Since I am teaching for ENG 249: Introduction to Technical Communication for the first time this semester, I want a few of my blog posts this semester to be about my experience teaching the class. Day One was a bit of a disaster, what with faulty technology and the like, but after talking to my adviser, I realized I was catastrophizing the first day. Things are actually going really great so far.
I have taught intermediate-level classes before in the form of writing electives and literature sequences, but had not yet been afforded the opportunity to teach Technical Communication, so this is a big deal to me! I was a bit nervous, and still am. The student demographics are not so nerve-racking, but teaching a course with content new-to-you is always makes me a bit nervous. One thing I have noticed, though, is that student interactions with me are more substantial in content and purpose, but not necessarily frequency. Now, instead of students coming up to me and asking me about due dates and preparing me for upcoming absences they are asking me to share course content-related articles and resources; they want to talk about privacy and ethics and identity and they want to do so not because they have to take an FYC course or because some obscure writing elective is required for their major, but because they want to learn more about those things and technical communication. They share my interests. Some, I dare say, even share my passion. So, I want to relay two quick stories which might double as anecdotes that happened to me in my first two weeks teaching tech comm.
So, I hope you enjoyed those two tidbits from my experience teaching tech comm so far. I’ll check in in a few weeks with another tech comm focused blog post. If you would like a PDF of the Tech Time Assignment sheet, reach out to me via email [email protected].
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Ethical, Accessible Alternatives to Assigning New Media from Streaming Sites Requiring Payment8/22/2019 I am a cord cutter. My wife is a cord cutter. We are a cordless household.
We aren’t the only ones, and haven’t been for quite some time. Frankly, another decade of the cord-cutting phenomenon approaches. But, what have been the implications of cord-cutting on our pedagogy, on the way we construct our courses, and in the texts we choose to teach. I think it is important to pause here and note that this blog post concerns student access to pay-sites for streaming media, and does not broach what these companies do with user data once they have it. This is a tangential ethical issue that deserves further exploration, for sure. The list of films and television shows I have used in the courses I have taught range widely, and the classes in which I have used texts from these mediums is many. It doesn’t matter if I am teaching a freshman composition sequence, or a 200-level literature sequence, or a course focused on business writing, I enjoy adding a clip here or a film there. But, what about when you want to assign an entire film that is only available on one of the major streaming platforms like Hulu, Amazon, or Netflix? This is an ethical quandary with many different perspectives, sure. Sites like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu require payment for users to access their archives of new media, so is it ethical to require students to view, talk about, and write about texts they have to pay to access? There is a ton of work done on this topic, but, in a short answer: no. It is not ethical, and it is not fair. Often times I make the assumption that everyone has a Netflix account. The truth is, though, not everyone has a Netflix account. What is even more absurd—personally—is that I don’t even have a Netflix account! I borrow from a friend. I still think it is important to work new media into the curriculum. So, how do we do that ethically? Last year I taught English 145: Writing in the Academic Disciplines. This is a writing program elective with a variety of majors; I’ve taught it a few times and I like the class because the students have the opportunity to explore writing and research in their own fields and disciplines, which means they get to personalize the course. In my spring section, I used my SurveyMonkey account to set up a pole to let students choose as a class the documentary film they wanted to watch. I only chose films available through the streaming service Kanopy because all students at my institution have access to that platform through the university library. By assigning films available through Kanopy, I worked around the ethical issues concerning access that come with assigning films from mainstream streaming services. Moreover, allowing the students to choose the film we watched as a class was a good exercise in community building, and helped give the class a distinct personality. Ultimately, they chose “Normal Is Over,” a 2016 film focusing on the existential implications climate change. “Normal is Over” is a good film—an important film—but it was long. So, since our class met twice a week, I cancelled Tuesday to let the students have time to watch the film and then we discussed the film on Thursday. Before you choose to assign a new media text only available on Netflix, consider the alternatives to assigning films and television shows only available on streaming sites that require payment for access. Avoid Hulu, Amazon, and Netflix. There are work-around to this issue, sure. I have found using Kanopy to be quite successful, and the best part is that I have access to Kanopy, too, so I have this entire media archive to explore! Ok, I will include a list of movies and television shows I have taught as I begin my 8thyear teaching in higher education. Profiled: The Mothers of Murdered Black and Latino Youth Fences The Office The Shining Do the Right Thing A Streetcar Named Desire Good Will Hunting 12 Years a Slave Rent Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Psycho Normal Is Over 2001: A Space Odyssey Seinfeld "The semester starts on a Monday. The semester starts on a Monday."
