Technology Project handout

Please find my Technology Project handout pasted below:


Resources for Argumentation Folder Project handout


Jonathan O’Brien (jonathan.obrien@nwtc.edu)


Date: 6/23/15

· Since this project is housed in a Blackboard shell that is password-protected, I cannot provide a Web address for easy access. Anyone wanting any parts or documents in the folder should email me, and I will send back a zipped file of the contents of the folder.
 
 
· Overview: This project consists of a folder housed in a Blackboard shell consisting of resources on the topic of argumentation. Included elements are articles on the argumentation, webpages to visit, examples to consider, an annotated bibliography, and a Prezi to get things started. I plan to use this folder in my in-person and online writing courses.
 
 
· Technology Project Audience: First- and second-year composition students. My hope is that this folder will be an engaging multi-media destination for students as they think about their argumentative research papers.
 
 
· List Key Features of the Technology Project: Sub-folders within the larger folder including those with the following names: Argumentation Prezi, Articles on Argumentation, Videos on Argumentation, Argument Examples, Argument Discussion, Background Information, Annotated Bibliography on Argument, Links to other Argument Resources, and a folder for fun: Argumentation Memes and Cartoons.
 
· Primary References: List 3 sources you used as you wrote about your Technology Project:
 
 

• Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.” When a Writer Can’t Write: Studies in Writer’s Block and Other Composing-Process Problems. Ed. Mike Rose. New York: Guilford, 1985. 134-165. Print.
• This well-known source made me look critically at what I had previously assumed, that students know what is meant by the terms argument and research. The realization that this is not always true has induced me to develop more resources for students learning those two academic writing modes.
• Knoblauch, A. Abby. “A Textbook Argument: Definitions of Argument in Leading Composition Textbooks.” College Composition and Communication 63.2 (2011): 244-268. ERIC. Web. 2 Jan. 2015.
• This comparative study of argumentation as taught in composition textbooks clarified to me that much of the scholarly innovations regarding argumentation and research are not making their way into those same textbooks. As a result, my technology project aims to fill this gap for my students by offering more options for argumentation and research.
• Uysal, Hacer Hande. “Argumentation across L1 and L2 Writing: Exploring Cultural Influences and Transfer Issues.” Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 9 (2012): 133-159. Print.
• This study is intriguing as a continuation of research in the field of contrastive rhetoric. It helped me better formulate how students from other cultures formulate arguments. Part of my argumentation project covers this topic and my hope is to invest other approaches to argumentation with symbolic value so that students can find their own argumentative voice.

My Credo

My credo of education involves the following:

·         I believe in the unique value of each person.

·         I believe that education should involve knowledge development, skill development, and ethical development. In other words, a well-educated person is knowledgeable, skillful, humane, moral, and ethical.

·         I believe that my role as a professional is to be prepared in the classroom, knowledgeable in my field, engaged with my community, and supportive of my students.

·         I must develop my content knowledge, my skills in pedagogy, and my connection with my students. In addition, I must serve my institution, my discipline, and my community through service and scholarship.

Print literacy

Our readings were helpful on this topic of defining literacy, though my own basic definition of the term remains largely unchanged. I still define literacy instrumentally, as facility within a discourse, using its tools, knowing its surface and deep culture, and knowing how it fits and modifies within different contexts. I accept Gee's notion that it is a "socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group". I think this definition, which does a nice job of acknowledging the role of society within literacy, has some problems, however. I can participate in and even be or become expert in a literate practice from outside a community's boundaries. The point of literacy may not be convergence, in other words. Also, I think literacy also refers to use of a literate groups tools, technologies, and cultural mores and norms. Gee seems to focus mainly on language.
I think literacy is important because it builds social capital, it increases participation in and construction of a discourse, and I think many of humanity's greatest goals and achievements are bound up in discourses. Even sometimes just changing a discourse, wherein one has to both participate and critique a discourse, is a worthy human goal.
My goals regarding literacy for my students turn on identifying and building the skills they already have and what they need to build capital in the system of higher education and the economy we live in. They also go past this basic goal in that I also want to encourage critical thinking by mastering the literate discourse. I think you can't critique it if you haven't owned it yet, so getting as many voices and participants literate in the target discourse is vital.
One way to accomplish this goal with students is to model a literate, critical interaction with the world of ideas and the academic discourse. My hope is that they see that even the august discourse of academia is open to critique and modification.

