Category: digital media

Heading to GLS

aleciamLeave a comment

It’s August and I wonder where the summer went. gls_logoBut I’m excited that it’s time for GLS — the annual Games, Learning, and Society conference at UW-Madison. I’m looking forward to catching up with old friends, meeting new people, and learning about what games everyone’s playing and how they’re planning to incorporate Pokemon Go into various learning spaces. I’m especially looking forward to talking with as many teachers as I can. Bringing digital media and DIY sensibilities into classrooms in meaningful ways can be tough, particularly for K-12 teachers who work under intense assessment regimes, and I want to be able to share recent work with my teacher-candidate students.

So: especially if you’re a teacher who is thinking in similar ways, please come join me, Debbie Fields, and Jayne Lammers for our workshop session “Designing for DIY: Presenting Tensions, Lessons, and Questions to Guide Innovative Learning Environments.” Here’s the session link for more info. We’re planning to share experiences from our own efforts to bring various digital media explorations into our classes. We’d love to hear about yours, and we want to think about how we might consolidate these experiences into larger principles, research questions, or agendas. Join us!

Writing: Still fun, still far from easy

aleciamLeave a comment

Today I was asked by the lovely folks at DML Commons to participate in a webinar about writing and collaboration, and it was so much fun to chat with several fantastic academic writers about their writing ideas and habits.grantwriting-tablescape

In short, I’d say that the major lesson was that (surprisingly or unsurprisingly!), writing
is hard for everyone. That, and we all are addicted to coffee.

Here’s my tablescape from yesterday’s grant writing. A nice window, coffee, tea, and knitting are just some of the ingredients in my successful writing sessions. I have to have caffeine and a distraction for my hands.

Sometimes, I don’t think that my students believe me when I tell them that I have a difficult time with writing, too. It’s tough to make the time to sit down and hash out what I mean. It’s even tougher when I show a messy draft to someone else and that person doesn’t understand what I’m trying to say.

Read More »

Coding for English Teachers

aleciamLeave a comment

 

My students learning to use hex tables to create color on the web.
My students learning to use hex tables to create color on the web. They did it!

When you’re building research in digital literacies, it often is very useful to be married to a coder. Chris often helps me think about the perspective of someone who works in the industry and whether what I’m thinking about teaching might actually be useful for students — either immediately or at some point in the future.

Recently, he came in to help me teach my students about coding. All of the folks in this class are English teachers, reading and writing specialists, or headed into pre-service English teaching internships. To say the least, many of them were highly skeptical. They weren’t sure whether they could code, first of all, or whether they wanted to learn. What relevance does code have to teaching reading and writing?Read More »

#walkmyworld: Googlemaps Biography

aleciamLeave a comment

As a part of my School University Dialogues research project, I’ve been visiting high school and college writing classrooms. I spent some time with my UNH colleague Leah Williams yesterday. She’s a creative writer, primarily, and has done some amazing things as far as developing techniques for teaching students about multimodal writing and digital composition. I sat with her students, who were writing stories about first jobs and summer camps, landmarks and realizations.

They were working on Googlemaps biographies —using maps to chart their narratives through physical locations — which seemed like a lovely way to think about this week’s #walkmyworld theme, our Journeys.

So, I tried it. I didn’t include full stories or original photos for every location I’ve lived, but I enjoyed combining the map, my own stories, and images that I’ve made and saved over the years. This snapshots-like technique appeals to the poet who still lurks inside of me (and is a little afraid of long-form personal writing).

googlemaps-bio

Here’s a link to my Googlemaps essay. You can’t see much in this tiny screenshot.