TEACHING HISTORY:
On Teaching with Technology
Technology, both in the sense of computing applications and multi-modal literacies, has consistently been an important aspect of my pedagogical itinerary. As an instructor, I have always tried to support student use and classroom integration of a variety of multimedia technologies. Student projects have included Power Point presentations, web pages, video commercials, advertising mock-ups, in addition to a variety of styles and genres of documents produced through desktop publishing technologies. My students and I find incorporating technology into our course projects extremely rewarding. It allows us to consider rhetorical and design choices across a variety of media and rhetorical situations.
As a means of exploring new applications and contexts of engagment with technology and the classroom, I developed a service learning project with Leonard Center and the Lionshare development team at Penn State. Lionshare is a Peer-2-Peer file sharing application that incorporates authentification procedures in order to allow secure sharing amongst scholars, institutions, and information archives. Over the course of two semesters, my technical writing students studied the usability of the Lionshare application. First, we studied usability principles and theory; then, we applied these techniques by running a usability study or trial. Each student produced a usability analysis based on this data. Findings were shared and posted on a course wiki site (user-editable web page). Certainly, this service learning project provided a "real-world" context for a critical investigation of technology and computing applications. Students carried out these projects across several different rhetorical and technological contexts. Furthermore, these projects allowed us to explore collaborative writing tactics across various stages of development: invention, study, analysis, writing, and revision.
However, it eventually became clear to me that the wiki was itself an extremely powerful tool for the kind of situated, collaborative, multi-valenced engagement with technology that I wanted to model for my students. Wikis have been a part of my teaching practices since the spring of 2005. My wiki course sites have evolved considerably in that time. In my current technical writing course, the wiki provides a quick and flexible means of collaborative exchange during inventional stages for writing projects. The wiki helps develop a sense of community and becomes a shared environment and convenient platform for sharing multimedia projects, just-in-time information, and relevant links. Through the wiki, my courses are able to model and scaffold skills like adaptability to new digital environments and to introduce collaborative learning/writing contexts. It has helped me foreground in my courses the rhetorical, critical, and functional literacies necessary for working in emerging contexts of the technological future.
Recent courses in advanced technical writing have utilized the wiki as a place for students to collectively gather and assemble the materials for their own unique e-portfolios. At the beginning of the semester, students write job applications and collaborate on an editing workshop for design, editing, and style issues. Next, a series of technical writing assignments allows us to learn principles of design, usability, effective technical writing, and to produce professional quality technical writing examples for our e-portfolios. Finally, in the capstone assignment all the materials we produced in previous assignments are repurposed as the barebones content for the e-portfolio. At this stage, the wiki becomes a collecting point for shared tutorials, references, FAQs, web resources, design strategies, etc. Additionally, options for completing the web site are scalable to student capacities: use a wiki, adapt a template, design from scratch. At the end of the assignment, we run a usability test on each other's web sites as a final quality control check. Ultimately, the course allows each student to produce a professionally designed and edited e-portfolio over the course of a single semester by leveraging collaborative writing and design processes of the entire course community.
My current business communications courses include a collaborative assignment in which students produce lessons or instruction modules on issues relevant to business communicators. These modules are delivered in written and multimedia formats including power-point, podcast, and screencast presentations. Students also gain a service learning experience insofar as the assignment is geared towards developing e-learning materials for the benefit of their peers and future students. I am increasingly committed to incorporating user-generated content and crowd-sourcing techniques into my course designs. Ultimately, I envision my classroom as a laboratory for testing the pedagogical models, open source production principles, and distributed learning techniques of tomorrow.