a call on a land-line phone.

A Blog Prompt: Talk About Affordances in Your Teaching Practice
What do some of your favorite technologies employed in the classroom afford? What are the positive outcomes of those affordances for achieving learning goals you or others have? What are some negative or potentially negative outcomes?

This is one of the blog prompts I'll ask the #AL881 folks to consider during our in-residence week. We'll do a detailed analysis during that week that should allow you to work from a solid rationale for selecting a mix of technologies when you design instructional experiences.

Maria’s Digital Workspace Portrait

Hi all,

I’m one of those people who is extremely organized and a self-proclaimed "queen" of time management. I view graduate school very much like an 8-5 job and because I have no young children (only dogs that act like them at points and a husband that can normally manage on his own) you’ll find me at my workspaces generally during normal working hours. However, once 5 o’clock hits, I’m pretty much packing stuff up and prepping dinner (5pm-11pm I find to be the worst and least productive times to work).

Working at MSU's Writing Center.

So because of my need to have a schedule and a plan, my digital workspaces don’t differ too often. On Monday’s, Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s, my computer and digital world is traditionally up and running at MSU’s Writing Center.  http://writing.msu.edu/ Here, I work as a consultant and spend my free-time working on projects and reading for this class.

On Thursday’s and Friday’s though I pack up my life in Lansing and move it to Grand Rapids, MI (this is what I consider to be home base). On days when I like to look at the window and casually work, I make camp at my dining room table. Working for the table, I have an awesome view of my backyard and space for the dogs to play.

Working digitally at my dining room table.

View from my dining room table.

My dog, Stella, protecting me from the squirrels outside.

However, when I need to really focus and concentrate you’ll find me upstairs in my guest bedroom/office. Here, I can shut the door and stare into a corner (this is where I spent most of my life during final exam week).

Working, focusing, concentrating upstairs at my desk without a view.

And on the off chance that I just need to catch up on some emails, I sit on my patio enjoying the breeze and warm summer sun. All these workspaces assist my different concentration and work needs. And I am grateful that WIFI now exists so that wherever my computer goes, my digital workspace can be easily created!

Summer living and summer working!

Meet Maria

Hello all, I’m Maria Novotny and am a current M.A. student at Michigan State University in Writing & Rhetoric. With a CSLP concentration (Critical Studies in Literacy and Pedagogy), I describe myself and my studies to those typically unfamiliar with the world of rhetoric as someone who is studying writing and the teaching of writing. But to all of you who may be more familiar with this world, my concentration lies in understanding issues of critical pedagogy, especially those related to race, and implementing that in my classrooms.

This past semester teaching WRA150 I asked my students to write about their own community – attempting to bridge my students personal and community practices into the classroom. In essence, I was trying to bring in Gere’s (1994) extracurriculum into my classroom. This provided students the opportunity to write about their own communities and learn about their peer’s communities, which generated great discussions regarding literacy and language. As part of the class, we created a blog where students described the class goals and posted their papers that explored their community’s in more detail.

My own intent of the blog was to create a space where students had an outside audience to consider. For every paper, they were invited to consider how what they wrote would be interpreted by the outside blogging world. Students were asked to consider that their papers had more of a purpose than simply fulfilling an assignment. Instead, they were attempts to educate and inform others of their community and it’s importance.  If you are interested, you can view the blog here: http://writingourcommunities.wordpress.com/

While it was great in theory to have a blog where students could express their connections to their community and attempt to create a space where community issues could be explored, I wished that I used the blog for more than simply a site to publically post revised papers. The blog tended to only deal with issues of audience and failed to engage students and their peers in actually reading these papers and learning about other’s communities. Further, I wish there was a way to generate more traffic to our site as well. This I think would have better energized and enthused my students.

Therefore, I hope for AL881 to provide the opportunity to ponder and reevaluate the use of technology in my first-year writing classrooms. As a teacher, I wonder how can I adopt a digital pedagogy in a classroom in order to better voice student’s communities with the outside world? How can you use technology to bring in the extracurriculum into the classroom?  Further, I need to better understand how students view technology. How do students view technology use, especially in a writing classroom? How do you use technology as a tool for effective scaffolding? And overall, how can teachers use technology as a learning tool rather than simply as a new medium for the classroom?

These questions guide my digital pedagogical journey this summer and I’m excited to generate new ideas and strengthen my pedagogy by learning from all of you!

