This section of NMAC 3108 will be offered entirely online. Writing for Digital Media (#WritDM) teaches the writing skills necessary in the digital age. The course is specifically designed for the New Media & Communications degree, though is applicable to a number of disciplines.

WritDM takes for its foundational premise that digital media differs from that of print in several fundamental ways. Because of these differences, to use digital media successfully, writers must develop specific skills for its mastery. WritDM is designed to introduce students to these skills, provide them various projects in which to develop them, and teach them to become savvy users of digital media. Read more on LitMUSE. The specific syllabus for this course is coming soon, though a look at this semester’s class will give you some idea of the requirements and topics.

Questions about it? Ask some of my current students about their experience.

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While I have been having a great semester, I have a couple of projects that I’m excited to get into. Teaching wise, this has a been a good semester — maybe one of my best ever in Georgia — but I’m looking forward to putting what I’ve learned about teaching and learning into further development.

Between 1997 and 2002, I won six teaching awards or commendations. These were all in graduate school while at USF. This recognition made me think I had something to offer students as professor in an institution of higher education. Since moving to Georgia in 2002, I have received exactly zero recognition as a teacher in the form of awards from my department or college. I always thought it had something to do with central Georgia and student expectations. However, now I’m thinking it has more to do with technological progress and an old style approach to teaching.

Ever since seeing Sugata Mitra’s TED Talk on building a school in the cloud, I have been energized. There are several aspects of teaching that I struggle with — the dominant one seems to be my personality. It often gets in the way of my being an effective teacher. No matter what I do in other ways to be a progressive educator, they are usually overshadowed by comments about my being “intimidating,” “difficult to approach,” or “lacking respect.” While I do not make conscious decisions to project these personality traits, they do seem get in the way. Therefore, what’s the best way to overcome them? Remove my chances of displaying them.

Essentially he argues that the old paradigm of education should be buried like the British Empire that invented it. The “sage on the stage” is over. Students need to discover their own knowledge, and with today’s access to information, learning is about engagement, discovery, and participation.

While Mitra’s idea is not really new, what is new is students’ access to gadgets. I’m familiar with similar arguments; Ted Nelson’s might be the first I encountered back in the day. Next, I think I read Donald Finkel’s Teaching with Your Mouth Shut and Bruce Sterling’s (yes, the science fiction writer) Tomorrow Now, and all left the impression that I should be removing myself as the nineteenth-century pedagogue. However, at the time, technology did not provide a dependable and equitable solution. I could simply not count on each student having access to a networked gadget.

Well, times have changed, and with them come new opportunities for teaching. Couple this new access with another digital development, and I have the foundation for my projects.

Ever since Apple introduced iBooks Author just over a year ago, I have been excited at the possibilities. Apple had done what they do best: given people tools to create and engage the culture that we live in. Before then, creating an ebook was a chore; in fact, no software really offered an easy solution. IBooks Author seemed just the ticket: it used a familiar interface and equipment. What could be better? I even authored a grant proposal that allowed the department to get thirty new iPads, and I used them to teach two new courses, which I also authored, last fall: Digital Humanities was offered on iTunes University, and eText Authoring taught an introductory course to authoring ebooks. The former used iPads for taking the class, while the latter allowed students to create their own content.

However, while both classes went well, something wasn’t quite right. While I’m comfortable with Apple’s products, I was uneasy requiring them for my classes. I’ve always been of the mind that choice is crucial in deciding on technology, especially those gadgets that become intimate parts of our lives. While Apple was the first to offer a mass access to ebook authoring, I’m happy to say that they are no longer the only circuit on the board.

Enter Inkling’s Habitat. I remember signing up for Habitat almost at the same time Apple released iBooks, but I heard nothing further from them until recently. Inkling has released a development environment for the masses. Habitat offers three major benefits over iBooks Author: (1) it is cross-platform; (2) it is web-based; and (3) it is collaborative. Each of these facts made me ditch iBooks Author faster than a Ferrari traverses the Nürburgring.

Habitat also uses HTML and CSS, both of which I have a familiarity with. I used to teach them, so using Habitat will make me refresh my knowledge — always a good thing. More on Habitat in future posts.

So, my projects: first will be a coursebook for my classes, which I’ll call The LitMUSE Coursebook (original, I know). See the photo above for a look at it in Habitat. Next will be a textbook to support my online sections of Writing for Digital Media. Details about these are forthcoming.

Suffice it to say, I’m ready for the semester to end, so I can upgrade my approach to teaching.

