Synthetic mode

Transcription

Ok, great! So it's great to be here. Thank you Hannah for inviting me and the Media Commons in general for inviting me. I'm gonna talk today about traditional and new media literacies. As Hannah mentioned my name is Christopher Long and I'm the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies at the College of the Liberal Arts. And not to be forgotten, and you'll hear a little bit today, also an Associate Professor of Philosophy. So I encourage you to, I'm gonna use my laser pointer to, let's see if it works, follow me at cplong or at lausdeanlong on Twitter. I'm trying to use social media to engage students. As I'll talk a little bit about today. So I think there's probably no question that we're living through a transformative period in the history of literacy. And Angela Lundsford has captured it something about that when she writes or says, "we're in the midst of a literary revolution and likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization." But what was this literary revolution in Greek civilization? Well it was, of course, the revolution that came about when writing was introduced into a culture that was largely oral before that. And I want to talk a little bit about that and focus on a platonic dialogue for a minute by the name of Fedras. The dialogue was named after a young man by the name of Fedras who was infatuated with words. Both written and spoken. And in that dialogue Socrates tells the story about the origins of writing. And the story goes something like this. Thoth was an Egyptian god had came to king Thamus of Egypt to tell him of this wonderful new technology that he had discovered. And the technology was writing. Thoth said that it was suppose to be this great medicine. He called in a pharmacon. And here just have the Greek word pharmacon right here. And it is a pharmacon he said for memory and wisdom. Now the important thing about this word pharmacon in Ancient Greek is that it has two meanings. Much like our word for drug. Because a drug can of course heal. But it also can be a poison when used incorrectly. So when Thoth comes and tells Thamus that he has this pharmacon. This wonderful medicine for memory and wisdom. Thamus is a bit skeptical and understandably so. And this is what he says. "Now you are the father of letters and as a result of your affection for them. You are stating just the opposite of what their effect will be. If people learn them it make their souls forgetful through lack of exercising their memory. And they'll put their trust in the external marks of writing instead of using their own internal capacity for remembering on their own." So here Thamus emphasizes the poisonous possibilities of the new technology. He does not share Thoth's vision of writing as having healing powers. And a few thousand years later something similar happened, right. When Johannes Gutenberg developed the printing press. There were those like Hieronimo Squarciafico who said abundance of books will make men less studious. And he like Thamus was right in a way. Because the mass reading public did not study the ancient text the way the scribes had done for generations. With Thamus and with Squarciafico technology is a poison. Not a medicine. But for Thoth and indeed for someone like Martin Luther who after posting his 95 theses on the on the cathedralite, Wittenberg used the press to publish and disseminate the sermons and writings that shook the authority of the Catholic church. For Luther this new technology was indeed a remedy. And so today in the face of another literary revolution there are those who wonder. Is Google making us stupid? Nicholas Carr joins Thamus and Squarciafico of emphasizing the impoverishing dimensions of new technology. And he writes in this article in the Atlantic Monthly about a year or two ago. "What the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it. In a swiftly moving stream of particles." The technology is poisoning us according to Carr. And we have no antidote. And yet even as we continually recall and affirm and I think we need to, the concerns of Thamus and Squarciafico and indeed Nicholas Carr let's not forget Thoth and Martin Luther. For every truly transformative technology bears in itself the possibility of impoverishing or enriching life. Although writing made many forgetful and who today can recite the Iliad from memory. I would venture to say none of us. But that was common in Ancient Greek culture. Although writing made many forgetful, without writing the thinking of some of history's most important events and some of history's greatest thinkers would have been lost to us forever. And although the printing press made writing into a commodity that gave rise to much literary garbage, it was quickly learned that romantic novels sold quite well. So they were proliferated. But the printing press also gave rise to great renaissance of learning and created the reading public with increased capacities for critical reflection. And so to the social web fosters, inattention, fragmentation, information overload but also it enables social learning. Opens us to a wide diversity of ideas. Allows us to connect in new ways and reinvigorates writing itself. By infusing it with the rich and complex dynamics of human social life. So let us return then for a moment to Socrates. Who reminds us of what was lost with the introduction of writing. "Writing he says has a strange character. You might expect written words to speak like intelligent beings but if you question them with the intention of learning something about what they're