(the new) bgblogging

My class must look pretty nuts to many people who stroll by our door– we speed through the history of arts reviewing in fifteen minutes and then spend twenty playing with a few words. We talk a lot and laugh a lot. We argue a bit too–about what makes good reviewing and bad, about how Dave Hickeymanages to travel from the most conversational digressions to absolute stylistic virtuosity within a matter of a couple of sentences, and about what Nabokov is up to in his story “Music” and how his hapless Victor may well be the best reviewer of music imaginable through his visceral, deeply felt experience of a piece he cannot even name by a composer he doesn’t know. The details of the syllabus emerge as we go in response to the direction taken by the class writing and discussion. The group agreed to let me put togeher the readings and writing assignments only a week ahead of them, so I can capitalize on where they are in their development right then at that point in the semester. It’s a lot of work, yes, but already I see this improvisational method of teaching paying off (and I do take to heart something I learned from the dance performance I blogged a few weeks ago–that the improv artists are the most well-prepared of them all).

Five classes into the semester and the artswriting blog is not only up and running —THANKS to the fabulous skill and effort (and creativity and patience) of my colleagues, Héctor Vila and Paul Amsbary— already, even though I need to do some tweaking and posting of many of the web resources for the class to explore, it is inspiring my students to work beyond what they thought they could do in this genre. They are writing thoughtfully and artfully about themselves, searching for their subject matter, their voice, their form, and their media. They are not at all afraid of the five-blogs-embedded within the sixth phenomenon, and seem pretty excited about putting their work out into the world.

Perhaps I am seeing the first group of students to take my artswriting course who are true native speakers of computer media–many more seem to find mixing media a natural means of expression than, say, two years ago. They don’t mind responding to one another on the blog, and they are embracing the community-collaborative aspect of the course design. And they’re delighted to be stretching their creative as well as critical faculties, playing around with simple movies, with oranges and text, with poems mixing with prose. Now I see the trouble I’ve landed myself in–keeping up with them!

Next week we have Janet Murray visiting Middlebury for the Clifford Symposium, and our class to talk about the future of narrative. We will explore with her the ways in which our use of the computer changes stories, and changes the classroom narrative altogether. I am interested in how introducing this new means of expression into our midst also necessitates a repositioning of the teacher within the class, which means that the classroom story is no longer hers–or at least primarily hers.

The following evening Siva Vaidhyanathan will talk about copyright and copywrong–a topic that comes up daily in my classes because of our desire to respond to art by “entering” the art–using it in our responses, or cobbling together a response to an artwork from a collage of our own original work and that of others (duly cited, of course).

These are fascinating and essential arenas for our students to enter, to think about and discuss–as they try out new ways of “writing,” they need to ask what effects these changes are having on the old systems still in place. What, for instance, is the effect of using images as well as words–what do images do to the words surrounding them? I see my students and the remarkable crew inHéctor’s seminartaking on the challenge of working within a collaborative to explore the thorny questions of community, responsibility, activism and the complexities of this networked world. His fourteen students have forged such a powerful bond as a group, first online, then in an intensive one-week residential workshop (PIE) and now in the seminar that they are, in my book, working well beyond any group of first-years I’ve ever seen. Héctor works his magic, absolutely, and is reaping the rewards–they need no pushing to get on the blog and to respond carefully, respectfully, and fully–they call themselves on missing opportunities within their posts, even. I am floored and find it hard to believe that anyone looking on at this classroom hasn’t seen the effectiveness of such an educational experience. As Matt Jennings, editor of Middlebury Magazine, said to me after observing the class a few days ago, “I want to go back to school–to this class!”

More to watch on those course blogs — in fact, they’re proving much more interesting than this wee blog–because there are many voices being heard, they are taking on fascinating issues in the arts and communities, and they are experimenting with media. Stay tuned…

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The Good

…Knowing that my daughter, off to Barnard College a few weeks ago, has her cell in the city. Every kid from rural Vermont should have one in NY, yes?

…Planning some moblogging adventures for my Arts writing class, ideas about which I posted here, and which promise to give us more opportunites to explore hypermedia along the lines of Jon Udell’s concept of the genre.

…Phone cam art as seen on BBC

…The way people are beginning to use Flickr

…What Dave Winer is doing with his cell and iPOD.

