Get Glogging

Here is a sample assignment for how glogging might be used to learn about literature, specifically about Nella Larson's Quicksand:

Some big questions to consider about Helga's experience of the educational system at "Naxos" include:

What is meant by educational "uplift"? What about Helga and about the other students and teachers gets cut out by the school in Naxos? Why is James able to get "naturalized" (7) to Naxos but Helga cannot? Who are they uplifting at the school? What are they uplifting them to? Why does Helga feel she must leave? How would Helga prefer the school to be? How would she like to relate to her students and colleagues? Why can't she?

To develop your answers to these questions, I'd like you to return to the opening chapters of Quicksand. Find a metaphor that Helga uses to describe the school. How does this metaphor make her frustrations with the school clear?

I would like you to create your own glog about this metaphor, that helps explain your answers to the big questions above.

For an example of how you might work on this, please take a look at my glog about W.E.B. Du Bois and education. As you will see, I've taken a quote from one of his essays and added an image and some of my thoughts about his metaphor of a "lever" to describe education. Also on the glog is a photo of Booker T. Washington, whose approach to education Du Bois criticized. With the photo, I've included some text about one thing I think the photo shows. I've also included a link to a blog post by a modern student and my brief explanation for how it relates to Quicksand. Finally, I've linked this glog to another glog with several quotes from Du Bois about education. Please click through to that glog and select a quote you think compares or contrasts with Helga's experience at Naxos.

For your own glog, you may use any of the kinds of approaches I have mentioned (finding an illustration, analyzing a photo, comparing it to another article) to talk about the metaphor you find in Quicksand. I will expect you to include:

1)At least one quote from Quicksand that includes a metaphor about how Helga understands the school
2)Your analysis about how the metaphor you find helps answer the big questions above
3)A quote from Du Bois that you want to relate to Helga's experience
4)Your analysis or questions about how this quote compares, contrasts, or relates to Helga's experience
5) An image you want to relate to Naxos or Quicksand
6) Your thoughts about that image's importance

It's a Glog

A glog, apparently, is a multimedia, web-linked kind of fancy poster. Below is my attempt at one, meant to relate to Nella Larson's Quicksand as a jumping off point for thinking about or researching the cultural conversations, practices, and controversies related to the idea of education as a means to cultural/racial uplift (the Naxos section of Larson's novel).

What I like about Glogging:

1. It's creative (in both senses: artistic/expressive and productive). Even though it is digital, you produce something concrete (in a sense), which is share-able and which allows a kind of pride of accomplishment in the creation.
2. It's interactive, which invites you to think about your audience (how will you design your glog so that the links, images, sounds, and video are interesting, useful, informative, etc. to your audience?)
3. It's curatorial, which offers a sense of the active construction of knowledge and history, as well as a sense of changing meaning by changing comparisons or contrasts (i.e. a glog on Du Bois has a different meaning than a glog on Du Bois and Garvey).
4. It's research- and discovery-oriented. This offers the chance to construct knowledge and make (sometimes surprising) connections yourself. Discovering things can be fun, too, which has to be good for the classroom, right? I'll admit I was absurdly pleased to realize the reggae song I'd chosen to go with my Garvey slideshow (made with animoto) actually used the words "you lift me up from quicksand."

Questions about Glogging that I'm still thinking about:

1. Can you assess glogs? Based on what criteria?
2. Are they best used for introductions to material, concepts, etc.? Or how might they be used for intermediate explorations? Final projects?
3. How do you design glog assignments so that they are more bacon than sizzle? Like the Word Clouds I posted about earlier, making a glog could easily become a hands-on/minds-off activity (especially if you just post links to lengthy material that you haven't read or don't understand yet).