saying they always just continue saying the same thing." What died with the invention of writing, that is the dynamics of social life in which meaning emerges, is re-born with the invention of social media technologies capable of infusing the written wordwith the meaning born of human life in common. So the question we now face is how we will respond to this revolutionary technological change. For it is a pharmacon both a poison and a medicine. But I think Socrates gives us a clue as to how we might proceed. We need to question it. We need to learn from it. We need to seek meaning in and through it. And we have to do this by using it together. So to begin this process I'd like to look at some traditional literacies. And I've divided this up into three parts. Three kinds of literacies which I'm calling the reading life, the writing life and the fulfilling life. And I speak of these in terms of the literacies of life. Because I want to emphasize that literacies in the plural is important here. That literacies are important because of the kinds of life they make possible. So emphasis on life. So to do that I need to start with my daughter. Who is named Chloe and she as you can see here is an image of her writing. She's learning how to write and I just want to call attention to the fact that although she's learning how to write she is developing certain skills that she doesn't yet have. So skills like being able to move your hand in a way to make a letter, although she's getting pretty good at that, you can see she's still working on that. Skills like needing to hear the sounds of a word and translating those into letter. Here this word right here is everything. Ok! And this was one of my favorites here. This is beautiful. She doesn't, she doesn't quite her it yet but she's still writing and she's practicing. She's working and she's developing skills. So skills are important in any literacy. Being able to form the letters. Being able to hear the sounds. But then there's also something bigger at stake. Which is the meaning in which we situate into which situate our lives. And that's what I would want to call an ability rather than a skill. A higher level cognitive capacity. That Chloe is learning herself as you can see. She's encountering something very remarkable it turns out, namely the wind. I love the wind it is beautiful. And her desire not only to hear and see and experience the wind. But to put that experience into writing is already the beginning of the development of an ability. Of a higher level of ability to integrate our experience into a meaningful life. So something similar happens I think in all reading. All right! There's certain skills involved. We need to be able to recognize letters. We need to know that words carry meaning. But there are higher level abilities that we also have to cultivate. Namely the desire to understand the ideas of others. Why do you open a book in the first place? The desire to investigate with curiosity. These are higher level abilities that you can't train into someone. In the same way that you can train someone to write a beautiful letter or to read a word. And similarly with the writing life we need skills. We need physical ability to form letters. We to be able to know something. The skill of understanding narrative and being able to compose things in a meaningful way. But we also need abilities. We need the ability to reflect critically. We need the ability to put our words to our experience. And at a higher level we have a set of skills associated with the fulfilling life. And I found myself struggling a little bit with this one because I thought, well what are the skills associated with a fulfilling life? Well then I remembered both Hannah and Chloe, my daughters, learning how to find their way into the world. Learning how to walk for the first time. Learning how to move. Learning how to talk. All of these are the skills core skills endemic to a meaningful life. And then thinking a little bit further about how they imagined a whole other possibility. Imagined all kinds of fantasy worlds. This was I thought the beginning of a fulfilling life in the sense that we all need to learn how to imagine things differently and imagine our lives perhaps in different contexts. And of course there are abilities associated with this as well. To establish meaningful relationships. We need to cultivate that kind of an ability. To integrate your personal life into the community of the whole. So these are the traditional life literacies I'd like to emphasize. Those, those are, those are important. But what happens to these literacies in the wake of the technological revolution associated with the social web. And I think Henry Jenkins in this text confronting the changes of participatory culture, puts something to words that's important. "The new media literacy should be seen today as social skills. And I would say social abilities, which are higher level, higher than just skills, social abilities as a way of interacting with a larger community and not simply an individualized skill to be used for personal expression." So let us turn then to new media literacies. Recognizing that many of the skills and abilities of traditional literacies remain the same. And holding in mind that new possibilities and dangers arise with the emergence of the social dimension. The social web like writing before it is a pharmacon. For it carries with it enriching and impoverishing possibilities. For the reading life. Let's begin with the enriching possibilities. Reading on the web, reading through your phones, reading