Bedford/St. Martin’s Bits bloggers posted on topics ranging from working with new TAs to how we teach research projects. Be sure that you check out all the great ideas for talking about pop culture (like reality TV shows) and how to teach with comics—and don’t miss Holly Pappas’s reflection on the end of one term and the beginning of the next in the Classroom Strategies and Resources section:
During October, the Bedford/St. Martin’s blogs posted over three dozen new posts on topics ranging from pop culture to teaching with technology. Be sure that you check out all the great ideas for talking about current events and the the election, and don’t miss Andrea Lunsford’s discussion of syllabus design in the Classroom Strategies and Resources section:
Barclay Barrios (Bits) explores the issue of eLearning at his university and thinks about the possibilities for hybrid courses.
Michael Michaud (Bits) reflects on how access to computers shapes what and how he teaches in Get a Room.
Barclay Barrios (Bits) discusses the challenges of returning students’ graded work while also complying with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act in FERPA-fy Me.
What do Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Ann Coulter have in common? How do they differ from Adolf Hitler, Ayn Rand, Michael Moore, Andrew Breitbart, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Michael Savage? A Rebel Pundit survey last month asked, “Which of these books would you be interested in having banned, if you could have books banned?”
The results were overwhelmingly in favor of banning the books of Palin, Beck and Coulter, though the math of the survey is a little confusing since the results don’t add up to 100%. That said, what’s going on here?
Rebel Pundit’s reporter set up on the street in Chicago, during the Printers Row Literary Festival. As these alleged book lovers passed by the reporter, he asked them which books they’d like banned, telling them they could ban up to three, and handing them a Sharpie so they could make tick marks under their choices. Before I go on, watch the Rebel Pundit video of folks participating in the survey:
Sadly, people take the marker and willingly step up to the poster. The editing of the video suggests the participants aren’t really thinking much. They don’t even interact much with the reporter, other than taking the Sharpie from his hand.
In fairness, Rebel Pundit does explain that there were naysayers:
Nine people explicitly stated to us they thought banning books was wrong, including two individuals who voted on the board but later approached us to say, (paraphrasing) “I think I made a mistake, and wanted to take my votes back if I could, because after further reflection, I think banning any book is wrong.”
Only nine people of 147 protested the idea of banning books. Of course, the point of the survey isn’t really book banning. It’s to demonstrate that people make choices without thinking.
My hunch is that the reporter expected people to vote unthinkingly. Rebel Pundit is a conservative blog. According to their About page, they are “a beacon of truth, showing the unholy alliance of the local mainstream media and the progressive Democratic Party.” Since Chicago is a traditionally liberal town, the video and related article depict the people of Chicago as foolish lemmings:
While there were in fact less than two handfuls of individuals who did tell us they don’t think any books should be banned, unfortunately there were a shocking amount of guests at this book fair who were quite open to the idea, and in fact lined up quite excited for the opportunity to voice their opinion.
Given the audience of the Rebel Pundit site, the site likely guessed that their readers would draw the connections that the liberal democrats at the book festival were actually interested in limiting individual freedoms by stepping up happily to ban books. You don’t need to read many of the comments to see that it worked.
How to Use the Video in the Classroom
Because of the way that people blindly choose to ban books, the video can be a useful part of class discussion of censorship and book banning. Though it’s a tempting idea, I would not set up a classroom or school survey to trap students into similar behavior. I want students to think critically about censorship, and I don’t think labeling them as unthinking is a good way to do that.
Instead, I want to play the video for students and ask them what they think is happening. Why are the participants so willing to participate in this book banning activity? I want them to identify how much thought is going into the participants’ decisions and how much peer pressure and the public nature of the survey contribute to participation. I’ll also ask students to look at the setup of the survey. It’s just a simple tick mark on a piece of poster paper. Does that simplicity or the presence of the reporter influence them to participate?
