Inviting Eli to Your Class

I am thrilled that this Fall semester, many fellow teachers will be using Eli Review in their classrooms for the first time. Thanks for giving it a try! We are excited to help out in any way that we can. Our colleagues often ask Jeff, Mike, & I "how do we get the best results using Eli right from the start?" In this post, I’ll answer that by suggesting a couple of ways of thinking about Eli as a new resource. And I’ll also suggest a few specific things to do to help you see the value of Eli right away.

1. Think of Eli as a window on students’ writing and reviewing process
It’s true that Eli is a service that streamlines the process of doing peer review. Students can easily exchange work and offer feedback to one another, guided by teachers’ prompts. But Eli is not merely meant to streamline workflow during review.

Eli allows teachers to set up write, review, and revise cycles and track students’ progress through them. This means that Eli is a service that supports all of writing instruction, not just that bit in the middle where students’ review each other’s work. Two things follow from this, for me, as a teacher. One is when in the process I give writers feedback.  With Eli, my guidance comes after each writer has

1) shared a draft in Eli (write)
2) received feedback from peers (review) and
3) compiled their feedback and a reflection in a revision plan (revise)

I still read each students’ draft, but now I also have a much clearer idea what they are planning to do next because I can see their revision plan and feedback. As a result, my feedback is more focused: I can adjust their revision priorities if need be, or simply encourage them to go ahead with a solid plan if they have one. To illustrate, let’s look at a snapshot from an individual students’ review report. Eli shows me how the student did and how he compares with the rest of the group. This student we will call “Jeremy” is doing rather well:

When I look at these results and read his draft, I know what to say to Jeremy. What would you say?

The second thing is that now, for a typical assignment, I might do 4 or 5 Write-Review-Revise cycles. I start with something short, like a prompt for the student to do a one paragraph "pitch" that glosses their key argument and supporting evidence for an argumentative essay. Next I might ask students to submit a precis' that summarizes a key secondary source. Third we might look at a "line of argument" or detailed outline. Fourth is a full draft in rough form.

The prompts for reviewers in each cycle would ask  students to focus on matters appropriate to that stage of the writing process. So we would leave matters of attributing source materials accurately in MLA style until cycle four, but we would address accurate paraphrasing in cycle two when students are preparing a precis.

I usually try to have one or two cycles per week in a typical course, which is enough to keep students focused on drafting, reviewing, and revising consistently throughout a project (as opposed to doing everything at the end).

2. Think of Eli as a means to adjust your teaching priorities on the fly
So what do multiple cycles, each with a detailed review report buy you as a teacher? Something nearly magical happens when, during a review, I make sure that I explicitly align my learning goals for a particular project with the review response prompts I give to students.

Here’s what the magic looks like. The data below come from reviewers’ combined responses to two scaled items – like survey questions – that I included as part of a review of rough drafts of an analytic essay.

Note that the prompts are things I hope to see my students doing by this point. These are things we've been talking about and practicing in class. Seeing these results, I know what to spend more time on. Not everybody is using secondary source material well just yet. But I also see which students are doing well. I'll have them lead our discussion.

But how do we get from a writing assignment to a review that gives me this kind of real-time feedback to guide instructional priorities? Let's go through that process using a writing assignment - a real one from a course my colleague was teaching called "Writing and the Environment." This is a prompt for one of the short weekly response papers students were asked to write:

Write a response to the chapters from Walden by Emerson. Your response should  consider the work itself as well as the historical context of the message. What did it  mean for Emerson to write this book? to write it when he did? These should not be simple summaries of the essays/chapter. Instead they should be  a comment on what YOU THINK and/or FEEL in response to the week’s  texts.  What main ideas stuck with you and why? What questions did they raise for  you?  What made you wonder? Did you agree, disagree? Were you inspired, angered, encouraged, surprised?  

Thinking ahead to the review report we want to see as the instructor – the one that aggregates information for the whole class – we are interested to know which response papers have the traits mentioned in the assignment description above. These traits match up with my colleauge's learning goals for this particular point in the course. She wanted students to engage Emerson's text not only as a work of creative non-fiction, but as part of an evolving, historical dialogue in the U.S. that has shaped our understanding of the environment and society's relationship(s) to it.

So one of the key learning outcomes for the Emerson weekly response is related to seeing Emerson's writing as a product of its time and as an influence on what came after. Another is less specific to that week and that particular reading because it applies to all of the readings, and it is the ability to not merely sum up what was said, but to explain how the views of the writer changed over the course of the narrative (and to attribute those changes to the writers' experiences).

