Dynamic Subspace

Category: Pedagogy

  • Georgia Tech’s Celebrating Teaching Day 2013

    My poster and I.
    My poster and I.

    This morning, Georgia Tech’s Center for the Enhancement of Learning (CETL) hosted the annual Celebrating Teaching Day.

    We began with a poster session that showcased pedagogies and assignments from across campus.

    A number of Brittain Fellows had their posters on display and we were there in force to talk about our teaching of communication as rhetorical and multimodal (WOVEN = written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal). I presented my poster on, “Writing the Brain: Composition and Neuroscience” [you may view it here–with thanks to my student Jinming Hu for giving me permission to share his work from class].

    Fellow Britts: Olga Menagarishvili, Mollie Barnes, Emily Kane, and Iuliu Ratiu
    Fellow Britts: Olga Menagarishvili, Mollie Barnes, Emily Kane, and Iuliu Ratiu

    We were able to share teaching ideas and techniques with others from the Georgia Tech community.

    Emily Kane explaining her assignments.
    Emily Kane explaining her assignments.

    The poster session was very well attended by people from across campus. The posters demonstrated the innovative teaching taking place at Georgia Tech.

    Lots of visitors and lots of posters at Celebrating Teaching Day, 2013.
    Lots of visitors and lots of posters at Celebrating Teaching Day, 2013.

    After the poster session, we were treated to lunch, an awards ceremony, remarks by President Bud Petersen, and finally, a presentation by Dr. Derek Bruff of Vanderbilt University on “Social Pedagogies.”

    Derek Bruff's Social Pedagogies Presentation.
    Derek Bruff’s Social Pedagogies Presentation.

  • My Georgia Tech ENGL1101 Syllabus Version 1.1, “Writing the Brain: Composition and Neuroscience”

    engl1101-syllabusI am currently teaching three sections of ENGL1101 at Georgia Tech. The class’ theme, “Writing the Brain: Composition and Neuroscience,” remains the same as my earlier syllabus that I taught in Fall 2012 [available here]. However, I have made some fundamental changes to the reading list (two books instead of only one: John Medina’s Brain Rules and Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal), reading schedule (began with WOVENtext, then three fundamental essays/excerpts from O’Shea’s The Brain, Gary Marcus’ Kludge, and Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind), and major projects (still three major projects, but now the first project incorporates Storify and ComicLife and the third project is an individual Pecha Kucha presentation instead of a group presentation–students will continue group work on the second project’s video). In the readings, I am encouraging more discussion about WOVEN and rhetoric in addition to discussion about the content and its application to composition. I have also integrated Twitter into the class’ daily rhythm and added daily reading presentations as a core component of the class. I have given the new syllabus a version 1.1 designation. Find out more by reading the new syllabus here.

    I should also note that I had planned on teaching ENGL1102 in Spring 2013, but the school asked for a volunteer to teaching ENGL1101 again. This seemed like a terrific opportunity to put some of my ideas from reflection into practice right away. I do plan to teach ENGL1102 in the future, and I will be ready with this syllabus (unless, of course, I find the time to develop another syllabus, which is something that I would like to do by continuing the “Writing the Brain” theme into the second tier class with neuronovels and neuronarratives).

  • Down and Dirty Guide to Literary Research with Digital Humanities Tools: Text Mining Basics

    2010-10-05 - IMG_2791
    Miao and Jason get things done with computers!

    As part of the final Digital Pedagogy seminar of fall 2012, Margaret Konkol, Patrick McHenry, Olga Menagarishvili, and I will lead the discussion on “trends in the digital humanities.” You can find out more about our readings and other DH resources by reading our TECHStyle post here.

    As part of my contribution to the seminar, I will give a demo titled, “Down and Dirty Guide to Literary Research with Digital Humanities Tools: Text Mining Basics.” In my presentation, I will show how traditional literary scholars can employ computers, cameras, and software to enhance their research.

    To supplement my presentation, I created the following outline with links to useful resources.

    Down and Dirty Guide to Literary Research with Digital Humanities Tools: Text Mining Basics

    1. Text Analysis and Text Mining
      1. My working definition of text mining: “Studying texts with computers and software to uncover new patterns, overlooked connections, and deeper meaning.”
      2. What is Text Analysis: Electronic Texts and Text Analysis by Geoffrey Rockwell and Ian Lancashire
      3. Text mining on Wikipedia
      4. Text Mining as a Research Tool by Ryan Shaw (an excellent resource with a presentation and links to more useful material on and offline)
    2. Advantages to Digital Research Materials
      1. Ask Interesting Questions That Would Otherwise Be Too Difficult or Time Consuming to Ask
      2. Efficiency
      3. Thoroughness
      4. Find New Patterns
      5. Develop Greater Insight
    3. Types of Digital Research Materials
      1. Your Notes
      2. eBooks
      3. eJournals
    4. Digitizing Your Own Research Materials
      1. What to Digitize
        1. Primary Sources
        2. Secondary Sources
      2. How to Digitize
        1. Acquire
          1. Camera > high resolution JPG
          2. Scanner > high resolution TIFF or JPG
        2. Collate as PDF
          1. Adobe Acrobat X Pro (now XI!)
          2. PDFCreator
          3. Mac OS X Preview
        3. Perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to generate machine readable/searchable plain text
          1. Adobe Acrobat X Pro
            1. Print PDF to a letter size PDF
            2. Tool > Recognize Text
          2. DevonThink
          3. Use Google
          4. Others?
        4. Save As/Export plain text > .txt files
        5. Engage the “Text” in New Ways
          1. New Ways of Seeing “Texts”
            1. Keyword Search
            2. Line Search
            3. Word Counts
            4. Concordance
            5. Patterns
          2. Tools to Help with Seeing “Texts”
            1. AntConc
            2. BBEdit (“It doesn’t suck” ®)
            3. MacOS X and Linux: cat, find, grep, and print (use “man cat” and “man grep” to learn more from the Terminal. More info here, here, here, here, and here.)
            4. DevonThink
            5. Notepad++
            6. Mac OS X Spotlight/Windows 7 Search
            7. TextEdit
            8. Others?
    IMG_0987
    Miao awaits digitization.

