100 YEARS OF NEW MEDIA PEDAGOGY

1. Prelude

1. Trailer
2. Introduction
3. Behind the Scenes

2. Methodological Play

1. Introduction
2. Thin Description & Data Visualization
3. Media Archaeology
4. Multimodal Performance
5. Methods of Data Collection and Coding

3. Visualizing the Archive

1. Introduction
2. Trends Across the Corpus
3. Radio
4. Film & Video
5. Television
6. Computer
7. Word Frequencies by Decade
8. Zooming Out

4. Listening to Audio Pedagogies

1. Introduction
2. English via the Airwaves
3. Mid-Century Audio Recording Pedagogies
4. Afterlives of Radio
5. Pedagogical Inspirations

5. Re-Seeing Film & Video Pedagogies

1. Introduction
2. Silent Film Devils
3. Making Movies in the 30s
4. Super-8 and Camcorder Fun
5. Pedagogical Inspirations

6. Remembering the “Perils” of Television

1. Introduction
2. TV Talk
3. McLuhan Redesigning Pedagogy
4. Pedagogical Inspirations

7. Conversing With Computers

1. Introduction
2. Act 1: Imagining Computer Futures
3. Act 2: PC Software Revolutions
4. Act 3: A Networked Social Turn
5. Act 4: Reading & Writing the Web
6. Act 5: Digital, Multimodal Literacies
7. Pedagogical Inspirations

8. Coda: Back to the Future

1. Introduction
2. The 7 Keys to Multimodal Pedagogy
3. Can You Really Believe They Said That?
4. The 5 Weirdest Classroom Technologies
5. Which English Journal Author Are You?
6. Playing in the Archives

9. Credits

1. Acknowledgements
2. References
3. Production Notes

Conversing With Computers

Pedagogical Inspirations

The history of computer-centered pedagogy stretches back, surprisingly, for over half a century. For many of our students, they’ve only known (and lived) the last couple of decades, when digital devices of various types have (in some contexts) become taken for granted. A look back at how English teachers experimented and innovated with computers through the years is one way of making digital technology a more deliberate, visible presence in the classroom, and by doing so, encouraging students to become more critical users of that technology. The following assignment descriptions are based upon influential English Journal articles on computer-based pedagogies.

