Being the only person who I think will speak their mind honestly in this post instead of mindlessly telling you how much I learned from this class, I regret to spend most of the following paragraphs in negativity. I didn't get much out of this class at all. Not due to my lack of preparation or due to Professor Foot. I felt on both ends that we, myself as a student and professor Foot as a teacher, put in the needed effort. I found the relationships I built with my peers and my professor were actually the best and most rewarding part of it. The class was faulted from its very beginning. Each assignment was plagued with misunderstandings of modern communication and technology and each lesson failed to actually grasp any new concepts with any sort of depth.
Starting right here, at the blogs. What is this? This is a blog. Well, sort of. This is actually just a set of reflective essays disguised as a blog. The premise of this assignment included trying to be a part of "the blogosphere." These blogs are filled with nothing except responses to classroom assignments. I do not qualify that as being a part of "the blogosphere." It's just doing homework in blogger instead of Microsoft Word. The blogosphere includes the entire internet and is about finding a niche category to share likeminded opinions and information with. Sharing our reflections on classroom assignments with the other students is just online classroom discussion -- not the blogosphere. As a writer and a blogger in my personal life, this entire set of assignments has failed in grasping the concept of real life blogging at all. Responding to a set of articles about technology on a blog is no different (or any more multi-modal) than typing up a response paper. And hell, the response paper may have actually had some critical depth to it. Instead, we all look for a few key points and hope you think there is something worthwhile in our 3-4 paragraphs that we don't even remember writing 2 weeks later. The only thing I find useful in this assignment is that a lot of other students may not have used Blogger before, so understanding the interface here online may be important to actually using it in the future. These are reflections -- not blogs.
We were told to set up facebook and twitter accounts. Starting with the latter for brevity, the twitter accounts we created were never even used. Why was our time wasted with this then? It confused me. I use mine because I really love twitter and have a personal account I use many, many times per day. The rest of the semester, I heard time and time again that my peers did not like twitter or were "confused" or any other number of random and minimal excuses to not utilize it. Facebook? 100x worse. The entire Facebook assignment completely misrepresented internet culture. From its very core, the assignment did nothing for us, or for the students we were working with. The reason people love Facebook is because its where their friends are and they have history there with their updates and photos, etc. etc. It's their own personalized timeline and they interact their constantly. This assignment forced both us, and our cooperating students, to have a DIFFERENT facebook account. This is where things go south. What this entails is having a completely separate, EMPTY profile with almost no friends and 0 status updates/personal history there to use for a SCHOOL assignment. You could tell by student's responses that they were uninterested and just forcing out their responses. I almost felt bad. There is no reason to spend time on this separate account because there is nothing there. Students (and all other teens) spend so much time on facebook because it is interactive and filled with their friends and other things that intrigue them. By creating a separate account, it becomes contrived and uninteresting. The assignment didn't take into account the WHY behind Facebook and, in turn, failed at actually achieving anything worthwhile.
There is a very distinct difference between using technology and multi-modalities in the classroom because they actually benefit the activity and forcing it onto students to make it look like you're utilizing the 21st century. Technology is still in its infancy and the internet is still the largest sociological experiment in anarchism that is still playing out. These sorts of activities aren't helping students take things to a farther level of thought. Blogs and Facebook give them, and us, a reason to give lackluster responses and half-hearted thoughts because it's not viewed the same way as a paper. Technology can be used in a way to force students to take things to a new level, but this class demonstrated exactly how it can be used a crutch instead. Without formalized critical thought on a lot of the work we did, the retention will be minimal and the interest in coming back even less. When taking the time to actually dig into a text and write about it is replaced with "put up a blog post about it," you don't get very detailed, analytical thought with real criticism in it. You get an ungrounded opinion piece that doesn't force the student to expand their mind. These posts included. What did we add to each other's lives from these blogs? If you think we all hung out on each other's blogs every day, you are sadly mistaken. We got in, did what we had to do to get our points, and got out.
Now, for a few sentences of positivity: We did a section on film that was wonderful. Sadly short, but extremely informative. The book we used on using film in the classroom was detailed and gave great tips on film theory and showed how to analyze a variety of popular films from several decades. This truly showed an informative and constructive way to use something multi-modal in the classroom and I plan to hold onto this book (along with all my other education books) and use it as I enter the classroom.
