Digital Literacy Presentation

1. Digital Literacy Presentation By Roger FrancisFebruary 11, 2010

2. Poetry as presented by • Cynthia Nichols Responding in Kind:Down in the Body in the Undergraduate Poetry Course Enculturation, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 2002

3. Cindy Nichols • A creative writing teacher and English lecturer for 19 years • Cindy Nichols has long battled the notion that poetry is inaccessible • What can teachers do to transform poetry's image from a source of fear and loathing to a meaningful genre that truly engages the soul? • encouraged her classes to try techniques less ordinary; performed poems with props, and scribbled poetry in chalk on the sidewalks outside. • Here, Nichols shares her written thoughts on the literary form, and why it's worth reassessing.

4. MY FOCUS • We will explore what Nichols is doing in terms of writing in hypermedia • We will focus less on the content aspect of responding to poetry

5. Explanation of Hypertext/Hypermedia • HyperMedia is a term used for hypertext which is not constrained to mere text: it can include graphics, video and sound • Hypertext and Hypermedia are concepts not products • Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references (links) to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by mouse click or keypress sequence. • http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/ht/htov.html

6. Flash 6 player Special Mention • For a full appreciation of hypertext/hypermedia regarding this article, you will need to update to flash 6 and have your speaker volume to a significant audible level.

7. Applications of Hypermedia in Education • http://informationr.net/ir/2-1/paper12.html hypermedia philosophy and characteristics are particularly appropriate for [….] the learner [to] explore his own interests according to his own experience, background and perspective….. the mere presence of hypermedia in the learning process will not improve learning. Hypermedia is merely an educational technology, and it can be used correctly or incorrectly, just like any other technology.

8. The Experience • Interactive hot spots in margins:  images that trigger audio effects and Flash movies should be clicked (for instance, burn marks and scratch marks). Other images that "rollover" to reveal side notes require only that your pointer hover over the image to initiate the action.

9. Ideas of Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin, • Bakhtin's theories focus primarily on the concept of DIALOGUE, and on the notion that language--any form of speech or writing--is always a dialogue • The wealth of new media resources, applied in tandem with the ideas of Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin, may be of some help to help increase students interest and appreciation of poetry

10. EFFORTS • reinscribing poems into visual art work; • reading poems aloud to the class in a variety of voices or with a variety of props; • and transplanting poems from the classroom into new and unusual contexts/environments.  • For example, one student put together a video of a poem's text, which scrolled slowly down the TV screen over and over.  He played the video without comment at a college party and observed the results.

11. Nichols poetry approach • reader and text neither somehow mystically merge nor remain empirically separate, but instead interanimate each other • wanted students to see the frame of the text as elastic, and to include themselves-in their own lives, in their own skins-within that frame, even in the act of wrestling with the text. • And I wanted them to respond, at least in part, as artists to art, as poets to poetry, rather than as critics or scholars.

12. Nichols interview • http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/ndsu/news/magazine/vol03_issue02/poetry.shtml • Q. What are the particular challenges of teaching poetry today? Do you believe fewer people are attempting to understand and enjoy poetry than in the past?

13. Excerpt from Nichols interview • A. I think it's fairly evident that, yeah, poetry is a marginalized genre in mainstream America. Even in its most popular forms, it simply doesn't sell the way that other genres do, the average person on the street doesn't appear to seek it out, and the great mass of my younger students have long reported feeling uneasy, dumb, indifferent, or occasionally even hostile to it. Lyric poems tend to invite a lingering, concentrated attention to the way that words mean and feel, and this of course is not at all the kind of attention invited by most mass media, whose bombardment of disparate and shrill messages prompts something like stupefaction. I mean, we just can't sit there on our couches and watch a car bombing full of body parts and screaming children one second and a Viagra commercial featuring Bob Dole the next without overwhelming whatever faculty it is in our hearts and psyches that responds to lyric poetry.

14. Another interview Question Q. You make many references to helping students write and read poetry "dialogically." What do you mean by that?

15. Answer • A. Maybe the word "conversational" is really enough. What I try to do is bring students into contact with a poem in a way that requires engaged openness. I don't want them observing poems, even though that can certainly be interesting. I want them to respond in kind; carry on a dialogue with a poem in its own language. I'm advocating, in other words, something like study by creative response rather than study by critical analysis. • My feeling in the classroom is: come on, you know you can do this. You think, speak and breathe the language of poetry all the time. It's part of the world. It's in Burger King commercials. It's in the language of your favorite sports newscaster, the wry crack of a dopey uncle, the line of a song that rips you to shreds. Write a poem in response to the poem. Talk back to the poet. Speak "poetry." Listen for the lower note, the odd resonance, the oblique meaning. Just don't be a provincial and arrogant tourist (critic, theorist, scholar, student) who reads the guidebook, however long and hard, however 'intelligently,' takes a snapshot, and gets back on the bus.

16. Hypermedia Drawback Concerns • Not clear as to the level of technological skill required to implement • Cost of hyperlink – can a teacher easily step in and incorporate this concept into a class room effot • Are their licensing issues with hyperlinking and hypertexting to other “works of art?”

17. Criticisims • needed clear poetry samples with hypermedia concept • The paper illustrates well the concept, but no direct illustration of poetry and its effect in this media • She dilutes the focus of the paper, or muddies the focus of the paper with much dialogue about Bakhtin • Bakhtin is relevant but a distraction to what should be the real theme

18. FOCUS QUESTIONS • 1) How is the use of hypermedia/Hypertext effective? • 2) Can you see any negative implications towards the use of hypermedia/hypertext? • 3) Can hypertext/hypermedia be easily embraced and utilized by instructors at all levels of education? • 4) Bakhtin; are the references to him relevant to the support of hypermedia

19. Instead of group breakouts • Groups assigned to type response to chat board for discussion by all in the class

20. Summary • Discussion and overview of feedback from class with regards to the focus questions assigned

21. Personal Perspective • Hypermedia can definitely make a difference in student learning capacities • Nichols use of poetry is one way to demonstrate its use • Beyond its use to stimulate an interest in poetry, I believe it can definitely add dimension to just about any subject area

22. Thanks • Thanks for you participation and attention!