Final Reflection

One of the points made early in this course was the distinction between being a consumer versus a producer of digital texts. Surprisingly (?), this is something I hadn't thought a lot about. I was thinking about the strange position many teachers find themselves in, where they are supposed to "bring" technology to their teaching (of the vague verb in a moment), yet the students are more tech-savvy than them. Tom pointed out the aforementioned distinction, that students may readily consume digital technology but rarely produce it. I think when a lot of people say that teachers should bring technology to the classroom, they're not quite sure what should be brought--maybe the teacher fires up the Smart Board now and again and ventures with his or her class into the computer room (or wheels in the cart of miniature laptops). Just throw it in there somehow.

What is clear to me now is that a teacher should do all three of the following:

1) produce digital texts (himself or herself), not just use (or even utilize) technology in some generic way (i.e. projecting typed notes from a lap-top, or having assignments posted on a class web-site--though both are effective practices).
2) have the students produce digital texts.
3) discuss technology.

Regarding the last one, part of this could be based on selections from (reading-level appropriate) commentators. (The Boyd piece about white flight, I think, would be an engaging example). But the discussion should start with what students think about their experience of producing the digital texts in that class.

Which brings me to what I thought about producing digital texts (in a roundabout way). When I started this class, I was not much of a producer of digital texts. My only real foray that I can think of was last year I started creating amusing power-point presentations to provide background and review for the Oedipus plays, which I was assigned to teach at the last minute, and which many students found dry and confusing. I then had students create slides on paper, because it seemed like too big of a hassle to have them create actual slides, which still contained pertinent content but was stripped of what made the format (relatively) compelling when I used it.

Not only wasn't I much of a producer, I wasn't even much of a consumer in the digital world. I have a low-level anxiety about how I spend my consuming leisure time--I don't ever sweat the time I spend with people (which brings up what counts as spending time "with" people--do you have to share the same physical space? ). I think this stems from a desire to improve my reading and writing (amplified by the fact that I am very slow at both, so if I don't allocate a lot of my available time for them, I feel like I'll never get anything read or written. So if I "goof" around on the internet or watch a tv show or sporting event I feel like I've squandered precious time. (Regarding the time as "precious" admittedly strikes me as being at least--probably more obnoxious than it is true). I realize it's not entirely logical. For example, I will listen to music for an hour, say. How is that more worthily spent time than watching a tv show, which to me feels frivolous (as an experience not a claim). How is watching a movie more substantial than navigating the internet? And somehow, time late at night seems more "wasteable" to me, even though that's probably the opposite of how it should be.

So I can't claim for simplicity's sake that I suddenly became aware during this course of how arbitrary and self-justifying my decisions are. However, over the past month, I have reexamined many assumptions about what's deeper or better or more substantial. And, in a similar vein, I think, I've dispensed corrected an all-or-nothing style of thinking about the digital world. For example, digitally robust texts still benefit from "old-fashioned" restraint. It's not the snazzier the better. And in a way, text can be more privileged in a setting in which it is granted prominence among other elements (even if temporarily), as opposed to having prominence by lack of anything else around.

My uninformed dismissal of Wikipedia is another example of re-examined assumptions. I don't think you can go there expecting more than an encyclopedia (albeit a compelling one), and I think that encyclopedic-styled "information" is probably given too much weigh by many. But that's a different problem.

Perhaps the fundamental reason I've steered on the periphery of the digital world is that it seemed too overwhelming to me. The "text" world is overwhelming enough. As I discovered, first in Weinberger, the web can be navigated with much more control than I thought through tagging. In practice, I'm just beginning to set up a stream into my Google reader, just beginning to see the degree to which tools like stumbleupon can increase the ration of finding versus looking for stuff that I'd want to see. The fact that I can in principle be a filter is one thing; the idea of me being an effective filter is truly exciting. When I said I felt conflicted about "goofing" around on the internet, a lot of that judgment is on me--not knowing what the hell I'm doing--not the internet.

By the way, my confusion about the efficacy of tagging in the case of my youtube video was resolved: a friend suggested that it might take youtube a day or so to enact the tags; the next day I punched in Xuan Bell and my video came up. The tagging world had briefly seemed suspect--if I couldn't track down a video of possibly the only person in the world with that name, and it was a video that I put there (with idiosyncratic nicknames tagged in for good measure), how the hell could I find anything?

The notion that knowledge explored through the web is increasingly socially-constructed is a powerful idea to me, still percolating... The laptop I am borrowing, however, might start melting if I don't wrap this up.

So, finally, I intend to use prezis and worldles for sure in my classroom--and have my students do them too--and I already used a jing, and am going to show a few things to my brother via jing. (It came in handy for my final project too. Speaking of which, I may use windows movie maker too, just not spend 175 hours preparing a video about the oracle at Delphi.) I gained a lot of confidence in using online tutorials to work my way through troubles and questions, most recently for cutting and manipulating (very basically) two tracks on audacity. I felt more self-sufficient by asking the computer for help than asking a living, breathing person (which I would still do in a heartbeat if one was around--but they often aren't).

I tried to make a point of breaking up my blog posts with images and links, and so it's maybe ironic that for this parting one I have nary an image and but one measly link, but here it is.