… Eric Paulos and Elizabeth Goodman’s Familiar Strangers Project

The Bad
…The inability of school districts to distinguish between the educational potential of cell phones, listed above under Good and proposed in Korea (as pointed out byBryan Alexander), and the abuse of the phone during classtime as our local Burlington FreePress noted in today’s editorial. (Do we need to ban cellphones outright? Can’t we teach our students–and, apparently, teachers– a little etiquette? I thought we were trying to foster critical thinking skills and the ability to exercise sound judgement. What kind of message are we sending if we say that ALL uses of a particular technology, that is not inherently harmful–the way firearms are, for example– are banned?)

The Ugly (A Personal Account)

…Flying back from Milwaukee this past weekend:
The plane lands, and as it taxis up to the gate, voices pop like corks being released about the cabin: “Hello?” “Hey” “Hi. Yeah it’s me…” “Honey? I’m here!” where just the minute before, the only sound was the insistent roar of the engines. Of the fifty-some people aboard the small jet, it seems as though a good twenty of them have flipped open their cellphones the second the wheels touch earth.

Meanwhile they have yet to utter a word to the people sitting next to them–strangers–and as they chatter on to loved ones, colleagues and friends, it’s as though they’ve encased themselves in a protective bubble, as though no one sits in the seat next to them. They chatter on — loudly–about whatever: the weather, the landing, the trip, private matters, business as though they were alone.

Do they do it to sheath themselves within a safe cocoon of the familiar when they’re on the road?

…On a class fieldtrip:
I am at the wheel; four sleepy college students are draped over the seats. A phone rings in the back, and a student starts talking to her mother. Another student pulls her phone from a pocket and dials, starts talking with her boyfriend; the girl in the front seat falls asleep. The four in the car have barely exchanged words.
Do they not want to speak to one another?

…At the top of the Statue of Liberty, a woman is speaking–yes, loudly–into a cellphone to someone in California: “Yes, I’m here, at the top, I made it, can you believe it?!” and she has her back to the view.

…On an escalator in the airport, I am traveling down, and a young man alone on the up-side is talking–loudly–to himself. But no, he has on a headset, and is carrying on a conversation about business, right here, out into the air as he looks right at me.

Yeah, I can’t stand it when I’m talking with someone and their cellphone starts chirping and they dive for the phone. Yeah it concerns me that perhaps we’re using the cellphone to isolate ourselves within our safe worlds. But you know, I think these tensions between ways of using technology and what our use of technology means to us and does to us are quite fascinating and useful. We’re just working it all out, and it will be a bumpy ride for sure, but that’s as it should be. When we’re experiencing moments of disequilibrium and uncertainty, that’s just when we have a chance to see things, really see them in a way that stirs our imagination out of its paralysis, yes?

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Day after day as I try to keep up with developments in integrating new technologies into classrooms, (thanks to such tireless edubloggers as Will Richardson and Anne Davis as well as Roland Tanglao and Cyprien Lomas who roam the world, it seems, in search of the best tools and applications thereof) I see how conferences, periodicals and edublogs are being flooded with presentations, articles and notices about the impact of new technologies on classrooms, and about how writing is a major player in the technology-rich educational setting. What concerns me is that all too many of the reports (especially high profile ones that reach mainstream media outlets) are NOT considering how blogging and other emerging forms of computer-mediated expression as continuous, collaborative, multi-media authoring are not the equivalent of writing with a new tool that for all intents and purposes is pretty much the same as quill, pen or typewriter, just faster and networked.

Kairos News and Edutopia both have September issues focusing on media literacy in light of a workworld that increasingly demands its inhabitants to be skilled users of the new technologies. (Of course, one question this brings up has to do with the disorientation of older workers who must adapt to a world speaking a language not their native tongue, but one they must learn as adults—think about how difficult it is for adult immigrants to learn the language of their new homeland, for example—but that’s another story for another post for another day.) And yet, the focus is still on writing as separate from graphics, from web design principles, from color theory–from sound principles. Students need more writing instruction, concludes one national report. (What else is new– reports state what teachers already know…)

If we consider writing in isolation, though, we miss the point of new technologies as well as the realities of the world we live in. James Duderstadt, Howard Rheingold, and Héctor Vila, among others, have been articulating the need for a new-media literacy curriculum for years, something George Lucas has recently expressed in Edutopia, arguing for us to understand that an entirely new means of writing—of expression—is emerging around us, and that we, as teachers, need to help our students “to understand [this] new language of expression…We must teach communication comprehensively, in all its forms…We live and work in a visually sophisticated world, so we must be sophisticated in using all forms of communication, not just the written word…If students aren’t taught the language of sound and images, shouldn’t they be considered as illiterate as if they left college without being able to read or write? …We must accept the fact that learning how to communicate with graphics, with music, with cinema, is just as important as communicating with words. Understanding these rules is as important as learning how to make a sentence work,” AND— “we need to take art and music out of “the arts class” and put it into the English class.”

