iLearn: Good for Students or Teachers?

I have used iLearn a few times during my time as a graduate student at SFSU, and I can't say that I am head over heals for the program. First of all, it is very time consuming and often feels like I have taken on another class, and posting always feels like a chore rather than a desired learning experience. On the other hand, I think it can be useful as a way to encourage students to prepare for discussions that will take place in the classroom. Requiring students to post insures that they have to read the class materials in order to make an informed posting on the iLearn discussion forum and, thus, they will be better prepared to participate in class. In this way, iLearn can be a very useful pedagogical tool for teachers because they can make sure that students are doing the readings. In addition, teachers can use student postings to facilitate in-class discussions and formulate participation grades.

iLearn might provide some very useful pedagogical strategies for teachers, but does it actually provide students with a good learning experience? In my experience as a student, I would have to say no. The only thing I really like about iLearn is that I can access the class syllabus and links to the articles we are reading in class all in one convenient space. However, I think iLearn too often becomes a kind of big brother site where teachers can monitor and evaluate student work rather than a site where students can organically interact with each other and the course material. As a graduate student, I always felt a little resentful that certain teachers did not trust their graduate students to come to class prepared, and my experience as a T.A. for a lower division literature course taught me that most undergraduate students feel the same way. Forced participation on iLearn in college often makes students feel like they are back in high school where they were treated as children who need to be monitored rather than adults who are in school because they want to be. For these reasons, I agree with both Kotkamp and Coopman's point that iLearn and promotes hierarchy among students and teachers rather than breaking down traditional power relationships in the classroom. I think iLearn might have potential as a pedagogical tool but it fails to allow students to take charge of their own learning space. If we are going to use digital learning spaces in the classroom, we need to create ones where students take part as active produces and monitors of the sites, so student learning is privileged over pedagogical usefulness.

RSS in the English classroom

RSS would be useful in an college english composition classroom if it could be used to encourage students to engage with larger social issues, evoke critical thinking, and participate in some sort of writing process (this writing process could be multi-textual). One way to do this would be to have students, individually or in groups, create their own blogs dedicated to an issue that is relevant to their lives and related to larger social concerns. They would subscribe to various blogs and other relevant sites that pertain to their specific issue. They should also engage in traditional library and academic journal research and create links to, or at least mention, their sources on their own blog. Their blog should contain the historical background of their particular issue, various perspectives, and even the students own stance on the issue. Their blog should include in depth written analysis as well as relevant photos, videos, and interviews. The students could even interview fellow classmates, family members, and anyone else they could think of. They also could be actively involved in conversations concerning their issue with the other blogs to which they subscribe. They could even have a section in their blog where they discuss how their particular issue has been dealt with in novels.

In a literature classroom, this project could be tweaked so that the blog the students create focuses around a specific novel, literary movement, literary theory, or controversy in literary studies (e.g. the canon). This might look something like the assignment Ned proposed on his blog.

Power to the people??

Power to the people??

A major theme I noticed running through both the readings for last week as well as the Bruns and Jacobs introduction for today is the idea that creating and participating in new technologies will transform the typical passive consumer/audience into an active producer (or produser, as Bruns and Jacobs suggest ). The implication seems to be that the average person should be able to gain social and political power by expressing/publishing their opinions on the web, by creating new social and political spaces, and by creating/designing technologies that will offer new perspectives. I agree that this kind of active participation is different than a passive acceptance of already available, static programs/technologies because we are creating our own spaces, communities, perspectives, and technologies instead of conforming to the status quo. But are we challenging or are we just conforming, once again, to changes in our society that will soon become the status quo?

I am not offering a dystopian view of technology here or suggesting that we should somehow resist new technologies. That would be unrealistic and naive. Obviously, we must evolve with our ever changing technological environment or be left behind, but as Bass and Rosenzweig point out in "Rewiring the History and Social Science Classroom," we must participate critically and without a blind acceptance to all new technologies. Some new technologies may actually produce citizens that are even more passive than before, plugging in and following directions without critically engaging with or questioning the new material. Thus, participating in new technologies does not automatically make us producers rather than consumers; rather, it is our method of engagement that results in the transformation.

Finally, I cannot help but be a little wary in terms of the actual power we can gain from participations in new technology. What kind of power will we actually gain (political, social, personal?) and what are the limits of this power when it comes to making concrete changes in our society? I guess I have my doubts that news blogs and the like (as Bruns and Jacobs seem to suggest) will ever actually replace mass media, "which produce[s] a vision of society for us to consume to relatively passive audiences" (8). Yes, we can produce our own visions of society on blogs and other web spaces, but can our visions ever actually replace or effectively challenge the more powerful vision produced by the mass media?

An interesting book that deals with some of these themes and issues is Adam J. Banks' Race, Rhetoric, and Technology.