Teaching Tech-Rich in a Tech-Bound World

This semester, I'm teaching in Olscamp 207, a computer lab. All the computers are rather large, enabling students to hide behind them if they choose. The computers are in rows with aisles only on the sides, making it difficult for me to walk around the room without climbing over students. Furthermore, All the computers face the front of the room, making discussions entirely student-teacher, rather than preferred student-student. It's hard for all of us to see each other, especially for students to see other students, since they're sitting down. So I believe that in physical ways, my classroom is technology-bound. Not ill-equipped, by any means. I'm enjoying using the technology available in the lab. But when it comes time for F2F discussions, it is difficult.

I have another past experience--much worse--where I had to teach in an ill-equipped lab. It was at Perrysburg HS, and I had planned a great lesson where students would go to the lab and work on projects. However, I (the naive student teacher) had reserved the lab that everyone else knew was "the one that doesn't work." For some unknown reason, the fabulous-looking brand-new lab computers often would unexpectedly crash, usually around 6th period. There was officially supposed to be a technical consultant in the building, but they only had enough money to hire one person to serve all the computers in the district. It was incredibly frustrating to both me and the students, but all everyone else would say was "well, why did you reserve that lab?" It was definitely an ill-equipped lab, under the guise of looking high-tech.

No matter where I am, I try to teach tech-rich, but am often derailed...ah, technology.

--eliz25

Technology Politics

A way to characterize several of this week’s readings is to say that technology is weapon of wielding power—it can provide us with power to support the status quo (as Selber’s definition of traditional computer literacy does), as well as a space in which to subvert that power (as several of Hess’s faculty web pages attempt). In general, technology on its own is most often decontextualized and considered as a combination of individual parts—which fits with what most universities consider as being “computer literacy.” Selber’s complaint is accurate—that most considerations of computer literacy do not think of it broadly, among a wide variety of perspectives (14). Such is the problem in Hess’s study, that faculty members are resistant to what Hess names as inevitable—the requirement of specific sections and information to a faculty web page—similar to the decontextualized fallacy of traditional computer literacy, university-mandated faculty pages erase individual identity and create pages that are no more than a series of individual parts. Two years ago, I redesigned the MA-Literature program website at BGSU (see it here) and created exactly that type of faculty web page—each based on a DreamWeaver template, filling in each box of the (invisible) table with the required information. What kind of identity does this type of page offer? On a different note, how is self-created identity (that which Hess studies) any more “authentic” or even “computer-literate” than the faculty pages I created? Certainly, in the pages Hess studies, several faculty structure their web pages as sites (literally) of resistance, but that is only one rhetorical option of many. I could go on, and may return to this idea, but will close with Selber’s comment that technology won’t solve our problems or create change—that possibility is situated only in social forces (8). Therefore, technology isn’t powerful in itself, but it is only powerful within a social context. By changing that social context, as Selber says and Hess hints at, we can change and reimagine computer literacy.

--eliz25

Welcome to my Adventures...

Greetings and welcome to my blog about the ever-exciting ups and downs of life as a Ph.D. student. This is guaranteed to be interesting...

-eliz25