Food for thought for the week: Blogging Pedagogy points to a thoughtful essay by Joseph Ugoretz on “Social Software, Folksonomy, and User Reviews in the College Context.”
Mr. Ugoretz, the director of teaching and learning with technology at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, argues that much-trafficked Web sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, Flickr, and even RateMyProfessors all belong to a “constellation of tools” that is dramatically altering the way users process information:
[I]n all of the cases, these tools, these resources, lack a central authority or a hierarchy of editorial control. In all of these cases the content and the conclusions and the references are communally negotiated and collaboratively assembled. And our students are using these tools. They are going to use them, whether we want them to or not, or whether we have thought about them or not.
Mr. Ugoretz goes on to suggest a number of steps that professors can take to focus that communal energy instead of fighting against it. He encourages professors, for example, to create exercises that require students to test online resources against each other—or against students’ own knowledge. And he recommends that professors use class wikis as motivational tools: When students know their work will be floating out on the public Web, Mr. Ugoretz argues, “the responsibility for the quality, efficacy and accuracy of that work is deepened.” —Brock Read
6 Responses to Sifting Through ‘a Constellation of Tools’
racmonti - April 13, 2012 at 6:17 pm
Please insert paragraph breaks in this! I tried to read it but kept getting lost. :)
Tenured_Radical - April 13, 2012 at 6:53 pm
Sorry — I have no idea why the paragraphs dissolved like that. Fixed.
Zoe Ellen Brain - April 14, 2012 at 7:39 pm
Wallace later said, “I should have known better,” and regretted his participation in the program.
And there’s the difference.
No matter, it’s too late to have conversations with either of them.
Robert Oscar Lopez - April 14, 2012 at 8:29 pm
Touching retrospective on Adrienne Rich. LGBT remains a very difficult term to enact, since, as I like to sing, “four of these things are not like the others.” I had no idea trans people were accused of spies. Bisexuals have, for the record, often been accused of lying, cheating, cowardice, pathology, and deceitfulness – by gay men and lesbians. In my recent book, I argue that anti-miscegenation and all its terrible specters now lives on, not as a question of race, but sexual orientation. The man forcibly classed by biology as “gay” who marries a woman is the new miscegenator, and all the old demonic slurs about tragic mulattoes, threats to families, and race-traitors — all that has returned but directed at bisexuals, “ex-gays,” closet cases, and now, I guess, trans people.
Maybe if we put down the politics and started being nice to people these tragedies wouldn’t have to happen. I enjoyed your guest column.
spratlas - April 15, 2012 at 1:26 pm
”I am hopeful that it is my good works that will outlive me, and not my mistakes…”
This is a beautiful thing for which to hope. I am hopeful that I will remember and consider others according to their good works, and not their mistakes. I also hope for the wisdom to distinguish mistakes from overtly malicious actions couched in subtlety. Those are the ones that really seem to hurt.
Paisley Currah - April 16, 2012 at 4:33 am
Rich’s personal support of Janice Raymond’s work may have been undone, to some degree, by much of her other work. Her essay on compulsory heterosexuality is, as C.L. Cole and L.C. Cate suggest, “a call to resist normative gender.” See the essay that C.L. Cole and L.C. Cate wrote, “Compulsory Gender and Transgender Existence: Adrienne’s Rich’s Queer Possibility,” in a special “Trans” issue of WSQ edited by Susan Stryker, myself, and Lisa Jean Moore (Vol. 36, Numbers 3 & 4).