Ruth's Background and Answers to Questions

My Teaching-
I have a very eclectic background.  My teaching philosophy has been forged through lots of trial and error, after reading lots of books and attending classes on what was definitely the “best” way to teach, then experiencing that what was in the textbooks didn’t always translate well to the students.  Finally, I found that the way that worked for me was to listen to the students and adapt to their method of learning.  I use a lot of questions in working with students and encourage us to go on a “journey” of learning  and discovery together, I’m not afraid to be directive at first so the students have a clear idea of expectations, but then I quickly try to “vanish” my direction and let them be self-guided as soon as possible.

My Credentials-
In teaching, the proof is the results of what we do.  I always like to point to my students as the proof that something, despite all my mistakes and weaknesses, worked. I was originally trained as a music teacher (I love the arts) and then through a series of events, I ended up home-schooling my four children (a girl and three boys) up to college (over 18 years of teaching).  They became- an ER nurse (BSN, CCRN, RN, EMT, FEMA emergency specialist), an attorney (who was a world class classical guitarist, winning the MTNA national competitions in college as a classical guitar major), a supply chain manager (who at the age of 20 was running all of Unilever’s exports to Puerto Rico and is now a fairly high level manager at Crane Engineering (an aero-space firm) at the age of 26), and a 3D graphic designer/programmer (who worked for a few start-up firms as a 3D graphic designer before getting a steady job with Jackson National Life as a programmer).  They are all married and I have three grandchildren (2 girls and a boy). 

My Professional Profile-
What was originally a promise to my father, while I was taking caring for him as he was dying of cancer, to write his biography, became a journey I never thought would happen. After I went back to school to sharpen my writing skills I found that I loved writing and working in the digital environment.  It allowed me to communicate beyond words-- incorporating color, design, interactivity, art, and even sometimes music-- to communicate to people.  I started working at the Writing Center at Lansing Community College (LCC) to help pay for my tuition and found that I loved working with the adult student as much as I have always loved working with children.  So after completing associate’s degrees in Web Site Design and Creative Writing at LCC, my bachelor’s with a double major in Computer Information Management and Management at Northwood University. Now I am in the Master’s program in the Telecommunications, Information Studies and Media department working in Computer Information Management with a cognate in Internet, Society, and Policy. 

I have an assistantship at the MSU Writing Center, work part time for the LCC Writing Center, tutor writing for students at Siena Heights University, tutor a student in Taiwan, have my own Web-Site design firm (Beachcomber Design, LLC), and currently am consulting on a Web-based software project for the Michigan Hospital Association (along with being a full-time grad student).  For fun I love to travel, hang out at the beach or by the pool over in Muskegon and Grand Haven, play guitar with a contemporary music band for our church, cook, and most of all play with my grandkids.

Places I Love to Go-
In the Online environment I have learned to really appreciate some tools that I previously dismissed- Twitter can be a great way to keep up on areas that are of interest to me and quickly see if I want to learn more-
My Twitter feeds-
@Ruth@MSU
@2012MWCA (for the Michigan Writing Center Conference I am coordinating in the fall)
@NetworkedTogether (to link with my blog)
My Blog-
NetworkedTogether.com
My Professional Site-

BeachcomberDesign.com

Flipboard- amazing app for iPads and iPhones, their design articles and technology feeds are very good
Wired.com- everything digital, organic, amazing scary stuff (check out Danger Room and try to read it without the music for Terminator or the Matrix going in your head)
WritingCenters.org- great articles

Real Places I love to go to get inspired digitally-

British Library and the British Museum

Salisbury

Musee du Louvre

Apple Stores (this one is in Paris)

Overview of an Article that Reflects my teaching Philosophy-

http://www.education.com/reference/article/mastery-learning/

I truly believe in “Mastery Learning,” breaking skills that need to be acquired into connected units that are easier for the students to remember.  I love giving fairly rapid and encouraging response to help lower frustration levels at the early stages of the learning process, and to build confidence.  After a short while the teacher/facilitator can step back and allow the student to learn more and more on their own.  In my experience, builds students who not only have a love for learning, but also will continue to grow and discover as they have positive early memories about the learning process.  If students encounter frustration and discouragement in the early stages of any class or new skill attainment, they will often push through, complaining all the way and then just do the minimum to get by.  Through Mastery Learning the student can gain true confidence from seeing early progress and getting a taste of success.

