My Prezi, My Culture

I’m glad to have been introduced to Prezi. I think it has some great potential for the writing classroom. I’ve seen a few sites where it has been used to teach poetry, for example. But I think it has interesting application for a range of composition approaches. It allows you to easily fly words and text around, along with images and video. I see it as a pretty cool way to to present lesson material, but I think putting it into the hands of students, with the combination of graphical composition of their own words and publishing their work to their fellow classmates, would offer a compelling invitation to the composition process.

I’ve included some links below to a few Prezi poetry and composition sites that I took inspiration from for the Prezi I made for my final New Media Text document.

My Culture, Richard’s final new media text doc

Stop Drilling, Natasa Bozic Grojic

Revealing Meaning, Broadcasting History, Bill Wolff

What is Poetry, Josh Flores

Reflection on the course title

Lately I’ve been thinking about how appropriate the course title of ENG 708 is: Teaching Writing in a Digital Age. The emphasis is still on writing and its central importance to critical thinking. I don’t think we need to be taking on the teaching of aspects of all new media, nor do we need to be concerned about ways new media may be supplanting written language, nor is it that we must now teach new media composition instead of English composition. But written language and the service it performs as vehicle for critical thinking certainly must be examined in its application to new media (as we are doing). In reference to Ong, just as language adapted to technological evolution like the printing press and the computer screen, writing will, I believe, always play the central part in how understanding is gained and knowledge is conveyed. This is because language is the primary medium for thought and composed language is still the optimal manifestation of that medium. We still need to teach English composition, but the medium of language will be applied to blogs or games or digital videos, as well as the printed page. Composed language will remain the underpinning, if not the central core, of the thought involved.

Certain species of flora and fauna, it is understood, have been with us for eons. The same may be true in the future for topic sentences and 5-paragraph essays, even as ever more highly evolved forms of media make their way into being.

Resources for Digital Storytelling

In my previous post I advocated for digital storytelling as a way to approach teaching a unit on digital literacy in a first year basic composition course. I want to follow up with a list of resources for those who want to learn more about the history, methods, and uses of digital storytelling in the learning environment.

A good place to start is with the Center for Digital Storytelling. CDS was at the center of the development and growth of digital storytelling as a medium, and has promoted media access and democratized self-expression as a civil right. It has fostered adoption of the medium among many organizations in the Bay Area, the U.S. and has presented workshops around the world.

The following are some links to galleries of digital stories:

CDS Stories

Creative Narrations: Multimedia for Community Development

Digital Stories Gallery at UMBC

Digital Stories in the Classroom: Profiles from UMBC’s Community of Practice

Digital Storytelling Asia

NWP – Literacy Through Technology: The Power of Digital Storytelling

Digital Storytelling Finds Its Place in the Classroom

Tips for Digital Storytelling

Coming Full Circle to Digital Literacy

Personal narrative has traditionally been used as a starting point for writing in first year English composition classes. Student writers can be motivated by the opportunity for self-reflection, and personal narrative can be used to introduce a critical examination of ideas about identity, experience, and culture. From this entry point the FYC course usually progresses to more formally structured genres of academic literacy including expository, analytical, and persuasive essays. With the omnipresent reality of the Internet and other networked technologies, digital literacy has taken on growing importance in preparing students for full participation in society and the professional world.

But how can this increase in pedagogical scope beyond traditional alphabetic literacy be achieved while at the same time meeting the needs of basic or developmental writers? In coming back full circle to the personal narrative there is opportunity for expanding into the realm of multi-media technology while at the same time returning to a fundamental grounding in the voice and written word.

With roots in oral tradition, digital storytelling is deeply and fundamentally personal, dealing with turning points and transformation, social construction and self-realization. In their journal article, “Crafting an Agentive Self: Case Studies of Digital Storytelling,” authors Glynda A. Hull and Mira-Lisa Katz quote Ochs & Capps (1996, 2001) in stating that “There is abundant research on narrative and the important role that narratives of self—stories about who we have been in the past and who we want to become in the future—can play in the construction of agentive identities” (44).

Typically, digital storytelling takes place in a workshop setting in which participants share ideas in a story circle and go on to write scripts that are revised for narrative efficacy and edited to fit a concise format of around two to five minutes in length. Then, over the span of approximately two days, recordings of voice narrations are made, photographs and other artifacts are scanned, images are pulled from the Internet, music is recorded and laid underneath, text may be inserted to highlight special points, and the result is pulled together into a short digital movie.

