Belated: Arola's Piece

"...just because technology is seamlessly woven into their lives does no mean they are technologically savvy." ~Arola

In response to that, I think:

Um, Word.

True 'dat.

I'm case in point and from my limited experiences, my students also feel ill-equipped to use technology, at least in educational settings and for educational purposes. Though to remedy or rectify this situation, there is no other way to combat this, to rectify this problem than to encourage "playing" with multmodality and digital media. Because clearly, technology is here to say and digital media and multimodalities will only continue to grow ever more complex and varied.

One of the points that this piece made, that I need to take heed of, is in the limiting factors when using templates. As a technologically stubborn person, I can understand that there is a downside to templates. Too often when using templates I over-rely on them; they're certainly a crutch for me. It makes sense that they would limit creativity and innovation on a larger scale. I found the examples of facebook compared to myspace an illustrative, and it's all the more reason to get out of my comfort zone to expand ideas of form beyond templates.

From Dr. RM's class, I had read a piece about "contact zones" (Bruce Pratt) in relation to Indigenous classrooms and Decolonial pedagogy, so it was interesting to reflect on this premise from a linguistic and how it pertains to interface, and the digital realm. Too often I think of linguistic matters and contact zones, pertaining to social interactions, forgetting that technology does not limit all social engagements. On the contrary, they can also promote them. And not just related to social media and playing, but in terms of academics as well.

One Instructor confronts her digital technological e-Fears...

I appreciate Selfe's position in the piece, "Tackling a Fundamental Problem" that people must come first, then pedagogies ought to be emphasized, followed by technologies. As someone who fears technology because of the potential distance and separation that it creates between people socially, relationally and in terms of face to face interactions, I applaud Selfe's emphasis on considering prioritizing people and considering their relationships to technology, rather than idolizing technology. I think because there is danger in separating the two or seeing them in total opposition, which I think happens (perhaps not in terms of scholarly work but when technology is implemented without critical or careful regard for its affordances and limitations). I fear when working with computers, or incorporating technology, and/or using digital media is done in uncritical ways, as academic institutions may run the risk of, while emphasizing technologies, also limiting a human approach or personalized factors. I appreciate that Selfe poses an idea that would not make the two cease to be diametrically opposed or forever at odds, in my mind, and hopefully also in practice. Similarly, Brooks, Lindgreen and Warner helps us readers to see that the focus ought to be on people first, then agency or outcomes of social change (with the aid of digital technologies?). However, these areas do not (have to) exist in a totally separate realm from one another. Perhaps this is one area that we may further bridge (one area of) this digital divide.

I found Sirc's metaphor thought-provoking that instructors may serve as a guide for students, while composition classrooms may be representative of a museum. While idealistically, I appreciate this concept, in practice, I also experience familiar jitters, especially when I'm reminded of how ill-equipped I feel to handle technology myself, much less serve as a guide my students in their tour of the museum of digital compositions. Undoubtedly this is the reason why Selfe stresses the need for teachers to "have opportunities to learn, explore, evaluate, re-try" so that we may become more well trained and comfortable with such technologies. Indeed, I need to, for myself personally and professionally, as well as an composition instructor, to "identify a sustainable system of support for such projects." I must drawn from, the resources that are available, listen to the collective experiences, consider the stakeholders and pay attention to success and failure stories surrounding digital technologies and digital literacies.

Furthermore, Bjork and Schwartz put forth some wonderfully thought provoking concepts in their "paradigm for mobile composition." Truly, rhetorical activity does exist, and knowledge and meaning making happens, and writing occurs, many times, perhaps more often, outside of academic spaces. Writing is no longer isolated to tradition classroom spaces (was it ever?), but especially now with the advent of new technology, mobile devices, laptops, WIFI, apps on smart phones, etc. Wireless networks do "redefine the classroom" and allow for "student-student collaboration" and reconfigure composition instruction and interactions. Rather than seeing in class writing and meaning making and out of class writing and meaning making as entirely separate realms, we need to visualize them as both important works that we, as scholars and educators, and our students actively, daily, engage in.

I do see how incorporating mobile assignments could further help to destabilize the dichotomy of digital or traditional, and open up possibilities for hybrid classrooms to emerge, and flourish. Now, to make the plunge or jump into the deep end. Eeep!

Alexander & Rhodes

In the last few chapters of On Multimodality: New Media in Composition Studies, Alexander and Rhodes provided two examples of bringing technology into the classroom, and examples of how to use it as critical pedagogy. One example they provided was in not only playing a video game, but in recognizing the technological literacies that students must possess in order to master them effectively. The other example offered a critical pedagogy that investigated how technology influenced the Virginia Tech shootings and how Cho used technology to more quickly disseminate information, compared to when the Columbine shootings took place.

I appreciate the need to understand and respect multiple technology literacies that our students (may) have. However, at the same time, I also think that we need to be leery of assuming that any and all students have those literacies and abilities. I know that many do, and many possess the capacity for learning them, even if they don't have much experience in it. Still, I think that there is an inherent danger in assuming that any student would flourish when met with a multimodal assignment or in using various digital programs to construct a composition text assignment. For this reason I appreciated how Alexander and Rhodes emphasized the need to teach students how to work with these programs, highlighting that instructors need to teach both critical selection and rhetorical effectiveness when constructing digital texts.

Though I appreciated the efforts Alexander and Rhodes made in providing the examples of social media surrounding Cho and his attach on Virginia Tech, I find myself a bit hesitant to know how exactly it constitutes critical pedagogy. Furthermore, I'm unsure how I could proceed in constructing my own form of critical pedagogy that used technology or investigated social media, etc. It still seems rather nebulous to me what they did, why it was critical pedagogy and how I could design something similar for my composition course.

To end, though I still have many insecurities, fears and hesitancy about using technology within my own composition classroom, mostly because of my own inabilities, I recognize the benefits that multimedia, technology and multimodality have in the composition classroom. Furthermore, I appreciate these authors' critical stance on the issue, acknowledging and warning against techno-illusionism.