As this quarter winds down, I'm thinking about how to fold my rekindled enthusiasm for web-related technologies into the two courses I'm teaching next quarter--Web Design & Implementation for undergrads, and a seminar in XML for the Web (undergrads and grads).
Group and individual blogs seemed like a no-brainer concept, but I've had a hard time finding them used effectively in higher ed contexts.
Then today, I saw a mention on grumpygirl's blog that led me to a blog that was clearly written by a student whose professor was talking about web design. The problem? As grumpygirl notes, the student provides no contact info, and no link back to a class site.
Not to be deterred, I change into my alter-ego, the technolibrarian. (Cue music. "Ain't no info lost enough, ain't no details obscured enough, ain't no meta tags bad enough, to keep me from finding more about you..."). A search in Google on Jessica's user ID and her teacher's last name (which she's helpfully mentioned in a post) yields quick results. She's apparently a student in in Charles Lowe's Writing About Digital Culture class at Florida State.
My first assumption was that it would be a technology course, but it's not. It's a freshman comp class! How cool is that? Geez, my freshmen would love a class like this. I need to find a way to open a channel of communication with the Language and Lit department at RIT about this. (Luckily, my mom teaches there. How convenient. :-)
From the syllabus:
First-Year Writing courses at FSU teach writing as a recursive and frequently collaborative process of invention, drafting, and revising. Writing is both personal and social, and students should learn how to write for a variety of purposes and audiences. Since writing is a process of making meaning as well as communicating, FYW teachers respond to the content of students' writing as well as to surface errors.[ . . . ]
In this class, we will be exploring many aspects of digital culture, including virtual communities, the history of the internet, creating hypertext, open source, artificial intelligence, blogging, etc. We will read Snow Crash, a cyberpunk sci-fi novel, and use the novel as a jumping off point for exploring directions that technology will take us in the future, as well as how these changes will impact society. We also will read many articles from the web which discuss some of the subjects listed above. And you'll be encouraged to expand your research to explore aspects of digital culture not covered in this class. Since this is a writing class and because learning about digital culture also means being an active participant, we will make heavy use of the class web site and every student will keep an individual weblog, or "blog."
Excellent. Must e-mail him asap to find out how the blogging is going in that class.
'technolibrarian' is boring.
need a new name for my librarian alter ego.
any suggestions?
This evening, selected faculty from our department will be performing at an informal coffeehouse event. The festivities will be webcast (and, I presume, archived) by our streaming media class, at polaris.it.rit.edu/~coffeehouse/.
Yours truly has precious few talents that she feels would be appropriate to display in front of her students. So she's hopped into the wayback machine, and retrieved her varsity letter jacket and pompoms from her days as a Sweet Home High School Pantherette. (Faithful readers will note that this explains the sudden trip to Buffalo.) The audience will be subjected to a brief monologue on life as a Pantherette (possibly accompanied by inappropriate language and burning of tissue paper flowers), followed by a historically accurate performance of the fight song routine.
Other highlights of the show will include Professor Henderson performing a stand-up routine while dressed in an elephant ballerina costume, and Professor Axelrod reciting original Vogon Poetry.
7:30-9:30pm, eastern standard time.
Don't count on blazingly fast streams, as I fear there may be some contention for resources.
Jill Walker has an excellent post on the issue of "hardcoded privilege" in her blog today. (Alas, Tinderbox doesn't support Trackback, so this won't be a bidirectional link. I'll post a note in her comments pointing this way.)
In it, she raises the issue of the growing information aggregation based on Amazon (daypop, allconsuming, etc), and the privileging of amazon that results. She raises it in the context of the impact on smaller bookstores, but that's not the part that scares me.
What I don't like is the narrowing of the information pipelines, and our resulting dependence upon the goodwill of the pipeline owners. Recently, I've seen other people commenting on the danger of treating Google as a public information infrastructure, and the same holds true here.
What happens, for example, if Amazon decides that they don't particularly want to include books on a particular subject in their collection? It's their right--they have no public duty to carry items on their virtual shelves. But if they become the de facto sole source for books on the 'net, it's only a matter of time before that happens.
I don't know what the answer is. But it does make me wary of services that reify this monolithic structure, no matter how seductive the services they provide may be.
www.flickr.com
|