Whitman Sells Pants

One of Levi's new ads features the voice of Walt Whitman reading from his poem "America" (at least, the voice recorded on the wax cylinder is thought to be Walt's). I was stunned when I saw (and heard) this ad. Although I'm not too keen on peddling jeans, I think you should watch it. (And this one with lines from "Pioneers, O, Pioneers" if you're curious) 


I'm conflicted. If this mini-movie didn't have a Levi's label slapped on the back of it, I would think this was a beautiful translation (illustration? re-imagination?) of Walt's poem - a heart-stirring, patriotic vision of America as resilient, and equal, in the face of hardship and struggle. I'm impressed at how current they've made the poem feel - I like the choice of the rustic, scratched font that emphasizes Walt's words as he says them and echoes the scratched quality of the audio. In fact, I love how the terrible audio quality comes across as modern, electric, and almost rustic-apocalyptic, instead of old-fashioned or unintentional. It sounds quite a bit like a train, rolling onward...


And yet, Walt's voice is resurrected here to sell jeans? to sell an ideology of save-America-by-shopping? my heart aches a bit at this. 


Seth Stevenson has some interesting things to say about it on Slate... 


What do you think?? 

Wordle me this

After reading this post on Blogging About the Web 2.0 Connected Classroom, which listed a lot of enthusiastic ideas for using word clouds (which you can generate at wordle.net, like the ones I made below, and at other places, I'm sure), I started to wonder about what I could do with them.

Here's my blog as a word cloud (minus "Whitman" and "Egyptian" and the most common English words):

I'm curious to see what my blog will look like as a word cloud in a few months, as I write more, and on different topics. Will "museum" grow even though "hieroglyphics" will undoubtedly shrink?

For a different look, here's the 1855 "Song of Myself" in a word cloud (again, without the most common English words. if you leave those in, not surprisingly, the cloud is mostly one big "I").
Could we use a word cloud like this in a productive way in the classroom? I enjoyed making these two word clouds, but I think this is a tool which is easy to accidentally turn into a hands-on minds-off activity. How do we use the word cloud thoughtfully?

From the post I read (see above), I especially liked one teacher's idea of using a word cloud to start an analysis of her school's mission statement and website. For the literature classroom, one place to start could be to take one surprisingly frequent word (perhaps "night" in "Song of Myself"), and explore what re-considerations it might encourage you to make about the poem. On the flipside, you could also defend a frequent word, explaining why it is essential to your understanding of the poem. What else might be productive?

Translating Whitman into the Classroom

First, returning to Whitman and the "uniform hieroglyphic" -

In "A Backward Glance O'er Traveled Roads" (available in Prose Works 1892: The Collected Works of Walt Whitman, Vol. II), Whitman compares his years of work on Leaves of Grass to the work of Jean-Francois Champollion, the "father of Egyptology," who is most famous for  beginning the unlocking of Egyptian hieroglyphs using the Rosetta Stone. Studying the Rosetta Stone, Champollion recognized that some hieroglyphs are alphabetic, some are syllabic, and others are determinative (representing an entire idea). He began to record and publish translations in the early 1820s, but his Egyptian grammar and dictionary were not published until after his death. On his death bed, Champollion is said to have given the corrected proofs of the grammar to the printer, saying, "Be careful of this. It is my calling card to posterity." It is this story that Whitman references in "A Backward Glance" - he writes that he looks upon Leaves of Grass as his "definitive carte visite to the coming generations of the New World" (Prose Works 1892, 712-13).

The Rosetta Stone itself is a massive stone slab (3 feet tall x 2.4 feet wide x 1 foot deep), with inscriptions of the same text (a decree) written in three languages: Egyptian hieroglyphics, demotic Egyptian (ancient everyday Egyptian), and Greek. The opportunity to compare these three scripts proved to be the key to translating ancient hieroglyphics. These close-ups (thanks, JonesBlog!) of the Rosetta Stone show demotic Egyptian on the left, classical Greek in the middle, and hieroglyphics on the right:

So, the classroom assignments I'm considering for "Song of Myself" and the universal hieroglyphic are:


