In reviewing Adriana Valdez Young's "Follow, Heart, Reblog, Crush: Teaching Writing with Tumblr" I also make several connections beyond the work to 1) my teaching and 2) to Gregory Ulmer's "Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy."
The first work briefly describes how Valdez Young has set up Tumblr for use in a range of classes and the advantages of such use.
The way I view my teaching has been influenced by Valdez Young's description and provided me with an initial idea for changing my opening project in English 101, specifically concerning an upcoming online course this fall.
The second work is described as a longer "textbook for teaching with and about the internet," as influenced by the author's teaching (Ulmer xii).
I see this work as a way for thinking about how I might connect the initial images collected and curated through Tumblr to a larger semester long sequence of activities / assignments.
The review(s)
Follow, Heart, Reblog, Crush: Teaching Writing with Tumblr
Valdez Young opens by describing Tumblr as an emerging technology and then moves quickly to connecting this technology to it use in teaching. The reader is provided with a narrative description of how Valdez Young sets up Tumblr and follows to students as they set up their own accounts. These connections between the teacher, students, and the wider Tumblr user base constitute several of the advantages that Valdez Young identifies as a part of using the technology. As a social medium, Tumblr also dissolves some of the typical barriers that students face. In particular, "Tumblr sites can blend into the time they [students] spend active on other social media sites and feels less like the discrete mental and physical space of “doing homework” (Valdez Young 13). Of the advantages Valdez Young mentions, it is the ability to connect to and share students' posts through a central course hub that I foresee particularly useful for an online course.
Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy
Published in 2003 Ulmer's textbook was at the time quite unique for the genre and a fitting second part of The Writing and Technology Series (Allyn and Bacon) edited by Victor Vitanza, the first being Jan Rune Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes' "MOOniversity: A Student's Guide to Online Learning Environments." Though Ulmer's central focuses on taking "students through a series of Web assignments.. that supplements existing print and web primers on HTML and graphics production" does not mesh with the present social media tilt of the Internet, I still find the pedagogical and theoretical underpinnings of his work useful (Ulmer xiii).
The book is structured around four discourses: career, family, entertainment, and community. These discourses are contexts in which students work to form an "image of wide scope" that Ulmer hopes students express as part of a "Mystory" (6). These discourses are explored in two chapters a piece, with an overview in the introduction and "emblems of wide scope" framing exploration of each discourse (Ulmer 245). Where the introductory overview provides tools for the reader (teacher) to navigate the proceeding chapters, the emblems of wide scope aim to help in guiding the student while they discover the image of wide scope as a recurring theme that emerges in each of the four discourses.
Mashup Pedagogy
Though the web activities Ulmer describes during each of the genre chapters do not interest me as a source of ideas to adopt in my own classroom, there are several pedagogical and theoretical areas in each chapter that I think may be useful. Throughout Ulmer's work he discusses the importance of the image. In his introduction the image is identified as "the second feature that one immediately notices in a networked classroom" (Ulmer 2). Here he is specifically addressing the ability to combine a graphical image file and text as a part of a web page. In this way, Ulmer sees the capabilities of HTML as "an exact correspondence between the cut-and-paste tools and the collage and juxtapositional rhetoric of twentieth-century vanguard poetics" (2).
These basic capabilities are a part of what Tumblr helps students do without the challenge of HTML. Furthermore, Tumblr's social media function push at the single author focus that the conventional web page assignments favor in Ulmer's work. The image is still important, but the collage becomes a product of the networked class rather than the goal of a single student's writing. By collecting the images of the students with Tumblr it is my hope that instead of stressing the production of a Mystory as Ulmer does, students can look for recurring themes together. I believe this shift can take cues from the steps Ulmer suggests, but the genre focus changes drastically.
Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy
Published in 2003 Ulmer's textbook was at the time quite unique for the genre and a fitting second part of The Writing and Technology Series (Allyn and Bacon) edited by Victor Vitanza, the first being Jan Rune Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes' "MOOniversity: A Student's Guide to Online Learning Environments." Though Ulmer's central focuses on taking "students through a series of Web assignments.. that supplements existing print and web primers on HTML and graphics production" does not mesh with the present social media tilt of the Internet, I still find the pedagogical and theoretical underpinnings of his work useful (Ulmer xiii).
The book is structured around four discourses: career, family, entertainment, and community. These discourses are contexts in which students work to form an "image of wide scope" that Ulmer hopes students express as part of a "Mystory" (6). These discourses are explored in two chapters a piece, with an overview in the introduction and "emblems of wide scope" framing exploration of each discourse (Ulmer 245). Where the introductory overview provides tools for the reader (teacher) to navigate the proceeding chapters, the emblems of wide scope aim to help in guiding the student while they discover the image of wide scope as a recurring theme that emerges in each of the four discourses.
Mashup Pedagogy
Though the web activities Ulmer describes during each of the genre chapters do not interest me as a source of ideas to adopt in my own classroom, there are several pedagogical and theoretical areas in each chapter that I think may be useful. Throughout Ulmer's work he discusses the importance of the image. In his introduction the image is identified as "the second feature that one immediately notices in a networked classroom" (Ulmer 2). Here he is specifically addressing the ability to combine a graphical image file and text as a part of a web page. In this way, Ulmer sees the capabilities of HTML as "an exact correspondence between the cut-and-paste tools and the collage and juxtapositional rhetoric of twentieth-century vanguard poetics" (2).
These basic capabilities are a part of what Tumblr helps students do without the challenge of HTML. Furthermore, Tumblr's social media function push at the single author focus that the conventional web page assignments favor in Ulmer's work. The image is still important, but the collage becomes a product of the networked class rather than the goal of a single student's writing. By collecting the images of the students with Tumblr it is my hope that instead of stressing the production of a Mystory as Ulmer does, students can look for recurring themes together. I believe this shift can take cues from the steps Ulmer suggests, but the genre focus changes drastically.
The five parts of the book reflect the steps of composing a mystory. Students map or document their situations or relationship to each of four institution: Career field or major; Family; Entertainment; community History (as taught in school or otherwise commemorated in the community. The final section is treated separately here but in practices may be folded into the process of the other assignments, the purpose being to interlink the four sites in a way that brings out a pattern. (Ulmer 6)Instead of focusing on institutions, I open with students collecting images of technology. These images become a source for exploring how technologies support learning. What remains is how to build on these initial steps so students can create connections between what they know / feel / believe about learning and technology to what they don’t know / feel / believe about learning and technology. So the course remake continues...
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