Wiki's and blogs, can expose one to a rich diversity of ideas. It can, and this is an exciting aspect of reading, what happens to the reading life from my perspective. Reading in this format can be an invitation to responding. The ability to comment on blog posts. It almost, it almost moves you from the passive moment of reading to the active moment of writing. But what's impoverishing? The impoverishing possibilities are that reading becomes browsing. That speed is given priority over, over carefulness. That scanning becomes ubiquitous. That in general the surface wins out over the depth. And so we need to be aware of the impoverishing possibilities of the reading life in a social web world. And so too with the writing life. In the enriching possibilities of course are that writing can cultivate public reflection. And it's been very exciting to see my students have an ability to engage the world and to reflect in writing in public in a way that we've never had before. Their writing is now accessible to an infinite audience. At least potentially. And of course with the use of collaborative tools like Wiki's and Google docs and other kinds of things, collaborative meaning becomes possible in a new and enriching way. But what about the impoverishing possibilities? Well of course efficiency can sometimes trump eloquence. Although I would agree with Stuart Selber who says that there is sometimes a remarkable eloquence to the efficiencies of a text message well written. Sometimes quantity is given privilege over quality. So we need to think about what are the impoverishing possibilities of these technologies. And with the fulfilling life also. The enriching possibilities is that new media technology can empower cooperation on a level that we haven't seen. It can cultivate kinds of connections and sustained relationships across distances in new ways. But the impoverishing possibility of course is that it can also cultivate and foster dispersion and fragmentation, inattention. It can also be used to confirm your prejudice. When you have your RSS feeds always feeding to the people you already agree with. Right! So you never really get exposed to genuine, genuine difference. So our roles as educators must be to cultivate the enriching possibilities of new media technologies. And in this case, this endeavor requires that we engage in a cooperative effort to educate ourselves and our students about the affordances and the limitations of new media technologies. And we must learn this by doing it. You must learn it by using the technologies. So as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the College of the Liberal Arts, I've sought to do this with my staff and faculty and students. And I've tried to do this by taking a cooperative approach. That recognizes that students have something to teach and teachers something to learn from a collaborative engagement with one another in and through social media technology. So what I'm gonna do now for this last little bit of this presentation is talk, show you, I hope, some examples of what we've done. The first clip here is a video that was created Jillian Billet, who is a staff member in my office, and she talks a little bit about what we've done in the office with social media to try to engage students. So here's Jillian. (Jillian) Before using digital media our office relied on pretty old school means of communication. We published a monthly newsletter which featured write-ups of past events and feature stories highlighting students, faculty, and majors. Digital media, however, now enables a more dynamic and interactive way to communicate with our audience. Students are not only authors on our blog but they're also able to post comments. Post video responses. And even share their own photos. This experiment has definitely paid off. Our office is now able to communicate more frequently and more profoundly with our students than ever. (Chris) So one of the things that we've tried to do is make sure that our engagement with social media technology is different from marketing. We're not pushing information, we're not, although we have an announcement blog that pushes, ok fine. Subscribe to it. It's great. It's got a lot of good information. But what we really want to do, what we really want to do is open a space for students to put words to their undergraduate experience in the Liberal Arts. And so that's what we've done. And so that's what we've done. We created some blogs. We've encouraged students to come post on them. Jillian's done a great job of sort of editing and putting her voice to that. We tweet out. But we don't just feed our blog to Twitter. We actually have a human voice behind Twitter and behind Facebook. So we don't just fall into this mode of impersonal pushing. We want to build a community. We want to use this technology to create an educational community. So, ok, now I'm not going through nine videos, ok don't worry this is not half an hour worth of video here. But I want to show you some examples of what we find happening here. And how the reading life and writing life and the fulfilling life I think are being cultivated. And those enriching possibilities of social media are being cultivated by what we're trying to do. So let's start, I'd like to start with Justin Ogden and just say a word about him. He's a, he's a undergraduate student in labor studies and he spent last summer in a factory in China. A shoe factory. Athletic shoe factory in China. He was someone who was very much interested in and still is interested in the labor movement and what it means to wear