1) free write (5 min.) on connection(s) you might see between Whitman the poet and Champollion the translator/historian/explorer/surveyor and/or what you think might interest Whitman above the carved/drawn symbols of hieroglyphics


2) then find at least 5 instances in the poem where you think Whitman is touching on issues/ideas of translation. Include these in a blog post with your thoughts or answers to the questions below. You can either incorporate the quotes/instances into your writing, or post them as a kind of found poem. You will also need to include in your post a (brief) explanation of the reading strategy (or strategies) you've used to think about or answer these questions.
What is Whitman translating/interpreting/reading? In other words, what are his "texts"? How are his "texts" like hieroglyphics? How does he imagine himself (or poets) to be like Champollion, the historian/explorer/surveyer/translator? Who is he translating for? What role does Whitman imagine for readers? 


3) Then, in class we'll discuss the students' ideas about "Song of Myself" and translation, moving toward a discussion of the imagined reader's role in the poem, and questions like these:
What strategies does Whitman use to encourage this role, or recruit his readers? What is the relationship between poet and reader? Reader and "text"? How do we read poetry? What does Whitman think (in "Song of Myself")  that poetry can do? What might the heroic quest (for knowledge? for self? for truth?) have to do with writing/reading/poetry?


4) We'll read and discuss the Norton Anthology of Poetry's "translation" or curation of "Song of Myself" (which uses the 1881 version and includes section 1 (I celebrate myself...), section 6 (the grass), section 11 (28 bathers), section 24 (through me many voices...), and section 52 (barbaric yawp and bootsoles)). We will focus on questions of curation, of what this version emphasizes, and in essence, argues about "Song of Myself."


5) Students will be assigned to curate their own version of "Song of Myself" and post it to their blog. They will be asked write an explanation of the choices they made and the effects they hoped to achieve with those choices (a more formal written piece that will be turned in to me). Finally, they will be asked to read and comment on at least 2 of their classmates' curations.

a uniform hieroglyphic

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;

How could I answer the child?....I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,

Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark,           and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child....the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic

(Leaves of Grass, 1855, pg. 13)

Another intriguing piece of historical context to consider with "Song of Myself" is this image of the "hieroglyphic," or more broadly, Egyptian imagery. It turns out that in the same year Whitman published the first edition of leaves of grass (1855), he also published "One of the Lessons Bordering Broadway: The Egyptian Museum," in Life Illustrated. In this article, he describes his own interest in all things Egyptian:


"The great 'Egyptian Collection' was well up in Broadway, and I got quite acquainted with Dr. Abbott, the proprietor—paid many visits there, and had long talks with him, in connection with my readings of many books and reports on Egypt—its antiquities, history, and how things and the scenes really look, and what the old relics stand for, as near we can now get. . . . As said, I went to the Egyptian Museum many, many times; sometimes had it all to myself—delved at the formidable catalogue—and on several occasions had the invaluable personal talk, correction, illustration and guidance of Dr. A. himself" (Walt Whitman, New York Dissected: A Sheaf of Recently Discovered Newspaper Articles by the Author of Leaves of Grass, (New York: Rufus Rockwell Wilson, 1936), 28.)



For more on this, take a look at New York Dissected (1936), which not only features the Life Illustrated article, but also other articles Whitman published on architecture, opera, and slavery. You could also take a look at Stephen Tapscott's article, "Whitman's Egypt in 'Song of Myself,'" which makes a case for reading the poem in terms of Egyptian imagery and mythology. 


What I think I'm most interested in is the specific image of the hieroglyph and how I might use that in a consideration of poem's focus on translation/reading and its recruitment of the reader. Most likely, there'll be more on this shortly...

(This 1853 poster advertisement for the museum comes to you courtesy of The Brooklyn Museum)

Party like it's 1855?

