MnCUEW, HO!

A group of my colleagues and I submitted a panel proposal to the Minnesota Colleges and Universities English and Writing (MnCUEW) conference at the end of February. We were informed that all the panel positions were filled, but just a few days ago we received e-mails informing us of the time our panel was to present. Yikes! While I regret that I have little time to prepare—the conference is in one week—I am thankful that I already know my topic quite well due to this class and this blog. After all, the panel is called “The Multimodal Classroom: Old Lesson Plans in New Ways.”

I will be presenting about my incorporation of texting and Twitter in my composition classroom. There being five of us in the panel, I will only have about ten minutes; so the piece will be succinct and svelte. I haven’t finessed all the details yet, but most of them will come from my blogging and my classroom experiences with the lessons. Basically, I will briefly explain my justifications, my goals, the lesson itself, and then share some of the results.

Having never presented at a conference, I have to say I am quite anxious. While I am relatively at ease speaking in front of a crowd, I do get antsy when it comes to big "to-do’s.” From my understanding, conference presentations can sometimes have only a handful—or less—audience members; but despite any unease on my part, I hope we get a good turnout: I’d love to make a grand entrance into the spotlight of discourse in my discipline.

On an unrelated note, today I found the perfect segue for my thesis paper. One of my favorite machinimator’s blogs held the key to linking machinima as a medium to machinima as a rhetorical tool. The journal length paper I wrote for Dr. Moberly’s rhetoric class last fall was heading towards that direction, but I hadn’t found a great way to show the art medium as rhetorical vehicle until this morning. Olibith—the machinimator whose blog I read, coincidentally also referenced in my paper—discussed in his blog how WoW game developers incorporated a character from one of his films into their game. Exciting!

This is exactly the evidence I was looking for to start analyzing machinima as a rhetorical interaction between players of the game and the game makers. It is proof, small as it may be, supporting the position that consumers are also producers (Baudrillard’s System of Objects).

Twitter in Retrospect

Friday I used Twitter in my freshman composition class. The results were surprising. Being that my class is at 3:00 p.m., and it was the day before spring break, I figured my students might enjoy something a bit out of the ordinary. I gave them a brief background on Twitter and had them watch the short introductory movie on the website. Three of my eighteen attending students had heard of Twitter; of those three, none had used it.

My assignment was quite simple: use the constrictions of Twitter to craft a thesis (or research question, topic idea) for the up coming argumentative essay. The class had been working on brainstorming their topics, heuristic questions, etc. for several days and had a loose idea on what they’d be writing about. (I gave them the freedom to choose what they wanted to argue, but maintained veto power over certain fruitless topics).

I emphasized the attention to word choice, the exercise’s arbitrary (arbitrary when writing an actual thesis) character count, and the need for preciseness in a thesis. After ten minutes of working, I asked some students to put their thesis on the doc cam and walk us through why they stated the thesis the way they did – if they found the task difficult, if they had to change some words to fit the count, if they were comfortable with that thesis.

One student had a thesis that was half the character-limit. The class decided hers was overly broad and not precise: she should have spent more characters clarifying and focusing. Another student had to change the word “enthusiasm” to “work” in his thesis: the class talked about the word choice, the reasons for such a drastic change, and possible alternatives. Of those that presented, a majority of them found the task difficult to manage (those who didn’t fell quite short of the limit and their theses were unfocused).

Overall, the exercise was a bit rough. I wish I had done a lot more with it, but the students seemed extremely apathetic (probably because spring break was nigh), which made me despondent. Perhaps my expectations were overly high, but I was taken aback by how few of the class knew about the microblogging tool; given the statistics, a number more should have at least heard of it. I think, however, that with more polish and experience, the exercise could be even more productive. A look at some of the TwitLit created with the application, checking out a famous person’s feed, or more time spent discussing the application before jumping into working with it may help.

If you’ve used Twitter in your classroom (composition or other; successfully or unsuccessfully), let me know.