Poet Ponders the Digital

I have always preferred to work alone, despising group work. Apparently, I'm not the only person to realize group work is absolutely not better  than working alone:   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all Pedagogically, I've always thought that groups allow students to avoid improving some skills. When I assign a group project, the best design student ends up doing the layout and design. Yes, that makes perfect sense and results in the best grade, but it doesn't help the student most in need of practice. Sure, we should play to our strengths on teams, but school is also about improving your weaknesses. We must balance letting students focus on their favorite tasks and skills against the need to get students to do what they don't realize they can do. Teams allow too many students to avoid work, while other students end up doing extra work. I want to work on my own, most of time, and that's ...

At the university where I teach we are engaged in a debate familiar to online educators: which delivery methods will we embrace and why? When discussing online education it is important to clarify how the experience will be "delivered" to students and how well the delivery method complements the instructional styles of various instructors. I have a decided preference for courses that include either some face to face meetings or live "synchronous" communications between the instructor and students. My preferences as an instructor reflect my preferences as a student, but only when I consider the best instructors I had throughout my education. Online education can refer to any of the following: Distance learning via teleconferencing technologies hosted in a traditional classroom setting; Synchronous learning conducted by an instructor specifically for remote students only; Hybrid learning, in which students meet sometimes in classrooms and sometimes online; Co...

As I prepare to assume the role of coordinator of an online (and traditional) degree program, I have been thinking about my ideal educational model. My ideal system would include online and traditional instruction, so many of the ideas I express below apply to traditional classroom education and online. Online systems might provide flexibility not possible for some traditional schools, which is why I am a believer in hybrid educational systems. So, my ideal degree program would… Allow students to switch between online and traditional instruction if they find online doesn't meet their learning styles or needs. Allow students to take and re-take any online tests and lab practicums two or three times until a set deadline, encouraging mastery over merely passing a test. A mix of questions or problems would prevent "memory gains" from repeated questions. Three exams does seem a reasonable cap, though. Allow students to move faster or slower than the traditional quarter and sem...

This article explains how one man's YouTube tutoring lessons went viral. Students worldwide now benefit. What does this experience tell us about education? The Classroom of the Future | Salman Khan | Big Think One major point of this article is that learning can be individualized with technology, though we know that's not easy when a school or university enforces a time-based model for teaching. For example, I have to guide students through a course in either eight or 15 weeks. There is no choice regarding the end date. I have never thought time-based education was the best model. Why should we move from one class to the next, one grade level to the next, as if all students are progressing that the same rate? Could online education force us to rethink this rather dated model of instruction? Granted, I'm not free to do as I want, but I can certainly advocate for changes to online learning, especially at the university level. Why shouldn't a student be...

People have asked me (okay, two people) what "Poet Ponders" is meant to be. What is my purpose? I now will attempt to clarify what makes "Poet Ponders" different from my blogs on rhetoric or writing. "Poet Ponders Pedagogy" is meant to address the role technology plays within the science and art of education. This is not a blog for general political rants, thoughts on the latest fiction, or photos of my cats. This blog is a place to explore how teaching and learning are affected by hardware and software. As a teacher, how does technology shape my experiences and those of my students? We have moved beyond the early "Digital Age" and through the "Interactive Web 2.0" trends. Now, our students occupy the "Social Media Age" and the Internet is much more than e-mail and the World Wide Web. Writing has been affected by Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and dozens of other "quick" media. These technologies enforce a brevity wit...

On March 1, 2011, I wrote about the difficult state of the academic job market in fields such as mine: "digital rhetoric" and "new media" studies. Even with a specialization in "special needs pedagogy" (disabled students), the market is challenging. There are several reasons for this and I want to share those before I share my personal update. Let me first point to a trend that has finally reached the university setting: "Software as a Service" (SaaS). For several years, and even before the rise of the Internet, companies and non-profits alike could pay to access software remotely. In fact, this was the original model of computing back in the ancient days of mainframe dominance. A company would "lease" time on a mainframe, housed at a data processing center. Universities would lease time on their mainframes, too. Often, smaller universities and local public schools would use a regional minicomputer or mainframe. Today, this is "the...