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Teaching should:

1. Use current technologies to extend the classroom;
2. Make technologies opaque so that they may be critiqued;
3. Look to art to develop analysis and empathy;
4. Help students organize information to create their own knowledge;
5. Encourage deliberate affinity and eschew thoughtless identity;
6. Foster a lifelong devotion to learning and participation.

In his book Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte faults today’s educational system with living in the nineteenth century. He argues that if a surgeon were taken from 100 years ago and placed in a contemporary operating theater, he would be lost, since science and technology have changed medicine so radically. The classroom, however, remains the same today as it did then, so a nineteenth-century teacher would have no trouble teaching in one of our post-2000 classrooms. Negroponte wrote this in 1992, but even with today’s computerized lecterns and “smart” boards, has the classroom really changed?

If the brick-and-mortar reality hasn’t, our digital environs have pushed the classroom beyond the physical. We no longer live solely in the physical world — much of our lives are extended into the virtual. Education must change to meet the new digital challenge and take advantage of it to rejuvenate and reinvigorate learning and teaching. Education should extend into “real life” to engage students where they live and work to show them there’s more to college than their practical goals.

Along with extending beyond the traditional classroom, teaching should also challenge the transparency of these places. Marshall McLuhan suggests that only through the critical eye of the artist may we see how media controls and directs our lives. It’s not enough to use technology to extend ourselves, but we must also be aware of the implications of these extensions. The tools of our lives must be scrutinized, not adopted thoughtlessly; in other words, teaching is about making the transparent a bit more opaque. Therefore, education should challenge, like reading a difficult novel. It should prepare students to puzzle through problems, to empathize with other life, and to appreciate the beauty in places they might not otherwise have looked. Literature is best experienced as part of a community; likewise is education. Literature allows for glimpses into the variety and subtlety of the world, and education should also reflect this heterogeneity in content and approach.

That said, the classroom must also be a safe place for taking risks, but not be a cloister. With digital technology and the ubiquity of devices, the classroom must extend beyond the traditional four walls. If students prefer to be online, then bring the classroom to them: use the network’s quotidian tools to enrich their lives in more meaningful ways. If Twitter engages them, use it for teaching.

New media encourages active participation, and education should ensure it’s deliberate. Many communities formed online are not done so through traditional means of social identity, but through affinity — shared interests that inspire passion and deeper understanding. By using these tools for higher education, students are encouraged to seek out what interests them about a subject — to find the expertise in communities that are passionate and engage with them for deeper understanding and broader insight. Digital communities also teach clarity of expression, often forcing deep thought with a limited amount of characters. Instead of killing the English language, communication online could help to strengthen it.

These digital communities by themselves are the first step. Bruce Sterling argues that educators have even a more important role in this brave new education: we must be “canon builders.” Educators have always guided students towards knowledge, but in these still nascent days of self-publication, democratization of knowledge, and social media, the is role is paramount. In an age where we are inundated with information, it’s the educator’s job to help students choose the information over the noise, synthesizing it into knowledge. In Toni Morrison‘s words: to be educated is to know what to “pass on.”

Finally, teaching less about the passing on of a certain knowledge, but about building a framework within students that encourages them to seek their own knowledge throughout their lifetimes. Teaching and learning ultimately takes place within us as a lifelong passion for critical, thoughtful, and nuanced participation in culture to benefit self and community.

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This semester, I’m teaching Writing for Digital Media. I’ve approached this course differently in the past, but since then, I have had a couple of epiphanies that pushed me in a new direction. I decided to teach foundational literacies of digital media: (1) strong writing, and (2) the unique aspects of doing it for the screen. The latter forms the basis of my approach: I’m not teaching writing using digital tools that will wind up in print, but specifically tools writers use to compose for the screen. Word processing and desktop publishing are out; WordPress and wikis are in.

Now, these tools are always in flux. However, one of the writing tools I thought was necessary to teach is Twitter. While many love to lament what texting and twittering are doing to the language, I happen to think that language is strong enough to take all forms of communication. In fact, I’ve thought for a while that academic composition could learn something from popular forms of new media communication. Let’s stop teaching writing that encourages bloated and awkward prose, and instead focus on writing that’s clean, tight, and succinct. You know, like a tweet.

This is a hard thing to do, especially for students that been trained their whole academic lives to write long-winded essays. I go into more detail about this elsewhere, so I won’t rehash it here. Suffice it to say, my approach has been to require word maximums, rather than minimums. Say what you need to say with the most economic, nuanced, and deliberate writing possible. You know, like a tweet.

