I think it sounds neat—and, much to my surprise, so do most of those offering comments on Chronicle, it seems. A former student of the class also chimed in to offer some positive reflections and a link to her course blog, which links to other students’ blogs. That should give a sense of the conversations that these technologies encouraged.

In unrelated news, I have about a dozen drafts for new posts that I am dying to complete and post, but they’re going to have to remain drafts until I push through some of my real (i.e., deadline-bound) work. Blogging is my own personal “disruptive technology,” I suppose (but usually in a good way). I expect to be posting a lot come August, the month I defend.

What’s got me blogging now is a funny coincidence: Just as I was commenting to my friend and fellow Annenberger Moira about the concept of “digital natives” needing some revamping (if not outright rejecting), she pointed me to “Generational Myth,” an article in the most recent Chronicle of Higher Ed by Siva Vaidhyanathan. (Link updated to direct to the free version—thanks, Siva!) The long and the short of the article is precisely what I have been observing in my own class: The generation of “digital natives” might not be so native to the digital as many presume, and is certainly not so homogeneous as to be able to be described by a single way of thinking across the board.

Some key excerpts:

College students in America are not as “digital” as we might wish to pretend. And even at elite universities, many are not rich enough. All this mystical talk about a generational shift and all the claims that kids won’t read books are just not true. Our students read books when books work for them (and when I tell them to). And they all (I mean all) tell me that they prefer the technology of the bound book to the PDF or Web page. What kids, like the rest of us, don’t like is the price of books. [...]

By focusing on wealthy, white, educated people, as journalists and pop-trend analysts tend to do, we miss out on the whole truth. [...]

[Esther] Hargittai explained why we tend to overestimate the digital skills of young people: “I think the assumption is that if [digital technology] was available from a young age for them, then they can use it better. Also, the people who tend to comment about technology use tend to be either academics or journalists or techies, and these three groups tend to understand some of these new developments better than the average person. Ask your average 18-year-old: Does he know what RSS means? And he won’t.”

Agreed.

What got me thinking about all this was teaching applications in the Adobe Creative Suite to seniors in college. I expected that they would not know how to use Photoshop, but that they would be proficient with basic document editing in Microsoft Windows. I was mistaken. They certainly know how to open a web browser to access Facebook, a webmail client, and Google Image Search, but the interfaces that serve up such applications seem alien to them.

In teaching Photoshop, I was getting questions like, “How do I resize a window so that I can see the other windows behind it?” Photoshop uses the same window resizing rules as any other Windows application: minimize/maximize buttons near the “close” button in the upper right corner of each window, and a space to click and drag to resize in the lower right corner. I believe I answered this question for no fewer than 10 students (out of 60, between three sections), and those are only the ones who spoke up to ask.

Another question that came up comparably frequently: “How come it keeps pasting the thing I pasted before?” The answer is that you need to copy something new in order to paste something new, and many students thought it was sufficient just to select the new thing they wanted to paste. Again, this works no differently from any other program in Windows. I also noted that the majority of students in my classes go to the Edit menu for common functions like copying and pasting—sometimes hunting around in the menu to find them—rather than using keyboard shortcuts.

And, for what it’s worth, they certainly don’t prefer clicking back and forth between Adobe applications and the PDFs I give them for handouts (in my perhaps misguided attempt to save a tree). These students are not ready to give up their paper media, and I certainly don’t blame them.

These are not dumb students: They have asked some good questions and have come up with some clever visual solutions to the projects I lay out for them. Several are also very enthusiastic and quite excited to learn such programs: A number have commented to me that this is like nothing they’ve ever done before, that they could fool around with these programs for hours, that this is now their favorite class. I honestly don’t think that has as much to do with me as it does with getting to learn some truly useful skills and practice with some surprisingly usable tools.

I would also echo Siva’s repeated insistence that “digital nativism” is more of an economic issue that some writers typically recognize. I don’t think these students are “poor,” per se, but chatting with one student last night after class helped put things into perspective for me. She mentioned that she had transferred to this school from another college (about a mile away) because of the steep tuition at the other place. She was glad, she said, to learn these design programs now because they seemed more commonly known and less commonly taught for beginners at her old school. (The class I’m teaching now isn’t a design class for art majors, but a required course teaching basic design literacy for all Communication and Journalism students.)

Of course, I’m not going to say there’s no truth to the idea that increased access to digital technology has changed the way that young people think about communication and information. As I said, these students are perfectly capable with Google Image Search, and that certainly changes the way that they approach a design project compared to how design students would have approached such a project 20 years ago. But my experiences teaching have made me curious to read (and perhaps conduct, after the dissertation) some research about how well college students really understand visual digital interfaces—or, perhaps, which interfaces they truly understand.