Yes, indeed. Now we’re cooking. And it’s just what some of us are trying to do– what Héctor was scolding me about back a few posts until I broke through to some interesting realizations in my own blogging, and what he is up to right now with his first-year seminar as they move into digital stories—it’s clear that the kids intuitively feel the power of the image and sound, but haven’t looked closely at the grammar, at the impact of sounds, image amd text influencing and intersecting with one another. And there’s even more to be gained from multi-media authoring in our classrooms. The process itself, at least as we’re developing it in our Middlebury classrooms, requires collaboration—and therefore the very making of the digital stories fosters the creation of a strong, effective community of learners while teaching valuable skills in this new language and deepening critical thinking. All three elements are crucial to becoming an engaged, effective citizen of a complex society.

Our students, on their own are naturally moving towards multi-media authoring — my students are about to take up their first multi-media piece in artswriting, and yet ahead of schedule, four students this week opted to bring in tangible image-based elements as part of their second writing assignment (Bold work to be handed in on the third day of class, even without having our darn blog up and running—see the previous post for my classroom blogging woes)—they are feeling the urge to break through the “tyranny” of the flat page and play with object and image (not sound, yet, interestingly enough, perhaps because it is more time-consuming to capture and store?). The assignment asked them to write about a color or a musical note from multiple perspectives, using multiple forms. Katie brought in an actual orange on which she wrote her riff about the color orange. That’s a first step. Alex, writing about the color blue, handed in an envelope of photos and a plastic bag filled with blue-hair clippings. She, too, feels the need to move beyond language to explore the color and yet she has the tangibles outside the writing, in envelopes, not yet fully presented. John handed in a children’s book, written by him and illustrated by a friend as part of his exploration of the color blue. He not only has pushed past language but has moved into collaboration, all on his own. Julina colored her paper with tints of green to write about green. So, if four out of thirteen students venture out into a multi-media exploration in the second week of class, without any instruction as to how how such a step might help them achieve the emotional impact they are seeking, imagine what the group will come up with once they have examined the potential outcomes of the interaction of sound, image and word.

The kids are halfway there. Now they need us to provide the opportunity, the setting and the questions to learn how to speak this new language effectively and elegantly. And we need to figure out how to integrate this work into our already overloaded courses. This work takes time in the class and out–other things have to be jettisoned or recrafted to fit in with the multi-media work.

I’ll be looking to my blogging colleagues and cohorts to keep pointing to promising developments in their own classrooms and the wider world as we travel further into the language of new media. What is working for others–how might we collaborate?

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I’ve been away from the blog for almost two weeks (directing a program, teaching in another, having one’s father land in the hospital, and struggling to meet a publication deadline all make it very difficult to get to the blog–though taking a break is a good thing–letting the field lie fallow, as it were, makes it more fertile) and have in that short time accumulated a list of topics on which I’d like to blog over the next few weeks/months, topics ranging from what teaching Dave Hickey — Air Guitar in particular– will bring my students (what will they say about his take on art and the Academy?) to responses I’ve been getting from artists about blog overkill. But those will have to wait for another post.

Héctor Vila keeps exhorting me to talk about my journey to blogging, because to paraphrase him speaking to me: “That’s what’s interesting, that’s what’s important about what you’re doing and needs to be put out there,” and it’s bothering me enough now–I’m seeing it now, or admitting it–that I’m going to explore that journey a bit here, as a start to a longer essay, perhaps, on the non-techie classroom teacher’s adventures in technology. And since I never got around to writing an “About” page, this will serve as one, just as it will also, I hope, serve to point to some ways we might consider our relationship with technology as we unleash it in our classrooms.

The part of the story that everyone loves to hear because they can indentify with it has to do with my humble beginnings as an out-there classroom technology user: Three years ago practically to the day, I went from zero to “a bit of technology” in the classroom. I wasn’t looking for technology, I wasn’t looking at it–it wasn’t even on the radar screen until I had what turned out to be a fateful dinner-party conversation with one Héctor Vila, who was checking out classroom blogging as one of the tools that might enable creative teachers to do more of the things they were trying to do while acknowledging, facing, the time and place we live in: a world saturated with technology.