I may be making extremely broad strokes in this post, and I don't mean to speak for everyone in INLA in this post, but as a group, we have all expressed our concern and the daunting task of most of the assignments (and their worthlessness) all semester. If no one stands by my side in this, that's fine. I'll know that my conscience is clear and that I spoke my mind because I care about myself as a future educator as well as my peers and the next year and the next year, etc. etc. as well. All in all, I am completely disappointed in the class on multi-modality. It is fundamentally flawed and not just needs to be tinkered with, but completely reworked.
Professor Foot, you were wonderful, and you did your best. I thank you for being so understanding and helpful to all of us this semester. I truly wish I would have taken more from your class, but I also am not willing to sit idly by just so I receive my points. If this reflection means you have to fail my blog or me from the class, I am willing to take that stand. But I am not willing to compromise my beliefs on education or to hide my emotions when I feel my time was wasted. Thanks for reading this.
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Pleasure Reading
13 years ago
16 comments:
This will probably have to be separated into multiple comment postings since it's so long....
There were a lot of things I DID like about the class, and all of them were assignments we did. I liked the autobio, the canonical wiki, CIFF, and I liked reading the articles. I wasn't crazy interested in much that when on IN class. I will agree with you when you say a lot of things were flawed, and I think that we could've gotten more out of the class than we did. I will say though that I think Dr. Kist/Foot's premise for a lot of the things we did was in good faith, they just didn't pan out well.
I think the blogs were supposed to 1. familiarize us to blogging which, as you said, many of us don't understand and 2. maybe to nudge us INTO that blogosphere. What I mean by the second point is that the articles were just something to grade so that they knew we were utilizing the blogs. We were given a lot of "choice posts" and I think that was supposed to get us to use blogging the way it's supposed to be used. Whether we did it or not is a different story.
But I completely and whole-heartedly agree with you on the Facebook project. I even mentioned in my own final reflection that I didn't think it was useful, and that I really didn't like the idea of ONLINE lit circles at all. Taken from my blog: "I think Facebook is something that should be used for entertainment. No one, including myself, wants to check two different accounts all the time (since just about everyone has a personal Facebook already). But online lit circles are good if I want to get more done in class, I guess. Students can log on and discuss the book on their own time and earn points for it. But as a rule of thumb, I like discussions to be in person.
(still quoting from my blog...)I think more and more, people are getting used to communicating online and being able to take the time to reevaluate and rethink their ideas, and more and more people are LOSING the ability to speak face-to-face. Verbal communication is a big part of literacy as well, and being able to express your ideas out loud is a skill that is worth teaching."
Another thing I wanted to point out was that were supposed to type up a whole comparison on two graphic novels, but we barely, if not at all, touched on style and benefits/disadvantages OF graphic novels in class. Things like that and the awesome film section could've been elaborated on more than it was.
I'm really excited that you're invested enough in the education of future educators to post this!
So FINALLY, while I agree with a lot of what you said, I don't think the class was "fundamentally flawed." I think the fundamentals were in good faith, but a lot of these ideas are in infant stages and just didn't work out as planned. I also think that the fact you were competent enough to write up this post shows you learned something from the course, so I doubt you'll be kicked out/failed. :)
I agree that the class is in its "infant stages". I think that we have to make mistakes to learn from them. I agree that it was a pain to make two fb accounts, but I honestly don't want high school kids checking out my personal account, not that I post inappropriate stuff, but still. Either way, I think that kids are undeniably learning differently and technology is a huge part of that. Some of the stuff didn't quite work out well, but that's a part of the learning process. I think it's an important class that has some growing to do, but it'll get there. In the meantime, I truly believe the INLA professors want our input. So, I'm sure they'll consider all of the suggestions we offer. You'll be fine, Mat! This shows your commitment!
I conpletely agree with you on the blogs, the facebook project, and twitter.... I wish we could have used these more than we did...... thanks Matt for posting this. I do think you were the only one with the guts to say what whas wrong with the class and everyone else, myself included, wrote about what we learned. Thanks!
My main problem with the class was that I felt that it promoted technology just for the sake of technology. I understand that technology is a wonderful tool that can be used in the classroom to enhance learning, but I also believe that there are many things that don't need to be taught with technology. For example, I was completely appalled by the article we read that said that creating a podcast could serve as a substitute for writing an essay. The author completely disregarded the fact that there is a huge difference between competence in speaking and writing skills. I plan on using technology in my own classroom but only when I believe that it will improve the overall lesson, not just to say that I used technology because it's the new trend.
