Making work-room
Example 2: Taking the Classwork out of the Classroom
Doug’s design approach was to re-create the “kitchen table” and to make that part of his networked classroom extension. In his Writing, Literacy, and Technology course, Doug wanted to encourage students to bring content and issues that the students ran across in their daily lives into the course. He had two pedagogical goals. First, he needed a technology that could be integrated into the daily workflow of web browsing and rich online literate lives that he knew students already engaged in. Second, it could not be a student’s own online-networked activity, but needed to be something that he or she could use in his or her own Euclidian space. Kitchen tables and their digital equivalents should not be “forced” into becoming the domain of the writing classroom. For such a move to be successful, Doug could not simply take over and make more spaces “sanctioned” school writing spaces. For Doug, the point was not to extend the writing class to the digital kitchen table and supplant it, but to have both exist at the same time as a place for both sanctioned and nonsanctioned forms of writing activity, in much the same way web browsers are used for both sanctioned and nonsanctioned writing tasks.
The way Doug imagined it, a student might be at home, on a kitchen table with her laptop reading news from friends. She comes across a story about the impact of mobile phones on literacy education and recognizes this as useful content to share for her class, but posting such a story would mean leaving what she is doing—logging in through multiple security measures, dealing with web browser version error notices, having Java scripting problems, and so on—so she doesn’t decide to post. By the time she gets to class, Monday, she has forgotten all about that interesting article and so it does not travel to the space of the class. The different writing stays siloed and nothing is done to bring that writing activity into either the Euclidian or networked space classroom.
For Doug, the answer to what was the digital equivalent of the “kitchen table” is the web browser. Doug has a different approach to creating collaborative spaces in his classroom. What he tries to do with his networked writing classrooms is to expand what counts to students as a “writing classroom” by creating and encouraging the use of web browser plug ins. The web browser is an ubiquitous writing technology. That is to say, students’ web browsers are used both in class and at home, albeit for very different purposes. The tool itself moves with the student across writing spaces, both institutionally sanctioned and nonsanctioned, which makes the web browser a useful entry point for beginning conversations about bridging differing Euclidian writing spaces.
Doug encouraged his students to integrate Twitter web-browser plugins into their browsers. Unlike learning-management systems, Twitter has an open-ended design, which is, in part, why Twitter was used so often by protesters during the Arab Spring in places like Egypt and Tunisia and during the Occupy movement in the United States. Such an open technological nature means Twitter is almost as flexible as the web browser itself, allowing third-party developers to create useful web browser plug-ins. Web browser plug-ins are tiny bits of programming that can be installed into modern web browsers and that usually add buttons that can be clicked on near the URL address line in an open browser window.
Doug understood that expanding the class to the digital kitchen table meant creating a network effect in terms of both Euclidian and networked space, but one that could be quickly summoned then disappear. He did this through three pedagogically designed moves. First, he created a short and easy to remember hashtag for his course, #enc3417. Second, he made participation in his course directly correlate with posts on Twitter by collecting and counting tweets with the TAGS tool. The more students tweeted information relevant to the class, the higher their class participation became. Third, he reinforced this participation in the classroom by spending the first ten minutes of every class engaged with discussions of the student posts. With these pedagogical design decisions in place, Doug noticed many more students contributing content and discussions to the class and his classroom conversations radically improved.
What Doug learned from this experience is that designing for “digital kitchen tables” requires multiple forms of reinforcement of networked associations. Doug tried to reinforce these associations by responding in Twitter to student tweets, using student tweets as objects to theorize about and spur classroom conversations and validate student tweets as a form of “classroom participation,” complete with grades and measures. Doug also made sure to use open technologies that integrated into student digital literacy experiences in the most unobtrusive way possible.