That’s what we tell ourselves, sure, but the reality is that for a lot of instructors working in higher education--graduate students teaching in writing programs, contingent faculty, tenured professors at universities with smaller English departments--the semester starts on the date of the pre-semester mini-conference. These departmental, occasionally intradepartmental, events might range from half-day workshops focused on the mission of the writing program to day-long conferences with breakout sessions led by colleagues in the department and peers from institutional entities like student services and writing centers. Pre-semester mini-conferences have been a part of my time at my last three stops: Illinois State University, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the University of Montevallo. In the Spring of 2018, I lead my first session at one of these events, entitled: “What Do You Know About Antecedent Knowledge?” at ISU Writing Program Grassroots Summit. Yesterday, I lead my second session. Yesterday, I, along with a peer, led a Q&A session with new graduate student instructors working in the writing program. This was the first year since I joined ISU that I was not involved with new instructor orientation, so I was excited to meet the new cohort. Yet, as I began planning, I tried to remain conscious of how my own positionality—and my own ability to impart wisdom, of which I think I have very little—would transfer to these probably exhausted, newly minted Ph.D. students after a week-and-a-half of orientation. (Yes, a week-and-a-half. Yes, probably too long.) So, I threw down the pen and paper and decided to let the questions they have guide the conversation. This turned out to be a clever idea, and my peer and I were able answer pointed questions instead of blabbering on for so long about our own experiences. However, I did write 3 things down in the notes in my phone which I wanted to make sure I worked into the conversation. I figured they might be worth sharing here now:
I don’t necessarily think the things I mentioned to the new cohort are groundbreaking or landmark or life-changing or whatever. A lot of it came from Gregory Colón Semenza’s highly recommended book Graduate Study for the 21stCentury. But, they were said, and they were, hopefully, absorbed. One day, down the road, maybe in the next four year, perhaps something mentioned yesterday will resonate with one of them. Let me start off by saying that I am blessed. Usually, I hate when people say that they are blessed, or, even worse, #blessed, but in this case I think it is important to acknowledge that my positionality has afforded me maximum privileges in life. Moreover, I am extremely, here it comes, #blessed because I have a partner who works as tirelessly as I do to make sure we survive while I am in graduate school. Recently I was having a discussion with a friend in the discipline, a WPA, and she mentioned that she thought it was important for graduate students to do radical things—like make a living wage. Of course, as a third-year Ph.D. student, I am feeling all too well the economic constraints of an endeavor like graduate school. Then, tonight, as I was winding down on Twitter—that sounds ridiculous, I know—just before I was going to start the second season of Frasier (https://bit.ly/2GUHxRN) on Netflix, I saw this Tweet: I blacked out the handle and photo to keep this Twitter user’s identity anonymous. By the way, if you have made it this far into the blog, kudos to you. Let’s keep going.
Each year, graduate students and contingent faculty are burdened with a daunting, almost insurmountable, financial burden when it comes to attending conferences, as well as other professional development opportunities. Coupling the unethical amount of money institutions pay graduate students with the rigorous amounts of emotional, physical, and mental labor required to succeed in higher education creates striking implications for the future mental wellness of the academy. Sure, you have heard this before: universities don’t pay graduate students and contingent faculty enough. Okay, well, you need to hear it again because things need to change, and the only way things are going to change is if we band togeth-- (Pause) I will admit, things got out of hand a bit there. Frasier was playing in the background and he was going on one of his long soliloquies and his passion yadda yadda osmosis… you get the point. Here’s the deal, though, we know that universities don’t compensate workers ethically. But, what about when conference organizers plan and execute the registration of their conference unethically? For the most part, graduate students and contingent faculty know how much they are getting compensated, unfair or not, because they sign a contract. Conference organizers, on the other hand, have the agency to choose and change the registration fees for conferences annually, and virtually all up the price for non-members. Of course, the primary difference in the institutional contract we sign and the registration fees we pay is stability, however fragile, meaning we know how much we are going to get paid; we don’t always know how much conference fees will be. Remember earlier in this blog post when I was getting all fired up and then stopped myself? It’s because I am fired up. I went to the Conference on Community Writing website, which is run by the Coalition for Community Writing, and checked out the About page. What I found leads me to propose this question: how are we supposed to “help to catalyze community-based writing through research, teaching, publications, workshops and conferences, and public writing projects about, with, for, and by local, global, and online communities” if we can’t even afford to join your efforts? We are on the threshold of a decade, or so, since the rise of social media games like FarmVille and Zombie Farming. These games are designed to connect users to other users through temporally-structured mundane activities, quests, and goals which lead to achievements. To gain an achievement took time, and interaction, which would frustrate users who became consumed by the mindlessness, numbness of these games. So, of course, the game designers built in a pay-option to expedite the game for users who could afford it.
These farming games made, and continue to make, a lot of money. But, in recent years, amateur technologists and DIY entrepreneurs have struck back, cultivating a way to make money through technology instead of feed their money to technology through farming as evidenced through the rise of phone farms. Phone farmers are technology users who employ multiple devices to click ads, watch videos, and consume media for fractions of cents. Financial returns for phone farmers vary depending on the size of their farm but can make anywhere from $20-$1,000 per month. People making money on and from the internet is not revelatory—in fact, there may be no more impactful relationship in our histories than one forever gestating between capitalism and the digital age. But, how does phone farming reflect our current socio-economic moment when contextualized against our present political landscape? It my own experiences, it seems to be the norm for many young professionals—not just academics—have a side hustle. Between us, my wife, who is registered nurse, and I work five jobs. She works three and I work two, and we are both enrolled in university programs. I mention this not to boost my self-esteem, or ego, but to say this is the norm for many people. Since so many people do maintain extra ways of making money, and with our current administration blatantly ignoring the plights of low-income and marginalized communities, I suspect we will continue to see a rise in phone farming. So, how will a rise in phone farming impact digital identity co-construction? The apps, which provide the platforms for phone farmers to constantly click and watch videos across multiple devices—from two to hundreds—to make money often times think that the same user is multiple people, which will, ultimately, be misleading in the datasets constructed from the data gained through the constant interactions of phone farmers. It is hard to know, then, exactly what the implications are for large-scale phone farming, but it is a phenomenon is worth continued examination. The first photos I saw of phone farms reminded me of scenes from dystopian science-fiction or technology-driven action shows and movies which always feature some hacker or goofy, yet technologically savvy, best friend or sidekick. This western trope was only adapted for these genres in the form of characters in dark, dingy basements lit by multiple computer screens hard at work. It is time I embrace my sidekick-ness and start phone farming to make a little extra dough. So, I plan to turn my garage work area into a small-scale phone farm in the next few months. Perhaps this is a better way to solve the student debt problem? I don’t know; I still want to know more about a freedom dividend, but I know phone farming sure is going to help us in the immediate future. |
Charles WoodsPhD student focusing on Rhetoric, Composition, and Technical Communication at Illinois State University. Archives
October 2019
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