I don’t think the decision to add a vote to the poster is part of some great political agenda, so I will downplay those connections at the beginning of the discussion. When the political aspect of the survey does come up, and I’m sure it will, I’ll ask students to think about how the choice of books and the setting for the survey were part of the reason people were eager to ban the books on the poster. What would happen if the same survey were set up in a conservative town or event?
There are also questions of graphic design to consider: does the layout of book covers on the poster play a part in the response? What would happen if the books are arranged differently on the poster or if the choices were shared only with words (without those very identifiable faces on the book covers)? If the survey itself were presented some other way, would the decision to participate be different?
After all this discussion, I’m thinking of introducing a research project on book banning. Students can research censorship events, like Nazi book burning to more recent censorship of bloggers in countries like China and Egypt. The focus can be widened to include films, songs, and other texts as well. Research questions like these could inspire papers or presentations:
How does peer pressure contribute to participation in book burnings?
What other persuasive devices were involved?
Are there political agendas at play in the choice of what has been banned?
Does the fact that just one book is banned simplify participation?
Who decided what was banned? What motives were at play?
If I decide not to go with a research activity, I may stick with the survey itself and ask students to write short responses that they’d give if they were asked, “Which books would you ban?” Answers can be anything from a 140-character Twitter posts to a video response or PowerPoint presentation. The resulting pieces can be part of public service announcement campaign during Banned Books Week.
You probably would have guessed that raven was one of the most frequently used words in Poe’s “The Raven,” but the Wordle word cloud on the right makes the impact of that word visually obvious. Wordle is a free tool that can make a word cloud out of any text that is pasted into a form or by using the text on a webpage. It includes some choices for formatting, so that you can change the color and layout of the words. You can also omit commonly used words. The final cloud can be printed or saved.
Last week, Edutopia shared some ideas for using Wordle in the classroom, as part of their New Teacher Boot Camp. In addition to checking out the Edutopia resources, take a look at these blog posts for more ideas on using word clouds for reading and writing activities in the classroom:
When I was little, I couldn’t remember the difference between Daylight Savings Time and Standard Time. Mom always repeated a little saying: “Spring ahead; Fall back.” I haven’t seen a flower pop its head above ground yet, but as I set my clock ahead this weekend, I know Spring can’t be too far away.
We’re springing ahead with a brand-new website for Bedford/St. Martin’s. It has a cleaner look and feel, new navigation elements, and helpful resources that make your search for course materials quick and easy. Check it out, and let us know what you think!
You probably noticed that we’ve been busy at Bedford Bits this past week too, with posts on posts on plagiarism, class discussion, video games, and more. Here’s a look back before you spring ahead into a new week:
Steve Bernhardt explores whether classroom desks are conducive to collaboration and laptop use by looking at what happens when teachers ask students to Have a Seat.
September 25–October 2 is Banned Books Week (BBW), so I’ve chosen a photo related to censorship and book banning. This post is the first of what, I hope, will become a regular feature, assuming feedback is positive.
The memorial itself is a sheet of glass inserted into the cobblestone plaza. Visitors can look through the glass to see a lighted, underground room lined with enough empty bookshelves to hold approximately 20,000 books.
Imagine yourself as one of the visitors to the memorial. Write a diary entry, blog entry, or short personal essay from the perspective of that visitor. Your goal is to capture what one of the people reflected on the glass is thinking.
Try freewriting on one of these questions to get started:
What emotions did the empty bookcases stir for you when you looked through the glass? Why?
Who else is reflected in the glass? Describe how someone else reacted to the memorial and how their response compared to yours.
Why did you come to the memorial? Did it meet your expectations?
How does the underground placement of the memorial affect its impact?
Describe the conversation you had with someone else reflected in the glass. What did you say to each other?
If you could create a memorial that peered through a window to another moment, what moment would you choose and how would you represent it?
Back in the days before 24-hour news networks, people went to their local movie theaters to see what was going on in the world.
The March of Time, perhaps the most well-known producer of these videos, distributed documentaries that covered everything from American culture and lifestyles, to business and industry, to the nation at war.
