cetl – Dynamic Subspace

Recovered Writing, Brittain Fellowship, CETL Brown Bag, Writing the Brain: Using Twitter and Storify, Oct. 2, 2013

Slides from "Writing the Brain" PowerPoint. — Slides from “Writing the Brain” PowerPoint.

This is the sixty-second post in a series that I call, “Recovered Writing.” I am going through my personal archive of undergraduate and graduate school writing, recovering those essays I consider interesting but that I am unlikely to revise for traditional publication, and posting those essays as-is on my blog in the hope of engaging others with these ideas that played a formative role in my development as a scholar and teacher. Because this and the other essays in the Recovered Writing series are posted as-is and edited only for web-readability, I hope that readers will accept them for what they are–undergraduate and graduate school essays conveying varying degrees of argumentation, rigor, idea development, and research. Furthermore, I dislike the idea of these essays languishing in a digital tomb, so I offer them here to excite your curiosity and encourage your conversation.

In this Recovered Writing post, I am including two PDF files that I used in my presentation on “Writing the Brain: Using Twitter and Storify” for the 2 October 2013 CETL Brown Bag Workshop. The first is my PowerPoint presentation file and the second is my handwritten presentation notes. Normally, I type up a carefully written script for my presentations, but in this case, I wrote my speaking notes out by hand. While I was driven my a tight deadline imposed by several other responsibilities converging at the same time, I saw this as an opportunity to experiment with a way of presenting that I normally don’t do and I wasn’t completely comfortable doing. As I tell my students, we grow by challenging ourselves, doing new things, and experimenting with new approaches. This was one such attempt on my part.

Join Me and Fellow Brittain Fellows Mollie Barnes and Marty Fink for “Engaging Students via Class-Related Social Media” Brown Bag

Register at the link below to join Brittain Fellows Mollie Barnes, Marty Fink, and me at the upcoming Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL) Engaging Conversation Series Brown Bag: “Engaging Students via Class-Related Social Media.” Mollie, Marty, and I have some great pedagogical stuff to share and discuss with the brown bag participants on using social media, questioning the use/purposes of social media, and engaging students with social media. I hope that others will share their approaches and ask awesome questions.

In my presentation, I will discuss my “Writing the Brain” assignment [ellis-jason-engl1101-01-assignment] from my ENGL1101 course at Georgia Tech. In this assignment, students use different media to express their thoughts on Twitter, Storify, a visual poster, and a five-page essay. I have adjusted the assignment this semester so that instead of charting their thoughts overall, they now focus on those thoughts related to their academic, professional, and life goals. Also, I no longer require them to use ComicLife for the visual poster–they may use it or any other software for creating a poster with photographs and drawings of their own creation. The poster embedded at the beginning of this paragraph explains an earlier iteration of the assignment.

The information and registration link for the event are included below.

ENGAGING CONVERSATIONS SERIES

Engaging Students via Class-Related Social Media

October 2, 2013

12:00 to 1:00 p.m.

Student Center, Piedmont Room

Brown Bag Luncheon

Song of Myself and Social Media:

Teaching Reading Practices through Tweets

Mollie Barnes, School of Literature, Media, and Communication

Writing the Brain:

Using Twitter and Storify in a

Multistep and Multimodal Project

Jason W. Ellis, School of Literature, Media, and Communication

Autobiography of the Selfie:

Multimodal Engagements with Instagram

Marty Fink, School of Literature, Media, and Communication

The Georgia Tech Brittain Fellows are collectively leading the way on campus with the use of social media in their classes. In this session, three Brittain Fellows will highlight how they are using Twitter, Storify, Tumblr and Instagram for teaching and learning. The Fellows will provide brief demos of the platforms, share their experiences with student assignments that range from using tweets as reading notes to semester-long projects that integrate social media with posters and essays, and discuss the challenges of FERPA.

REGISTER

Georgia Tech’s Celebrating Teaching Day 2013

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

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

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.

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.”