So, with these goals in mind, I’ll set up the review prompt like this:

Read the essay and check the box to indicate if the writer has done the following things:

• include facts that accurately place the work in its historical context
• explain the change(s) in perspective the author underwent
• explain the experiences Emerson had that inspired his thinking
• include thoughts of the writer (not only a summary of Emerson's thoughts)

What this will give us in the review report is a snapshot of how often reviewers notice these features in the drafts they read. We can see, too, which individual writers did well in comparison to the larger group and this will give us a source of samples to discuss in class. But most importantly as the instructor, I can use this – along with my own reading of the drafts – to adjust my plans about what to discuss in class. If only 30% of the drafts discussed Emerson’s changes in perspective, for instance, that can become the most important thing to address in the next class meeting.

You might be wondering, at this point, "where's the revision part of this cycle?" Well, for these short response papers, which help students process readings, we might not ask for revised versions to be turned in. But if I'm the instructor, I'd still use the revision plan task in Eli anyway, like this:

Revision Plan Prompt
You will have a chance to write on this topic again for your synthesis essay.  Gather the feedback that was most helpful for you from the peer review  round and reflect on the ways you might re-read Emerson, do additional  research, or revise your responses. Write a note to your future self about what you can do to score well on the exam with a similar writing task.

Once students have submitted their revision plans, what I see, as the teacher, is a set of materials that includes their original draft, all the feedback they received from peers, all the feedback they gave to others, and their revision plan with reflections on what they can improve upon in their next opportunity to write about Emerson. This is what I comment on, offering advice that adjusts or reinforces priorities to help them focus on the areas of greatest need.

A final thought: Write, Review, Revise…Repeat!
With Eli, my approach to teaching writing has not really changed very much. But my execution - my ability to see, understand, and offer feedback on students' writing process has improved dramatically. I make more decisions and give more feedback based on evidence than I did in the past.

Students’ work during peer review, on the other hand, changes tremendously with Eli. It is, quite simply, far better. So are their revision plans and revised drafts. With better (and more) feedback, I see better writing. It is that simple. 

Eli and The Evidence: How I Use Review Results to Guide Deliberate Practice

Recently, I traveled to Washington State University to talk with faculty there about writing, learning to write, and what the evidence says is the best way to encourage student learning. You can find lots of the material for both the full-day workshop and my University address on the Multimodal blog published by the Writing Program.

In my talk, I reviewed some of the powerful evidence that shows what works in writing instruction: deliberate practice, guided by an expert (teacher), and scaffolded by peer feedback (Kellogg & Whiteford, 2009). But I also urged teachers to be guided by the kind of evidence that emerges from their own classrooms when students share their work. This is not simply doing what peer-reviewed studies say works, but involves systematically evaluating what the students in your classroom need and responding to that as well.

This can be a challenge to do. The evidence we need to make good pedagogical choices for the whole group, or to tailor feedback for a particular student, does not collect itself.

This is why we built Eli! With Eli, instructors can gather information shared by students during a peer review session to learn how the group - and how each individual student - is doing relative to the learning goals for a particular project or for the course as a whole.

A Review Report in Eli
Our marketing partner, Bedford St. Martin's, has put together some great resources designed to help instructors get the most out of Eli. And one especially helpful discussion that I'd like to point out here shows what evidence a review report makes available and how it might be used to guide deliberate practice in writing. Here's what a teacher's review report looks like in Eli:

Because Eli aggregates the results of review feedback into one report, a teacher can see trends that are helpful for providing various kinds of feedback to students. Here, I'll talk about just one kind of feedback - trait matching - and how it can be useful in the context of deliberate practice. I'll also offer some examples from my own pedagogy to show why having evidence is so powerful.

Help Students Identify Revision Priorities by Noting Missing Traits or Qualities
One type of feedback that students can give one another is called "trait matching" in Eli. Reviewers check boxes to indicate whether a specific feature is present in the draft. When I'm teaching, I use trait matching items to help students zero in on what is most important at a particular stage in their drafting process. Early on, for instance, it might be a main idea or thesis. Later on, it might be supporting details to develop an argument more fully.

In the review report, then, I get a result like this:

This tells me what percentage of reviewed drafts contained the four traits I have specified should be in each one. Notice that in this summary, most writers have included a summary of their own media use patterns. But fewer writers have made references to two secondary sources in these drafts.