  • Learning and Teaching New Tricks in Technical Communication: Presentations on Single-Sourcing and Digital Literacy

    LCARS Initialization Screen from Star Trek: TNG Technical Manual for Windows 3.1

    As a member of Georgia Tech’s Brittain Fellowship in the Writing and Communication Program, I have the tremendous opportunity to participate in seminars with my peers after the day’s teaching is done.

    All Brittain Fellows are required to participate in the weekly Digital Pedagogy seminar on Wednesday evenings and those Fellows who are specifically teaching technical communication or business writing are also required to join the weekly Technical Communication seminar on Monday nights. Since I am not teaching tech comm but eager to teach it in the near future, I volunteered to join the tech comm folks on Mondays.

    At the beginning of the semester in both seminars, we brainstormed and chose topics to present on. From the list of topics, two people elected to work together to choose readings and guide the discussion. For tech comm, we picked these topics to discuss during the fall semester: Rhetorical vs. Instrumental; Career planning; the Ethos or Soul of Technical Communication; Syntactics, grammar, conventions in tech discourse; Gender and Technical Discourse; Visual literacy; Accessibility issues; Single-sourcing and user experience (UX); Digital Literacy and Social media; Workplace Ethics, Technical Discourse, and Business Culture; Service learning; Orality and Nonverbal Communication in the workplace;  and Disciplinary distinctions and conventions.

    As you might guess from my research interests in digital discourses, I volunteered to present one week on Single-sourcing and user experience (UX) and another week on Digital Literacy and Social media.

    Rachel Mahan and I presented on single-sourcing and user experience on Oct. 29, 2012. After I introduced different approaches and theoretical issues surrounding single-sourcing, Rachel shared her personal workplace experience with single-sourcing. I also shared firsthand experience from fellow Georgia Tech alums Smitha Prasadh and Andrew Pilsch (many thanks!). You can find our discussion readings and questions on TechStyle here.

    Olga Menagarishvili and I presented on Digital Literacy and Social Media on Nov. 5, 2012. I lead the group through a number of tools for analyzing social media privacy, and Olga prepared a fun active learning “jigsaw” assignment to lead the group toward a deeper discussion of “layered literacies.” You can find our readings, discussion questions, and online resources on TechStyle here.

    I am now developing my first technical communication syllabus and assignments. I have some ideas about how to approach technical communication from simultaneously practical (workplace-oriented) and imaginative (science fictional) directions. I want to guide students to be exemplary technical communicators who capably demonstrate and understand the rhetorical, critical, and ethical dimensions of what that entails. We will see when the opportunity for me to do this will present itself.

  • My Georgia Tech ENGL 1102 Class Description and Reading List for Spring 2012, “The Promise and Peril of the Digital Age Explored Through Science Fiction”

    Martin Widmer’s “Tomb [V’]” (2007).
    [UPDATE: I volunteered to teach three sections of ENGL1101 instead of three sections of ENGL1102 when the school made the request. This gives me an opportunity to immediately revise my ENGL1101 syllabus and try new things with my students!] In Spring 2013, I will be teaching three sections of ENGL 1102 (sections: P1, E, and M). For these sections, I will guide students toward completing and exceeding the desired educational outcomes with a class structured on the them, “The Promise and Peril of the Digital Age Explored Through Science Fiction.”

    Building on the rhetorical strategies and WOVEN modalities introduced in ENGL1101, this class further develops students’ communicative and critical thinking abilities by guiding students through challenging research-based projects. The research focus of this class is on the promise and peril of the contemporary digital age. Science fiction is a uniquely suited genre for considering the digital age, because it is the only literature that is firmly situated at the intersection of science, technology, and culture. Furthermore, science fiction is a literature about the present in which it is written rather than its imagined future. With this in mind, recent science fictions comment on our present and our near future in simultaneously promising and troubling ways. Drawing on science fiction across multiple media (including novels, films, and video games) and using newly acquired tools of critical theory from cultural studies and the study of science and technology, students will develop a number of research-based projects individually and collaboratively that explore how science fiction informs and critiques the on-going digital age. All of these projects will culminate in or include a digital component (e.g., blog posts, Twitter essays, Storify curations, online videos, and Omeka archives). Also, students will learn how to use digital humanities technologies to inform their thinking and research.

    Reading List:

    Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood, Anchor, 2004, 978-0385721677

    Ready Player One, Ernest Cline, Broadway, 2012, 978-0307887443

    Neuromancer, William Gibson, Ace, 2000, 978-0441007462

    River of Gods, Ian McDonald, Pyr, 2007, 978-1591025955

    Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge, Tor, 2007, 978-0812536362

    Online reading:

    Little Brother, Cory Doctorow [available here]

    Game List:

    CYPHER: Cyberpunk Text Adventure [available here]

    I am still developing the class syllabus and assignments. When these are completed, I will post copies in a subsequent post.