Completely agree with the blogs! There was so much required for the blogs that we didn't get on and look around and see what everyone was writing about. Instead, we got on made our 6 comments and got off to finish other work. This doesn't seem like blogging to me. I feel that we could have done the same thing by just writing our responses in Word and turning them in, the only problem would be that our peers couldn't comment on them.
The Facebook discussions were the same way. It didn't feel like Facebook because all we did was comment, there wasn't any pictures or updates or anything of that sort. I know we were supposed to have a literature circle, but that could have took place somewhere else. We lost all aspects of Facebook when using it.
I too don't understand why we created a Twitter account and then never used it. It was like we just needed busy work to do because half of the time what we did in class didn't exactly relate to our assignments.
I agree there were a lot of things that might seem good in theory, but they didn't work out the best that they could.
I agree with your thoughts and that of this class being in the stage where it could use some redefining. I just want to stress that we truly love Ms. Foot and appreciate all she did to try and help us take away what we could from this class. I hope this at least makes someone think about how this class could be made better, because isn't that the point of this reflection? To see what we think of the class and to gauge whether or not it was effective? :)
While I did really enjoy some of the assignments, I do agree with matt and Julie that some seemed like we were using technology just for the sake of technology. In my blog, I made a comment about how MANY of the assignments were extremely too tedious for the amount of knowledge I gained from them. I feel as though if they weren't so detailed I could have taken the time to really work on understanding why I was doing the project, but that was not the case a lot of the times. I feel as though some assignments were so complicated and long that the focus was "Did I do this confusing assignment right" and not "how can I use this in my class"
Like Matt, I absolutely loved our classes on films. Those were very exciting, and I can definitely see myself using them in my class. I also really enjoyed the canonical wiki. I am actually going to suggest teaching the book I covered when I student teach.
I also really appreciated the effort put in by Ms. Foot. She worked hard for the class and was a joy to have as prof.
I am thankful that Matt has spoken his mind and hope that our reflections can be seen as a way to collect information to improve the class's effectiveness.
Thank you for pointing out how this class could be made better. While we appreciate Ms. Foot as a teacher, the structure of this class could have been a lot more effective. I wholeheartedly agree with your critique of the blog and facebook assignments. Like you, Im just not sure this contrived type of social networking belongs in the classroom. However, I also liked some of the aspects of this class and could see using them in my classroom such as the multi genere bios. Overall, I think we all gained some valuable exprience in the class and got some better idea of how we want to teach, wether we got ideas on what to do or what we know we don't want to do. And that is what the learning process is supposed to look like. Kudos to you Matt for speaking your mind.
I completely agree with Angel, I really enjoyed Miss Foot in class and she has put a lot of effort into helping us get the most out of the course. I strongly believe and agree with Matt when he says that the structure of the course could have been more effective. Nonetheless, I feel as though the assignments we did in class could effectively be used in our future classrooms and I believe this was the point of the course. As a teacher, every student is not going to like our teaching style, so we have to ultimately just promote learning. I can honestly say I learned a lot from this course. I may not use the multi-modal tools the way they were presented in class, but I will use the tools. I too appreciate you expressing your opinion and in a professional way, but I also believe it is important to ponder on what you could take away from this course.
I, along with most students who comments to Mat's blog, will agree to the content of this course. As I said in my own blog, I learned the most content from the shortest section of the class: film. I wish would have concentrated on how to incorporate this is all English classes more. This should not reflect Professor Foot's teaching. I enjoyed coming to class BECAUSE of her and my fellow classmates who have become dear friends of mine.
Wow, I can't believe that all of us are commenting on one blog post, but it definitely is a good one. Matt, I agree with some of the things you have said in this post, and I do think that if this is taught the right ways students can get more out of it to take to their own classrooms. I agree with Julie in the effect that I feel like it was just about using technology for technology's sake, because I knew how to use twitter, and facebook, and videos. Technology is the future, and I see that, but I believe that the way this class was set up really didn't help me use technology in a new way. I agree about the blogs, but I do think that they have caused me to write what I want to say in a short concise way, and has given me a forum to talk about things I have issues with and assignments that I have done. I look at it more as a self reflection of my own work. I also agree with Angel that Miss Foot truly tried her hardest to help us and was very understanding.
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