Selected Bibliography Some texts either specifically or indirectly on the history of education and education theory (pedagogy) that have influenced me. The list is exported from my Bookends database, so there might be some formatting errors. I am trying to clean up my database, but I have several thousand books in the system (and on my shelves). Beniger, James. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Berlin, James A. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures : Refiguring College English Studies . Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition. West Lafayette, Ind.: Parlor Press, 2003. Corbett, Edward P. J., Nancy Myers, and Gary Tate. The Writing Teacher's Sourcebook . 4th ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 0195123778 (alk. paper) Cuban, Larry. The Blackboard and the Bottom Line : Why Schools Can't Be Businesses . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. ---. How Scholars T...

When I consider what I hope to teach and research, I begin with the question how online collaborative tools shape the composition process. How does technology restrict or expand the choices available? Is composing enhanced or degraded for those with special needs or language limitations? Because I am a creative writer, I view "team" compositions of interactive fiction with the same curiosity I have for non-fiction projects. Composition, in my mind, includes a mix of what we often label as creative and academic genres. What matters to me is the writing process, regardless of how we might categorize the product at a specific moment. "Composition and rhetoric" are often perceived as limited to the study of academic genres. I cannot foresee myself being limited to genres I want to challenge and reshape. The "rhetoric of fiction" and "rhetoric of theatre/film" are topics I would hope to teach in the future, from a technological and co...

I posted a response to Geoffrey Sirc's "Box Logic" ( Writing New Media , 2004) that might have been my reaction to his essay, but I also think I didn't quite understand the essay. Hearing Prof. Sirc speak on November 27, 2007, I realized his theories were not far from my own, at least within creative writing, which might have been why I didn't sense any "revelation" in the essay. At the same time, the links between art theory and composition that escaped my comprehension when reading were much much clearer during the visual and oral presentation. However, I also don't complete agree these approaches help in a college composition course meant to teach academic norms. This leads to an interesting question: why would I be thrilled by his presentation, but utterly flummoxed by a text? Why did the text leave me confused and disappointed, while hearing Prof. Sirc was fascinating? I think it is important to admit -- Sirc's ideas are interesting....

Assignment: find images of interest to you and collect them. I do not collect much of anything. I do not know of any "scene" nor do I have any particular focused interest at the moment. Maintaining my Web sites is now about maintaining content, not creativity or discovery. (They are academic tools, not hobbies.) I seldom leave my house, except to travel between the home and the university campus. I do not have any hobbies, which would merely distract me from writing assignments. I have no desire to gather random things without purpose, and the "purpose" of completing an assignment was painful enough with the Flikr slideshow I was asked to produce earlier in the semester. Without my wife's assistance, the idea of looking at pictures would have been too daunting. When I have "nothing to do," I do whatever I am asked to do by my family or employer. I have a list of stories and projects at all times, though, giving me guidance when I wonder wha...

Responding to Geoffrey Sirc's "Box Logic" ( Writing New Media , 2004): 1) What should we be teaching as composition? (p. 110) I do not spend much time on Web design (HTML, CSS) because those technologies will change within a year or two. Rhetorical thought, however, is a skill that can be applied for both analysis of existing material or synthesis of new. Thinking strategically is a portable skill. 2) I truly despise the "creativity" of making blocks of text non-columnar (113). It is painful to read as it is, so why make it any more difficult? If this were poetry, I would be forgiving — poetry is condensed meaning. This is not poetry. It is a mockery of poetry and creativity to have a scholarly article make pretense of creativity. Bluntly, the blocks serve no purpose in this text. They do not move me emotionally, they merely annoy me as a reader of a dense text. If you want to be poetic be poetic, but this is not even prosaic. It's silliness. 3) I a...

I am a skeptic when it comes to technology in the classroom. From accounts like those found in The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology , by Todd Oppenheimer, to the works of Larry Cuban, one finds a series of issues with technology that keep repeating every generation — as if technology and the excitement that always follows it will translate into better-educated students. Oppenheimer is an award-winning San Francisco journalist who toured the country to study how computers were used in the classroom. He began as an optimistic believer in technology and ended the work on a skeptical note, almost a "back-to-basics" philosophy based on everything from the price of technology to the lack of technical support and training teachers generally receive. Gene I Maeroff's work, A Classroom of One: How Online Learning Is Changing Our Schools and Colleges , is authored by one of the leading experts on education. Maeroff has written 11 books in 3...