Therefore, for the first time, I required my students to have Twitter accounts and actually use them. Their first exercise was to use Twitter to liveblog an event, like a class lecture. This was the first revelation. Going through their liveblogs was eye-opening: they actually had to be engaged with the material in a whole new way. Not only did they need to pay attention, but they had to distill what they heard into 140 characters. Reading many of their liveblogs made me feel like I was sitting in the classroom with them. Wow. (Interestingly, I spoke with a couple of colleagues who allowed my students to liveblog their classes, and they had similar observations. One said that she could see what students were getting and concepts that were not clear. It appears this tweeting in class can be educational for the professor as well.)

Get started with Twitter in the classroom. Instructions for my students. litmuse.net/online/twitter #edtech

— Gerald R. Lucas (@drgrlucas) October 21, 2012

I decided to have my students continue to use Twitter. I asked them to begin communicating with me solely via mentions, or if it was more sensitive, through private messages on Twitter. Again, I wasn’t really aware of the brilliance of this at first, either. Rather than getting dozens of lengthy emails a day from students that often required a lengthy reply, here I was getting 140-character questions to which I could briefly reply. Ah: another wow moment.

Twitter and I are now tight. Another up side to this is that all students have cell phones, so requiring them to tweet — especially during class — is not asking too much. In fact, I know that most of them would rather be looking at their phones, anyway. I’ll be incorporating TweetChat into my classes as early as next week. Yes, I’m looking at you, Digital Humanities, with your fancy iPads.

I’ve begin looking around for Twitter support pages, particularly for education. I found several good resources, but none better than Edudemic’s 100 Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom. I’m still going through it, but I’m happy to see that some work has been done for me.

More about this soon. Oh, and I have two Twitter accounts now: @drgrlucas for work, and @grlucas for other than work. Come and say hello.

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I want to thank Sheron Smith, MSC’s News Bureau Coordinator; Alex Willison, the student reporter who interviewed me and wrote the story in the college newspaper; and the editor of The Statement, Kristin Hanlin for giving Alex the assignment. I should also offer my thanks to Provost Martha Venn for her enthusiastic support — it would not have happened without her.

This is one of the reasons why I have the best job in the world.

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This course satisfies a core requirement, but it hasn’t been offered in a long time — if ever. Unfortunately, it may not make. Hopefully, the poster I have made above will help. Tell your friends.

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Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” —Mark Twain

I have been invited to talk about study abroad at the Cultural Journeys undergraduate conference. I’ll be speaking after three students who have actually participated in study abroad programs, so I wonder just how much I’ll add to the conversation. Students tend to be more convincing than faculty in these matters.

I truly believe that study abroad — and travel in general — makes us better people. I know that for me, the two times I have taught in London have been two of the best experiences of my professional and personal life. They have made me a better teacher and a better person. I’m pretty sure that most people would benefit from getting the heck out of Georgia for a summer. But how to convince them?

I decided to use music and images to convey my enthusiasm. So, I put together a video of my photography from my 2009 and 2011 travels, along with some words of wisdom about travel from others more eloquent than I. Check out my video above.

Also, in thinking about this a bit more, I found two useful resources: “Why Study Abroad?” and “Study Abroad Myths and Misconceptions.”

We Americans spend so much of our lives constructing ever-shrinking bubbles that define us and isolate us. With money as the ultimate pursuit, all of our decisions are in many ways determined: how to make the most; how to protect it; how to pass it on and to whom. It often seems that chasing the American Dream closes us off to opportunities we would otherwise engage, like foreign travel. Most of my students here in central Georgia were born here and they will die here, without ever traveling far from the lives they have built. This is not necessarily a criticism — we all need our comfort zones — but without getting outside the bubble, it becomes smaller and it in turn makes us smaller. New experiences takes risk, and that’s the very opposite of comfort and security.

Interestingly, more American women take advantage of study abroad programs than men do. Some of the conclusions are interesting.

Yes, travel is a risk. Yes, it can be expensive. However, this is what we pursue money for. If money can’t help us expand our lives in meaningful ways, what good is it? Of all the things to invest in, travel and self-discovery should be among the most important.

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Straight to the point. I called my first section “The Art of Science” and positioned it as a study of postmodern culture in general and digital culture in particular. I think it worked pretty well, so I will borrow some ideas from that course for my new offering: “Digital Humanities.”

I think there’s a misperception of the digital humanities even among those who profess to know what it is, so opines Stanley Fish. I tend to agree with him. To many, it seems to be a catch-all that unfortunately catches nothing. If you Google “digital humanities,” the first hit is from the venerable Wikipedia that defines it as: “The digital humanities is an area of research, teaching, and creation concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities.” This is about as enlightening as the catalog description of HUMN 2151 above.

This course will look at defining “digital humanities” and examining both primary and secondary texts that seem to relate. More on this as my syllabus develops.

