Digital Literacy Metaphors

January 30, 2018 by

a bit of godiva happiness by Janine, used under a CC-BY 2.0 licenseBefore Winter Break, I began a series of activities on digital literacy, inspired by Virginia Tech Libraries’ digital literacy initiative. I first asked students to create definitions of digital native and digital literacy and to explore the relationship between digital literacy and online identity. With these basics taken care of, I challenged students to research a public figure’s online identity and then to map their own online identities. This week, I begin sharing writing assignments and activities that ask students to explore their personal connection to and perspectives on these ideas.

I particularly love writing activities that ask students to explore and share their backgrounds as writers because they allow me to learn so much about what students need to succeed in the class. Similar activities that ask students to tell us about their backgrounds with digital literacy can teach us volumes as well.

When we think about how students adopt and interact with technology, we can easily be tricked by stereotypes and general beliefs rather than exploring the diversity of strategies and practices that students employ. In this week’s activity, I ask students to share their beliefs and experiences with digital literacy creatively by choosing metaphors that represent their use of digital literacy tools and then explaining themselves in an extended digital literacy narrative that focuses on that metaphor.

Discussing Extended Metaphors

I know composition students are familiar with metaphors from their previous English courses, but they will do better with this assignment if we spend some time exploring how the symbolism works with these figures of speech. An easy introduction is the famous Forrest Gump bus stop scene, where Forrest explains that “Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” A short clip of the scene is included below:

The clip should quickly activate students’ prior knowledge of metaphors and how they work. The Purdue OWL’s Using Metaphors in Creative Writing provides a summary of how metaphors work with examples from literature. You can continue the conversation about metaphor, if you like, with a classic literary example, such as these poems:

Choosing Digital Literacy Metaphors

Once students are confident about how extended metaphors work, they can begin thinking about their own metaphors. Here are the steps I use:

  1. Begin in one of the following ways. If students are not comfortable writing about their own experiences, ask them to write about their general impressions or about the identity or experiences of someone they know or have heard about.
     
    1. If students mapped their own online identities, you can begin with their maps, asking students to identify information on their maps that could be represented by metaphors. They can think about the way that they work in or interact with others in one or more of the places they have mapped.
    2. Ask students to brainstorm about places they go online and the ways that they (or others) work or interact in these places. Once they have some ideas in mind, ask them to think about how they might represent the work, interaction, or places with a metaphor.
    3. Have students brainstorm about specific interactions or experiences they have had in digital spaces. Once they have some ideas in mind, ask them to think about metaphors they might use to represent these experiences.
  2. Consider the ways that metaphors are typically used to discuss our use of digital technology. The following articles provide useful observations for your discussion with students:
     
  3. To inspire students, share these categories of metaphorical comparisons, emphasizing that any metaphor will work as long as students support the comparison with specific details:
     
    1. an animal (such as a cheetah, a chameleon, a panda, or a shark)
    2. a pet (such as a bulldog, a kitten, or a betta)
    3. a vehicle (such as a tractor trailer, a backhoe, a hybrid car, or a bicycle)
    4. a sports-related object (such as a snowboard, a bowling ball, a softball bat, or a
    5. a sports event (such as a basketball game, an Olympic competition, a NASCAR race, or a triathlon)
    6. an everyday action (such as cooking a meal, cleaning out a closet, playing a game, or weeding a garden)
  4. After you share some of the basic comparisons above, invite students to brainstorm additional categories and comparisons of their own. Once they finish gathering ideas, students should have plenty of options to choose among for their project. Naturally, encourage students to feel free to make their own choices as well. Emphasize that they are not limited to class list.

Writing about Digital Literacy with Metaphors

Once students have explored how metaphors work and collected a list of possible metaphors, ask students to create a project that explains or presents their metaphor to readers. Students might pursue any of these options:

  • an academic paper that explains the metaphor
  • a poem that presents the metaphor
  • a collection of quotations from news outlets, pop culture resources, and other media that invoke the metaphor
  • a fable that tells of an event, interaction, or experience, using the metaphor
  • a child’s picture book that explores the metaphor
  • an infographic that presents the metaphor
  • a mythic creation tale that describes how the writer learned about a digital literacy practice
  • a series of Instagram posts that explores the metaphor
  • an online museum display that demonstrates the metaphor
  • a movie trailer that teases viewers about a feature presentation of the metaphor

The class can brainstorm additional options if desired. Alternately, you might narrow the options available to focus the assignment more tightly. Whatever option you choose, encourage students to explore their own understanding of digital literacy and their experiences in digital spaces.

Any Ideas to Add?

I would love to hear how you would try this activity with students. Please tell me! Just leave a comment below with the details, and come back next week for another writing activity that explores digital literacy.

 

Photo credit: a bit of godiva happiness by Janine, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license

This post originally published on the Bedford Bits blog.

