Online Pedagogy and Student Privacy
I find myself strongly affected by Josh Honn’s blog post this morning, and would encourage you all to read it. (He’s also on Twitter if you want to say hi: @joshhonn.) I set up this course with a default expectation of public engagement–and not just with your final digital thesis projects, but along the way, too, with a publicly-accessible/Google-indexed eportfolio, with biographies and other student-generated content on this site, with our digital reading journals, with Google Docs of my lesson plans that I know other scholars are having a look at as we progress (not in the least because I posted links on Twitter, and interacted with the authors we are reading in that fashion).
We should probably have a brief discussion on Tuesday about privacy, and what guidelines this class should have going forward. I think that public engagement is a critical part of research and scholarship, and I think that too much of what happens in the academy is classist and kept separate, so my default is visibility, visibility, and more visibility. But I may have accidentally trampled on your own thoughts and feelings about that as students. So in the meantime, let’s keep doing our work as planned–but let’s also check in at our next meeting, and make some decisions as a group.
Tech & Research: I get complacent/don’t go far enough
When I asked everyone to blog about the ways they’re already using technology to conduct research, I didn’t realize that it would reveal some of my own character flaws to me! Now, when it comes to my doctoral research, I like to think I’m quite thorough and comprehensive in my use of digital research tools. I’m the Google Scholar Queen, I keep my dissertation organized through the use of project management software, Zotero is my go-to for bibliographic completeness and accuracy. I know how to use a boatload of databases, and I’ve managed to even bring tech into the archive, photographing and religiously documenting the primary sources I’m commenting on in my dissertation project. I have enough tech in my own research that I get self-righteously frustrated with academics who don’t use technologies to their fullest–when a library puts out a ridiculously incomplete digital finding aid for an archive, for example, or when a member of my dissertation group confesses that she’s still keeping her dissertation bibliography in one massive Word file. And finally, I’m teaching this class, so I’m thinking about digital research practices pretty much every day–I’m choosing what I want to share with you all, and thinking through how to explain what I do choose to share.
But outside of my research life, I don’t actually think I use technology particularly well. I feel like the research I do is indulgent, and only serves my baser interests. I’ll delve deep into Facebook and spend hours searching to figure out what happened to a friend from elementary school, or I’ll find and download a 30-gigabyte torrent of every episode of Road to Avonlea (I watched the entire run, seven seasons, over January break. People, it is not that good of a show!), or I’ll turn on my tablet and open up the Seamless app to order the exact same food from the exact same neighborhood restaurant for the third time this month. I once spent an entire Sunday morning reading up on the history of the song “Indian Reservation.” In a lot of ways, I think the “research” I do with tech in my personal life is all about gratification. That’s what I get for assigning this question–a harsh look at my own moments of sloth!
Resources for Week #1: (Literary) Texts Are Objects We Can Manipulate
- Updated syllabus [PDF]
- Lindsey’s open planning Google Doc. Feel free to add comments or take notes directly on this throughout the session. We will use a collaborative Google Doc each week.
Literary Sources
- Aimee Bender, “The Rememberer” [PDF] [RapGenius]
- Jackson Mac Low:
- Poets.org on Oulipo
- Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project
- Paul La Farge, “Luminous Airplanes”
- Raymond Queneau, “A Story As You Like It”
- T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” [annotated]
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