The movie making process, with its simple, yet multi-modal format, provides an immersive engagement with the act of meaning-making. Technology is embraced and manageably learned. In the space of a few days a story is composed that foregrounds the author’s authentic and original voice. It can be put on the Internet and shared with friends, family, classmates, or people from around the world.

Writing to the Moment

If you want to liberate a society, just give them the internet. If you want to have a free society, just give them the internet.”
—Wael Ghonim, Egyptian pro-democracy Internet activist and Google marketing executive

In his article, Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First-Year Composition, Charles Tryon says he titled his first course in which he encouraged his students to read and write blogs “Writing to the Moment.” Tryon quotes Richard Ohmann (2003: 124) in suggesting that “…higher education and schooling in general serve a democratic society by nourishing hearty citizenship.”

Currently, there is probably no better example of “writing to the moment” than the use of the Internet by the revolutionary movements in North Africa and the Middle East. Although social media like Facebook and Twitter have played a more central role in organizing protests, blogs also play a part in the expression of revolutionary sentiment throughout the region.

It is impossible not to feel the breeze of the winds of change sweeping through the Arab World today.  Mesmerized by the news, and totally awestricken by the sheer fact that fear is gone; we the people of this region have finally reclaimed our long muted voice.” –From: http://www.7iber.com/

Ghonim, who through the use of Facebook helped organize the revolution that overthrew Hosney Mubarak in Egypt, said in an interview with CNN, “If you want to have a free society, just give them the internet.” But can the Internet just be “given” to a country? And can it in all cases be used freely as a tool for freedom?

In actuality, it is up to those who control political power in a dictatorship as to whether or how much access to the Internet will be “given.” As Sarah Lovenheim has written in the Washington Post, “Besides their authoritarian systems, China and Egypt share some similarities when it comes to Internet use. About one-third of each nation’s population uses the Web. (That’s 450 million people in China, and nearly 27 million people in Egypt.) But one striking difference is that Internet freedom has been much greater in Egypt, and democracy advocates have made use of it.”

In a CNN Interview, Evgeny Morozov author of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,” says that “People who are concerned about freedom and democracy and creating democratic values abroad…are far better off assuming the Internet will strengthen dictators. It doesn’t matter whether it will strengthen them more or less than the protesters. But by assuming that the Internet does help the bad guys, we by default adopt a far more critical attitude, for example, to Western companies that supply technologies of censorship and surveillance in these governments.”

It was lucky for the Egyptian revolutionaries that their government was so inept at censoring and controlling content. According to Morozov, who is a visiting scholar scholar at Stanford, countries like Iran, Russia, and China are much more sophisticated in their control of access and content. As Lovenheim writes in her article, content containing the words “Egypt” and “Cairo” have disappeared from the Internet in China.

According to Morozov, “…the governments we were hoping to oppose [are] becoming much smarter about the web. They [are] doing things that [are] much more sophisticated than [we] could ever expect. We thought they would just be banning websites, but they [are] actually doing things like doing data mining of social networking profiles and launching cyberattacks, and it [becomes] clear that these governments are very active consumers of these tools themselves.”

The best way to ensure our freedom of expression is to engage in it actively. In America, where freedom of speech and political assembly are thought to be guaranteed rights, a good way to engage students’ social participation can be to encourage active blogging. A good place to start is with reading blogs written by people who are fighting for their own rights and freedom.

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Revolution 2.0 as distributed collaboration:

Collaborative production, where people have to coordinate with one another to get anything done, is considerably harder than simple sharing, but the results can be more profound. New tools allow large groups to collaborate, by taking advantage of nonfinancial motivations and by allowing for wildly differing levels of contribution…Perhaps the most famous example of distributed collaboration today is Wikipedia, the collaboratively created encyclopedia that has become one of the most visited websites in the world.”
—Clay Shirkey, Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production

“This is revolution 2.0. No one was a hero. No one one was a hero. Because everyone was a hero. Everyone has done something. We all use Wikipedia. If you think of the concept of Wikipedia where everyone is collaborating on content. And at the end of the day you’ve built the largest encyclopedia in the world. From just an idea that sounded crazy you have the largest encyclopedia in the world. And in the Egyptian revolution, the revolution 2.0, everyone has contributed something–small or big, they contributed something–to bring us one of the most inspiring stories in the history of mankind when it comes to revolutions.”
—Wael Ghonim in his March 6th TED Address

I find I’m a bit torn about the implications I see built around the idea of “composition” expanding to include “new media” elements such as video, audio, graphics, animation, database systems, and computer language programming. Richard Miller even gives the example of someone who is “composing the web.” I agree that the possibilities around all of these elements can generate a tremendous amount of excitement. And they should certainly be relevant and motivating for students. But I will argue that one fundamental core aspect may be lost, and that certain other visionary ideals may be practically unobtainable.