The newsreels and documentaries on the HBO site include historical events, cultural happenings, and biographical profiles. The videos provide a wonderful snapshot of life in America and around the world.
One of my favorite possibilities for class discussion this fall is the Oil and Men video, which offers a profile of Standard Oil of Indiana from 1951. What a great pairing that 30 minute video would make for videos and news stories on BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Here are some others you may want to spend some time with:
Basic English 1, with text by I. A. Richards, is quite odd, though perhaps not the best “teaching picture.” There’s also a Basic English 2 if you survive the first video.
Tobaccoland, USA might pair nicely with an analysis of cigarette advertisements and anti-smoking commercials.
Leadbelly is a short biopic on the famous musician, which might be compared to profiles on celebrities shown on TV or in magazines like People.
Wit and Humor is a dramatization of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment.”
It’s unfortunate that HBO has left the running clock on the videos, but it’s still a handy collection with limitless possibilities for the classroom.
It’s politically correct to be disappointed with BP and their little oil well problem in the Gulf. But how can I be angry when they provide me with such wonderful gifts?
First, BP America digitally enhanced some of their oil spill clean-up photos. The images are great for pointing out the sloppiness of the Photoshop work and, more importantly, discussing the ethical issues related to tampering with the images. Be sure to look at the face-saving explanation BP has posted with the BP Altered Images Flickr set. Any class exploring visual rhetoric should spend time with these photos. So a big thank you to BP for classroom material.
How could you NOT like an image that includes Max Headroom, War Games, Star Trek, Poltergeist, and The Matrix?
As part of a visual rhetoric lesson plan, the Wired challenge images open up the topic of satire and parody. Students can discuss how the different images critique the way BP has handled the oil spill—both in its actual clean-up and in the images they have shared with the public.
So politically correct or not, I’m a little thankful to BP America for providing me with the materials for a timely lesson on an important topic.
There are right ways to dress for a job interview. Sure, you want to stand out to an extent. You don’t want to blend into the sea of suits that march before the hiring committee. But, um, you don’t want to stand out for the wrong reasons. Probably shouldn’t wear a catwoman costume to an interview for at an engineering firm.
The same advice applies to résumés. When I talk about résumés with students, I do encourage them to do things that will make themselves stand out a little.
Traditional résumés can get very boring when you’re reading through a stack of 20 or 30 of them. If students can make themselves stand out, they have a better chance of being noticed—and we all know that being noticed can lead to getting that job.
It’s just as important, though, to talk about how audience comes into play in preparing résumés. You can teach this lesson quickly and clearly with the Dzine blog collection of “27 Examples of Impressive Resume(CV) Designs,” which my friend @Alliegator8u found and shared.
Go over résumés as you normally would, exploring more traditional examples in your text or online.
Share the DZine collection of résumés with students and encourage general feedback and discussion. You can click on the résumés to see larger versions.
Once general discussion dies down, ask students to think about the jobs that they would apply for themselves. You might group students with like career goals for this project. Have students brainstorm some details about the positions and companies they will send resumes to. Emphasize that students are effectively completing an audience analysis for these companies.
Return to the DZine collection of résumés. With their audience analysis in mind, ask students to identify which of the résumés might stand out and still fit with the needs and expectations of the audience companies. Encourage students to read through the comments on the page for some interesting discussion as well.
It’s likely that some of the more intriguing DZine résumés will be inappropriate. While they are clever and eye-catching, most of the résumés are suited only for edgier graphic design positions and companies.
I don’t think I’d encourage MrSunnyBlack or Sofiane42 to send those résumés to a conservative company. But Kenji2030 and Kamilmytnik might have a reasonable mix of traditional elements and “wow” design that would let their résumés stand out without ending up in the decline pile. As the résumés should make clear to students, it’s all a matter of the audience the résumés are presented to.
I’ve been a Wordle addict for a while. The online tool takes any text and creates a cloud of the words based on their frequency. It makes for some fun analysis activities that goes beyond the norm in the classroom.