Filed under activity idea: english, Bedford Bits

One Big New Thing: Changing How Groups Are Set Up

January 23, 2018 by

The Early Birds by Kristin Klein, on FlickrHappy New Semester! I hope you are all ready for the new school term. Today is the first day of classes for me, so I have been busy getting new resources online and revising those that I want to use again. I am teaching four sections of Technical Writing, all completely online.

Before I return to the series of posts on digital literacy that I started last month, I want to share the one big new thing I’m trying this semester.

 

Every term, I try to improve everything about my courses. It’s a nice goal, but it’s next to impossible to achieve. With four sections of student to respond to, it’s hard to rethink and rewrite everything at the same time. I certainly want to improve my courses, but I need to be realistic about how I do it. That’s where my idea of one big new thing came from. Starting this semester, I am going to stick to just one change so I can make improvements while still keeping my workload manageable.

 

My one big thing this semester is to change how groups are set up in an effort to improve participation during the term. A big challenge with writing groups in an online course is time management and scheduling. Since there is no class meeting time, students have no shared time slot when they are all available to collaborate. Here’s what usually happens:

 

  • Student A shares a draft with the group early on the day the project is assigned.
  • Student B shares a draft late in the evening on the day before the project is due.
  • Student C shares a draft just before lunch on the day the project is due.
  • Student D shares her draft a few hours before the project’s midnight submission deadline.

 

With no overlap among their schedules, students have difficulty giving and getting feedback. They need to keep checking back in the course CMS to see if anyone has submitted a draft or left them feedback.

I’ve tried different strategies to address the problem. Setting strict deadlines for peer feedback hasn’t worked. Scheduling in extra time to allow for the time management issues hasn’t worked either. No matter what I try, students still work on their own schedules. Worse, students who need extra time, get sick, or have a conflict may not be able to meet the requirements of the stricter schedules or systems.

 

I also tried creating groups that were based on majors. I grouped all the computer science majors together, all the environmentally-focused majors together, and so on. I hoped their shared interests and overlap in other classes would help collaborate. That idea backfired as students dealt with due dates in other classes. When there was a big project due in the senior-level civil engineering course, the civil engineers group couldn’t collaborate successfully. Everyone in the group was burdened in the same way, so there was no one with a light load to help pick up the slack.

 

I have been asking everyone for advice as I’ve tried to improve online group work. In a meeting with colleagues last month, we may have come up with a solution, one that seems so obvious in hindsight. Instead of fighting the underlying challenges that complicate online group work, the solution is to take advantage of them, to turn that constraint into an affordance. Specifically, on this first day of classes, students will complete a survey that tells me about their time management and work preferences. It includes questions and multiple choice answers like these:

 

Which of the following best describes when you like to do work for your classes?

  • I’m an early bird. I am up and working first thing in the morning.
  • I’m a morning person, but I won’t be up and working before dawn.
  • I’m a midday person. You’ll find me working any time from 10am to 2pm.
  • I’m an afternoon person. I’m likely to work any time from noon to 6pm.
  • I’m an early evening person. You’ll find me working from 6pm to 10pm.
  • I’m a late evening person. I do most of my work from 9pm to midnight.
  • I’m a night owl. You’ll find me working late into the night and sometimes in the wee hours of the morning.

 

Which scenario best describes how you work or how you prefer to work on projects?

  • I dive in immediately and prefer to finish as early as I can. I hate being rushed.
  • I usually work exactly to the project’s schedule. If the schedule allows a week, I work during the whole week.
  • I like to be close to finished a day or so ahead of the due date.
  • I usually wait until work is due. I like the pressure of a deadline.
  • It’s complicated. The way I work depends upon the other things going on at the time (classes, work, student organizations, etc.).

 

As you have probably guessed, the idea is to arrange groups so that the early birds are all together in one group while the night owls are in another group. I expect it to be complicated to arrange, but I hope the similar work preferences will allow students to collaborate more easily. Here’s the explanation that I’m sharing with students:

 

The information you share in this survey will help me set up writing groups, where you will share drafts and give one another feedback. One of the big challenges of writing groups is the different schedules and ways of working we all have.

 

My plan is to create groups of people with similar working patterns, rather than a random mix. For instance, I will make a group of people who prefer to work in the evening. That way, the group members are more likely to be online at the same time. Likewise, I will try to pay attention to how people work, sorting those who like to finish early into a different group from those who work best at the last minute, under the pressure of a deadline.

 

Please know that I am not judging your answers in any way. I don’t care how you work. I’m a night owl myself. This system will only work if you answer the questions honestly so that I can setup groups that have a better chance of working together smoothly than a random distribution sorted by the computer.

 

I want to stress that last paragraph to students in particular. This system won’t work if they choose the answers that they THINK a teacher wants to hear instead of giving me honest responses.

 

That’s my one big new thing for this term. I will report on how it works later in the semester. If you have feedback or suggestions, I would love to hear from you in the comments below—and come back next week for the return of my series on digital literacy assignments. Have a great week, everyone!

 

 

Photo credit: The Early Birds by Kristin Klein, on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license

This post originally published on the Bedford Bits blog.

Filed under Bedford Bits