Smith (bbsmith@ilstu.edu) is working on identities and literacies and has been in Uganda for 5 years, and she’s looking for online and offline identities and what they mean for literacy technologies. So far she’s sharing information about Ugandan women working in transnational companies, and, in that workspace, how do these women use literacy? The medical transcriptions they make holds to a certain specific language that they need to use to do their jobs. Also, they have aglicized their names for their work on call centers. Smith said that “relationship between the materials and the imagined. The works are far removed physically from the transnational “home site” of companies.” These virtual identities force them to become more than one person: their offline and online identities.Through the call center they appropriate a western culture even though they never leave Uganda. Most of the learning comes from experiences only in Uganda and no formal education.

Next up at Orzolek and Canfield on Cyborg Theories & Meatspace Realities. So what the heck in meatspace? Now Bonnie’s talking Donna Haraway. Cool. Biology in technological. There’s no entological separation between biological and technological. She’s talking about Katherine Hale’s idea of posthuman, and I think she’s lost a lot of people in the room. It’s ok because she’s not lost me. By using blogs in first year composition, the issues with dominant discourses have seeped through. One of them is the social connections online and with these communities they hoped to increase self-esteem of students. She mentioned an article on Viewing Class division through Facebook and said that FB is cleaner and more esthetically pleasing. Some people use both FB and MySpace because they can have a dichotomous identity. (e.g. SciFi Geek Nerd on FB and dominatrix on MySpace). An analogy: FB is like IKEA. MySpace is like what…. KMart, maybe?)

Now the other lady’s talking and she said by connecting online via blogs is to establish friendship networks. By prodding she tried to encourage weekly writing online and hoped those connections would spill into the traditional classroom. She had several assumptions about classroom versus social online, which were many times inaccurate. At times talk from classes spilled into the online space, though. Recently, a Chronical of Higher Ed author (missed the name) said we needed to give more guidelines on how to blog for class. What?! This is crazy. If I assess a blog, they they write for ME, the professor. If I don’t assess it, they write for THEMSELVES. This is better for me. It’s like the student in my class who will read everything as long as I don’t assign it; when I tell her to read something, she won’t.

She’s telling us how a lot of students won’t think they’re writers because formally they struggle, but online in blogs and FB, they’re prolific writers! Kids don’t like to write in high school or college, but they’ll post online all day long. How can we connect between online writing and offline writing? Do we really need to connect them, or not?

Now they’re talking about how if blogs are assigned, they don’t want to do it. But they will write on their own all of the time. They resist the pedagogical nature of blogging. These presenters seem to be talking about how to teach Web 2.0 rather than how to teach their CONTENT in that frame. I’m note sure they’re quite where they’re suppose to be, and there’s a fine line between content and tool that needs to be addressed.

A question from the audience is how do they handle private versus public in the frame of the university. One presenter “requires” them to blog 2x a week (I put requires in quotes because I’m not down with this idea of force). Blogging is 20% of her course grade. How do you assess this, is asked? They say they do different types of assessment. Self-assessment, peer-assessment (peer reading groups), and instructor assessment). Mostly they want the students to engage online.

My problem I think is that these instructors are trying “to give students agency”. How the hell can we give agency? We can’t, and this is bothering me. And with that, sorry but not the best session.

Posted in conferences, presentations