Celebrations might be another "outside the poem" topic which we could pursue with "Song of Myself." It looks like the "celebration" in the opening line of the poem is the only time Whitman actually uses that word, but he also includes a catalog of contemporary types of celebrations (pg. 36 of the 1855 edition):

Upon the race-course, or enjoying pic-nics or jigs or a good game of base-ball,

At he-festivals with blackguard jibes and ironical license and bull-dances and           drinking and laughter,

At the cider-mill, tasting the sweet of the brown squash....sucking the juice           through a straw,

At apple-pealings, wanting kisses for all the red fruit I find,

At musters and beach-parties and friendly bees and huskings and house-raisings;

Could research into the cultural context of celebrations help us better understand what he means by celebrating himself? What does Whitman see in American celebrations?

Ahoy, there, Walt

In "Song of Myself," Whitman is fascinated with exhalation and inhalation; by following some of the poem's gestures to the outside, seeing what we find in the cultural world of mid-19th century America (exhalations), and then turning round to re-examine the poem with that cultural find in mind- we will mimic the repeating process of an outward breath and then a drawing in that Whitman uses in the poem. And hopefully this will let us dive deeper into the poem, or catch more of it in our understanding...

So, how about considering this passage from the poem (pg. 38 of the 1855 edition), which features arctic exploration? It's not a famous or pivotal passage, but the context of arctic exploration turns out to be quite surprising and dramatic.

I anchor my ship for a little while only,

My messengers continually cruise away or bring their returns to me.

I go hunting polar furs and the seal... leaping chasms with a pike-pointed staff            ....clinging to topples of brittle and blue.

I ascend to the foretruck.... I take my place late at night in the crow's nest....           we sail through the arctic sea.... it is plenty light enough,

Through the clear atmosphere I stretch around on the wonderful beauty,

The enormous masses of ice pass me and I pass them.... the scenery is plain in           all directions,

The white-topped mountains point up in the distance.... I fling out my fancies           toward them;

We are about approaching some great battlefield in which we are soon to be           engaged,

We pass the colossal outposts of the encampments.... we pass with still feet and           caution;

Or we are entering by the suburbs some vast and ruined city.... the blocks and           fallen architecture more than all the living cities of the globe.

I am a free companion.... I bivouac by invading watchfires.

I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,

And tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.

My voice is the wife's voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs,

They fetch my man's body up dripping and drowned.

I understand the large hearts of heroes,

The courage of present times and all times;

In the 1850s (and in most of the 19th century), there was a fascination, almost a mania for exploring the arctic regions - in order to map them and to find the long-sought Northwest Passage, which was imagined to be of great commercial value.

This map is from the 1870s, but it shows the supposed open sea above North America, which the explorers were seeking:

In the 1850s, interest in arctic exploration focused on the mysterious disappearance of the famous British explorer Sir John Franklin. Franklin and his entire crew of 129 men were lost during their 1845 hunt for the Northwest Passage.

The mystery of their disappearance captivated Brits and Americans for years - both countries sent multiple expeditions in search of the lost crew (or at least clues to their disappearance) and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic were filled with reports, illustrations, maps, and such about the fascinating mystery. In fact, this has been called the first mass media mystery - in that new technologies allowed the public to see and follow the clues as they were uncovered. Hundreds of reports of the expedition and the search for story of the explorer's disappearance were published.

Confident images published on the eve of the expedition, like these showing the industriousness of the explorers and the wonders of the Arctic...

Gave way to grimmer, though no less romanticized, depictions of the North:

In the early 1850s, on an expedition in search of Sir John Franklin, Captain Robert McClure established the existence of the fabled Northwest Passage, although he was not able to sail through it. On Nov. 12, 1853, the New York Times began its coverage of McClure's expedition with this dispatch (w/ my underlining):

