Teaching and Technology:
A Primer for Instructors Using
The New Humanities Reader
by Barclay
Barrios
Download an
MSWord version of this article
|
|
I. Introduction
|
e.
It used to be the fifth letter of the alphabet. Now it's more. Now,
it's a prefix--one that, when attached to any word, attracts resources
and attention, often in previously unheard of quantities: e-commerce,
e-mail, e-zines, e-banking, e-books, e-Christmas, e-filing taxes,
and, even, e-learning. One could imagine attaching "e"
to just about anything, and the resulting combination would be not
only legible, but quite probably socially laudable as well. Increasingly,
we live in a world where technology is precious cultural capital.
|
| "We
already have the skills that are most needed in the e-world, even
if we don't yet have membership in that world." |
That's all good and well if you have that capital but
what if you don't? The digital divide is multi-dimensional: certainly,
it cuts the haves from the have-nots in terms of who has access to
technology, but it also cuts the knows from the don't-knows in terms
of who can use that technology. How do we as educators acquire this
"e" in order to remain competitive in our own job market?
And, what's more, how do we prepare our students to read this new
world of technology, and to write in it as well?
To start, we should remember that in the end "e" is a symbol,
a code, rooted not just in language but in the alphabet itself (computers,
after all, themselves run on codes and languages). We should also
realize that the web is primarily a web of content (here, we would
do well to recall the motto of the internet "information just
wants to be free"). And we, as teachers, are professional readers
of codes and languages. What's more, we're excellent content producers,
which is vital in this cyber-powered world. This is to say that we
already have the skills that are most needed in the e-world, even
if we don't yet have membership in that world. In this essay, I would
like to suggest some ways to gain entry into the world of technology,
some strategies to turn Expos into e-Xpos. |
| |
II. Using
The New Humanities Reader to Teach Technology |
Perhaps the first set of strategies to
consider are those that don't use technology at all, those that, instead,
use the essays in The New Humanities Reader to teach students what
Cindy Selfe has called "critical technological literacy":
"a reflective awareness of" "the complex set of socially
and culturally situated values, practices, and skills involved in
operating linguistically within the context of electronic environments,
including reading, writing, and communicating" (148). In other
words, the first way to get technology into the classroom is not to
use it, but to think about it. For example, Selfe goes on to offer
an example from Anne Wysocki's class at Michigan Technological University,
in which she gives her students the budget for the department's computer
lab and encourages them to consider the various trade-offs in decisions
about technology.
Many of the essays in The New Humanities Reader open up similar
possibilities, explicitly or implicitly. You might, for example, use
Peter Drucker's "The Age of Social Transformation" to locate
the digital divide very locally. Drucker's seemingly uncrossable line
between blue collar and knowledge workers is, really, the digital
divide itself. If your institution provides little access to computers,
if your students have perhaps never used a computer, Drucker provides
a ground to consider the dynamics of knowledge in today's society.
Students can use Drucker to map the lines of power and influence drawn
by access to and deployment of knowledge, and they can apply these
lessons to their own access (or lack thereof) to technology and the
know how to use it. |
| Who hasn't
seen a "blue screen of death"? Who has never had a computer
crash and lost work and time as a consequence? |
For students who've used computers, a salient essay is Henry Petroski's
"Selections from: To Engineer is Human." Petroski deals
with the role of failure in the process of engineering and, though
he is himself a civil engineer, one of his central examples concerns
technology: the evolutionary development through failure of his son's
Speak and Spell toy. In his essay, the story of this toy is convincing,
advancing his argument about the evolutionary role of failure through
consumer electronics. It would be, I think, fruitful to ask students
about their own experiences with computers. Who hasn't seen a "blue
screen of death"? Who has never had a computer crash and lost
work and time as a consequence? Why is it, then, that operating systems
don't seem to improve from this failure? And why do we tolerate it,
even accept it as inevitable? If Petroski is right that failures lead
to improvements, why doesn't that seem to be the case with computers?
Given that the conventional narrative of technology is progressive
(computers are always faster and better, using computers is empowering
and time saving), Petroski gives student a way to rethink this narrative
even as their experiences with the failures of technology allows them
to question Petroski's valorization of failure.