I get into it a little in my BLOGTALK paper–here’s the excerpt:

I thought the section pretty much covered it until today when HV told me that I had touched upon only the coming to technology, not the full effect of integrating it, what it entailed outside the classroom in order to make it work inside the classroom. Yes, I was a creative, daring teacher who had always been willing to try out just about anything in my classroom if it had a chance to engage my students effectively with their learning. That is one of the characteristics possessed by all those who truly integrate technology into their classrooms because it might just help make the classroom a better place for the students and then for the world. That’s a necessary given. But it isn’t enough; it ain’t the whole story, and that’s the very part of the story I need to consider.

So here’s my confession though it might well turn many teachers away from technology altogether:

Incorporating technology into the classroom is not a kinda, sorta, maybe thing–as Hemingway said about prose, it’s “architecture not interior decoration.” For the teacher it means sitting inside the process of being and becoming and acknowledging that the building is unlike anything we’ve ever been in. Everyone knows that reading or writing (or whatever it is that we do) on a screen is not the same as on paper–but we teachers don’t spend enough time thinking about what impact that has on our teaching. We are so cavalier in our desire for ease and speed–

Using technology in our classrooms thrusts the teacher, whether she likes it or not, into an ongoing, at times mystifying learning process: there’s a learning curve involved here, for thoughtful integration of the computer into our classrooms demands a willingness to understand the relationship of cyberstudies to critical pedagogical and social theory; it takes a teacher who is willing to invest a considerable amount of time and effort into getting to know a world heretofore unknown to her. She has to play around; she has to ask questions; she has to fumble in the dark. It isn’t about asking the technologists to do it for her so she can get to the teaching. She’s gotta venture down the road herself. Otherwise she might unwittingly do what was done unto her a bit earlier this evening: a Powerpoint presentation delivered by the Driver’s Ed teacher at her daughter’s high school. Slide after slide saying things such as #10 Say goodnight; # 7 Question and Answer Session; #3 Thanks for Coming!– Why did he need technology at all? To give us something to look at? To have something to do with himself while he spoke? Because it is expected of us now? It was thoroughly depressing. If we depend on technology as a means of teaching and learning–if we use blogs in our classrooms, for example–we have to think about what exactly they are and what they mean if we are to have any chance of steering the course of technology integration into higher ed classrooms.

Right now, if truth be told, I’ve virtually embarked on my own graduate program of study into art and technology, cybertheory, hypertext theory, not to mention understanding research on communities. This isn’t Kansas anymore, Toto. Where’s my Heaney and Toibin, my McGahern and Boylan, I ask myself at times. Things were a lot easier, certainly, before I mucked about with computers in my work, things were simpler. I’m feeling like Brendan the Navigator, if I stick to my Irish imagery, and thanking my lucky cyberstars that I’ve spent some time puzzling out those celestial bodies for the ways they let me read them as a kind of map across the ocean.

And honestly, I can’t pull out a nice, neat proof to support my contention that my students are better off using technology than not, but I do know that it’s helping me to challenge them to examine any smug certainty they might be harboring about how the world is and how we might express our sense of it. I sure do know that it is testing me, forcing me to reflect, to put my beliefs and gifts as a teacher on the line day after day, and I know that my students are excited about having an opportunity to do something a bit different from what they do in other classes, to do something that seems to mean something out there in the world, at least for a moment.

So, here I am, on the brink of starting a new semester, once again scratching my head and saying how did I ever get here, in this place where I’m as likely to check out a new art website as I am to read a new Irish story, knowing that I have to keep up with developments in cyberspace just as I have to keep up with new novels coming out of Ireland. You don’t just pull a chapter of Ulysses in to the classroom without trying to understand what the heck’s going on in it yourself, after all.

And so I read Lévy and Lessig, Johnson and Murray, Ascott and Rheingold; I pore over Bernstein and Landow, Bolter and Weinberger. I present at blogging conferences, and at digital storytelling workshops; I mess around with multi-media tools and mapping applications; I think about mo-blogging and streaming video into collaborative web projects. I talk with colleagues; I blog my as-they-form thoughts. That’s excessive, probably, but it gives me a firm ground on which to stand as I, a non-techie teacher, experiment with the frontiers of teaching with technology.

And yes, it means that in the class we discuss how technology is mediating our work, and so, yes, we read fewer Iirsh novels in the bargain. But I am a big believer in less is more if what we’re engaging our students in is an integrated, powerful learning experience–and to do that we have to grow, we have to be challenged: learning is not learning if it is static, yes?. I haven’t seen anything that makes my classroom as rich as does the interaction of blogging, digital multi-media work, asynchronous discussions, face-to-face classroom meetings, reading, writing, thinking, playing with the computer in that mix. And so, I’ll keep educating myself, puzzling it out as I go. Pretty obvious, yes?

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