This lesson plan is an easy one to conduct: let your students play with the PlayStation 4 VR suite from the DWRL, and then encourage them to talk about the experience! Sounds simple, right? It is! But the scholarship the lesson produces is anything BUT simple. Interacting with this lesson allows students to engage with many areas of scholarship. Examples include: The following lesson plan uses Isbister’s book as an example. This lesson challenges students to experience something new (Virtual …
Lesson Plan: Digital Reproduction
In 1935 Walter Benjamin wrote, “Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes.” This assignment musses with his assertion by creating a digital, “academic,” work of art. It asks students to produce an audio recording of his article “The Work of …
Lesson Plan: Wearable Tech and Metadata
These modules introduce the importance of ‘metadata’ to undergraduate students. They create a necessary link between metadata and contemporary ‘Wearable Tech’. Understanding how metadata is created and used helps students realize the ramifications of its existence, including its influence on the process of digital writing. Learning Objectives One class period, but the lesson is modulated to fit into already existing lessons as the instructor wishes The articles listed, the link to Project ‘Seen’, a computer and smartphone None The lesson …
Cool Tools: The Rhetorical Methods Twine Game
Following the success of last year’s Twine research group, we in the DWRL wanted to take a step toward making Twine an integral part of the classroom. So during the break I set myself a goal: I wanted to write a completely new kind of Twine game. The resulting text, a Rhetorical Methods game, helps students to take a page and a half of notes regarding the issue, event, or other controversy that they choose to write about in the Rhetoric …
Twine: The Meta Game
Team Twine was busy in the spring. Kendall, Lily, and I have been hard at work making some wonderful stuff for the DWRL. To help us along, we’ve read books and articles, held meetings and brainstorming sessions, developed our own materials and shared them with each other, facilitated Game Jams for others, and even made our own games. But since the busy semester is coming to a close, I want this post to be simple. For this post, I just …
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Twine Games: The Digital Author
In this way is revealed the whole being of writing: a text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation; but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but the reader. Roland Barthes—The Death of the Author It was 1967 when Roland Barthes first pronounced the death of the author. It was …
Lesson Plan: Using Twitter for Research
Last semester I worked with the DWRL, as well as undergraduate students Chioma Nwosu, Eliza Marks, Kayla Marks, and Jazmyn Griffin, to develop a short podcast describing the research value of Twitter. It centered on searching Twitter for quotes by using the hashtag function, and covered some of the issues that emerge when searching for controversial topics. To start off this semester, I’ve bundled the pod with a lesson plan meant to help instructors talk about Twitter’s academic virtues!
The Faith of Hashtags
You hit your name and maybe something in the whole scheme of the system gives a death rattle. For now your name is over their name, over the subway manufacturer, the Transit Authority, the city administration. Your presence is on their presence, your alias hangs over their scene. There is a pleasurable sense of depth to the elusiveness of the meaning. Norman Mailer, The Faith of Graffiti In 1974 Norman Mailer put words to Jon Naar’s photos depicting what some …
The ‘Fantasy’ of Participation
There’s an article that I love, because it analyzes a growing trend regarding people and their relationships with technology. Titled, Communication in online fan communities: The ethics of intimate strangers, author Christine James analyzes relationships between celebrities and paparazzi, celebrities and fans, and fans among themselves. James wants to know why they seem so strange. The answer is simple—tech love is embedded in each, it’s mediating our relationships. Donna Haraway was right, James asserts, about ‘the current state of the …
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