empathy

"Empathy and pity are strong and necessary emotions that deepen our sense of connection to others; but they depend on a kind of metaphorical imagination of what others are going through. The facile assumption that we can literary "feel others' pain" can be dangerous to our sense of who we are--and, more alarmingly, who the others are, too." --Daniel Mendelsohn NYT OpEd March 9, '08.

Mendelsohn's response is to the fraud perpetrated by recent pseudo- memoirists--DeWael and Seltzer. It interests me because I teach the memoir and am writing a memoir. Why these writers did not just write fiction I will never know. Does the memoir in the popular imagination connect more to the truth than fiction? Why for heaven's sake. I want my students (and myself) to write memoirs because they allow us to write our histories and present them to a reader who will, if they are written with energy and a dramatic flare, connect to them because we have given them an experience. And the experience does not have to be horrific; it can be something that is merely (ha!) observed with precision and depth.

The idea of employing "a kind of metaphoric imagination" is just what the memoirist has to do when telling his/her story as well as those of others. It starts with discovering the emotional truth of memories that can then become universal--the action of any good metaphor.

Twitter and FYC students

Saw this interview with David Perry about the academic uses of Twitter. He says for it to work in the classroom it has to be a combination of the "mundane and the insightful." I can see students starting out twittering about what they are doing at a particular moment (i.e., admitting to eating a tub full of ripple ice cream but NOT to drinking a bottle of ripple wine!--here I'm dating myself, of course.) but how do you get them to start connecting to the class? Perry seems to think it happens naturally. I'm not so sure. Students, at least first year students, need to see the purpose for school related activities. They want it to count for something mainly because they are busy and the technology (i.e., facebook) they do every day is really a way to escape. My writing center tutors balked at using twitter outside of the center but were happy to use it as a way of communicating with me when they were on shift.

Perry also says that it gives students a sense of who he is outside the classroom and that helps learning. He says: "[I]t's not about the nodes in the network; it's about the connections you can form between information." I think that this is a fairly underrated benefit of something like twitter. But with every other sort of communication it would have to be constrained by the context (see below), as in: "I'm now twittering about my life outside the classroom"--meaning: I write particular things and not other things so my students can see me as a "real" guy. I don't want to appear cynical here but to be realistic. Connections I think arise within some sort of form, otherwise they have no walls to bounce off of to connect to something else.

Finally, there is this from Perry: "We're always trying to teach students, especially in writing, that context determines meaning. And because Twitter has very refined rules about what you can do--only 140 characters, for example--it's developed its own sort of discursive grammar set; that can serve as an example of how rules can be productive for communication and can limit communication." One way of doing twitter in the classroom might be to have students do it for a particular amount of time (at the beginning of the semester) and then have them write about the experience Provide some sources about twitter and then let them actually do their own self study. Then the twittering could be optional for the rest of the semester.

ITC eLearning Conference in St. Petersburg, FL on February 16-19

This is the first of several entries on the workshops and presentations I attended at the ITC Conference

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Feb. 16^th Saturday afternoon

Note: the first event I attended at the conference was an afternoon workshop on Second Life

Workshop: Second Life

The presenter gave us a link to his Second Life links: Blu Baraka. Some good stuff here.

Notes:

- Look into the Ivory Tower of primitive objects—ready made objects.

- Look into Notecards . . . as a way to drop off assignments in a writing class.

- Check out freebie warehouse—another place to get objects for your in-world space.

- There is the problem of a steep learning curve with Second Life. One suggestion: Have a free class for students who want to learn Second Life. The objective: personalization and community.

Ideas for teaching writing in Second Life:

- Since online students are at a distance in respect to each other, Second Life could provide a place where they can discuss a topic in real time and “see” one another.

- In a writing class students could do research in-world on identity and other cultural aspects of Second Life. Then they could come back to the relative safety of the Second Life classroom (see below) to discuss what they found and to drop off papers for their classmates to read and review and for the teacher to grade.

A small teaching space (a room) can be purchased in Second Life for $9 with additional maintenance fee. I'm going to look into it.

We were told about a listserv for Second Life. Here is an announcement of an interesting up coming event from that second life listserv: .

April 22 - 6PM - Newbie Q&A - Teaching Tips - OLN Island
Location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/OLN%20Island/126/126/27

So you want to teach a class using Second Life? Get advice from seasoned veterans about bringing students in-world for the first time!

• Avoid common pitfalls and misconceptions

• Learn tips and tricks to make the course session successful

• How to bring existing course materials (websites, PPTs, videos) in-world

• How to track student activity in your virtual classroom

• Discuss appropriate language for your syllabus regarding expectations and behavior