1. Robo-Teacher Describing a computer-based essay grading program in 1966, Arthur Daigon wrote, “[R]eading and evaluating that complex symbolic process we call language surely must be a presumptuous incursion into realms strictly assigned to the human intellect. How indeed can, or dare, a machine compete in this area?” (46). How, indeed. One way you can have students explore the various stages of the writing process, develop a shared understanding of evaluative criteria, and play (on a rudimentary level) with programming logics is by tasking them with creating their own essay-grading software mock-up. For this activity, students should discuss how they would design a program to assess elements such as writing style, use of secondary sources, depth of analysis, and so on. How would those individual elements be weighted by the program to arrive at a grade? They might also consider how such a program would convey feedback to the writer so that it’s helpful and motivating. Students would finally present their ideas in short presentations where, in addition to explaining how the program would work, they would also include additional information for the mock program, such as its name, logo, a “wireframe” (i.e., a basic overview of the program), or some sample screenshots.
2. The Right Tool for the Job We’ve come a long way since the clunky word processing programs of the 1980s described by Brian Monahan, Charles Moran, Patricia Kennedy, among other English Journal authors. Today, we see not only a proliferation of writing software, but hardware as well, each with its own unique set of affordances and constraints. For this assignment, have students take up small writing tasks using a few of these different tools. For example, you might ask them to compose several paragraph-long reading responses using a range of software—Microsoft Word, Google Docs, 750 words, Written? Kitten! (and if you really want to emphasize how much more developed the technology has become, consider having them work in an emulated version of WordStar). In addition to trying out different writing software, you can also ask students to write with different hardware: desktop computers, laptop computers, smartphones with speech dictation, pencils, and pens. While writing, students should also take notes about how it feels to write using each technology: what’s easy, what’s difficult, noteworthy differences and similarities, and so forth. These notes will then form the basis of a comparative analysis of these various writing tools, which can then be created and delivered using the student’s preferred medium and mode of composing.
3. News of the World Although we remain critical of how “global village” rhetorics ignore problems of access inequality, we are nevertheless inspired by teachers like Jeff Golub (quoted in Wresch 1991) who used digital networks to engage students in analyzing how news events—like the fall of the Berlin Wall—were experienced and represented in different locations. Continuing this tradition, we suggest teachers might ask students to critically analyze how a contemporary news event has been covered on a range of national and international news and social media sites—looking for differences in what events are covered and how choices of word and image reflect media bias. (In our experience, students almost always find the coverage on BBC to be superior to any of the U. S. outlets.) We also recommend encouraging students to use Twitter advanced search (by hashtag and geographic location) as a way to explore how social media users from outside the United States are responding to the news of the day. At the same time, it’s also important to engage students in questioning how continuing problems of linguistic and technological access necessarily limit their ability to use the web to engage with diverse global perspectives.
4. The Designs, They Are A’Changing Some time has passed since teachers such as Bowman and Endenfeld (2000), Kellen (2002), and Weiler (2003) asked their students to take part in composing for the World Wide Web. A lot has changed, too, in terms of the web’s visual rhetoric and the underlying technology used to both create and deliver web content. Have students become digital media archaeologists by visiting older versions of currently popular websites cached on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Direct them to pay attention to how the site has changed over the years in terms of its graphic design and branding, organization and navigation structure, and how content is presented (i.e., note substantive changes in editorial voice, writing style, or choice of medium). Then, have students characterize those changes. Which ones are aesthetic? Which ones are functional? How do they reflect broader trends in web design and content delivery?
5. Word Crunching Michael LaMonico (1995) showed how quantitative text analysis programs like WordCruncher can help students notice patterns in texts they might otherwise pass over. Although the WordCruncher software still exists, we particularly recommend Voyant as a robust textual analysis tool that’s easy and free to use. In addition to looking for patterns in digitized literary and rhetorical texts they are analyzing, students can also use Voyant in order to gain insight about the most frequent words that appear in their writing. We often find that when students take a look at a word cloud of the most frequent words that appear in their drafts they often can gain new insight into what the true “center of gravity” of their work is and then they can revise accordingly. Re-seeing writing through a word cloud can also work at the level of stylistic editing to point to less meaningful words that are perhaps being used too frequently.
6. Collaboratively Re-mediating Literature Students sometimes find it hard to connect with older literary texts, but they often will become more engaged in critically reading literary works if they have a chance to create digitally re-mediated versions of those texts for real audiences (Patterson 1999; Walton and Bork 2001; House 2007). Using freely available software such as Omeka or Wordpress, students can create a digital version of a literary text that includes both hypertext annotations and other archival objects that can help readers gain a deeper understanding of the contexts in which the text was written. Furthermore, students can create multimodal compositions that engage socio-political themes raised by the literature they are reading—powerfully demonstrating why reading print literature remains timely and relevant for social justice work in the digital era.
7. Composing For a Cause Maureen Connoly and Vicky Giouroukakis (2012) describe a research-based project where students wrote letters to future teachers addressing the topic of cyberbullying and its impact on young people. In that same spirit, you can likewise promote advocacy in your own classroom by creating a similar project that touches on common issues in digital culture. In small teams, have your students research topics such as the fake news phenomenon, issues of digital privacy, activist hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, and issues of technological access. Based on their research, have teams compose five- to ten-minute documentary shorts that not only present an overview of research on the topic, but advocate for some course of action related to the topic (e.g., point the audience to resources for additional information, include contact information for relevant volunteer groups, suggest a list of possible ways to help, argue for policy changes).

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