Build my own app-
I actually would eventually like to build my own app with the help of my son.  However, to give it away here would ruin the marketability. 

The second thing I would like to do is to be a part of a team to help build a better delivery system for educational material.  It would be nice to have a portal like Angel/Blackboard/Desire2Learn that could be a one stop place for the educator as well as the student. 
My dream site would have-

• F2F interactivity, like Adobe Connect or Skype
• Responsive chatting
• Content management
• Testing design with various levels of feedback and random question programability
• Visually appealing layout, like Blogger
• Simple interface, like Facebook
• Feeds that update to a mobile device, like Twitter
• Interface with the User in mind, like Apple

-all in one place, at a reasonable cost

--if we could design this, we would be rich

Megan's Introduction

Hi all,

I really hate pictures.  I need
one of Bill's Bookshelf shots

I'm Megan Charley.  I'm between years 3 and 4 of my PhD program in the English Department here at MSU.  I study modernist literature and film (that's primarily early 20th century stuff; for those of you who don't have an English background think Hemingway, Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner, etc, and weird avant garde films that drive my students crazy).  My work centers on gender, the body, and visual culture.  I have a BA in English from Oakland University (yes, the one an hour and a half south of here) and an MA in English from the University of Kentucky (in the much missed Lexington, Kentucky). 

I've been teaching for a little while now.  Between here in WRAC and at the University of Kentucky I've taught three years of composition, and TA'd (teaching my own recitation sections while a professor taught the lectures) for a few sections of IAH and Intro to Film.  I'm used to using different technologies to support my face to face classes, and right now I'm teaching my first fully online class: IAH 201.  An experienced professor designed it, so I'm just running it and making some minor changes as I go.  The class is well constructed, but is exclusively on Angel and limited mostly to basic text.  The experience is making me think about ways to spice up the class to help students better engage with the material. 

The English department has asked us to design and pitch an online class for next year-- so these days I'm thinking a lot about how things like close reading (of literature and film) can be done online. The idea of teaching a film class fully online sounds challenging and exciting, so that's what I've been focusing on the most.  You'll all be hearing more about that over the next several weeks.   

Jennifer's App if she Could Build One

If I had the skill I know exactly what I would build. Now let's see if I can describe it :) It would be called "MYOB - Managing your own Budget" 

It would be a scanner/ accounting/ tracking application.
Most receipts now have a bar code at the bottom which contains 1) the amount you spent 2) what you bought and 3) when you bought it.

What I want is an application that will extract that data and put it in a spread sheet. This way you can 1) have a basic electronic checkbook - you scan the receipt and it calculates how much is spent and subtracts it from your total. 2) It also will track what you buy categorically- so you can look at how often you buy milk, or how many times you   caved in and got the expensive chocolate instead of the cheap. 3) It also then gives you the data to figure out spending habits- such as if you spend more in the morning hours or evening hours.  If you spend more on a Tuesday or Friday.

As with most technology- most people would probably use it only for the accounting application but it would carry the potential for behavior modification if you used the whole thing.

I have seen plenty of tracking applications for various things but nothing like what I detailed.  Most require you to manually input the information- which of course is why I don't use them.

I'm all good to learn how to build it- if I have the skills, I just have no idea how right now.

Jennifer's Introduction

Good Morning All,
My name is Jennifer and I'm a first year PhD student at MSU.

Where to begin?  I write, I teach and I play with tech :)  Such tiny little words to explain the path that I have taken to end up here.

For this journey I started out with a degree in African American Studies and instead of teaching like I planned, I accepted a job with the government in non-profit work about education technology programs.  It was great while it lasted but the great chop of 2004 left me trying to figure out what I was going to do.

So I decided to get an MPA so I would stop hearing about how my experiences made me too expensive to hire without an advanced degree.  As I was getting my MPA I started research African American women in pursuit of the doctoral degree because I really did intend to go back to the non-profit world.  Then my adviser told me I should get either a JD or PhD.

I thought about his advice for a while and while I was thinking I was getting my MA in Composition and Rhetoric because that whole writing thing never left me. Before you go back and scan to figure out where I talked about writing- I didn't :)  However I joined my first  creative writers group in the early 90's and have been one ever since.  I write fantasy - the title is shifting to speculative fiction - and have been honing my craft with a great group of people.  Some of my best writing habits I learned from these writing groups: research, daily writing, breaking up writing blocks, teaching and editing.