Another chapter has been added to the long and eventful history of Arctic exploration; and it announces the fact which all past endeavor has sought to demonstrate. Capt. McClure, one of the bravest of the many noble spirits who have lavished upon the frozen icebergs of the Pole, heroism equal to the conquest of nations, has spent three years of his life amid the solitudes of that desolate region; and though no relic of Sir John Franklin has met his eye, he has partly accomplished the work which Franklin undertook. He has established the fact that a passage exists between the Atlantic and Pacific through the ocean that surrounds the Pole.[...]It is doubtful, indeed, whether the vast accumulations of ice on that route will ever permit it to be pursued; and it seems quite certain that no practical use of the channel can ever be made. But the geographical science gains by the knowledge that the passage exists, and that America is only an island.[...]In another part of this morning's Times we commence the publication of the official dispatches, in which he gives a detailed narrative of his experience and observations during the whole period of his sojourn in that region of awful and sublime desolation. They are very voluminous and will occupy a large portion of our space for several successive days; --but we are confident they will be eagerly welcomed by the great mass of intelligent readers." 

Inspired by earlier searches, Charles Francis Hall departed on his own Sir John Francis hunt/expedition in 1860. When he returned in 1862, he brought two of his Inuit guides, Tookolito ("Hannah") and Ebierbing ("Joe") back to New York with him, where they were exhibited (!) at P.T. Barnum's museum.


To return to "Song of Myself" - the experience of the North that Whitman seems to be invoking is one closer to this euphoric image (already featured once above). A dreamscape of solitude, masculinity, and grandeur. Yet one that is still connected by incoming and outgoing messages. This image of the North, especially given the context of the 19th century exploration "age of heroes" and the disappearance of Sir John Franklin and crew, touches on many issues that might be fruitfully explored/traced in the poem:

man's relation to nature
the industriousness of man
self-exploration and exploration of nature
conquering
heroism
masculinity
nation/globe (especially American national identity in relation to Britain)
hunt/search
expansion
natives, not civilization
there & back (what do you bring back? are you different on return? do you return to the same place you left?)
mapping/cataloging




(Unless otherwise noted, all images are from Prof. R. Potter's online Franklin expedition museum)

Yawp

"No author's life in the nineteenth century was more continuously photographed than Whitman's."
- Ed Folsom, "'This Heart's Geography': The Photographs of Walt Whitman" 

That Whitman was fascinated by photographs of himself isn't surprising, given his interest in trying to depict, understand, and catalog the self - and his fascination with all things Walt. But, the photographs in The Walt Whitman Archive that stood out to me most (besides the ones of Walt in his birthday suit!), were the few that showed the poet with another person. 


This photo of Walt with his friend, Peter Doyle, is the earliest photo of Walt with anyone else. 

Looking at it reminds me that much of "Song of Myself" is about this kind of moment, trying to understand the experience of being an "I" looking at a "you." And, it reminds me that, wondrously, the great poet was just an ordinary man.


I get that same feeling looking at the archived images of his manuscripts...

What's that on your Boot-Soles?

Confronting The Walt Whitman Archive is akin to confronting Whitman's famous "Song of Myself," in that there is simply too much there to grasp it all together. So, I made my start with one of the obvious advantages of the digital archive - the ability to see and compare the seven versions of "Song of Myself" which Whitman published in the US over his lifetime. I decided to look at the close of the poem (starting at "Listener up there!") in each edition, comparing the changes made.

This section didn't change dramatically over the years, but as Whitman insists in the poem that no thing is too small or soft but it can be the hub of the universe, the subtle differences I can see still interest me. Other than the deletion of "here you" from the line "Listener up there! Here you...what have you to confide to me?" in the 1881 and 1891 versions of the poem, the changes to this section are mainly in punctuation and in the typesetting (is that the right way to describe the layout of the words on the page?).