This helps me to identify what I need to emphasize to the whole group, and it also allows me to evaluate each individual student's revision priorities as reflected in their revision plans (also in Eli). I know that at least 44% of those plans should list references to secondary sources!

Here's how I might convey these trends to students. First, I will reassure them that the patterns they've noticed agree with my own reading of their work. This let's them know that they can trust the feedback they are receiving from their peers:

Overall Comments

Overall, your review responses to trait matching items (the check boxes) and scaled items (star ratings) are very good and accurate. I did not find many instances where I disagreed with reviewers about what they had seen in a draft or how well the writer had met one of the criteria represented in the star ratings.

What this means: you can trust the feedback coming from your peers about whether or not your drafts contain all the specified features. Use these as you begin drafting to turn your attention to those things that were not present or not as detailed as they could have been.

Next, I'll try to interpret a bit and even pull out some good examples that they identified during their reviews (and which I think everyone can learn from):

Trait Matching - Summarizing Patterns, Including Detail, and Analyzing

I'm happy to say that on the whole, folks did a good job summarizing their own data. Almost everyone (88%) included a summary of media use patterns and (85%) supported these with detailed evidence. Of the few who were rated by peers as deficient in this area, they often merely listed statistics and did not frame these in terms of a pattern. The following example is modified, but shows what I mean:

List rather than summarize
"I sent 27 text messages on Wednesday and 41 on Thursday. I received 18 texts on Wednesday and 51 on Thursday."

Summarize, rather than list:
"My weekday texting activity seemed to depend on how much time I spent at work on a given day. On my day off, Wednesday, I sent just a little under twice the number of texts than I did on Tuesday, a day when I worked. I also received more texts on my off day, likely because I was engaged in longer conversations than I would be if I were at work."

See how example one is just the facts, while example two identifies a use pattern that the facts support? That's a key difference.

But by far, the biggest shift most of you will make as you draft your essays is from summarizing to analyzing. This makes sense, but will be a challenge as you also need to incorporate secondary source data. Note that only 68% of you " Described the relationship between two or more patterns" and just "65% provided evidence to explain the relationship between two or more patterns." As I read the drafts, I'd put those numbers just a little bit lower - you were generous with one another in your reviews this time! :)

Of course, these are just my comments to the whole group. For individual students, I can drill down further and say something like this: 


Thanks for providing a wonderful example of using evidence to support a claim. You are using primary source data well in this draft! Now, work on putting your primary source data in comparison with the secondary source - the trends reported in the Pew Internet report. Are your media use patterns similar or different than others' in your age group as reported by Pew?

Having this evidence makes all the difference when it comes to getting students to see a writing assignment as a way to identify what kinds of writing moves they need to improve (vs. those that they are doing well) and to practice those things in a deliberate way.

References
Kellogg, R. T., & Whiteford, A. P. (2009). Training advanced writing skills: The case for deliberate practice. Educational Psychologies, 44(4), 250–266.

The (non)Book of Eli

There are many stories to tell about our motivations for creating Eli Review. One goes back to my dissertation research at Purdue, where I studied the way experienced teachers adapted to new technologies in the classroom. The headline from that study: technologies that support writing have pedagogies built into them. Often, those pedagogies clash with those the teacher has. The takeaway from this is straighforward, but hardly simple. Rhetorics can live not only in books and articles, but in machines and software. When they do, they can transform practice in powerful ways.

What would it mean for us to build rhetorics and pedagogies into our own writing environments? That has been one of the driving questions of my career. And so it is one of the stories behind Eli. Eli is not the first system I had a hand in creating to embody a theory of rhetoric. But it is, by just about any standard, the most successful attempt. Eli is used every day by hundreds or even thousands of teachers and students. More than all the people who've ever read an article or book chapter I wrote, to be sure. Likely more than all the people who've ever heard me speak about research, theory, or pedagogy.

Eli embodies many theories about the way writing works. Far more than I can usefully wedge into an article and still have the article remain coherent. In Eli's deep structure - the data formats that represent people, texts, and actions in the system - lie counterintuitive ideas about textuality that mash the ideas of Derrida, Barthes, and Iser together. Eli doesn't see texts that are part of reviews as coherent wholes. Rather, a text is a surface upon which the social actions of a review unfold.  Texts provide an ability to index actions, relate them to one another, and provide a view of what would ordinarily be invisible social interactions back to writers, reviewers, and review coordinators. And while texts in Eli are palimpsests, they are also social actors of a sort. That is, we understand that over the course of a review, texts assume the agency of various human users for whom they stand in. And when I say we "understand" this, I mean we've built representations of review activity that explicitly support what, in Actor-Network Theory terms, are moments of inscription, enrollment, and interresement in the course of a review. We even have an algorithm for evaluating review success based on this progression, a novel measure of review *activity* rather than review comments or texts.