I wonder, for example, whether the applications that the average college student understands most intuitively are web apps more so than the browsers and operating system windows used to navigate to them. Has the operating system interface become so transparent, with so much of interaction moved to the content of the individual application, that simple, more or less universal functions like “Ctrl-C” and window minimizing now seem acceptable to ignore?

I suspect that someone else has already written on this, so I plan to hunt around in some journals before I muse much further on it. I just felt the need to make a note of this before I get caught up in teaching Illustrator and InDesign, and some other anecdote gets me thinking about something else entirely. As many have warned me, teaching can be as much of a learning experience for the instructor as it is for the students.

ENGL 009 314 TR 1:30pm-3:00pm Smith
Brains, Jocks, Burnouts, and Rebels

What is a nerd? A Jock? Have these identities always existed in school, or are they new? Do they exist across cultures, or are they a uniquely American phenomenon? How is it that unique individuals embrace these categories or are pushed into them? This course will explore identities as they exist in high schools, and students will engage in critical writing around the creation and definition of identity categories, both generally and in terms of personal experience.

“Brains, Jocks, Burnouts, and Rebels” is about high school hierarchies (with a description starting with the words “What is a nerd?”), and “Freaks and Geeks” is about fandom (“Most of us would admit to being a freak or a geek about something—in other words, a fan”).

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ENGL 009 319 MW 3:30pm-5:00pm Cook
Freaks and Geeks

Most of us would admit to being a freak or geek about something — in other words, a fan. This is a class about fan culture, in which we will think critically about the idea of the fan and his or her relationship to literary and cultural production. Using critical essays, documentary films, novels and websites, we will study the theory and practice of fandom. We will examine the ways fans creatively demonstrate their enthusiasm for literary classics like Shakespeare and Austen, consider the communities created by contemporary phenomena like Star Trek and the Harry Potter books, and explore the idea of a cult classic and what it means to be part of a cult following. In short weekly assignments and several longer, formal essays, students will discuss their own experience as fans and reflect upon the ways in which fandom constitutes a unique mode of reading a text, whether it be a novel, television show, film, or piece of music.

I’m fascinated that in two pages you get such different takes on practically the same concepts. One conceptualizes nerdiness as part of a distinct social category, and the other assumes that we all have a certain amount of geekiness, our “own experience as fans.” It’s often quite intentional to refer in one case to “nerds” and in the other to “geeks,” although there’s little ambiguity about the oddity associated with the word “freak.”

If you’re a Penn student, note that the last day to add a writing class is September 14th!

Research: For academic research and conferences related to geek culture and various traditionally geeky media. (I’ll also tag posts about my own research with this because I still can’t bring myself to make a category titled “Me me me,” though I admit I’m especially interested in getting feedback on my papers.)

School Culture: For items pertaining to school culture as lived by students, such as clubs and social hierarchies.

Education: For issues pertaining to teaching and education at all levels.

Honestly, this is mostly for my own convenience as I go back through old posts and collect thoughts for papers and such, but I figured I might as well let everyone know.

Update: Going through my bloated “Miscellaneous” category to categorize them more specifically, I noticed a definite thread of posts tallying up people’s ways of defining the boundaries of geekdom—geek vs. nerd, art geek vs. science geek, and so on. And so I figured I might as well go ahead and also add a category for Defining Geekdom. Sorry if this brings up a bunch of old posts on people’s RSS readers (the way I believe it does with mine).

Make next year easier… upload last year’s homework to Facebook Docs! [...]

It may be summer, but before you delete all of your homework, you should upload it to FACEBOOK DOCS!

FACEBOOK DOCS is an application made by a company called SCRIBD.
SCRIBD : TEXT :: YOUTUBE : VIDEOS

Wouldn’t it be nice if next time you got stuck on a problem, you could just open up Facebook Docs and find the paper of a student from last year… not to cheat, but just to compare…

Everything you write is /your/ property. Thus, there’s no reason to not share off your mad writing skills and maybe help some poor soul down the road…

Its like getting a book with comments already in the margin!

PS… Cheating is wrong. but helping others is Christian.

Now, a few things.