To begin with the appearance on the page, you can see here the first page of this section in the 1855, 1856, 1867, and 1891 editions:

It's hard to see on the blog, but looking at them together, I noticed that while the first edition (1855) has small print, the lines have enough room to spread their full length across the page, rarely having to spill into a second, indented line. This impression of
s p r e a  d   i   n  g and stretching (a la Walt's soul, which early in the poem reaches from his beard to his toes, or like his body, which late in the poem he effuses in "eddies" and lets "drift in lacy jags.") is amplified by the profusion of ellipses (more about that in a bit!). Later editions, like the 1856 and 1867, offer larger print, which means fewer words and lines per page (a chance to focus on them more closely, perhaps?), but this also means the lines become more cramped, hitting the edges of the page and having to retreat with an indent. These editions also bristle with more punctuation than the earliest version (more about this later). The final two editions of Leaves of Grass return to a style similar to that of the 1855 edition - with the lines more often stretching their full length instead of wrapping around, and the words less restricted by punctuation. I think it's pretty clear what style I prefer for this section, but what style best suits your idea of the poem?

To return to the profusion of ellipses in the 1855 edition - they're everywhere in the section I'm looking at....

"Do I contradict myself? 
Very well then....I contradict myself;
I am large....I contain multitudes."


And...

"I depart as air...I shake my white locks at the runaway sun"

Later additions tighten up the words, using more definite punctuation. The ellipses never return:

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself,
I am large, I contain multitudes."


And...

"I depart as air, I shake my white locks at
      the run-away sun"


The shedding of the ellipses suggests a more certain, more forceful, more assured voice. But...I prefer the hint of hesitation....the space for breathing (echoing Walt's interest in inhalation and exhalation), and...the thinking implied in the original ellipses. And, don't they suit the poem's sentiments well?
"I depart as air" dot dot dot seems much more fitting than "I depart as air" comma.

In the 1871 edition a new punctuation appears: parentheses. "I am large, I contain multitudes" slips into a pair:

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large--I contain multitudes.)"

And in 1881, another pair grip the closing line of the stanza above, too:

"Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)"


What do you make of turning these lines into (asides)? And what do you think of the archive as a place or means for digging into Whitman's poetry?

Novice in the Archive

Gearing up for our project with the Whitman Archive this week, I've spent some time checking out the British Library's Online Gallery. Here's what I see so far:

The home page of the archive is minimalistic, with a lot of white space and not a lot of text or buttons. The focus is on a few images the center that scroll across the page much like the feature of iTunes that lets users virtually flip through their music collection (as though in a jukebox). Each image represents a content area that you are invited to explore...

There's also a box with popular searches (the more popular the search, the bigger the font).

Some images allow zooming, rotating and other manipulation. All images have contextual notes about dates, authors, and how the image came to be in the collection.

A few other archives that caught my eye are:

The Book Cover Archive, which is pretty much what it sounds like. This is a design eye candy, with a literary bent. I suspect it has potential as a tool for talking about print culture, design, selection, etc....

And, Revolution and Romanticism and The Word on The Street, both of which feature street literature from the 18th and 19th centuries (broadside ballads, penny dreadfuls, chapbooks and other tales of dastardly deeds or derring-do). By the by, chapbooks could make an interesting pairing with New Media, as they were popular before and while copyright laws were getting formulated; they were cheaply made, intended for a mass audience and were often mash-ups of many styles, stories, and genres - and they were very often rip-offs (or appropriations?) of other authors' works....

Backward Design

Trying to design a lesson plan "backwards" - a la Grant Wiggins' and Jay McTighhe's advice in Understanding by Design - means first focusing on:

1) the big ideas or questions you want students to be able to understand and engage with.

Then, figuring out how you'll:

2) assess whether they understand (AKA, what evidence will show you that they have learned).

And only then:

3) designing your class plan.

Trying to apply this process to teaching Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" proved to be trickier than expected (just as Frost apparently said about that poem, in fact). What I like about the backward design process is its focus on  learning (as opposed to just teaching - which often means teaching more by habit than by design). This focus comes primarily from having to first spell out the big issues and questions you want your students to be able to understand and engage with. This encourages you to work with students on questions that are actually part of your own work or the work of your discipline; often scholarly work and the lives of professors seem like mysteries to students, but this process might make it more clear why the work/their work/your work is engaging, relevant, and important.