Now this word cloud-driven analysis is ready to move to the next level with Tagxedo. Highlighted Friday as Jane‘s Pick of the Day, Tagxedo shapes your cloud of words into an image. To demonstrate, I used the text of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 and had Tagxedo arrange the words into a heart. Cute, no?
Tagxedo allows you to choose one of 42 included image shapes or upload your own image. Settings allow you to customize the colors, contrast, and other features of the resulting word cloud.
You an also exclude words, and customize the way that the text is handled (e.g., include or exclude numbers or punctuation). Like Wordle, Tagxedo allows you to save the resulting word clouds. You can place the image in the Tagxedo Gallery, create an embedded version you can use elsewhere, or simply save the image as a JPG or PNG.
The possible downside: The tool uses Microsoft’s Silverlight. I didn’t have Silverlight installed, and it managed to crash my machine once the installation completed and I tried to refresh the Tagxedo page. If you allow for that possible bump and can get Silverlight installed, however, you’ll have another option for playing with word clouds in the classroom.
The benefit of Tagxedo in the classroom is its stronger connection to visual rhetoric. Word clouds emphasize the words that are used most frequently in a text. Taken out of their context, key words stand out and readers can think about how they may work as symbols, establish a mood, or build an image.
Tagxedo word clouds allow students to pair that kind of textual analysis with an image that extends the emphasis the words communicate. Consider the image on the left. I took the text of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat.” Click on the cat image to see a larger version. If you have Silverlight installed, you can go to the Tagxedo site to see the Silverlight version, which enlarges the words in the image when you mouse over them.
To make the image, I had Tagxedo focus on the top 150 words. I chose the cat shape, which is one of Tagxedo’s included images, and then I changed the colors to get the strong contrast I wanted. I love the way this cat image includes the words cat, wall, myself, and animal in the center of the image, and the stark black and white contrast makes the cat image really stand out.
Now imagine students applying this same tool to texts you explore in class. The process is fairly simple:
Choose a text. You might have students analyze a full chapter of a work, a short story, several poems by a single poet, or an essay. The text might come from an author in their textbooks or it could be their own work. Project Gutenberg can make the process for many out of copyright text as simple as copy and paste.
The Tagxedo developers also have the ability to point to an HTML page and are working on the capability to use a Twitter feed or search results.
Choose an image. There are 42 images included in Tagxedo. Students can also use their own images. Designs with a clear two-color appearance will work best. Simpler designs probably work best. A detailed image of a colorful garden is not going to work as well picture of a single flower.
Enter the information in Tagxedo. Use the various tools in the left panel to customize the results. Make sure students know how to save the image so that they can share it with the class or turn it in.
Simple and fun, Tagxedo takes word clouds beyond simple rectangles and asks students to do a bit more critical thinking than Wordle word clouds do. There’s still a place for Wordle in the classroom, but Tagxedo adds another level to the designs that deepen students’ critical thinking—and can create some nice posters for the class bulletin boards and websites!
Hi, I’m Traci Gardner, known in most circles as Tengrrl. I’ve been exploring and writing about the best ways to teach composition using digital technology for over 20 years. You may have come here because you’re looking for my Lists of Ten or because you know my work on the ReadWriteThink website. You can also find my daily collection of links to news stories about technology and the teaching of writing, literacy, and literature. You can read more on my About page, or connect with me on one of the networks below. Thanks for visiting the site.
Bedford/St. Martin’s Bits bloggers posted on topics ranging from working with new TAs to how we teach research projects. Be sure that you check out all the great ideas for talking about pop culture (like reality TV shows) and how to teach with comics—and don’t miss Holly Pappas’s reflection on the end of one term and the beginning of the next in the Classroom Strategies and Resources section:
Now this word cloud-driven analysis is ready to move to the next level with 
Hi, I’m Traci Gardner, known in most circles as Tengrrl. I’ve been exploring and writing about the best ways to teach composition using digital technology for over 20 years. You may have come here because you’re looking for my 
