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Articles Conference Reviews |
2009A2LaceySession A2: When the Mobile Medium is the Message: From Marshall McLuhan to Nicholas Carr Kristine Blair, Bowling Green State University From the simultaneous perspectives of department chair and editor of Computers and Composition Online, Blair began her presentation by noting the dichotomous relation of these two roles and their relations to print media and multimodality. Blair interrogates Nicholas Carr’s 2008 essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” which argues that distracted and fast reading supersedes slow and leisurely engagement with online texts. Blair responds by noting that even though students seem to have a lessened ability to deal with academic discourses, English department faculty are often unable and unwilling to adopt multimodalities (the discourse of their students) into their classrooms. As Blair attests, beginning these conversations with senior faculty poses difficulty—some might feel that they are old or not cutting edge. However, Blair suggests that we can demonstrate how the technology is similar to existing structures. In order to adopt multimodalities into all courses within the English department, not just those in composition and rhetoric, Blair encourages senior faculty by showing how print medias are not disappearing, but as Bolter argues, are simply remediated within new digital genres. For example, by illustrating that blogs can be used as an updated form of a reading journal and wikis can be used to facilitate group projects, senior faculty may be more inclined to adopt new technologies into their established course structures. Finally, Blair reminded the audience that her presentation is a call to action—we must encourage our departments and future faculty to adopt multimodalities into their curriculum. As inspiration for his presentation, Brooks introduced the following McLuhan quote: “The computer's true function is to program and orchestrate terrestrial and galactic environments and energies in a harmonious way.” Even further, Brooks applied the notion of ‘galactic environments and energies’ in three ‘harmonious ways’ in his classrooms and research. First, Brooks introduced the audience to the Virtual Peace Garden, both a Drupal site for a special topics seminar and a Second Life replication of the International Peace Garden. The Virtual Peace Garden functions as a virtual monument, representing ideas close to real-life gardening, such as patience and cultivation, which in turn help us think long-term and not statically. Next, Brooks introduced the virtual exchange program at North Dakota State University, a program that Brooks states “elaborates the global exchange and enables students to connect to a larger world.” Moving dialogue into a multimodal environment, Brooks argues that the networked learning environment creates a space for the combination of students, texts, and universities. He suggests that the goal of this global exchange program is both cultural negotiations as well as fostering an intimate simulation of the global workplace. Finally, Brooks emphasized that the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program can be used as a campus-wide challenge to engage students and faculty. For Brooks, the OLPC is the medium through which education and peace become the message. However, these three ‘harmonious ways’ do not come without challenges, and Brooks closed his presentation by questioning their sustainability: Is the Second Life peace garden and island or a ghost town? What is the right scope and duration for the virtual exchange program? For OLPC, is small possible? As Blair challenged her Computers and Writing audience, so too did Brooks by encouraging his listeners to engage their campuses in these global, electronic activities. Jeney (who subtitled her presentation “A New Musical-Comedy-Horror Show”) opened with a clip from “Stream of Consciousness,” an episode from season three of the television show The Outer Limits. The clip shows one character criticized by others because he still prefers to (gasp) waste time reading books, a task the other characters do not bother with because they can quickly and literally absorb information. Jeney utilized this clip to illustrate the various attitudes towards technology in her classroom, and then introduced a shepherding metaphor for further emphasis. The metaphor, “the (idealized) pastoral paradigm,” was used to explain how we interact with students in writing with technology classrooms: sometimes they follow you, others need you to pick them up, some need to be rounded up by the border collies, and some even fall off the cliff. However, Jeney notes that the students all have one important feature in common, that none of them enter the classroom as technological blank slates. Switching gears, Jeney showed how she examined the TechRhet archives and investigated the lingo (e.g. jargon, smileys and acronyms) that the users employed, and pointed to some frequently used terms within that lingo (e.g. e-learning, blog-a-thon, CompPile, metadata). From the data, Jeney concluded that attitudes towards information technology came from everywhere, and she used these frameworks and loci for developing her classroom. At the end of her presentation, Jenney distributed animal stickers and asked everyone in the audience to select one that aligns with your feelings about a certain technology (for example, one audience member noted, “E-mail is the monkey on my back!”). |