100 YEARS OF NEW MEDIA PEDAGOGY

1. Prelude

1. Trailer
2. Introduction
3. Behind the Scenes

2. Methodological Play

1. Introduction
2. Thin Description & Data Visualization
3. Media Archaeology
4. Multimodal Performance
5. Methods of Data Collection and Coding

3. Visualizing the Archive

1. Introduction
2. Trends Across the Corpus
3. Radio
4. Film & Video
5. Television
6. Computer
7. Word Frequencies by Decade
8. Zooming Out

4. Listening to Audio Pedagogies

1. Introduction
2. English via the Airwaves
3. Mid-Century Audio Recording Pedagogies
4. Afterlives of Radio
5. Pedagogical Inspirations

5. Re-Seeing Film & Video Pedagogies

1. Introduction
2. Silent Film Devils
3. Making Movies in the 30s
4. Super-8 and Camcorder Fun
5. Pedagogical Inspirations

6. Remembering the “Perils” of Television

1. Introduction
2. TV Talk
3. McLuhan Redesigning Pedagogy
4. Pedagogical Inspirations

7. Conversing With Computers

1. Introduction
2. Act 1: Imagining Computer Futures
3. Act 2: PC Software Revolutions
4. Act 3: A Networked Social Turn
5. Act 4: Reading & Writing the Web
6. Act 5: Digital, Multimodal Literacies
7. Pedagogical Inspirations

8. Coda: Back to the Future

1. Introduction
2. The 7 Keys to Multimodal Pedagogy
3. Can You Really Believe They Said That?
4. The 5 Weirdest Classroom Technologies
5. Which English Journal Author Are You?
6. Playing in the Archives

9. Credits

1. Acknowledgements
2. References
3. Production Notes

Coda: Back to the Future

The 5 Weirdest Classroom Technologies You’ve Never Heard Of (Number Three Will Shock You!)

• Click to view transcript

  
  

  The 5 Weirdest Classroom Technologies You’ve Never Heard of (Number 3 Will Shock You!) (.txt version)

  [Audio: background electronic dance music plays throughout]
  [Video: BEN appears in front of animated purple bubble backdrop; majority of video is of this footage, with occasional cutaways to images]

  What is happening, YouTube!? I’m Ben, and welcome to 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy. While the English Journal has plenty of articles that deal with film cameras, cassette recorders, and computers, every once in a while, something truly strange makes its way down the pike: the old, the new, the unexpected, the long extinct, the things that never quite caught on, and the plain old “out there.” These off-the-beaten path technologies offer us a sense of the kind of critical engagement English educators had with the technologies of their day. So, with that in mind, we’re counting down the five weirdest classroom technologies you’ve never heard of, straight from the pages of English Journal!

  [Video: caption overlay reads “Top Five!”]
  [Audio: sound effects bracketed in dialogue below correspond to location]
  [Video: overlays of icons for thumbs up, subscribe, comment, and notification bell]

  Now before we get started: Be sure to slap a like [cheering sound effect] on this video and subscribe to our channel. And feel free to leave a comment below to let us know what you think [babbling sound effect]. Also, be sure to click on that notification bell [bell sound effect] so that you can be among the first to know whenever we put out brand-spankin’-new content. Okay, with that out of the way, let’s get on with the countdown . . .

  [Audio: offscreen announcer says “NUMBER FIVE!”]
  [Video: futuristic animated graphic of number]

  Coming in at number five, Breaker breaker, good buddy! It’s the CB radio.

  [Video: caption overlay reads “CB Radio”; cutaway to clip of transfer trucks driving down highway and drivers talking on CBs]

  Okay, I know that many of you are aware of what citizen’s band radio is—that “Pre-Internet of the Interstate” for 1970s truckers everywhere—but we were a little surprised to see it come up in the pages of English Journal. To be fair, CB wasn’t technically mentioned in the context of a classroom assignment. But in 1978, Nancy Thompson wrote of the need to pay attention to developing technologies, and the CB craze in particular, because of its potential to democratize the airwaves by making two-way electronic communication between citizens possible. She even offers a prediction of technologies-to-come, writing:

  [Video: cut to image of quotation read below]

  “The CB is another electronic domain that is educating the public in new styles of communication, and it could be preparing for the future possibility of two-way active participation through television.” (105)

  Keep in mind, this is a good three decades before we’d see the likes of Skype, Zoom, and FaceTime. And that’s pretty cool! So let’s hammer down and get on with the rest of our list.