If your class is particularly digitally savvy, you might want to consider
Mitchell Stephens' "Thinking 'Above the Stream': New Philosophies,"
which examines the emergences of a new kind of literacy (what Stephens
calls the "new video") based on images. Stephens argues
that the decline of the printed word is perhaps not also a sign of
cultural devastation, that, instead, the new video represents new
perspectives for looking at things "above the stream."
Many other essays provide opportunities to bring technology into the
classroom without it actually being there. Alexander Stille's "The
Ganges' Next Life" examines how technology can be balanced with
spirituality in an attempt to save the Ganges River. Michael Pollan
looks at the emergence of biotechnology in agriculture and the ways
in which Monsanto, creators of the biotech New Leaf potato, imagines
itself in terms of computers and software while Ian Wilmut, the scientist
involved in the creation of the cloned sheep Dolly, wades into the
tricky debate around cloning and examines the ethics of human cloning.
In using essays that deal with technology, or in creating a whole
sequence of assignments around the issue, you enable your students
to become better readers of technology, help them to see the issues
at stake in decisions about technology with a critical eye, and ultimately
give them the opportunity to make reasoned decisions on technological
issues. |
| |
|
III. Using Technology to Teach The New Humanities Reader
|
Although computers have been used in the teaching of
writing for at least twenty years, there is yet to emerge, I would
argue, a solidified pedagogy which helps us to incorporate technology
in ways that do not merely recreate classroom activities with keyboards
and monitors instead of pens and paper. At the same time, technology
clearly does present new opportunities to strengthen the work we do
in educating our students. The key seems to be imagining what technology
makes possible for us that would not have been possible (or that would
have been much less possible) before technology.
Certainly, the web, with its vast network of information, presents
such an opportunity. And, even if you yourself are not comfortable
with "surfing the web," you can still incorporate this technology
into your classroom by asking your students to take the lead. For
example, you might ask students to use a search engine like Google
(http://www.google.com) to research an author before you start a new
reading, bringing to class either a summary of what they were able
to learn about the author or a list of relevant websites the class
might want to visit. This practice uses students' generally stronger
technological skills to show the class the place of the reading in
the wider world: it ceases to be twenty pages in a textbook and becomes
instead a piece of information in action in the larger social context.
If you are familiar with web searching and surfing, you can provide
this for the class yourself. What's more, you can make use of the
resources available on The New Humanities Reader website (http://www.newhum.com).
The reader's website has resources for both you and your students,
ranging from sample assignments and classroom practices to self-directed
tutorials and links for all of the readings. The website, moreover,
gives you the opportunity to contribute your own content in the form
of assignments and sequences. This means that the website is not simply
a storage site for static information but is instead the locus of
a community.
You can use the web to create a community for your class as well,
by building for or with the class a simple homepage. The idea of creating
a website is, no doubt, intimidating for some people; however, there
are resources available to make this project both free and relatively
easy. Netscape (http://www.netscape.com),
for example, offers free software called Composer that lets you make
basic webpages in a WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get")
interface. These pages can then be hosted on a free site such as Yahoo's
Geocities (http://geocities.yahoo.com),
or your institution may provide webspace to anyone with an account
on its computer systems. The homepage, certainly, is a way for you
to communicate with your students and share important information
such as the class syllabus or assignments, but it can also serve as
a way to forge classroom community by asking the class to make decisions
on colors or design or by contributing content.
The web allows for communities of teaching as well. The New Humanities
Reader website is one model for forming such a community on a
national scale, but you could also create a more localized community.
Teachers within a program, department, or institution of learning
can come together through a simple website that shares site-specific
assignments, classroom practices, and pedagogical strategies. This
website, too, can be a shared experience: not only can your local
community of teaching share responsibility for maintaining such a
site, but you can get together to build it, in the process sharing
knowledge of, not only teaching, but website construction as well.
One help in creating such a community, particularly across geographical
distances, is email, which can be an asset in your instruction as
well. If you don't have a service such as America On-Line (AOL) or
if your institution does not provide you with an email account, you
might want to consider a free email account offered through services
such as Hotmail (http://www.hotmail.com)
or Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com).