Questions for podcast

Brent, Summer, Jennifer, and I are working on a literacy research project where we will ask questions about reading and print literacy to children: in this case, my two oldest boys, ages nine and six; Summer's oldest two boys, ages nine and six; and Jennifer's two children, a nine-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl. We will ask the following questions:
Do you remember the first time someone read to you?
Do you read with an adult?
How did you learn to read?
What do you like to read?
What are you reading right now?
Where and when do you read?
Do you think reading is important? Why?

Going tech-free

I maintained a pencil and paper record of my tech-free journey, in trying to keep with the spirit of the tech-free idea. However, even using a pencil and paper, as I noted, is using technology since to a caveman with a sharp stick, an Amish man with a steel plow is highly technological indeed. My journey began at 11 AM since I even forgot to do the "tech-free" thing until that point, which I think is illustrative in itself. The deeply ingrained way that technology infiltrates our lives invites comparison to the involuntary beating of our hearts. The coffee maker, the stove, the refrigerator that keeps the eggs cold, the radio that pumps tunes to fight off the silence. All are ways that we use technology in a deeply taken-for-granted, almost even entitled sense. We are modern people and this is our manner of life, the air we breathe, our birthright.
My own day went quite well without technology since I had planned for it effectively. I did the tech-free day on Sunday and I had tackled much of the online and technical work I needed to do for work and school ahead of time. Still, since I am teaching two online classes right now, I needed to check my email and Blackboard shells briefly to answer questions and put out any fires of the day. Also, with my wife at home with our five children, all 8 and under, I needed to call and video chat with them a couple times during the day. Children don't understand "tech-free" days. Neither do wives, for that matter. Still, mostly I read during the day and did a good bit of cooking, which set me up nicely for the week. I planned a nice evening hike and had a great time doing that. In actuality, my wife and I are somewhat used to this way of doing things, minus the phones, which we use to stay in contact with each other regularly. We spend our summers on Washington Island, Wisconsin, where we have a house. However, we do not have Internet there, no cable, no television for that matter, and only spotty cell phone reception. We love the down time there with our kids, playing games, hiking, riding bikes, reading, going to the beach, visiting friends and cousins. This mode of life is deeply ingrained in us with our respective family histories. We are suspicious of and sometimes even hostile toward technology as a matter of course. We try to limit its role in our lives by encouraging reading, games, outside activity, work, conversation, and adventure. We do not have cable at home, though we have Internet. It's hard to escape the clutches of technology completely due to our careers.
As far as impacts from this experience, I think it just reinforces our already strong commitment to self-consciously consider technology's role in our individual and family life. My wife and I dwell on this topic and she greatly supports an even more limited use of technology than we already have (though she did not like not having phone contact with me for the day since we are a distance away from each other). For instance, I have been thinking about how that I often read my Kindle around the children, but it is hard for them to tell if I am reading or playing a game. I might need to read more print books around them so they can quickly see that I am reading a book. As always, you get what you model, so our own attachment to and use of technology needs to reflect what we want to see, which is a strong engagement with people rather than devices, with reading rather than playing games, with ideas rather than an uncritical use of technology.

Time Machine reflection

I think the two videos we watched did a very nice capturing the shift in our relationship to technology, which was accentuated by the very technology that was used to depict this change. In other words, the technology available to filmmakers in some ways changes the story since the topic itself, time travel, still dwells at the frontier of our current scientific knowledge. Where knowledge is limited, imagination and myth step in. Our understanding of the current limits of human knowledge offers us a fertile area for speculation just over that edge. This is clearest in the older movie, for instance, in how the experiment with the time travel model is conducted. The director shows us a well-made, artistically-interesting device that has motion and that seems to cause a mini-disruption in the time-space continuum with its rattling of the objects in its immediate environment. In the new movie, the experimental phase is glossed over for the deployment of the actual time machine, which is a masterfully-designed and -built piece of machinery that exceeded the capabilities and even imaginations of the director and special effects people who made the original movie. For instance, the new time machine creates two glowing beams, indicative in modern cinema of high energy fields, and creates a sort of bubble inside which the time-space continuum seems to rupture. These are all newer concepts that are the result of the conventions of cinema when it seeks to depict such phenomena that are at the edge of the currently known. In essence, it is our rattling of the light fixture from the previous movie.

First post

This is my first blog entry. Yahoo!