  [Audio: clip of “Eastbound and Down” fades out]
  [Audio: offscreen announcer says “NUMBER FOUR!”]
  [Video: futuristic animated graphic of number]

  Number four is, wait for it . . . the tachistoscope! What in the ever-loving heck is that, you ask?

  [Video: caption overlay reads “Tachistoscope”; cut to patent illustration of tachistoscope]

  Well, if you believe Wikipedia, it’s a mechanical device created in the late nineteenth century that displays an image or series of images for a set amount of time, and it’s used in applications ranging from psychological evaluation to military training. The way it works is it projects pictures onto a screen until a timed shutter mechanism snaps shut—kinda like if a camera and a slide projector had a baby that didn’t want you playing with any of its toys.

  [Video: cut to angry toddler growling]

  We actually found two references to tachistoscopes in English Journal: one from Corinne Brown in 1951, the other from Alan Snyder the following year. Brown described using the device like a rapid-fire flashcard drill to help students with their spelling, claiming that errors increased twenty-seven percent when she stopped using it for a couple of weeks (104). Snyder, on the other hand, describes a page-mounted, rolling version of the tachistoscope branded the Flashreader used to develop students’ speed-reading superpowers. Super-fast reading skills . . . think that would end up getting me a spot on the Avengers?

  [Video: cut to Hulk punching Thor, with lame punching sound effect]
  [Audio: offscreen announcer says “NUMBER THREE!”]
  [Video: futuristic animated graphic of number]

  This next technology is the Delineascope. Anyone know what a delineascope is? Anyone? Anyone?

  [Video: caption overlay reads “Delineascope”; cut to Ferris Bueller scene of teacher saying “Bueller? Bueller?”; cut to image of delineascope; cut to historic Delineascope magazine advertisement]

  Back in 1948, John Muri terrorized his students with this opaque projector by showing students’ work, unannounced, to the entire class. Needless to say, they freaked the *** out. Muri seemed to delight in showing students the warts-and-all character of their writing: bad handwriting, misspellings, general carelessness (257). Muri used public humiliation as a perverse incentive for improving student writing, that sadistic jerk!

  [Audio: offscreen announcer says “NUMBER TWO!”]
  [Video: futuristic animated graphic of number]

  We’re down to number two, and boy, is it a doozy! Looong before Avatar in 2009 or even fifties popcorn fodder like It Came from Outer Space, 3-D was all the rage.

  [Video: backdrop changes to black-and-white image of audience viewing 3-D movie; caption overlay reads “Stereograph”; backdrop changes to image of Viewmaster; cut to sepia-toned footage of Ben viewing stereoscope in nineteenth-century parlor]

  Back in the late 1800s, stereographs were taking the nation by storm. Even before the beloved Viewmaster of my childhood, folks were gathering in their parlors to look at images of scenic vistas, majestic buildings, and works of art in all their glorious height, width, and depth. These cards, which had doubled images with slightly different color reproductions, were viewed with special devices called stereoscopes. In 1915—1915!

  [Audio: echo and airhorn sound effects]

  —Mary Crawford blew our popcorn-eating minds when she wrote about the array of media available to the English teacher of that early day. In addition to stereograph cards, Crawford also details several other visual technologies—magic lantern slides, postcards, overhead projectors, and even sculptured busts of famous authors. She also discussed ways of incorporating audio, such as utilizing the phonograph to play vinyl pressings of Shakespearean lyrics or Old English ballads (151). Mary Crawford was a vocal proponent of bringing a full-on multimodal experience to students . . . and did I mention this was back in 1915?!

  [Audio: offscreen announcer says “NUMBER ONE!”]
  [Video: futuristic animated graphic of number]

  Finally, the one you’ve all been waiting for . . .

  [Audio: horn fanfare sound effect]
  [Video: caption overlay reads “All the Things”; scrolling caption reads “1. Live performance 2. Audio tape 3. Overhead projector 4. Water 5. Food coloring (?) 6. Salad oil (?!) 7. Pyrex (?!?) 8. Guitar (!!!)”]

