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Articles Conference Reviews |
2008J19HochmanRe-Mapping Technological Territories Deanya Lattimore: Territories of the Electronic Self Lattimore began by explaining she is presenting an excerpt of a longer piece and wants to focus her presentation with some notions behind Erving Goffman’s terminology. She began by discussing “a conversational preserve” to explain her sensibilities of space online. She illustrated this idea with her analysis of how email is initially a conversational preserve, but in reality it isn’t. It’s more of a “persistent conversation” that is available to others at other times. Professor Lattimore uses Laura Gurak’s “action terms” of internet communication to emphasize speed, reach, anonymity and interactivity. Next she went back to Goffman’s notions of territories occurring with non-spatial and spatial claims to frame her research. Like many in our field, Lattimore admires Goffman’s ideas (from the 70s) because they are useful for today’s online exploration. In addition to spatial issues, Lattimore continues to use Goffman’s notion of markers and identity concerning the stakes and rights to claims. Lattimore called for more understanding between readers and writers based on a sense of public and private boundaries. She exemplified this point by pointing out that her students pictured as drinkers on Facebook could be expelled from her school for just the picture. Even though they are personalizing themselves online, their senses of public and private writing need to be challenged and coached. Steven Corbett: Mapping, Re-mediating and Reflecting on Writing Process Realities: Results of a Two Year Study of the Transition from Print to Electronic Portfolios in First-Year Composition Due to a lack of projector and internet, the slide presentation, Corbett had to read his paper. Corbett read fast, and it was hard at first to enter the text, but soon his points became clear. Portfolios for Professor Corbett are a way to express awareness of a learning journey (not a destination or product). Corbett used Kathi Yancey’s groundbreaking work to emphasize the reflective aspects of portfolios, and made the point that online portfolios create multiple points of view to enable more reflecting about writing. He cited results from a pilot study analyzing online and paper sections, which began as a way to give teachers at his school the option of using paper or eportfolios. Six TAs joined the pilot study (three using eportfolios, three not). There was already a mature paper portfolio assessment system in place, but some of the pilot TAs using eportfolios were new to teaching with technology. Nonetheless, results showed that eportfolios were a success with only a few minor technical glitches. More important, the teachers found better writing in the eportfolios and administrators saw “the light.” Corbett pointed out four important variables from the research: assignment function, instructional practice, access, and audience engagement. All six TAs saw that the eportfolio changed the institutional and traditional content of portfolios because they could introduce multimedia. The TAs in the pilot study saw more interdisciplinarity in the student writing, and the students’ senses of audiences were not as narrow as in the paper portfolios from the study. Corbett then went on to describe how the teachers and students needed to make adjustments for eportfolios. In the second year, the department took a greater role in promoting eportfolios, and the department even encouraged TAs to create online teaching portfolios for the purposes reflection and self-promotion for the job market. Discussions of best practices happened informally and infiltrated English department pedagogy discussions. Corbett asserts that eportfolios are extending beyond English and helping teachers to “go paperless.” Professor Corbett found research with subtle shifts that, over time, will create a large change in the way we process our students’ work. His confidence and range of insights on this eportfolio process make this reviewer confident in Corbett’s prediction. Nicole Amare: Semiotic Sexism in the Visual Rhetoric of Ivy League Web Sites Amare began by explaining how she came to this topic, and, like Lattimore, she focused on thinking learned from 1970s. She recalled basic examples of sexism explored by feminists in the 70s (using “he” to mean he and she, expecting the police to be men, expecting a cook to be female and a chef to male, etc.) to further her analysis of sexism in today’s visual rhetoric. She looked at the homepages of Ivy League schools because the they market their images to students. She studied images (placement, size, etc.) and the body languages of the men and women pictured on the web pages. She analyzed approximately 400 images and called for better visual guidelines. Amare claims that today’s college population is 60% female, and higher education is becoming a more feminized place. Her analysis (with interactive help from the audience) of the Harvard homepage led to a pretty stark picture of sexism. After some analysis and focus on the Harvard page, an audience member stated that the images were clearly “male-centered.” Amare made it clear she was not out to get the ivies, but she had expected more liberal and less sexist representation from the Ivy League. She concluded that the conflict between reflecting and creating reality blurred the truth of institutional realities in her study. Although I’m less than interested about the Ivy league’s language of images, I was impressed with the way Amare teaches us to use visual literacy more critically. |