the kinds of clothes we're wearing and what kind of labor goes into that. And so here's what Justin said. We asked him to blog of course, you know, helped him go abroad so we said ok in return will you blog for us? And he did that. So here's, here's a point that he makes about how reading became for him an invitation to respond. (Justin) It was very interesting to see different responses to some of the blog posts. And writing about eating chicken feet in the dormitory cafeteria. Or taking, taking my friends to KFC for the first time. And it was very interesting to hear students response whether it was through the comments at the end of the blog. Or if it was someone, a classmate, that read the blog asking me about it. (Chris) So here Justin does a great of articulating how powerful it can be to blog. And to anticipate and to get the kind of feedback that you can from writing in that format. So I put this under the reading life even though he's doing the writing he's also tuned into now writing for an audience and his reader. He's tuned into, he's writing now for a reader rather than just for himself. Now the other aspect of the other enriching possibility of the reading life that I want to emphasize happened with a student name Nicole Zinni. Who was, did study abroad in Turkey last summer. And she was blogging on a blog called Istanbul not Constantinople, and I was following along on this blog during, one of the great things about this for me is I get to live vicariously through my students and sit here in State College all summer and reading the blog posts about what kind of wonderful experiences students are having. And Nicole wrote a great post about the veil and the way the veil was perceived in Turkey. And this was something that I responded to on the blog. And then we have a podcast, Liberal Arts Voices, I invite everyone to subscribe to it, and we invited her onto the podcast to talk about this. So this is a clip, an audio clip, that we put a few pictures to about that experience. (Interviewer) Did your reflecting in writing on the blog and other modes of reflection that you did while you were there help you in any way in terms of thinking about your experience while you were having it? (Nicole) I would think so yeah, because I come up with a lot of the ideas in my blog. You know from going to class or from going to a mosque and the blog allowed me to reflect and think back. I wrote one piece about the veil and what that means in Turkey. And it's an incredibly complicated issue and just being able to sit and research the different ideas and the different perspectives in the Turkish population on the head covering it kind of makes me, it allowed me to bring together all these ideas. Look over all of them. And then form my own opinion. (Interviewer) Well that was, that was one of the posts that was really interesting from my perspective is to hear you sort of the struggle with the complexity of that issue but also put very, I thought, thoughtful words to the whole problem. You really gave me an incite into an area that I didn't have as deep an understanding of as I did after reading your blog. So I appreciated that. (Nichole) Oh, thank you! (Chris) So one of the things that I think that clip shows you is not only how this technology can expose us all to a more diverse set of ideas. But what can happen and how important it is for us as educators to engage our students and to be willing to learn from our students. So I think the fact that I'm sometimes making comments on their posts and that we're inviting them onto the Liberal Arts Voices podcasts and that I'm involved in that and really soliciting from them information and recognizing them not only as students but as teachers is an empowering and important aspect of this and it is part of what I mean by a cooperative education. That is education that involves faculty and students and staff working together to create a culture of learning. So let's look for a minute here at a couple of examples from the writing life and how we're trying to cultivate it enriching possibilities of the writing life. Back to Justin now he's gonna talk here about how meaning comes through collaboration. (Justin) For me as the writer that was very intriguing to see what they picked up on. And what they enjoyed in some ways it was, aah, maybe I could have you know talked about the first time I was training on sewing machines in the first few weeks. Or people enjoyed this area and so it came as a surprise that some, some things that I thought may not be as popular. People really liked. And you know with an essay you wouldn't have that type of, that feedback, or at least access to a large number of people to able to give you feedback and so that was, it was really interesting see how people evaluated what I wrote. And especially that just instantaneously people could go up there and write a comment. (Chris) You can see we have an eloquent student here with this. Justin's point is really well taken that he's really giving voice to the idea that meaning emerges in collaboration and so as his writing itself changed over the course of writing the blog as he received feedback from students and from colleagues and even faculty. But I do want to point out and then remind ourselves of the possible diminishing or impoverishing dimensions of the technology here. In this post he's talking also about blogging but in this one he emphasizes a difference between essay writing and his blog writing and I want to just call attention to this cause it's something that we should be tuned into. (Justin) I think, I