Brave New World

The wiki platform is yet another powerful tool in the Composition/ESL instructor's arsenal. In my undergrad and grad programs I sat through classes that were simply lecture, start to finish, day after day. Having new media tools such as blogs, web pages, and wikis has saved my own teaching from falling into this wit-dulling cycle where students have every reason not to be invested... there is nothing collaborative about straight lecture. The whole idea behind my own teaching is to create a student-centered classroom where ideas can flow freely back and forth and I act more as a mediator between students and their ideas and perspectives. Blogs, which I require for journaling, allow students a time and a place for personal reflection. Web pages give my students a home base where they can organize their academiclife for not only my class but for their entire class load. But, these are all solipsistic forms of new media use in the classroom.

Now that I have been exposed to the wonders of the wiki here in English 808, I will be able to bring something collaborative back to my students. Group projects will have a user-friendly and truly collaborative platform. Of course the impetus will be on the students to share the load when it comes to a project, but the wiki will be a great introduction to what they can or might expect when they are out in the working world and collaboration is key if not always an equitable situation.  The challenge for me as an instructor, of course, will be to determine who has done what and how much. Assigning grades for a collaborative project is going to be a challenge that will have to navigated and I can alread y see emails in my inbox and hear knocks on my office door from students disgruntled by the lack of effort of one or another team member on these types of collaborative platforms. So, there will be a learning curve for me as well, but that is always the best situation for any class: for me to be adding to my knowledge and skills as an instructor at the same time my students are discovering new ideas and new ways of working. Clearly the collaborative nature of the wiki will challenge me to come up with a new model for checks and balances on student work. I look forward to this challenge, but understand, like my students, I will stumble at first while adapting to a new model.

In terms of the public nature of collaborative writing, I think it will be fascinating to note how my students' writing changes in this new group dynamic. the mix of individual effort assignments and collaborative projects should provide a wider perspective of and deeper insight into each student. Will weaker writers work harder to match the level of other stronger team members or will stronger writers be dragged down? The world of the wiki is as much a social experiment as it is a lesson in working together. To ignore this powerful platform as a potential tool for creating a dynamic class experiment is to limit myself as an instructor and to deny the my students an opportunity to dip a toe in new media's brave new world.

Time Travel Tech and Literacy: Two Films

Viewing the 1960 version of H.G. Wells "Time Machine" it is evident how much technology has changed just by the fact that the credits for the film appear at the beginning. This is not only a stylistic reality of the era, but also speaks to the few people that needed to be credited for creating the finished product. The end credits for the 2002 version of the film come at the end and undoubtedly list hundreds of people.  Yet it is apparent that the story telling in 2002 version is more human. The story immediately ties itself in its narrative to to the human condition, thus it becomes more universally literate. The film could easily play to a multicultural, mutiethnic audience and key elements of the narrative could be easily understood across cultures even without benefit of subtitles. The 1960 version on the other hand would play to primarily and english speaking audience, mainly becomes it is dialogue driven - which is ironic being the film is about a futuristic technology. The audience for the 2002 film needs to be more visually literate than language literate. This is an important distinction in what it means to be literate in the twenty-first century and is a crucial component of bringing a technologically driven story to its audience. In the the 1960 version there is a line where one of the characters asks the inventor of the time machine if he has thought at all about the commercial potential of his invention. What is interesting is the 2002 filmmakers, unlike the 1960's filmmakers of this same story, did consider the commercial potential and so constructed their technologically driven film for a vissually literate audience which is a far larger audience than the purely language driven version from 1960's which is more or less a glorified stage play. The technology of filmmaking in 2002 serves very well the product of a 2002 movie about time travel - the future truly meets the future here. Where as carpentry and matte paintings were clearly employed in the 1960's version, digital technologies, perhaps some of them invented themselves for the production (something which is not uncommon, i.e. Lucas Film), were employed to give the film an actual futuristic flavor. The 1960's version needs to tell most of the story through narrative - characters pontificating back and forth. The 2002 film usesa visual language which compliments the sparse dialogue and furthers the story through kinetic devices: action vs. inaction, visual vs. narrative, mobile vs. static. Technology not only compliments literacy in the 2002 production of the time machine but opens up opportunities for the technology to appear less overwhelming. The audience is given a humanizing scene where he inventor loses his bride-to-be and this narrative device works as a universal theme to pull the audience into the story. With this accomplished through this narrative device, the audience is free to go along on the technological ride that follows. Suspension of disbelief for the technology of time travel has been achieved, so all the technical wizadry that follows can be accepted and further the narrative.