Eli also carries our ideas about how people learn to write. One radical one is that people can learn as much or more from reviewing work by others as they can by writing. Another, less radical thought for most writing teachers that is still difficult to act upon in a traditional classroom is that where writers *do* learn from writing, they do so most effectively from revision. Eli provides an environment where review can play a more prominent role in learning to write simply by making the coordination of review activity far easier and faster to do. Eli also provides an environment where writers can get more high-quality feedback more often, allowing more of their writing time to be spent on revising.

If Eli were a book, I could never get an editor to allow me to put all the ideas that make it work into one volume. It would appear to stray, to lose focus, or to vacillate wildly from the minutae of poststructuralist theories of language to the currently-in-fashion ontological perspectives of ANT to the pragmatic ideas of writing researchers like Britton and Hillocks. In Eli, they live as comfortably as an engine, drive train, and electronic ignition controls in a contemporary car, systems that stem from ideas of different eras, with different theories, all working seamlessly together.

Book Review: Angela Haas, American Indians, and Rhetoric

Book Review:
Haas, Angela M. “A Rhetoric of Alliance: What American Indians Can Tell Us About Digital and Visual Rhetoric.” Dissertation. 2008.

When deciding on a book to review I chose a dissertation that I’ve wanted to read in its entirety for some time. My background is in public policy and comparative studies in race and ethnicity, so I’ve always had fun trying to understand my identity as a scholar of rhetoric. However, the weaving of my multiple scholarly trainings is of the utmost importance to me as a cultural rhetorics scholar. So I’ll try to sort through all of that while also telling you about Angela Haas. 

In “A Rhetoric of Alliance,” Angela Haas takes on the task of tracing how American Indians have been represented in relation to technology by both Natives and non-Natives alike. Haas describes her project as follows:
"Specifically, my dissertation aims to rupture racial stereotypes and widely held theoretical and political assumptions by providing case studies on specific culturally-sitated technological practices of a specific race, utilize a broader, more flexible, and more historically-situated definition of technology and considerations of technological theories and practices, thereby reflecting a larger history of technological design and use by people of color" (70).

What I appreciate about this project is the manner in which it deconstructs culturally specific theories of technology to broaden the utility of professional writing practice and study. For example, as an rhetoric scholar Haas goes to great lengths to highlight the commonalities in the theory of the communication medium (or the skill or art of what she sees) as opposed to a given author’s utility of it. By doing so, a reader is able to see how shifting the perspective from studying the product to studying the process of making meaning, particularly in the context of Native making practices and digital technologies. It’s not an argument of better or before, but of the affordances of seeing how they’re related (I’ll return to this a little later). The secret to this argument, though, lies in her methodology.

Angela describes her theoretical framework as an "indiscipline," noting how she pulls three distinct fields together to inform conversations for Rhetoric and Writing as well as American Indian Studies (145). What I see her doing to achieve this is describing how her multiple, mixed methods collaboratively construct a picture of teaching, research, and scholarship that accounts for politics, identity, culture, dominance/power, and historical/social contexts (see pp. 170-190 for an in-depth exploration of pedagogical strategies). Angela’s methods specifically include literature reviews, rhetorical analyses of theories, historiographical/archival research, case studies, oral history, and interviews (60). And through these data she asks her readers to see how such knowledge might make them reimagine their pedagogy, as it did for me when I taught Science and Technology as a First Year Writing Course.

So, how will my work benefit from grappling with such methodological concerns? As I see it now, the affordances of generating a discourse informed by multiple methods and multiple fields of study increases the utility/applicability of an argument. I would argue that the strongest feature of Haas’ dissertation is in the realm of pedagogy, and this is largely a result of her orientation as a cultural rhetorics scholar. Haas explains that “cultural rhetorics inquiry is concerned with challenging traditional canons of rhetorical thought through the study of rhetorics historically margianalized or unrecognized by Western culture and with constructing new methodologies for investigating the plurality of histories of rhetoric" (8). When it comes to teaching a class on science and technology, consider the power in the pedagogical decision to interrogate cultural notions of science and technology. In my mind this is a big move because it facilitates the possibility of student learning outcomes to include politics and everyday life.

