Category: students

Coding for English Teachers

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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 »

Shakespeare (A coding exercise)

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Below you will find the text of the Shakespeare fan page that Chris made to push my teaching students into learning some HTML and CSS mark-up by compelling them into making some deeply necessary edits. English major humor ahead! I’m leaving it here for posterity, though you should be deeply saddened to know that you’re missing the original, eye-searing aqua-and-yellow color scheme.

The cover image is a Wikimedia Commons image of the “Flower Portrait” of Shakespeare.

Here goes…

*

William_Shakespeare_1609
“Flower portrait” of Shakespeare.

O HAI you guys! I made this web page so that every one would know that I am William Shakespeare’s #1 fanboy. He wrote lots of plays and poems and stuff. Here is his wikipedia page if you want to read more stuff about him. HE IS THE GREATEST EVAR!

My favorite play is called Merchant of Venezuela. It is about two young people who fall in love even though they come from different sides of the tracks. The both have twins and when the four of them go camping in the woods one night fairies come and turn one of them into a horse or something. But that’s ok because they’re all on an island where a sorcerer lives (he used to be a king but when he tried to divide up his kingdom his kids kicked him out). So in the end there’s this HUUGE sword battle where everybody dies because one of the swords is poisonous and the other is really really pointy. It is SO COOL.

#walkmyworld: Mirrors and Reflections

aleciamLeave a comment

Hello for the first time in awhile, #walkmyworld folks! We in English 789 have been blazing a bit of a parallel trail, working around our larger research projects, Spring Break for the students, and digging into digital poems. Because few of us have worked with digital texts in deep ways before, I thought it might be a nice way to stick a bit more closely to text at first before composing on our own. We started with several poems broadly about reflections of self, inspired by Ian O’Byrne‘s suggestions for Mirror week:

– Two Fusiliers, by Robert Graves
– Narcissus, by Alice Oswald
– The Shape of Saying, by Mary O’Malley
– I Go Back to May 1937, by Sharon Olds

We broke up into groups and started by annotating these poems in Googledocs, marking them up, making sense of them, and thinking about how we might use visual or audio components to help us “see” these powerful words and images in new ways. Shawna Coppola and I worked together on O’Malley’s Shape of Saying, which is about language, identity, and the marginalization of the Irish language under British rule . We spend a lot of time thinking about the sounds of the poem (for instance, listening to Irish speakers), trying to think about how we might represent the sound of a language visually, how language reflect selves and cultures. One person in the linked video talks about “the thought process in Irish” and how it’s distinct.Read More »