think the blog writing is so dynamic in you can insert hyperlinks you can insert pictures and it just brings this entirely new level of depth to what you're trying to discuss. And I was able to, in one of the posts, I was able to just kind of hit some bullet points on some of the really memorable things. But I think that ability to quickly shift and include so much content in one probably wouldn't normally write in an essay because an essay I'd probably stick with one idea and develop that. Whereas a blog I could have one idea, but also many different ideas building into it. (Chris) So here if we want to cultivate the ability to develop one idea very well we have to perhaps do that differently. Although I think blogging can allow people to do that. But he's thematizing the dimensions of blogging that allows a diversity of ideas to come in and the ability to put bullet points and these sorts of things up there as something positive and I'm wondering as I'm listening to this how positive that is. Sometimes in some context that's definitely that's what we want to do. But in other contexts if we're trying to develop an ability to write in substantive and deep way we need to think about what the technology of blogging and the culture of blogging does to that. So now turning again to the fulfilling life for a couple of examples, I want to talk a minute about connection that we we're able to establish in our blog. We had a series of a number of people who were doing internships in Washington D.C. this summer. And we of course invited them onto the Liberal Arts Voices podcast and had them, had them discussing things and this is what they were this is what they talked about. But Jillian talks a little bit here in this clip about how we began to build a community around this, these interns in DC, who didn't know each other before they went. (Jillian) It's been exciting to watch our student bloggers create a community and network in this space. We wanted our blog to provide a space for our undergraduates to have the opportunity to reflect on their educational experiences. Like internships, study abroad and research. And these are the kind of out of classroom activities that our students don't normally have a space to write about. We actually had three students blogging for us this summer about their internships in Washington D.C. The students hadn't met before. They were living in different parts of the DC area and we're interning for different companies. And yet they were able to use the space at the blog to compare their experiences and comment on each others posts. We were eventually able to have them join our Liberal Arts Voices podcast. Which gave them another opportunity to speak with each other about their internships and experiences in DC. (Chris) So that was wonderful to them on the podcast to talk about that and to hear some of their experiences about DC and to see them now in face to face relationship rather than just relating to one another through comments on the blog. Now one last example here is a this example again by Justin about slowing down. I hear all the time that the problem with social media technology is it's too fast. It's too quick. Students don't slow down. They don't consider things. And so I thought this comment by Justin was a very interesting. (Justin) The blog helped me slow down and unpack those reflections. And see that this is a once in a lifetime experience and just everyday in the factory I didn't always stop and pull myself out and see just how unique and life changing it really was. (Chris) So and that quote always just makes me smile. That's, that, I mean that's why do study abroad. That's why we're in education. That's why I can, wanted to accept a position as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the College of Liberal Arts. That's why those kinds of transformative experiences I think is why at least I do what I do. And there's no question really that the traditional literacies are being transformed by new media technologies. But they will remain in impoverished if we don't respond and interact with new media and substantive and meaningful ways. So that we all might grow as a Nichole Zinny did in Turkey into a more mature and thoughtful and compassionate person. We can, we can learn something from Nichole and so let's listen one final time to Nicole and what she has to say about her experience in Turkey. (Nicole) I grew a lot more confident just traveling around the country by yourself sometimes or just with one other person you find out like what you're capable of. If you're able to read peoples personalities or character well or not. And just you know you fail a lot and so you become humbled. But all those mistakes you know that's what, that's what made this trip so great. So coming back, yeah I want to say, I'm a different person. But I'd say I'm improved. (Chris) And that's really what it's, that's really what it's all about. Is improving ourselves, learning, growing, in those transformative experiences that make education what it is. So in conclusion I just want to thank Heather Summerlin and Jillian Billet for their excellent video editing skills. They were the ones that put the videos together. And allowed me to make this prezi. I also want to invite you to visit my website here. To visit the LAUS website at laus.la.psu.edu and of course again to follow along on Twitter and I am happy to hopefully have some time for discussion and comments. Thank you! [ applause ] [ inaudible question ] So the question is when I use social media in particular my classes, and I do, am I