Again, I appreciate that Haas’ work encourages a shift of theoretical perspective and orientation surrounding the topics of technology and writing. But also useful is the way in which she connects the pedagogical with the political in order to illuminate 1) disciplinary shortcomings and 2) practical methods of challenging the dominance of colonial notions of knowledge-making.

The Politics of Technology in Curriculum and Instruction

Reading Response 4:
Carroll, David. “Mobile Learning Tools: A Teachable Moment in the Age of the App.” In Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy.

As you may have read in my post on how/who I understand my students to be, I recognize myself as a teacher who is not technologically proficient in digital environments. It is because of this that I found David Carrol’s piece to be especially helpful for understanding how scholars who DO experiment pedagogically with common, new technologies think about instruction.

The greatest strength in Carroll’s article can be found in the way he coordinates a review of the scholarly conversations surrounding mobile technologies with macro-level, societal concerns. For example, Carroll emphasizes a strong need for balancing private technological development with public access and use. Comparing institutional desires with the legal constraints in corporate development, Carroll argues that we need to move toward a disentangling of private and public interests in the realm of systemic educational development. In other words, the “ad hoc” manner in which schools locate funding for technologies may in fact be to the detriment of the students in the long run as a result of capitalist drives.

For me this piece is useful for the questions it raises about seeking and adopting new technologies into classrooms and curricula. The lines between private profit and public education are so blurred at this point it is becoming increasingly difficult to determine who is really profiting: students or the owners of the corporate firms developing and selling the technologies. I, like David Carroll, favor the development of educational technologies in so far as access and enhancing learning remain higher priorities than profit and scale.

Fitzpatrick and New Technologies

Reading Response 3:
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “Google Wave: Pedagogical Success, Technological Failure?” In Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s piece on Google Wave is an excellent article for contemplating the incorporation of new, complex technologies in writing classrooms. On one hand, this is a success story focusing on the affordances of incorporating socially-geared digital environments into one’s pedagogy. On the other, this is a cautionary tale for scholars who may be made vulnerable by a tool mismatched for the learning. I can’t help but think of Latour’s Aramis here.

—Check out my brief overview of Bruno Latour’s Aramis, or the Love of Technology if you would like to know where this is coming from—

Fitzpatrick’s piece does a phenomenal job of highlighting just how powerful a strategic application of new technology can be. Given that Google designed Wave to help people engage writing in social spaces, it provided an ideal format for one unit during a semester. Fitzpatrick wanted students to think and gather information socially and collaboratively. I recognize her decision to experiment with communication environment rather than type of product to be a sound strategy worth emulating. However, because of the overwhelming influence of corporate strategies in developing mass-market systems there’s also a downside. 

As in the case with Aramis, “the most crucial problem was perhaps that Wave’s users—and more importantly its evangelists—didn’t have a clear enough sense of what the system was actually good for” (paragraph 9). The pitfall in using technologies like Google Wave is that large, systemic shifts in business models and technical support often subvert the ability of people to meaningfully engage technology consistently over time. Either educators must become endlessly adaptable, or more rigid in their infrastructural demands.

For me I take this as a practical lesson in pedagogical portability. I value a technology’s applicability over its complexity any day of the week. Maybe it’s my favor toward inductive pedagogy?

Mark Sample and What it Means to Teach

Reading Response 2:
Sample, Mark. “The Question of Expert Learners.” In Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy.

In “The Question of Expert Learners,” Sample asks teachers to return to a fundamental question: What do we mean by teaching? I find this to be a useful rhetorical move because it asks teachers to bring their own practices to light alongside Sample’s sharing of experience. Or, in other words, reimagining teaching by reframing learning. The overall argument is simple: if pedagogical decisions are based on theories of learning as a process/skill, a teacher is far more likely to succeed in teaching something. That’s it.

But I think that’s a complicated notion. Sample identifies intentionality, reflection, and accountability as principles for guiding learning. Essentially, if one’s authorial moves can purposefully engage these principles then learning will unfold in the process itself. Sample prefers to think of it as “guided inquiry or cognitive apprenticeship,” where the teacher or other students may guide one another from beginning learner to expert learner. This path, Sample argues, offers a classroom many in roads to learning and development.

I find this essay to be highly pragmatic and applicable to any classroom setting. Those who study art forms know that the processes involved in learning a skill or art are often compatible, if not directly translatable to another skill or art. And the reason for this: we all share some degree of commonality in how we learn, even if our idiosyncrasies differ. Such knowledge can help build strong teachers in my book.

