Full Panel
Panelists
Ashley Young (Duke University), Sam Abramovich (University of Pittsburgh), Bryce Peake (University of Oregon), Viola Lasmana (University of Southern California)
Biographies
Ashley Young is a PhD student in History at Duke University, where she is studying the
history of Southern foodways in the Atlantic World.
Samuel Abramovich is a Doctoral Student at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to that he was a researcher at the Center for Technology in Education at Johns Hopkins University, a Technology Coordinator for a Boston Independent School, and a Social Studies Teacher.
Bryce Peake is a PhD candidate in Media Studies at the University of Oregon, where he has taught media production, feminist media studies, and cultural anthropology. He is also the web mistress for fembotcollective.org and Ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology, which he shares with the HASTAC community as a HASTAC fellow.
Viola Lasmana is a PhD student at the University of Southern California’s English department and an Assistant Lecturer in Composition at USC’s Writing Program.A current HASTAC Scholar, Viola works in the intersections of literature, film, digital humanities, and media studies.
Panel Description
This panel brings together a group of scholars from diverse fields and disciplines interested in innovative pedagogical techniques and transformative learning. As the university classroom and lecture hall undergo rapid changes, how are educators bringing digital knowledge into the classroom to revolutionize traditional learning environments? In what ways do digital tools foster both individual expression and collaborative learning? What new tools can we use to address and encourage imaginative forms of praxis, over-riding the trendy transformation of the classroom into a utilitarian space of skill attainment?
Uniting theory and practice, our panel examines various ways of pedagogically mobilizing the digital, whether it be in creating new dialectical spaces of learning, or developing analogical/ analogous practices that transpose one space into the other. Ashley Young (Duke- History) explores Google Drive and Twitter as sites of intra-communal note-taking by students, asserting that greater attention is needed to teaching digital tools if we expect our students to be successful tool users. How might these tools be used to create more productive educational environments, productively harnessing students’ multitasking skills? Interrogating what might motivate students once they have such tools, Sam Abromovich (Pitt- Learning Research Development Center) share his research findings on the role of badges in pushing students to new levels of learning. Sam argues that the badge is only successful in motivating students when careful consideration is paid to what is being motivated. How, he asks, might we use research to understand the badge system and successfully deploy it in our classrooms? Bryce Peake (UOregon- Media Studies) examines how gamification might be used to un-anonmyize the lecture hall. At state universities like the University of Oregon, 200+ student lectures have become the norm for introductory classes, yet technology for engaging students in this atmosphere is sadly lagging behind small-class digital innovation. Designed and implemented by a team of faculty, IT professionals, and graduate students, SLuG mobilizes MMORPG pick- up group technology in order to transform the “massively multi-student lecture hall” into a space of collaborative, group-centered creativity. Finally, Viola Lasman (USC- English) mobilizes the subversive audio practice of remix to reconfigure the composition classroom as a site for moving beyond writing. Composition, for Viola, involves the deployment of all aural and visual semiotic resources, and such a process she argues must move beyond the text/image, linear/ non-linear binaries previously central in composition teaching and learning. Each of these lightning talks will reflect on how dialectical and analogic praxis can transform our classrooms, our learning, and our intellectual engagements.