Colloquium Roundtable: Objectifying Technology in the Classroom
Please contact facilitator Jim Brown at jimbrown@mail.utexas.edu if you have quesitons about or are planning to attend this roundtable.
The CWRL classroom is a peculiar place for a class about technology. There are a number of questions that arise for any instructor in the CWRL: Do we think enough about how these computers, scanners, and software tools inform our teaching practices? Do we run the risk of letting this technology melt into the background? This roundtable discussion will take on questions about objectifying technology. The term objectify tends to be pejorative. In fact, in discussing the title for this roundtable discussion, there was disagreement about the appropriateness of the term. Do we objectify technology in the CWRL, or is it more of an intricate balance between practice and reflexivity? We hope the title of this discussion can be a jumping off point for an exchange about the complicated relationship CWRL instructors have with technology.
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The three instructors leading the roundtable discussion all deal explicitly with technology in their classes. Mariela Gunn’s “Computers and Writing”, Doug Freeman’s “TechRhet: The Rhetoric of Technology”, and Jim Brown’s “Arguing the Digital Divide” all make technology part of their course content. One could argue that the questions we’ve raised become magnified when technology is the topic of your course. Is it easier or harder to talk about technology in these classes?
We envision this roundtable as a way for instructors to talk about strategies and theoretical underpinnings of CWRL classes. Those interested in using technology in their classes or making technology a central theme of their course may find this discussion especially helpful, but we also believe this discussion will be broad enough for any CWRL instructor to find it useful and interesting.
This is the first of a four-part series about the CWRL Colloquium. The colloquium will take place on November 5 in the Eastwoods Room of the Texas Union. Upcoming spotlights will describe each of the colloquium roundtable discussions.
Facilitator's Report
This roundtable was attended by Doug Freeman, Liz Jones, Kristen Cole, Mariela Gunn, and Jim Brown. While Mariela, Jim, and Doug were designated as panelists, the discussion was very much free-form. No formal presentations were given.
The “Objectifying Technology in the Classroom,” began with a quick look at the OED definition of the word “objectify.” The most recent definition is: “To degrade or demote (a person, class of people, etc.) to the status of a mere object; to treat as an object; to reify. Also: to identify (a person) with a particular stereotype; to stereotype.” While we acknowledged that this type of degradation almost always has to do with people, we began discussing how students tend to “degrade” technology in a certain way. We talked about how students approach technology as “mere object” and how they don’t really consider how technology shapes their daily lives. This led to a very interesting discussion about how to make students more aware their interactions with technology. Our discussion took a number of turns from this point. Here are some of the highlights.
• Doug Freeman noted that CWRL instructors should take advantage of what he called “first day anxiety.” Students many times approach CWRL classrooms with unease because they don’t quite understand what the role of computers will be in the class. Doug suggested making this a topic of conversation on the first day to get students thinking about how they sometimes take technology for granted.
• Mariela Gunn noted that students have very advanced digital literacies from their use of the web for entertainment. She specifically pointed to fantasy sports websites and online communities such as Facebook. Mariela suggested that we could take advantage of the literacies students bring to our classes.
• While many students enter our classes with a great deal of digital literacy, we noted how many of them are confused by technologies that they associate with “school-type” activities. We noted that problems with an application like Microsoft Word Commenting might stem from the fact that they’re worried about doing things the “right” way. This led to a great discussion of how we could get students into a more of a “play” mode when using technology in the classroom. Here were some ways we thought this could happen:
o Allow students a space in Drupal to create their own page
o Role-play identities in both virtual environments and face-to-face
o Using a chat program on the first day of class to get students into more informal conversation
As Doug mentioned, our discussion seemed to revolve around two big questions: 1) How do we get students to be more reflexive about the technologies they interact with on a daily basis?, 2) How do we show students new technologies in a way that is useful for them? We believe that some of the strategies mentioned above are a good start to getting students to think more about technology rather than just using it as a means to an and.
The final portion of our discussion focused on ways to get more inter-classroom interaction happening in the CWRL. We discussed how instructors could use meta-blogs or RSS feeds of student blogs so that classes could interact in virtual environments. Due to scheduling and logistical issues, we thought this was the most promising way to get students to think about the classroom as part of a larger context. By interacting with other students in other classes, we thought students would be able to experience their own learning as something much less abstract and much more useful.