This was day one's prompt: "Reflect on your experience using media and technologies—images, audio, film, social media, hypertext, projectors, etc.—in your teaching. How does the Wysocki piece support, develop, or challenge what you already believe about writing and the teaching of writing?"
I've been pretty open to engaging technology in my teaching--blogging with graduate students in grad seminars since 2006 and some undergraduates in indp studies, for instance. I started blogging with students in CCR 601 in 2006. I've blogged in two additional grad seminars. I think that this has worked out somewhat well--students post their research notes and responses, respond to each other, and prime the pump for class discussion. Most students keep their blogs going beyond the class or had them before, in some cases.
So my life as a blogger has been pretty course-based. I have had periods of time when I've blogged on my own, especially about food and farming issues that I am tracking in the media. I've used my own blogging to get discussion going in undergrad classes of these issues. Some of my undergrads have read my blog posts on farming and food and send me their blogs as well.
As a teacher, I'm often using documentary, you-tube clips, and other media. I've had students do quite a bit with image work over the years--using images to design arguments about places and spaces, for instance. I had a 105 place-based assignment that had students analyze and represent a place in Syracuse (as part of the geographies of exclusion assignment). Students did a lot with google images and some with Flickr.
In my WRT 255 course (Fall 2008), II had students design an advocacy campaign as part of their final project. Some made videos, some designed brochures or websites, some hooked their videos to social media campaigns on Facebook. The work was really interesting. I'm sure Tech Camp was a huge influence in me going in this direction--also seeing Gail Hawisher speak about using video as a mode of writing.
Wysocki's article is helpful in thinking how I frame my work. I am interested in her argument about materiality and new media, in particular, and the idea that we can make student more conscious of the materiality of technologies, objects, and artifacts. I like the way she invites teachers of writing to the table and shows us what we can bring as well as what we will have to be open to learning. I connected a great deal to her point (p. 23) that we have to be open to the new type of work that is produced. This new work challenges us to rethink and push our criteria for assessing writing and our notions of what writing is and does.
My plan for my WRT 105 this fall is to go a lot farther than I have in the past with engaging social media, image work, and some work with video.
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