The educator in me cringes a bit because it’s almost certain that this will be used to plagiarize. That’s why I added it to my own Facebook account, actually, figuring I might need to search it in the future when I read a paper that seems just a bit off. I did catch a plagiarist this way once, using Google—I suspected that undergraduates are unlikely to use womb metaphors when deconstructing film, and the first search hit confirmed this for me. Dealing with a plagiarist was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my graduate school experience, and the idea of online tools further enabling this is bound to tick a lot of us off. Even if this service is meant to be used for tutoring rather than plagiarism, the “make homework easier” mentality may be missing the point of homework, and the punctuation errors really aren’t helping.

On the other hand, these folks have done their homework (ha ha). They have a pretty reasonable argument that homework answers are students’ intellectual property, and arguably, exam-taking alone and without external references is not exactly representative of problem-solving outside a school context. The problem, of course, is that some teachers can’t or won’t make up all new testing materials each year—but why should that be the students’ problem?

Perhaps voicing this perspective seems unsympathetic to my teaching brethren and sistren, a function of my own need as a researcher of media and culture to update teaching materials frequently and rely more on papers than exams. I’m sorry, brothers and sisters, but I must say that I was swayed somewhat by today’s Featured Doc, “They Didn’t Study,” offering examples of amusing doodles and inane answers on exams. I haven’t really thought much before about how homework actually functions as a medium of communication, but this got me thinking about it.

I did this stupid stuff in high school, even in college a bit. (My calc test asked me to draw “Region R” and “Section S,” but I added “Mister T” as a free bonus.) Sure, this may have been picked as the Featured Doc to strengthen the argument that this service isn’t just about cheating, but come on: you know we “culture people” are suckers for evidence of “resistance.” If I try hard enough, I bet can envision a scenario in which doodling Batman or a Ninja Turtle in one of my own classes could result in bonus points.

For what it’s worth, when you google the company that makes this application, Scribd, the second link is a Scribd doc, “pictures of geek culture.” At first I thought this was just an odd coincidence, unrelated to my other comments about Facebook Docs, but now I wonder if it’s potentially relevant after all. Should we be reassured that the geeks—perhaps those least likely to cheat—are those most firmly associated with this service at present? Or, if this takes off, should we see Facebook Docs as a sign that the non-geeks are becoming media literate enough to conceptualize homework as intellectual property, to contribute to and learn from user-generated content online? I still expect to drop by for a search or two while grading some day, but I can’t write this off as nothing more than legitimated plagiarism just yet.

Postscript: A friend from Penn just walked in the room and I showed her this post and the Featured Docs. She said that she used to make similar doodles on her own tests, and then she suddenly exclaimed that she knows the person who drew this, who showed her the drawing in person. Also, I’m not sure why, but the Facebook Docs uploaded from Penn so far include an issue of the Annenberg newsletter. And, finally, apologies to the anonymous artists whose work appears here uncredited.

Update: Kotaku linked to this conversation as well, and now has its own conversation going between gamers debating whether game research is pointless and obvious. At the risk of self-parody, I can’t help but comment here about how interesting I find that: here we are, finally taking this medium seriously after years major institutions saying it’s all just kids’ stuff, and now we’re called irrelevant. I don’t know whether it says more about gaming or academia, but it may be the first thing in my own young life to nearly make me throw up my hands and say, “Oh, you kids today!”

37. Bring a CPR dummy to class and announce that it will be the teaching assistant for the semester. Assign it an office and office hours.

38. Have a grad student in a black beret pluck at a bass while you lecture.

39. Sprint from the room in a panic if you hear sirens outside.

40. Give an opening monologue. Take two minute “commercial breaks” every ten minutes.

Okay, maybe #39 is stretching it. But there’s something to be said about amusing ways to address youth subcultures (#38), television flow (#40), and … well, I don’t know about the dummy either, but I’m sure I could link it back to The Media Equation through some convoluted explanation. Of course, this is coming from someone who admires teaching strategies like grading a game design course out of a million points. Not that I think that teachers should make learning easy or that it’s our job to “edutain” students (see Mark Edmundson’s article “On the uses of a liberal education: 1. As lite entertainment for bored college students”); I’m just more a fan of the object lesson than straight-up lecturing. Also, I like dummies.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, I can’t help but agree that in-class writing would reduce plagiarism. On the other hand, at-home paper writing is one of the few times in a classroom experience that students can really cut loose and write about (practically) whatever they want. If it weren’t for open-ended term papers, I wouldn’t have been able to write about comic books in my undergraduate courses. Knowing that I could get away with doing things that actually interest me in academia is what convinced me to continue on this career path.

Is there a way to make a curriculum cheater-resistant but also stimulating for motivated students?