  It’s—well, it’s not so much a technology as it is an amalgam of different what-nots: live performance, audiotape, overhead projector, water, food coloring, salad oil, Pyrex, and guitar. No, that’s not my grocery list, that’s the recipe for a truly immersive literary experience recounted in Cecilia Anne Nagy’s article, “Rhythm, Color, Response, Creativity.”

  [Audio: sitar sound effect]
  [Video: backdrop changes to op-art style colored dot and colored oil animations; clip of Dee-Lite music video]

  The year was 1972, and the trippiness of Woodstock and Andy Warhol factory parties still lingered in the air. In an effort to teach her high school freshman to actually read, critically appreciate, and truly experience poetry, Nagy described a grooooovy happening. She provided a multimodal accompaniment to a recorded reading of James Weldon Johnson’s poem “The Creation” that included a lava-lamp style light show using the pie plate, water, oil, and food coloring. At key points, she would blow on the water, place her hand over the light, or cut the lights entirely. After the light show, she also played guitar while students sang a series of spirituals in round robin fashion as a kind of performative response to the poem. Nagy’s takeaway from talking with her students following this exercise?

  [Video: cut to image of quotation read below]

  “During this discussion, the students’ responses were proof-positive that teenagers possess deep-seated and well-defined emotions” (141).

  What?! Teens have emotions? Who’da thunk it?

  [Video: cut to Suicidal Tendencies’ “Institutionalized” music video]

  But wait—we’re not done just yet…

  [Audio: offscreen announcer says “BONUS TECH!”]
  [Video: animated graphic of explosion, with caption overlay reading “Bonus tech!”]

  Okay so this reference doesn’t technically come to us from English Journal, but it did pop up in the course of our digging around in some contemporaneous readings. Well apparently, everybody actually hasn’t heard about the MIRD.

  [Audio: “Surfin Bird” clip]
  [Video: caption overlay reads “MIRD?!?”; animated cartoon singing bird overlay]

  In 1965, Wayne Pirtle wrote an article for College Composition and Communication in which he talks about this odd little doohickey developed by two science instructors at his home of Merced College. Called the “Multiple Integrated Response Device,” or MIRD for short, Pirtle ended up using this device in his remedial English class to quiz students on their grammar knowledge. He explains the contraption this way:

  [Audio: quotation read quickly with periodic escalation of pitch, ending with exasperated “Ah, [censored] it!”]
  [Video: caption overlay of quotation below in Star Wars style crawl; background is of hands working with a large tangle of electrical wires]

  “In concept MIRD is quite simple. Consider a classroom in which a switch is placed underneath the desk of each student. The switch has four positions and is connected to a panel of lights and switches at the teacher’s desk. The teacher can ask students to choose a response to a multiple choice or true and false question and then the student may indicate his choice by turning his switch to one of four positions. When the students have made their choice, the teacher depresses one of four switches which designates the correct response. If the student’s choice is correct, his individual light turns on in the panel of lights at the front of the room. Both students and teacher can see the lights on the teacher’s panel; consequently, each student knows immediately whether or not his response is correct.” (176)

  — Ah, [censored] it!

  Yeah, simple, right?

  [Video: cutaway to The Simpsons clip; Ralph Wiggum: “My knob tastes funny.” Focus group moderator: “Please refrain from tasting the knob.”]

  So basically, the MIRD was clickers before clickers were cool. And now that we’re in an era saturated by mobile quiz and polling apps, it seems like the MIRD may have been a few decades ahead of its time, because from what we can tell from our half-assed research, it never caught on. Rest in peace, little MIRD—we hardly knew ye.

  [Audio: angelic choir swell]
  [Video: cut to sad cat image]

  So there you have it: the five weirdest classroom technologies you’ve never heard of. Rediscovering these examples of oddball tech can help us see how English teachers innovated, experimented, and in some cases, moved on to ultimately utilize more useful technologies.

  Now be sure to check out references linked in the transcript below for more details, and we’ll see you next time. PEACE!

  [Video: outtakes of Ben in studio, saying, “Yeah, that’ll give you some stuff. Alright.” Humming, snapping, burp.]

  Media assets used in this production listed in Production Notes.

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