Vygotsky and Learning

Reading Response 1:
Vygotsky, Lev S. “Interaction Between Learning and Development.” Excerpted from Readings on the Development of Children. 1978.

What do we know the teaching of writing is all about? Psychology. Enter Vygotsky and his zone of proximal development. I appreciate scholars who work to make the teaching of writing more accessible and ultimately easier, and this piece is especially useful for those looking for theories of learning.

Attempting to extend the location of learning to include realms beyond the classroom, Vygotsky challenges traditional theories of education. He argues that “any learning a child encounters in school always has a previous history,” meaning that school is not the primary source of development (32). With this knowledge, I don’t believe it is difficult to see how such an idea alone can change the way teachers approach lesson plans or interactions with students. Yet his argument continues to grow.

Specifically, Vygotsky explains the common knowledge that when properly matched, the type of learning and a child’s developmental level can be powerful, coordinated tools for enhancing a learning environment. To provide evidence the author identifies two developmental levels to showcase the relational differences. The first, “actual development,” is “the level of development of a child’s mental functions that has been established as a result of certain already completed developmental cycles” (32). The zone of proximal development, on the other hand, traces a student’s “internal course of development,” or their state of learning as they are in the process of building. This is useful to pay attention to because it can be used as a method of teaching students self sufficiency with a given subject (a result of its prospective characterization) (33).

Learning itself is not development based on Vygotsky’s research. And this conclusion should have serious implications for how we imagine the teaching of writing in particular. If students learn faster than their processes of development can keep up with, then teachers must adjust the location and effects of their developmental lessons/moments.

A Set of Learning Goals

Share a Set of Learning Goals:
Here is a brief description of the focus of and goals for an online course engaging Science and Technology from a Cultural Rhetorics standpoint.

As the course title suggests we will spend this semester thinking, reading, and writing about science and technology in the world. For the purposes of our section I built a course asking you to consider the use of science and technology in your everyday lives, in your academic careers, and also in your potential future careers. Under the frame of “The Tools We Use,” we will engage in activities that exercise your critical thinking and analytical skills while practicing for the demands of college writing. Much of what I ask you to do will be based on your own experience. Therefore, the best advice I can give you is to stay close to what you know from your everyday life, and then use the research skills we practice to build on your knowledge. Our specific goals for our section are as follows:
-Assess scholarly notions of Science & Technology as cultural practices
-Critically evaluate our own uses of technologies to better understand how we learn
-Use writing to better understand technology, and technology to better understand writing (ELI Review)
-Engage in academic research processes as a method of knowledge-building
-Understand writing as a communal activity, not an individual one.

My Students

My Students:
I do know that there’s one thing I can count on in a given semester as a teacher: my students often have more (and more advanced) technological literacies than I.

Working at Michigan State University I teach students from all over the world. So yes, pinpointing who they are is certainly difficult. One cultural phenomenon that is fairly commonplace is the use of the internet for knowledge production. Anybody who visits YouTube can be instructed on how to do myriad things in a matter of minutes. With an increase of knowledge availability comes a strain on knowledge application. Today it’s getting increasingly easier for students to acquire a little knowledge about many things; it’s far more difficult to acquire a lot of knowledge about a few things using the internet. The implications for college writing here are potentially large depending on how a teacher negotiates  a student’s technological utilization.

Another category of technology use among my students is entertainment. I am not a video-game player, nor do I have a smart phone. Cell phones are one of the few incredibly visible student technologies in the classroom. With the amount of writing many of them do on their phones alone, it is not difficult to make various technologies relevant to classroom activity. As I mentioned in my technology statement, the process of learning one skill or art can be translated into other skills and arts. Sometimes students just need to be asked the right question about how their knowledge of one skill can be made to apply to another.

Video games then (even though I’m not a player) are often one of my favorite subjects to ask students about. It is usually possible to extrapolate the writing mechanic equivalencies after hearing a game described. Mortal Kombat is my favorite example, particularly with my interest in martial arts. When I ask students who play the game about the opponent in the final fight, they describe the artist who has mastered and can apply the styles of all the combatants, and not to mention in the right context.

I do my best to adapt to the learning needs of a teaching situation. This means that my technological choices are highly rhetorical. If there’s a skill I want students to learn, I will do my best to select the most appropriate medium/format the lesson. If I can show students advanced arrangement with sticky notes, I will do so if that is the most effective and efficient way. If there is a rhetorical affordance of choosing another technological medium, I will certainly cater to my audience (commercials, movies, songs, etc.).

I suppose that makes me a technological opportunist, not necessarily enthusiast.