I started teaching English Composition and Creative Writing at Mott Community College (we can discuss the best interview ever later) and trained to teach online/hybrid courses because they sounded neat- I didn't anticipate the work load!! But I was hooked with this notion of using technology to enhance what I did.

So with a ton of missing details and really exciting stories - here I am working towards my PhD looking at the Digital Environment & Cultural Voices.

My boys - the reason I will usually post at night :)

I look forward to working with you all and learning from you all!

Hello World (of AL 881)

Chad O'Neil here (the cute one is my son, Orin). 

I began my obsession with technology at that other 'Michigan' school as an Engineering student.  Not long after finishing my introduction to Aerospace Engineering class I decided I'd much rather major in English.  I haven't turned back.  I completed my B.A. in English at The University of Michigan in 2002, worked briefly for Apple, and then heard about the start of the amazing Masters program in Digital Rhetoric & Professional Writing at MSU.  I completed my M.A. at MSU in 2005 during my first semester as a doctoral student at NC State in Raleigh, NC.  Though I learned a great deal about myself and discovered my love for teaching during my four years at NC State, my comprehensive exams turned out to be the end of my journey there.


So here I am again, as a Lifelong student 'testing the waters.'


I was privileged to spend much of my time at Michigan and MSU working with great people at each institutes' Writing Centers.  Much of the work I did as a consultant / tutor focused on learning, using, and teaching others about technology in the context of academic writing (composition).


I gained my first classroom teaching experience at NC State teaching first year composition.  I have built on this teaching experience as Part Time Faculty at Parkland College here in Champaign, IL over the past three years.  I have recently begun working with Continuing Education at Eastern Illinois University piloting Writing Center hours for their continuing education students that take classes here at Parkland.

Whether it was using text only email to work with students on their papers over email at U of M or piloting tablet computers as a part of my teaching here at Parkland, technology use has always been a part of my teaching.  Recently I was given the opportunity to teach an online English course this coming fall.  I am taking this opportunity to reevaluate my teaching.  How might technology be leveraged differently in both the traditional and online courses I teach? Are there way to approach the curriculum guidelines for the courses I teach while considering the broader digital texts students use and produce?


These are just a couple of questions I'm looking forward to considering during the coming weeks.  I can't wait to learn more about the rest of you, what you hope to gain from the course, and one another.

Teaching with Technology - Let's Think & Write & Talk About It!

You've made your way to the blog for a graduate course at Michigan State University called Teaching with Technology. The course is offered by the College of Arts & Letters at MSU, though it is appropriate for a wide range of scholars, teachers, and others who want to learn more about how technology, teaching, and learning intersect.

Members of the class will post and comment here; if you are visiting, please feel free to comment as well. If you are robot, we do not wish to hear about the virtues of various types of berries or other natural products for weight loss. Please move along.

Feel free to look at the 100+ posts from last year - you may find them helpful! Class project descriptions are available via the "projects" tab near the top of the page. The course syllabus is here. You will need an MSUnet ID to access it.


A Little About Me

My "Bookcase" Faculty Shot

I'm Bill Hart-Davidson, an Associate Professor in Rhetoric & Writing at MSU in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric & American Cultures. I co-direct the Writing in Digital Environments research center at MSU along with Jeff Grabill. I also direct the Rhetoric & Writing graduate program.

I've made the theory, practice, and design of resources for teaching with technology an important part of my career for a long time. My dissertation focused on this topic, in fact, and I was able to show that writing technologies like software, hardware, and even network protocols enact pedagogies that reflect not only the views of an instructor, but of students and the designers of those technologies as well. This can make a networked classroom, for instance, a complex place to teach and learn as competing ideas about how this is best accomplished abound. Engagement with the challenges of teaching with technology, then, is an essential part of developing effective pedagogy.

One way instructors can most effectively engage technology in the pursuit of effective teaching is to develop their own resources, including software & systems meant to fulfill unmet needs of fellow teachers or students. Recently my colleagues Jeff Grabill, Mike McLeod, and I with the assistance of partners at Red Cedar Solutions Group in Okemos, MI have done just that. We've created Eli, a web-based service for coordinating and evaluating peer and other types of writing review in educational settings. Eli is the first of what we hope will be many solutions that address the complexity of teaching and learning in digital environments.

I'm looking forward to a great Summer Session! Let's talk about Teaching with Technology!