Media Spaces as Places and It’s Alignment with FYW Goals

When we were reading about critical perspectives during the first week of class, I remember being struck by the use of the term “affordances”. Particularly, William Gaver’s piece The Affordances of Media Spaces for Collaboration was a source that I found particularly helpful with grappling with this new term and it’s relationship with technology. It was his analysis of media spaces and comparison of those spaces against physical spaces, like the classroom, that made me begin to think about how the use of media and technology in the classroom alters interactions and space. However, it was not until completing our F2F session and beginning to break down interactions in a grid using concepts, like one-to-one or one-to-many, that this piece became especially enlightening.

Currently thinking about Gaver’s piece as I am in the trenches of revising a course, I can’t help but think that he must be channeling DeCerteau and his concept of space and place. DeCerteau in The Practice of Everyday Life claims that space is a practiced place.  Understanding this, I wonder what place is created by the media space practices instituted in today’s technology-savvy classrooms. From my reading of the article and understanding of DeCerteau, I believe Gaver appears to suggest that collaboration is one practice that creates an interactive place. And thinking about our F2F sessions and our use of Eli, I can see the correlation. Eli as a media space very much encourages interaction and collaboration. In fact, it depends upon it in order to be successful. Yet this interaction and collaboration is complex. Not only are students interacting with students but teachers are interacting with students. And this interaction is not static, i.e. only checking a box and allowing another “person” to see it. Rather, the interaction attempts to allow for conversations to carry across the media space – creating a place of interactive learning and intelligible growth. Ultimately, through the practices provided by the space, a new place- a community of learning – is formed.

This understanding of how spaces, specifically media spaces, can create unique and collaborative spaces is essential to my own course revisions. As I mentioned throughout other blog posts, I am extremely interested in this idea of breaking down classroom walls and bringing in students outside communities into our writing classroom. Implementing media spaces in the classroom in regards to how Gaver understands it, appears to afford both the student and teacher new opportunities to break down those walls and create a different classroom identity. Using online forums instead of classrooms, student and teacher identity is challenged and decentered. No longer are student and teacher interactions confined to a physical space. Further, overall learning becomes less dependent by the space and more dependent upon communicative online interaction. This interaction as well no longer can be with solely students in a classroom but can begin to include outsiders (i.e. sending students to a website and posting on an author’s blog). As such, the classroom community extends itself into a much larger “learningsphere”.

On an even larger scale, I am interested in theorizing what the FYW classroom space means and what it does, essentially how the practices of that space create a very unique place. Implementing then technological and media elements (spaces) into that FYW classroom then have considerable impact on those practices that our students learn to embody throughout their academic career. Specifically, Gaver suggests that media spaces afford collaboration. This is key to FYW classrooms where we attempt to teach our students how to collaborate by conducting peer reviews and building analytical skills. Thus, the need to communicate and then learning how to collaborate to improve writing appear to align nicely with FYW goals.  As such, while the Gaver piece initially afforded me an understanding of affordances in classrooms. Reflecting on my own use of technology and my own practices that I have adopted throughout this course have better afforded me a broader understanding of how technological spaces teach skills that match with FYW goals. This article I believe will then help me as I continue my course design and offer up my theoretical takings in my reflective piece at the end of the semester.