I’m not sure about this leap from “writing in an age of digital media” to composing all elements of digital media. I won’t say that there is not an evolutionary rhetorical connection and progression, or even that the act of writing cannot encompass all of these elements (as in scripting for film, video, games, and new media. But scripting is not an end “product”). But I do believe the leap is quantum in nature and that if we, as teachers, try to make that leap without having first facilitated a basis of competence in the rhetorical, formal, and stylistic form of regular old writing (i.e. sentences making a discourse that contributes to critical thinking) that this writing ability is not going to otherwise somehow come through being able to include audio or video in one’s product (ne essay).

Secondly, the excitement about new media has been with us for quite some time. There’s nothing new about new media other than that the tools are becoming more refined and powerful, and access to them is becoming easier. But the web has also spawned a growth in text-based communication. In other words (my premise): writing *for* new media has grown greatly in its importance. But this, to me, does not directly translate into writing *with* new media. Shooting and editing video is not writing. Animation is not writing. Scripting is coding, not writing. Using a blogging or website building application is not writing.

But perhaps we want to change the definition of what composition means (I sometimes see inferences to musical composition). So in that case, the composer would be “creator” instead of “writer,” and that is what we would be teaching. But this seems to me to be what used to be called multi-media and is now referred to as new media—we would be teaching new media, not writing for new media.

I used to program in Flash, one of the main programming languages for animation on the web. It’s a very powerful platform and has the ability to do “data visualization,” that is, building sophisticated interactive charts and graphs. But you have to be a pretty hard core programmer to do this. In the world of web programming there is the idea of mash-ups where developers with programming skills can mix—or you can call it composing if you like—disparate elements from disparate sources across the web—video, data, graphics, animation, and so on. Artists are often drawn to this interactive medium because of its visual nature. Writing certainly can and does play an important part in this, but there is, to my mind, a big difference between the parts and the whole. *Writing* composition is not *everything* composition. It’s great to become involved with all of it as an aspect of creative learning. But I think there should be a caution to not confuse one for the other.

These kids today–an opportunity for transformation of consciousness

In his 2009 Wired article on the “New Literacy” Clive Thomson warns us that “As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can’t write—and technology is to blame.” Indeed, this perennial lament was echoed on January 18th of this year as AP educational writer Eric Gorski wrote that “A study of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.” The blame for this performance, however, is not lain at the feet of technology. One reason the article cites is that students simply aren’t required to write or read enough.

According to a January 7th The New York Times article, William H. Fitzhugh has published a print journal of selected high school essays for over two decades. He makes the claim that “Most kids don’t know how to write, don’t know any history, and that’s a disgrace,” Further, he says that “Writing is the most dumbed-down subject in our schools.” According to a survey cited by Mr. Fitzhugh, 95 percent of the teachers surveyed “said assigning long research papers was important, but 8 out of 10 said they never did because they had too little time to read and grade them.” Though Mr. Fitzhugh was forced take his journal online this year, while discontinuing the print version, he apparently saw no increased opportunity in this, beyond saving money, such as reaching a wider networked and involved audience.

In his article, Thompson highlights the work of Andrea Lundsford, who in her Stanford Study of Writing found that “Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom…” With web media students have found purpose and audience for their writing that classrooms have not been able to provide. However, as Will Richardson says in his book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, “as is often the case, education has been slow to adapt to these new tools and potentials.”

In his article, “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought,” Walter J. Ong writes that “Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word.” As well as making interior transformations, networked media is forging transformations of social conceptions of how students learn and build knowledge. If we accept that writing elevates consciousness by holding a mirror to thought process, we can also understand that this close examination of one’s thoughts is often met with anxiety and resistance. But just as the printing press provided a greatly expanded audience for those with a purpose for communicating, students now inhabit a world where increased sense of purpose and audience bring greater enjoyment to writing. And there is an immediacy that brings language back to the realm of conversation and community. This presents great opportunity for teachers to expand upon.

In order to learn, we must think, and we don’t know what we think until we try to express it. We end up having to ask ourselves a lot of questions. This is essentially the aim of educational writing. It is also what transpires in the networked community among its members. In group discussions, blogs, and wikis, others can comment on, or even edit our writing. A little collaborative learning might even take some of the load off the amount of written response that traditionally fell solely to the teacher, and who knows, perhaps a few more “pages” of writing could get assigned.