At the same time, this isn't easy! I struggled to get from the big questions & assessment phases to the concrete class design - largely because, like an ESL student who has just learned all the ways she can make a grammar mistake in English - I felt extremely aware of all the ways I could make a class plan too top-down, too unfocused, too "activity"-oriented, etc. to make up my mind on what would actually work...

CMS = See a Mess?

The term “Course Management System” sounds more ominous than educational, as though it were designed to shuffle students mechanically through a chute, rather than to facilitate their learning. This, in a sense, is what Erna Kotkamp argues in “Digital objects in e-learning environments,” when she writes that the primary function of a Course Management System (CMS) is to facilitate administrative tasks, such as grading, rather than facilitating learning. San Francisco State University (SFSU) uses its own CMS, which was created to save the university money and to hopefully be more responsive to faculty and student needs than other systems. But, the question remains: are students boxed-in by ilearn? (judging from the ilearn logo, which features a person crammed into the “I” of ilearn, boxing students in, seems to be the goal!)

To begin with, ilearn itself has a rather dull, bleak interface. Many teachers try to spruce it up with content-related images, but the effect is often like adding tinsel to a dead Christmas tree – it just doesn’t make enough difference. It might even make the tree look a little sadder than before. The impact of ilearn’s aesthetics is difficult to assess precisely, but my sense is that it has a dampening effect – and creates the impression that whatever can occur in this site will likely be dull, gray, and institutional instead of lively and engaging. Likewise, the site’s emphasis is clearly not on visual learning or engagement but primarily on written, static communication.

In addition, there is a uniformity of appearance to every course’s ilearn site – each course is always organized into three columns, with only minor changes possible, even by teachers. The site also contains an explicit hierarchy – for example, only the teacher can post to the “news” forum and every participant is “forced” (yes, forced is actually the word that ilearn uses!) to subscribe to that forum (meaning they will receive email updates whenever something is posted there). Each “news” post appears in the right-hand column on the course site’s front page, while other (read: student) forum posts remain buried within forums. Thus, the information from the teacher posts is separated as “news” and privileged as important and urgent. In contrast, the student’s contributions must occur within the boundaries set by the teacher; students cannot start their own forums, but may only post within teacher-created forums. However, students may add their own topic “threads” within forums or reply to other students’ “threads.”

As you may have noticed, the language of the site, like its gray background, is quite formal and impersonal: everyone in the course is labeled a “participant,” discussions are called “forums,” class materials are “resources.” This encourages an impersonal, scholarly, but cold and rigid learning environment, rather than one of personal, lively, interaction. On the one hand, this encourages students to be thoughtful about their contributions to the class site, but on the other hand, it may discourage them from engaging fully or comfortably in learning by participating in the site.

Contrary to Erna Kotkamp's assertion, my anecdotal experience of ilearn in 3 semesters is that the main use for the site (when professors choose to use it at all) is to use it for the discussion forums. The most successful discussion forums I've seen were organized by week, with a requirement (from the professor) that each student participate by posting 1-2 thoughtful questions in response to the week’s reading. These posts were expected to include ideas of possible answers or ideas, quotes, etc. to consider when trying to come up with an answer. Most importantly, replying to other students’ posts was encouraged and accepted in lieu of starting a post. The result was that each week there were many postings, with many replies. Most posts had at least one reply and some had upwards of 5 or 6 replies.