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Ever since iBooks came out with the iPad, I have wanted to publish some of my own content. Yet, as anyone who has ever tried can attest, this is not easy. Creating EPUBs is just awkward and inconvenient. Think of it as writing a web page before WISWYG editors, or composing an essay on a pre-GUI word processor.

The recent release of Pages allows a document to be exported as an EPUB, but then to actually see it, a transfer to the iPad is necessary. In theory, this should be easy, but iTunes is such a piece of junk, that nothing like this is ever easy. (Say, Apple, when are you gonna fix this obsolete piece of bloatware anyway?) So, until the release of iBook Author, writing electronic books was not exactly convenient or easy.

Supposedly, iBooks Author is changing all of that. Roger Rosner’s demo was way cool — the video above gives you a bit of a look. The keynote emphasizes textbooks, but the potential for any kind of electronic publication is there. For example, I’ve started publishing literary content on LitMUSE, but wouldn’t delivery on the iPad be so much better, especially since you can annotate it and take it with you even without a network connection? Yes, maybe this is one more nail in the Web’s coffin. Plus, the ability to add multimedia content — e.g., Eliot reading The Waste Land, excerpts from a documentary on Homer, or photos I recently took in Greece — would boost it to the next level — especially in a Humanities class. I already have a ton of original content.

And speaking of the end of the Web, perhaps LitMUSE’s days as a course Web site are numbered in the light of the new iTunes U. It provides a slick way to deliver all sorts of content in a convenient format. They did not demo the course construction during the keynote, but Apple’s web site makes it look pretty easy. I know I would be perfect for this. Maybe this will be LitMUSE 2.0?

I already have ideas for my next semester’s classes, and I can’t wait to get started. I predict this is the beginning of a whole new chapter in my academic life.

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Real education is subversive.

Values worth having are not done so blindly. They must be examined critically and thoroughly in the harsh light of day by every generation. We must be deliberate in choosing and supporting our values if they are to have, well, value. It’s in this nebulous area where real education is integral for a healthy and prosperous society.

Real education is the water that cleans the grit of fear and ignorance out of our eyes. It washes away the superstition that allows us to be cowardly and hateful. It clears the way for us to see the possibilities that our lives could have free of the detritus of fearful tradition to trip us up. Today’s NYTimes obituary of Christopher Hitchens makes a similar point:

Not only do the things in the hate column inspire hate, they also try their best to destroy those things in the love column — the things that are a part of the subversive education.

I’m not talking about revolution. Subversion is more akin to quiet resistance à la Michel de Certeau. In The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson puts it this way: “intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.” Later, the protagonist is discussing a similar topic with the constable; he asks her which path will she take: “conformity or rebellion.” She answers:

Real education teaches the subtleties in life — the nuances. It teaches us to revel in ambiguity, not run from it. Contradiction is a time for consideration and dialog, not guns.

Yet, the demagogy that teaches absolutes and obeisance might also be a necessary part of education, only in giving the truly educated something to subvert and challenge. As Ted Nelson points out: primary education is more about training us how to behave than it is about teaching knowledge. Creativity is sacrificed for conformity. When we get through this structured system of imposed boredom and systematized indoctrination, we are called citizens and patriots and normal. If we stop here, we’re never truly educated.

Only after getting through my first two years as an undergraduate did I begin to get a real education. In these classes, I took an active part in my learning; instead of sitting in grids, we sat around conference tables; instead of being told what I should be learning, I was able to discover the knowledge for myself under the guidance of the professor. This was a time when poetry began to sing for me. This was a time when I discovered that the way I had always ordered my life — white, heterosexual, catholic, capitalist, male — was not the only way to see the world. In fact, it was a fairly  narrow way to look at life, and I have since discarded most of those arbitrary categories.

Maybe this is why I have always liked computers. Again, Stephenson gives us a look at a potential future for education in The Diamond Age. The primer that Hackworth illegally compiles for his daughter falls into the hands of a disenfranchised little girl living in a future China. The idea for The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer is thought up by a Lord who tells the actual builder to consider what it means to be subversive. Hackworth at least unconsciously takes this message to heart and invents a book that allows the reader to find her own knowledge. The book does not work by itself — there is a “ractor” named Miranda that is just as integral to Nell’s education as the primer — but it is a key component to subverting the dominance of the ideologies that would have kept Nell a second-class citizen her whole life. This primer reminds me of what is beginning to happen with education in the digital age. Or at least the possibility for a real education.

While much of education is the learning of what our parents and other authorities say is True, it’s as much about understanding how it’s not — of finding our own ways and discarding those truths that no longer work for us. I teach literature, irony, humor, nuance, subtlety. My job is to help others dispel their own tyrannies of thought.

I teach subversion.

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