"In Between Lauding and Deriding: A Pedagogical Review of MySpace." James J. Brown and Lacey Donohue. Currents in Electronic Literacy, Spring 2007.
"It behooves educators to understand how such sites operate, the ways in which our students operate on such sites, and how their interactions and relationships with the site can be incorporated into our teaching."
"Some instructors have expressed concerns about privacy invasion and the potential for blurred lines between student and instructor. If you are aware of these issues, ready to face them, and comfortable with the site, MySpace offers a number of possibilities for the writing classroom."
"If our students enjoy writing on social networking sites, and if a significant portion of their lives are spent creating, commenting on, and 'pimping' profiles, it is in our best interest to begin exploring and re-imagining these spaces as sites of instruction."
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"Computer Conferences and Learning: Authority, Resistance, and Internally Persuasive Discourse." Dec. 1990. College English 52.8: pp 847-869.
"We now notice, for instance, that the traditional forums comprising these classrooms--group discussions, lectures, teacher-student conferences, written assignments--generally support a traditional hegemony in which teachers determine th appropriate an inappropriate discourse. We notice, further, that this political arrangement encourages intellectual accommodation in students, discourages intellectual resistance, and hence may seriously limit students' understanding of, and effective use of, language. As a result, we have begun to recognize the need for non-traditional forums for academic exchange, forums that allow interaction patters disruptive of a teacher-centered hegemony. These forums should encourage students to use language to resist as well as to accommodate and should enable individuals to create internally persuasive discourse, as well as to adopt discourse validated by external authority" (847).
Disruptive behavior is usually related to course material, students' dissatisfactions with it. They don't object to the learning, but the teachers' methodologies.
"We will argue that these computer conferences are powerful, non-traditional learning forums for students not simply because they allow for another oppurtunity for collaboration and dialogue--although this is certainly one of their functions--but also because they encourage students to resist, dissent, and explore the role that controversy and intellectual divergence play in learning and thinking" (849).
"Education, even as it empowers students with new knowledge and the ability to operate successfully within academic discourse communities, also oppress them, dictating a specific set of values and beliefs along with appropriate forms of behavior" (850).
"Thus, we know that using discourse effectively as a social force involves understanding both the values of constancy, or convention, and the value of change, of resistance to convention" (850).
"By encouraging students to resist in academic forums, we recognize and authorize them as members within the educational system, with as much right to initiate change as any of us" (851).
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How is MySpace different from these online conferences??? It's inherently social, involves online identity, blogs???, power is compromised, I'm a user just as they are...
James Paul Gee... the sandbox: allows them freedom of play, they can choose how much, how little, what, to say. How.
If Burke is right, and language is epistemological, then doesn't it serve students in the process of learning to do so in their own language. Learning is moving from what is known to what is unknown (Barbara)... moving from their own language to the language mandated by convention...
At the same time, in response to notions of teaching change..., in light of our responsibility to give them the tools to succeed in a world so governed by conventions, we must provide the rhetorical toolbox necessary for recognizing, analyzing, and reproducing the rules of a particular discourse community... then they can decide when to push boundaries and when to conform.
danah boyd
"It behooves educators to understand how such sites operate, the ways in which our students operate on such sites, and how their interactions and relationships with the site can be incorporated into our teaching."
"Some instructors have expressed concerns about privacy invasion and the potential for blurred lines between student and instructor. If you are aware of these issues, ready to face them, and comfortable with the site, MySpace offers a number of possibilities for the writing classroom."
"If our students enjoy writing on social networking sites, and if a significant portion of their lives are spent creating, commenting on, and 'pimping' profiles, it is in our best interest to begin exploring and re-imagining these spaces as sites of instruction."
__________________________________________________
"Computer Conferences and Learning: Authority, Resistance, and Internally Persuasive Discourse." Dec. 1990. College English 52.8: pp 847-869.
"We now notice, for instance, that the traditional forums comprising these classrooms--group discussions, lectures, teacher-student conferences, written assignments--generally support a traditional hegemony in which teachers determine th appropriate an inappropriate discourse. We notice, further, that this political arrangement encourages intellectual accommodation in students, discourages intellectual resistance, and hence may seriously limit students' understanding of, and effective use of, language. As a result, we have begun to recognize the need for non-traditional forums for academic exchange, forums that allow interaction patters disruptive of a teacher-centered hegemony. These forums should encourage students to use language to resist as well as to accommodate and should enable individuals to create internally persuasive discourse, as well as to adopt discourse validated by external authority" (847).
Disruptive behavior is usually related to course material, students' dissatisfactions with it. They don't object to the learning, but the teachers' methodologies.
"We will argue that these computer conferences are powerful, non-traditional learning forums for students not simply because they allow for another oppurtunity for collaboration and dialogue--although this is certainly one of their functions--but also because they encourage students to resist, dissent, and explore the role that controversy and intellectual divergence play in learning and thinking" (849).
"Education, even as it empowers students with new knowledge and the ability to operate successfully within academic discourse communities, also oppress them, dictating a specific set of values and beliefs along with appropriate forms of behavior" (850).
"Thus, we know that using discourse effectively as a social force involves understanding both the values of constancy, or convention, and the value of change, of resistance to convention" (850).
"By encouraging students to resist in academic forums, we recognize and authorize them as members within the educational system, with as much right to initiate change as any of us" (851).
_____________________________________________
How is MySpace different from these online conferences??? It's inherently social, involves online identity, blogs???, power is compromised, I'm a user just as they are...
James Paul Gee... the sandbox: allows them freedom of play, they can choose how much, how little, what, to say. How.
If Burke is right, and language is epistemological, then doesn't it serve students in the process of learning to do so in their own language. Learning is moving from what is known to what is unknown (Barbara)... moving from their own language to the language mandated by convention...
At the same time, in response to notions of teaching change..., in light of our responsibility to give them the tools to succeed in a world so governed by conventions, we must provide the rhetorical toolbox necessary for recognizing, analyzing, and reproducing the rules of a particular discourse community... then they can decide when to push boundaries and when to conform.
danah boyd
