System, Self, and Society: Understanding and Controlling the Rhetoric of Information

Plenary Presentation

Julie Meloni

Time and again we’ve been told that our students are digital natives–the most technologically savvy that have ever crossed the thresholds of our institutions, who are able to text, email, use Facebook, and play games on any and all devices and all at the same time–yet as our collective experience has likely shown, the concept
of the digital native is little more than a polite fiction.

In this talk, I will discuss the importance of understanding the social and cultural role of the information that surrounds us and our students and, to some extent, the usefulness of understanding the rhetoric of the underlying code that shapes these systems.  As our students find themselves embedded in a society that is in no small part shaped by our information networks, it becomes necessary to investigate and interrogate how social and collaborative networking, information retrieval, content organization, and copyright issues pervade the lives of the modern student. As instructors who attempt to weave technology into our pedagogy, I discuss ways in which we can (and should) encourage and support student understanding of the function and limits of their own rhetorical choices within information production and retrieval.

We Are All The Pretender Now: Learning In an Age of Just-in-Time Instruction

Plenary Presentation

Mike Caulfield, Keene State College

People with no IT background installing complicated computer systems in a single afternoon. Amateur chess players beating both grandmasters and supercomputers using off the shelf software. Your spouse cooking a meal like a master chef — without any formal training. Coworkers communicating to someone across the world in a language they are just encountering for the first time.
This is not science fiction — it is the average person’s life today, in 2010. Just-in-time instruction is the hidden revolution that has already radically changed how we live. This presentation will demonstrate how pervasive these modes of instruction have become and discuss the implications for university education, and well as introduce some practical classroom applications of just-in-time approaches.

Engaging the New Classroom Conversation

During this talk we will investigate key trends impacting educators in their overall design of learning. Focusing on the emergence of user-created content, social spaces, and mobile devices we will take an integrated look at how we can better utilize technology within these areas to meet the needs of our students. We will also explore how these technologies have, and continue to, impact both faculty and learners and review some active examples within each area. During this talk, we will focus attention on how educators can leverage selected disruptive technologies to shape learning outcomes in new ways.

If Any Moron Can Write a Blog, Then All Blogs are Written by Morons, Right?

The title of my talk is one phrasing of the general strategy employed by many faculty (and increasingly, students) when it comes to approaching material on the open web. Faculty not only discourage, but often outright forbid the use of blogs, wikis, or other online resources that are not peer-reviewed. Doing so does a disservice to our students and doesn’t encourage the kind of critical thinking and analytical strategies necessary for our students (and us) to participate in our hyper-mediated society. Already, peer-reviewed material appears right alongside non-peer-reviewed material on the web. This will only increase in the future as scholarly work comes out from behind paywalls into the public web. And this will be a good thing. But will our students be ready to sort through multiple channels and sources of information and make informed decisions? In this talk, I will take apart the logic of the title. In the process, I will explore how a blog can be just as good a resource as a peer-reviewed article, how using Wikipedia teaches valuable lessons about cooperation and information creation and perceptions, how having students actively contribute to these resources teaches more than writing an academic paper, and what happens when students leave college and no longer have access to peer-reviewed materials. I want to ask the question, “Now what?” in the context of teaching and learning in a world where everything is on the web and everyone has access to it and to think beyond what happens while students are in our classrooms to the time when they work, play, and vote alongside us. How can we structure our teaching to help create the informed citizenry of the future?