attracting a stronger, or a stronger student, the same strong students that I always have? I appreciate that. Or a broader diversity of students? Well let's say a couple of things about that. I think one is that, the kinds of skills and abilities that one needs to thrive in the kinds of classes that I teach in philosophy. When I expect, for example, students to blog consistently for example over the course of the whole semester and don't give them specific writing assignments. But rather just expect that you will be reading text throughout the semester and writing when you're moved to write. The skills that allow a student to thrive in a class like that. We are often not good at cultivating I think at the higher education in higher ed but also in secondary school and in high schools. Because students you know what we're really teaching students is ok just follow my instructions and when I tell you to submit something here's the assignment. Submit it and get it to me on time. And what interestingly I found at least and this is anecdotal but I'm a philosopher and not a social scientist so I can just universalize from that. The, but actually if I were really that, then I wouldn't have just said that. But anyway, what I found was interesting is that my honor students have a lot more difficulty with the kinds of open-ended insistence that you write consistently over the course of the semester. Rather than, ok, June, June, not June, but January 15th ok paper on the antigone is due, right. Honor students are very good at knowing what, figuring out what teachers want and giving it to them. And it would include myself among those that kind of student. I always was figuring out what is it this teacher want. I'm gonna get it to the teacher. So there's a lot of work to be done about cultivating those abilities that allow students to take ownership of their own education but you have to it's difficult to just open it up. Because students aren't necessarily used to doing that. So there's a lot of work that has to sort of go on about, in the background, about sort of ok this is not like an open-ended assignment that whereas anything goes. It's an assignment that requires that you reflect critically throughout the whole semester in writing in public. But I'm not gonna mandate you what you should care about. Along as you're writing about something were talking in the course. The reading in the course. So I don't know if that answers your question. I mean I think I do I do get a broader, I do get some broader appeal but I also some push back on you know what can't you just you know make the assignment due and a deadline. I mean I had the deadlines throughout the semester where I evaluate their work, you know. Instead of three papers I just have three periods of evaluations where I evaluate their writing work. But go ahead you wanted to follow-up quick. [ inaudible question ] Yeah, right! I think sometimes it can. And I've had the experience where students were really, the greatest comment I've had from greatest comments I've had from students are where they say well you know I could have, I'm on my computer and I could have gone on Facebook and do this. But instead I'm, oh, let me check out what's going on the course blog. Like to me that's gold, you know. So yes I think they when it's working right the blog becomes an extension of a community in the classroom and I think it's an extension of that it has to be reinforced face to face in the classroom at least on my model. And that's critical. And it becomes a place where students want to go often. But I think there's students who drop out that class sometimes because they don't want to do that. Yeah! [ inaudible question ] Oh, thank you! Well I mean I think, so the model, thank you, the model that I was using, am using, is to again insist that students blog or write throughout the semester but not giving them individual assignments. But then I would evaluate them three times, three or four times a semester. And according to a rubric. But what I'm finding also is, you know, just what I said about students cultivating abilities in students. The same goes for faculty. You know, and I think I, you know, can you learn to relinquish certain kind of control in order to win it back in a different way. And that's the thing that is really critical from my perspective because you know we tend to think, we faculty tend to think of control as ok I'm gonna mandate you do this. That's how I'm gonna exert control in my class. But actually it's, I find it's so much more powerful to open up a space for them to take ownership. And once they do take ownership then to emphasize using their own words the points that you were gonna want to emphasize anyway. And so that, but I still think that's a form of control. No question. But it's a different kind of control because it really takes seriously and respects students desire to and ability to put words to the content and to their learning experience. Yeah! [ inaudible question ] Well I think, that's a good a question, how do I, how do I make it work right when it's working right? Well I think this is not and it doesn't have anything to do with technology I don't think. It has to do with every class thinking intentionally about how you're cultivating a community of learning in that classroom. And so to make it work right you have to spend some time growing it. During, sometime during the semester growing it. Students will, on my class, come in and they don't know quite what to expect. And at first they think well this is going to be easier because I don't have these