Our workshop group designed the following classroom activity: \u201cHow would SIRI sound if she was\u2026\u201d To put on students\u2019 radar the trope of AI as feminine and submissive, students attempt to rethink how SIRI would sound if she was a different character, which could be taken from literature, games, television, etc.: a drill sergeant, Lara Croft, Sarah Connor, an action hero, an objectified AI, etc. The activity might also prompt discussion of gender and racial representation in the popular culture artifacts under discussion.<\/p>\n

Reflections from the Group Discussion<\/b><\/p>\n

The mini-workshop concluded with a large group discussion where the groups shared their activities, reflected on themes across the groups, and considered future possibilities for how the DRC might be used and resources it could provide.<\/p>\n

One theme that emerged across each of the groups\u2019 classroom activities was the emphasis on creating and making<\/i>. While the Makerspaces group was inherently prompting making, each of the groups also found themselves developing activities that prompted creating, whether captions, Twitter bots, or imagining what SIRI could sound like.<\/p>\n

The discussion and the different activities had us also considering the implications for pedagogical practices<\/i> and how they shift. As the activities could scale from classroom activities to multi-part projects, we were left considering what assessment could be for the projects. There is the question as well of how much access the instructor has, especially with regards to knowledge to technology.<\/p>\n

Not only do these activities have implications for pedagogical practices, but they also caused us to reflect more so on our learning goals<\/i>. As instructors, we want to develop activities that would be fun to teach our students and for them to engage in.<\/p>\n

As the Remediating Dis\/Ability group further reminded us, it is important to consider when we are being able blind. The discussion ended with the theme of reaching out<\/i> and how the activities serve as a means of bridging the gap between writing in the classroom and writing in the world. The DRC was considered as a space to invite students to participate. With student\u2019s work being public beyond the classroom, there is the need to have safe spaces.<\/p>\n

Reflections from Participants<\/b><\/p>\n

Marcia Bost, Shorter University <\/i><\/b>(Social Justice and Games workshop group):<\/p>\n

Reflection on blog carnival activities: Bouncing ideas off each other is always fun and usually productive. I like how our Siri activity leads students to explore the expected gender stereotypes which are reflected in the blog posts. We talked about using this activity in first year composition, but I\u2019m wondering about whether it could be used in upper level courses as well. In addition to first year composition, I teach a course on Editing and Publishing, which focuses on the conventions and ways to publish. \u00a0The Siri activity could be used as an introduction to the pitfalls of relying too heavily on the conventions and of editing for ever-changing demands of the social media. I also teach a course called Modern Writing, where we explore the digital genres of writing such as Twitter, Facebook, and memes. I\u2019m thinking that the Siri activity could be used as an introduction to analysis of any of these genres, pointing students towards their own critical thinking about the issue of gender representation.<\/i><\/p>\n

Marc Santos, University of Northern Colorado <\/i><\/b>(Social Justice and Games workshop group):<\/p>\n

I enjoyed our workshop group. My research interests focus on a notion of postpedagogy informed by Rickert, Davis, Vitanza, and Ulmer. Part of that notion involves avoiding directly confronting ideology. Direct confrontation can lead to resistance and resentment. Games can approach ideology in non-direct ways, potentially prompting students to ask questions themselves. I think the impact of Bogost and Holmes suggests that we are better off changing what people do in hopes changing what they think (rather than the other way around), and games facilitate such change.<\/i>
\n<\/i>
\n<\/i>I liked our idea of redesigning Siri because it doesn\u2019t necessarily directly present itself as a critical, ideological activity. But we can, with optimism, hope that students will be spurned to ask that question\u2014to think critically about why Siri was designed as she was. Not every student will ask such questions, but I bet many would. And such questioning would likely be more authentic, more powerful, more transformative, because they were asking it.<\/i><\/p>\n

Final Thoughts<\/b><\/p>\n

Overall, Computers & Writing and our mini-workshop provided us with the opportunity to reflect on our own pedagogical practices and how we engage and re-engage the DRC. Particularly evident throughout the groups\u2019 takeaways and the reflections is the importance of fostering and developing students\u2019 critical thinking. Thank you to all who participated in our mini-workshop. If you have other ideas of how you might (or already have!) utilize these DRC \u00a0materials or others in your classroom, we would love to hear from you in the comments!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the DRC\u2019s 2018 mini-workshop at Computers & Writing, our focus was on how the work of the DRC may fill the gap between classroom conversations and real world events. Using select materials curated from past DRC posts, attendees brainstormed problems and issues that arose on a topic and created activities building from it. Guiding<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":15092,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[631],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[1176,1337],"class_list":{"0":"post-15130","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-2018-cw-reviews"},"authors":[{"term_id":1176,"user_id":127,"is_guest":0,"slug":"araw","display_name":"Adrienne Raw","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/8621a4a2b3ca5b8f457fc60c3f1fd5b0?s=96&d=identicon&r=g","user_url":"","last_name":"Raw","first_name":"Adrienne","job_title":"","description":"Adrienne E. Raw is a PhD student in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. Her interests include fan studies, digital rhetoric, and composition pedagogy."},{"term_id":1337,"user_id":186,"is_guest":0,"slug":"lgarskie","display_name":"Lauren Garskie","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/b838e82c78aab76e93f69b816cb77d6e?s=96&d=identicon&r=g","user_url":"","last_name":"Garskie","first_name":"Lauren","job_title":"","description":"Lauren Garskie is a PhD student in the Rhetoric & Writing Program at Bowling Green State University. Her interests include design, literacies, digital rhetoric, and multimodality."}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/127"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15130"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15134,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15130\/revisions\/15134"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15130"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=15130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}