so much of what we’ve read about so far is old, semi-unfamiliar technology and interfaces that seem hard to picture because they’ve been displaced by so many other fancier, newer applications. but MOOs are a thing I actually have used and remember– some online classes at Texas Tech still use them, or at least they did in 2012. they were fun. chatroom-esque. handy transcripts of entire class periods.

would a MOO still seem like “a brave new world” to students today? One like Daisley describes here?  “when one first encounters the world of computer conferencing, it is a brave new unknown world where language is the only available tool for separating the murky waters from the seemingly stable land” (113). I don’t know if chatrooms are a thing kids these days are into, or if they would feel like a murky, unfamiliar communicational landscape. twitter and facebook and all the mobile social media do have a very, very different vibe to them, so maybe a chatroom would seem different enough.

reading all of these pieces made me wonder if it’s specifically something in the newness of these platforms that makes them welcome/encourage such play for students (or anyone learning to work within them for the first time). is it because newness and lack of previous associations make it easier for students to just jump in? I’m not sure. there is probably more to it than that.

I’m seeing so many connections between this class and Thomas’s posthumanism class. I love when that happens, and I’m glad I happen to be taking both classes. Kolko touches on the implications of blurry internet-based collaborations in a way that make me think about posthumanism: “If there is one common theme in cyberspace scholarship, particularly that which is grounded in synchronous CMC, it is that notions of a boundaried and consistent self dissolve” (177). in digital spaces, it is very, very easy to be multiple, to code-switch and take on a range of identities.

Daisley also makes some interesting (and optimistic-ish) observations about selfhood and community: “if individuals use CMC as a tool for social interaction through language, a breakdown of boundaries between the individual-subjective self and the social-communal self will be the result. Everyone, it is presumed, will have the opportunity to be heard; everyone will have a voice” (112). is that so? maybe. there is possibly still hope for this. I love what Daisley asks about why we enjoy playing with words and concepts in debate-style contexts so much– “Is it the “winning” of a rhetorical point that produces a feeling of pleasure? Or is it– as the first example intimates–simply the feeling of connectedness, the “interacting with your fellow students”?” (112). that’s a question I want to keep coming back to.

today in 420, all my plans for computer/projector object lessons died because the instructor computer seemed to fry itself to death. so I swapped to a student station and posted links to some of the things I had planned to show, and left students to look through them on their own. it was useful that we were meeting in a lab and I was able to do that.

other things I’ve done with the tech in these labs:

collected lesson plan links on Pinterest– the non-linear layout suits my random personality very well

had students join a class Pinterest board and post visualizations or photoshop tutorial projects

hosted class discussion forums where students either respond to readings or post links to examples they’ve been researching (today it was the worst/ugliest/weirdest resumes)

showed videos

played audio podcasts

linked to resources like the OWL or other helpful how-to things

had students pull up drafts and then rotate around the room adding comments/feedback/questions

goodness, Moran’s descriptions are bewildering! I wonder how much they made sense or didn’t to his original audience. how many of his readers would be familiar enough with these systems to picture exactly the procedures and commands he references so matter-of-factly? it’s hard to imagine any kind of pedagogy/technology article being written in quite the same style today. there are so many options and customizations and different systems to be used. most audiences would surely demand more background info on anything like what Moran tries to explain.
I’m using drupal this semester in my 420 class, and my students and I are both bewildered by that too. I’m kind of jealous of thy easy-sounding, engaged way Moran seems to use what he has. I’m not to that stage yet. drupal is so foreign. it’ll be ages before I figure it out enough to make things happen so neatly in class.
maybe when I figure it out, it will facilitate awesome and unique things for my teaching and my students’ composing processes. this is the theme of the other two pieces: technologies changing our writing and revision habits. I know they have changed mine. the old need to recopy things from paper to screen once facilitated and encouraged different writing habits. for some people, that sort of sub-process might still show up. sometimes I do write or draft on paper and revise from those copies as I type. and like Sam talked about with the placeholders she uses, I do similar things. I get very messy with my typed drafts. dashes and bold and asterisks and all caps and question marks all over in the holes where I don’t know what I’m trying to say yet. if I didn’t have the option of so easily copying/pasting, find-and-replace-ing, or typing nonsense only to ruthlessly erase it later, I would probably be much less likely to draft the way I do.

so quaint, some of these old, monospaced articles seem. they were all eye-opening, in a way though. to imagine teaching all the ‘scary’ brand-new technologies these instructors were teaching… and to listen to the concerns they had and the observations they were making about what was useful, what wasn’t, what students liked or found easy, and what would likely be important/unimportant in the future of computers + writing pedagogy… it all adds more texture to my picture of our field’s development and its history during that time.

I kept thinking too about analogues for us in 2015. what are the ‘scary’ brand-new composition technologies that we aren’t yet sure how to incorporate into our classrooms? there are probably dozens. but we don’t often see students characterized as frightened, unfamiliar newbies anymore. we talk about digital natives and brave, self-taught explorers of new technological platforms. the Dinan et al. and the Moore pieces contradict each other a bit in this– Dinan et al. are careful to suggest gentle, “non-threatening” ways of teaching with computers in a writing class. Moore is more excited and positive. He notes, “They were not intimidated by the new technology, and little formal instruction was necessary. Most of the time, one student learned from another” (58). the latter perspective is much more like the kind I see instructors taking today. throw the students in, make them figure stuff out together. fun! maybe some balance between the two wouldn’t be so bad, though.

this line from Dinan et al. rang very familiar bells: “Although computer literacy is valuable to students, they do not need to know very much about computers to use word processing in developing their writing skills. Instructors should stick to what is essential” (38). it’s pretty common to make that sort of separation, and I know I’ve done it myself. writing is writing. gadgets are gadgets. they can overlap and interconnect, but they don’t have to. it’s as if writing transcends its materials, and it always will, and that it does is very important. this both rings true for me and it also seems very worth questioning. maybe that will be a theme for me this semester in this class…