assignments mandated to me. And then of course we get, I put the first assessment period relatively early. You know two weeks in. And they see, oh, actually you know because I didn't post something I basically say you didn't hand in the writing for this assignment. You wouldn't do that. I don't think. So you get zero on this. And then all of a sudden ah, ok, now there's some recognition of some standards here and meanwhile hopefully there's some students who really are getting it and they're beginning to blog and beginning to develop ideas on the blog and respond to students. Then in the classroom I don't usually, on the blog I don't usually comment much in public. My influence in the classroom with the blog on the screen highlighting the points that I think are important. And so that's how I begin to reinforce the kind of writing. The kind of engagement with the material that I value. And then it becomes very interesting in terms of the dynamic because then they start competing for face time on the lecture. [ inaudible question ] Yeah, I think it does. I mean,yeah, ok, you can call it trick. But I just think that's good pedagogical practices. And it's good parenting too, right. You want to reinforce good behavior and you don't want to praise or pay much attention to bad behavior. And so I think that's, that's what I tried to do. [ inaudible question ] So, yeah, So why can't you have them writing and then using, using the blog in the classroom. Say look this is an excellent passage. Check it out. It's up here. You know what I love about this? It's got a thesis statement at the beginning. And the paragraph is organized in a way that really reinforces that point that you start out with it. And look at how they make reference actually to the exact text that we're dealing with. I don't know what you know parts of the writing you want. [ inaudible question ] But why is that old school? Oh, I would definitely. I mean the beauty of it, it is writing. Ultimately I can bring it up here. I can praise the writing. I can also call attention to the limits of the writing. But then I can also praise the content. The idea that's being expressed. So I want to be able to move fluidly between those modes. I want to move from the analytic mode into a more synthetic mode and talk about look at how well this passage is written. Look at also the excellent point that's made that maybe we need to discuss. And the great thing about having this dynamic, this living conversation in writing up on the screen is that you can also take the step back and say oh remember when Amanda responded to this and I loved how she responded because she was critical but she wasn't belligerent. And then you can get into a whole meta level of discussion of how we respond to one another. You know in this sphere and also then in the classroom. So I think there's a real ability to do all the kinds of things that you want to do. Both speaking about analytic, analytic technical things with regard to writing but also the larger issues of the content. Yeah! [ inaudible question ] Yeah, I think. Yeah, I think that's a good point. It is like a diary. But I think the interesting, and journaling, right, reading journals which I used to do before this. But there are differences and important ones that we have to be attuned to. Namely the public dimension of it. So if you're asking students to do this in public which you can of course the technology could be locked down and private so you don't have to do it that way. I choose to do it public because part of the learning objective that I have is for students to learn to articulate their ideas in public and to respond to, to respond in public. So there's an important point to be made about that. So I think last question. Is that ok? Ok, yeah, last question. [ inaudible question ] Right! Well it all comes down to the rubric. So in a way yes, I am demanding it. But I'm doing it in I think a less well, yeah, there's coercion involved. I don't want to pretend that you know the power dynamic between student and teacher dissolves here. That's not what I'm talking about. It's what I'm asking faculty to think about is the way we use our authority in the classroom. And so, but rather than saying you have to manage, you must come in on at least five people. I'm not really interested in counting posts or comments. I'm just not, I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in evaluating their ability to reflect in writing on the material and to respond to one another in substantive ways. And so what I do in the rubric is I say ok here's what an A would like. Right, you have to make, you know, I don't tell them how many posts they have to make. You have to reflect in writing in public consistently and substantively throughout the semester. And part of that writing and reflecting in public can be commenting. And I make it a distinction between posts which should be organized and in a coherent more formal way and comments which can be a little bit more colloquial. But comments count as writing. And when it becomes, and when they, but when I evaluate them and all I have is comments, then they get to hear about how they need to write some posts. And if all I have are posts then they get to hear about in you know behind the scenes, not in public, through the course management. Yes, exactly! And that's why the point is about cultivating and growing. It's about nourishing this culture of learning. And doing it with the media technology. So I'm getting the sign that says I gotta stop talking. So thank you very much for being here. [ applause ]