This forum format, which is called “discussion,” obviously differs quite a bit from in-person classroom discussion. The type of discussion which is possible in the ilearn forums and which occurs there is more often more formal, lengthy and thoughtful than spur-of-the-moment discussion in a classroom. It is less directed by the professor (despite the professor being the one who sets up the “forum” for discussion), in that comments and replies are made from student to student rather than student to teacher. It allows longer one-to-one interaction between two students than might be comfortable in a classroom. It gives students time to think over, or digest material and questions and formulate responses to one another and the texts. It allows for including links to other pages and texts that are interesting and related. It is more durable than in-class conversations in that your comments remain on the page throughout the course, and can be a resource, reminder, or jumping off point for yourself and others throughout the semester. These forums even persist beyond the semester – you can return to previous ilearn course pages as long as you are enrolled at SFSU. Also, these forums provide a space for students who are not comfortable speaking up in class to “speak up” as it were online, to contribute in that way. And, as opposed to blogs or other open web resources, the ilearn course is a relatively “safe” space for these students to participate in. If for example, a student is shy about speaking up in class, I would imagine that speaking to the world-wide web wouldn’t be much more comfortable. The ilearn site strikes a balance in that it is more public than just turning in an assignment to a teacher, but still more private than posting it for the whole web to read.

Using the discussion forum in successfully can make learning feel more like a cooperative and interactive process. Although it is somewhat hindered by the clunky features of ilearn, it nevertheless offers a learning process that involves preparation, thoughtfulness, creation of your own ideas, and responding to others’ ideas as well as your own. It structures learning as something that doesn’t happen just in a classroom, but something that each “participant” is engaging in and creating with the class. It encourages students to come to class with ideas to discuss, rather than expecting to be told what ideas to have about the reading, or coming to class having read the material but not yet formulated any ideas about it.

Still, the success of the discussion forums depends both on the engagement of the students – their willingness to think, work, write, and post – as well as the guidance of the instructor. Instead of functioning well, like I described above, these forums can become mere means of turning in assignments when instructors aren’t thoughtful about their purpose. This is most likely to happen when: an instructor fails to encourage replying to posts, or actively discourages replying; a professor doesn’t require (thoughtful) participation; the post is focused on a grade more than on a conversation; the forum is structured more for ease of grading than for thinking and communicating; or the instructor uses the posts as free lesson-planning. Of course, even in well-structured forums, there are downsides and risks – one is the sense of being left hanging – of posting and getting no response online or in class, from peers or the instructor.

Outside of discussion forums, the uses of ilearn tend to be limited, but with creativity can be worked around. One such very successful project I experienced (as a TA) was an ilearn Virtual Coffeehouse for an 18th century literature unit, in which students were asked to create 18th c. avatars and “visit” several coffeehouses and engage in conversations with their peers about literature and events from the period. Despite the inconvenience of navigating from one “Coffeehouse” forum to another, this assignment was wildly successful. Many students went above and beyond our expectations in researching and creating their online personas and crafting their conversations; they added pictures and photos, inserted stage directions, wrote in dialects, and even made up their own 18th-century-style poetry. They seemed more engaged in this project than with any other assignment, not only in the thoughtfulness of their literary analyses, but also in their imagination of the historical period, and the connections they recognized among culture, gender, class, literature, politics, economics, etc. Their enthusiasm for the project spilled over into class discussions as well, enlivening these and encouraging many more students to participate in-person in addition to participating online.

What successes or failures have you experienced (as student or teacher) in online education forums? What made the difference between success and failure?

Teach Naked?

Jose Bowen makes a case for "teaching naked" - meaning, teaching without technology in the classroom.  He advocates using technology like video podcasts to deliver lectures outside of class time so that students and professors can instead use those valuable minutes for discussion and engagement. If that's too much to ask, Mr. Bowen says, at least ditch the PowerPoint presentations, which turn both teachers and students into zombies.

It's clear Mr. Bowen can come up with an eye-catching title, but what do you think of his ideas? He has a point about the snooze factor of slideshow presentations - it is infinitely frustrating watching a slideshow lecture that you could've gone through more productively if the professor had just emailed it to you. And yet, there are times when I've found slideshow presentations worked very well - particularly for looking at passages of poetry together, or for considering a visual representation of a literary idea. Likewise, I think he has a point that as online education becomes more common, the main asset that brick-and-mortar universities have to offer is the opportunity for face-to-face interaction; the more we can actually work with professors and other students, the better our experience, and the more we learn...