Collecting email addresses from your students and adding them into
an email "address book" provides a quick way to contact
your entire class. You might use this to send them reminders or assignments,
or, I was at one conference where a teacher described the positive
effects on student morale that resulted from her emailing the class
a supportive note each evening. Instructors with more knowledge of
technology, or with more support for technology at their institutions,
may want to ask if listserv's are available. A class listserv acts
as an email discussion list: you can use this to send information
to the entire class without remembering all of their email addresses,
or you can prompt the class to engage in discussion about the issues
of the readings outside of the classroom.
This sense of an extended classroom enabled by technology is possible
with something like a forum as well. Forums are web-based bulletin
board systems that allow for posted discussions so, unlike a listserv
or email list, there's record of what's been said. Forums do require
some technological resources; however, there are many free or inexpensive
forum software packages that run on PHP, a free web-scripting language,
and mySQL, a free database package. One such system (a very robust
and powerful one) is vBulletin (http://www.vbulletin.com)
which costs under $200. Free PHP-based forum systems are also available
at PHP script repositories such as HotScripts (http://www.hotscripts.com)
or the PHP Resource Index (http://php.resourceindex.com).
Free web scripts open up a number of innovative pedagogical opportunities.
For example, you could use a free script written in PERL, another
web programming language, to create a class collaborative paper. Cliff's
Never Ending Story Script (http://www.shavenferret.com/scripts/)
is one such script. You could provide a sample argument and then ask
the class to construct the paper collaboratively, with one student
writing the introduction and then students taking turns writing body
paragraphs. This collaborative model of paper writing not only further
builds class community but also enables group learning.
So far, I have tried to focus on the technologies most readily available.
Even if you don't have a computer yourself, for example, you might
be able to use a library computer to check a Hotmail account. However,
if your institution has a computer lab available for classes, then
multiple new opportunities are available. This computer classroom
could be used for web-enrichment of the essay by looking at web pages
connected to the issue, but it can also be used for in-class drafting,
which lets students leave the classroom not only with ideas for their
paper, but with an actual file that contains the start of a draft.
Depending on what software is available in such a computer classroom,
you can also introduce your students to the possibilities of new media.
Consider, for example, asking them to use a graphics program such
as Photoshop to create a visual argument. Moving argumentation into
the visual underscores the ways in which images carry information;
moreover, switching registers from the written to the visual can provide
new perspectives for your students. Visual arguments challenge students
to manipulate images in ways which clearly convey intended meaning,
and can introduce students to the complexities of visual communication. |
| |
| IV. Conclusion |
There seems to be, always I think, some sense of the inevitable
with technology, a sense closely tied to evolutionary, progressive,
and teleological narratives. We would do well to challenge these narratives
themselves, to question the goals and functions of technological progress.
However, to be sure, rejecting technology does little to question
its ideological hold. I am reminded of Donna Haraway's classic call
to feminists in "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and
Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." One of Haraway's
main goals is for feminists not to reject technology out of hand,
to come to understand instead the ways in which systems of oppression
(what Haraway terms the "informatics of domination") begin
to be encoded in technology. Haraway's solution is the cyborg: a monster
in some respects that adapts and absorbs, accepts and rejects, with
one simple goal in mind-survival. We would do well to heed Haraway's
call as well, to realize that however we feel about technology personally
it's an issue that cannot be dismissed, only dealt with.
We can deal with that issue in any number of ways, but surely one
of the most potent methods is to confront technology head-on in our
teaching and in our classrooms. That doesn't necessarily mean we need
to embrace technology, but it does mean we need to learn how to read
it, and how to deploy it in humane ways. The New Humanities Reader
provides one avenue for such a confrontation, through the discussions
of readings to the ways we choose to enact our pedagogy around technology.
I hope I've given you some ideas on how you yourself can enter into
technology, ways to turn e from a scarlet
letter into a tool of learning. |
| |
Works
Cited
Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and
Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians,
Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. 149-181. New York; Routledge,
1991.
Miller, Richard E. and Kurt Spellmeyer. The New Humanities Reader.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001.
Selfe, Cynthia. Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century:
The Importance of Paying Attention. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
UP, 1999. |
|
