The approach [being used for a particular course] is quite simple: have the students respond to each and every reading through the class blog by selecting three or more categories that define their understanding of the text, then they need to explain their choice of this category (which is wide open) with a close reading (read more about the approach here). Simple enough.
(Someone please tell me if I have offended blog ethics and/or etiquette in my citation.)
This morning, I finally got around to attending to the reading more carefully; now that I am nearing earth again, I think I have the beginnings of a way to structure my Intro to Philosophy course. The epiphany came in reading the linked description of the approach (again, here). From that, I quote: "...it's a kind of wild way to think about category tagging not so much as an after-thought or general repository of ideas, but as a specific act of declaratively defining the way in which they closely read the works and write about them." (emphasis mine.)
In my course, we will read canonical texts (works by the philosophers typically covered in a survey course) and we consider contemporary "texts" in film, advertising series, television, etc. By using reflective blogs tagged as students' declarative definitions, I imagine that we can construct an ongoing conversation that engages texts carefully and collaboratively.
Within this dialogue, our alternating engagement with ancient and contemporary texts can provide a "temporal distance" from which we may more clearly see our pre-judgments. I will provide the first tags from which the students choose, but students will be able to add tags. (Here is my attempt to play in a world of "always already" and the "anticipation of completeness" without ignoring the hegemonic power of prior scholarship and my own pre-judgments. Thanks, Hans Gadamer and all the post-moderns.)
Back to Groom's work....I did begin there....I am particularly attracted to the "weighted tag/category cloud." (I add my thanks, D'Arcy!) Now I'm off to figure out how to make this happen.
Well, right after I figure out what book/s the students will need. This appears to be the only concern of the institution. Until student evaluations roll 'round, at least.
1 comment:
Dawn+,
Wow, I'm really excited you find this useful. And, with inimitable Chris Lott as your collaborator, I'm sure my paltry attempt at re-thinking tags will be made quickly more intelligible.
I am particularly interested in the oscillation in your class between older, more canonical texts and contemporary film, advertising, etc. This, in my opinion, opens up so many possibilities for blogs and wikis. Primarily because they are superb tools for for framing multimedia like audio, video and images in a conversational/discussion orientated context. I taught an English 101 class using a blog/wiki combination, and I found myself relying on the blog to talk about certain commercials that I found on YouTube or images from archive.org, etc. I found my presentation in class was really quite dynamic and we could discuss Virginia Slim and Enjoli commercials as well as The Daisy Chain political ad after having watched it on the blog. Students can then add their own contributions via comments, their own posts, etc. Best of all, this comes with little or no overhead. And then there is Mojiti.com wherein you can have students annotate videos online -wow! But I digress.
The weighted tags is an interesting experiment that I am really having fun with. The students have already done five blog posts each (there are 6 students) and there are already fifty tags, several of which have been tagged more than once. What we started to realize quickly while doing this are two things: 1) they are framing their discussion of these texts using concepts that they have to anchor in the readings, and 2) they have already thought and reflected upon several concepts of at least four works we have read -this work can now be further developed in relationship to the other posts of their class classmates that are often overlapping.
I guess the overall idea is to start thinking and examining in more detail the assumed categories we bring to any given discipline or series of works on a particular theme. Additionally, how do we define these categories for knowing and, in turn, how do they define (and limit?) our knowledge. Using a category cloud to trace a particular course's ways of knowing their topic really gets at the linguistic means through which many of the Web 2.0 technologies are opening up a whole universe for accessing so many different ways for approaching our teaching, as well as some exciting possibilities for tracing and re-visualizing how we collaboratively frame, create, and construct meanings/knowledge/power, etc.
Sorry to go on a bit, I'm just really excited about the idea of thinking through this ideas in a larger context with folks from all kinds of disciplines. I almost feel ashamed that you read my pathetic summation of Foucault -you being a philosophy faculty. But hey, isn't that why we're doing this, to get that feed back, and to engage that conversation. What could be better for students than to see how their professors engage, learn, research, and conceptualize the very ideas they are sharing!
Ok, I'll stop! Just a long-winded way of saying thanks for tacking back to my post :)
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