DRC (Digital Rhetoric Collaborative) Call for Blog Carnival Contributions

Call for Blog Carnival Contributions: The Past, Present, and Future of Digital Publishing:

http://www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org/2016/09/20/call-for-blog-carnival-contributions-the-past-present-and-future-of-digital-publishing/

"Breaking the 'Iron Triangle'" from Inside Higher Education

I'm not sure about this project. The desire to teach more students with better outcomes is laudable. The desire to do this without spending more money, when we know we're spending money on things that have nothing to do with education--yes, college football, fancy dorms and rec centers, etc. And don't forget how administrative costs continue to rise. know some complain about professors who do more research than teach, and I admit, that can be a problem as well. What bothers me with this project is that we seem to be insisting that the classroom isn't our priority, at least when it comes to what we're going to spend out money on. The gist of this article seems to be, let's teach better--Let's teach more students better--as long as we don't have to spend more money. 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/17/flipped-classroom-project-north-carolina-greensboro-produces-promising-results?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=11262092fa-DNU201608017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-11262092fa-197508093&mc_cid=11262092fa&mc_eid=fa5284ca01

Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities

Not sure if this article qualifies as online learning, but when someone is this angry, it makes good reading:


https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neoliberal-tools-archives-political-history-digital-humanities/

Makerspaces

Ah, those librarians, quietly joining, or perhaps fomenting, a revolution. 

A few links on Makerspaces:

http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/a-librarians-guide-to-makerspaces/

http://library-maker-culture.weebly.com/what-are-they.html

http://makered.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Makerspace-Playbook-Feb-2013.pdf

http://renovatedlearning.com/makerspace-resources/

So, are Makerspaces, sometimes referred to as Hackerspaces, f2f or online? Are they a hybrid of the two? Is one possible without the other?  

The Electronic Word

Published in 1993. To long ago to be pertinent to the digital world twenty some-odd years later? Or worth checking out? It's in the library, so at least a trip across campus. QA76.9.C66 L363 1994, Brownsville Stacks. Theory tends to be more durable than technology. So, possibilities.  

 

Richard A. Lanham

302 pages | 4 halftones, 2 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 1993

The personal computer has revolutionized communication, and digitized text has introduced a radically new medium of expression. Interactive, volatile, mixing word and image, the electronic word challenges our assumptions about the shape of culture itself.

A Language of Play

 Raul sent this to me the other day. Grading right now, so no time to pick up something at random to read. I'll put it here and come back to it later.

"A Language of Play: New Media’s Possibility Spaces." Joshua Daniel-Wariya. Computers and Composition 40 (2016) 32–47. The link below will take you to the abstract on Science Direct, which seems to think we're willing to pay 31 dollars for a journal article. Many university libraries carry Computers and Composition on a database. If not, inter-library loan is always an option. doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2016.03.011

The MIT Online Educational Policy Initiative

Anyone who taught in a computer classroom in the 90s remembers how those classrooms always seemed to be made for doing something other than teaching. They were designed by technicians ostensibly for teachers. Unfortunately, most of the time, those technicians had never themselves taught, so their designs often didn't fit our needs. As often happens in academia, the designs fit the dimensions of some room in the basement where the computer lab was--right next to the Writing Center, and just as difficult to find.

For those of us who taught writing, the layout was even more foreign, since those rooms always seemed to be set up like a lecture, something we'd long since moved away from. We couldn't rearrange those computer desks in a circle for class discussion or in multiple circles for group work. I remember asking all the students to pull their chairs up to the front of the room and squeeze together. Thank goodness the chairs all had wheels.

So, it's no surprise to me that the MIT study came to the conclusion that we should, "focus on people and process, not technology" (IHE). In other words, teaching should guide technology, not technology guide teaching. Surprise.


MIT Online Education Policy Initiative: https://oepi.mit.edu/final-report

Summary in Inside Higher Education (if you don't have time to read the whole report): https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/04/20/mit-online-learning-report-notes-importance-teachers-instructional-designers?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=f4741c5510-DNU20160420&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-f4741c5510-197508093

Drive By Book Review: The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture

The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture, Edited by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson.

With it's bright orange cover, The State of Play immediately announces that overly subtle academiceze will not be in play--though insight and intelligence is widely displayed. This little book contains 13 diverse essays that, as the title suggests, explores video game culture from the inside. 

Forget Fox Channel clichés about video games causing violence. This issue isn’t ignored; it’s handled in a sophisticated enough way that, as Cara Ellison and Brendan Keogh write in “The Joy of Virtual Violence,” “It's the rest of the world that needs to catch up” (155).

Essays range from straight on commentaries on gender discrimination—a more critical issue than violence for most gamers—representation of race and ethnicity, to esoteric explorations of identity, as in Ola Wikander’s “The God in the Machine”:  

“There is an interesting relationship that can be imagined between this type of Gnostic mythology and the role of the video game player in relation to the character he or she plays. Just like the fallen human soul described by Gnostic religions, the video game player steps into a false world that only exists for as long as one believes in it” (246).

Twine: an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.

I've been playing with Twine (http://twinery.org/).

From their website:

Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.

You don't need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you're ready.
Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere. Anything you create with it is completely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes.
Twine was originally created by Chris Klimas in 2009 and is now maintained by a whole bunch of people at several different repositories.


I found the stories I was most attracted to were the nonlinear (not necessarily plot-based) stories that explicitly took advantage of the format. Here are a couple of interesting ones:

http://www.fahlstaff.com/

https://sub-q.com/play-a-man-in-his-life/

http://www.magicalwasteland.com/the-arboretum
I'm playing round with the possibility of using Twine to deliver instruction online. Could lecture notes, even lectures, become interactive using Twine. I'll play with the possibilities this summer.  

10 Rules of Etiquette for Video Conferencing

That Wall Street Journal. They've got rules for everything.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/ten-rules-of-etiquette-for-videoconferencing-1457921535

Of course, Blast From the Past already covered everything we need to know in a 49 second scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP-rXX6MICE

Snapchat as Flash Cards

Here's a guy using Snapchat as a means to reinforce the major points in his lectures. He gets a lot of grief in the comments. I wanted to post a comment at the end of this article, but NPR never sent me a confirmation of registration e-mail, so I was unable to. Simply put, all he's doing is sending his students the equivalent of 3X5 flashcards, something some of them will doubtless do with their lecture notes anyway, to refresh their memory. What a great idea.

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/03/29/467091289/how-teachers-are-using-snapchat?utm_source=tumblr.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=thirteenseven&utm_term=artsculture&utm_content=20160330

Digital Course Materials--Yet Another Survey

I wonder how much laziness feeds this attitude. After all, if you go digital, you often have to develop your own materials out of that unsorted information base called the Internet. Isn't it easier just to pick something that's been packaged and tied up with a bow?


https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/02/22/study-faculty-members-skeptical-digital-course-materials-unfamiliar-oer?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=194526da11-DNU20160222&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-194526da11-197508093

FREE WEBINAR: USING ROBOTIC TELEPRESENCE TO IMPROVE LEARNING IN HYBRID CLASSES

At first I laughed:

I actually got an e-mail this weekend advertising this webinar. I’m thinking about signing up and turning it into a drinking game. Anyone want to join me? Thursday 2:00 at University Draft House. We can ask them to put it on the TV over the bar.  

Is this the wave of the future?

Student: “Hello? Is this the robot who is supposed to look over my paper and correct my grammar errors?
Robotutor:  “I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.”

Student: “Who’s Dave? Can you help me or not? Is there some problem with my paper?”

Robotutor: “I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.”

Student: “What are you talking about?

Robotutor: “This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.”  

Student: “What mission? I just want help with my grammar.”  

Robotutor: “I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.”

Student: “What? Who’s Frank? Is he that guy in the Writing Center who said they shut down the OWL and I should call you if I needed help after five? I should have just asked my aunt who teaches second grade.” Click.  

Then, I googled robotic telepresence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI5fryQMGss  

 

Now I want one for Christmas. 

"Plato's Wiki: the Possibility of Digital Dialectic."

Link to "Plato's Wiki: the Possibility of Digital Dialectic," my take on the intersection between between wikis and classroom discussion, and which we can most readily label "dialectic."


http://qudoublehelixjournal.org/index.php/dh/article/view/50/242