A Heterotopic Space

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• In a comment I left on someone else's blog a few hours ago, I wrote that this kind of thing would work if it were two-way. I got the idea from you to have Thinking & Writing students videotape their oral presentations outside of class. The ones who were nervous about presenting appreciated the chance to do multiple takes, and then later in the term when I had students present again, they could watch their earlier performance and gain a lot of confidence from their progress.

  When I have my "Intro to Literary Study" students working with iambic pentameter and composing sonnets, I think adding an audio component to the units on poetic meter and poetry analysis will be vital.

  In the past I have tried dictating my comprehensive formative comment into a speech-to-text program, and then editing the result. That was when I was suffering from carpal tunnel really bad a few years ago...

  There are times when I am in the middle of editing a student paper, and I get a great idea. (It happened to Tolkien, so why not me?) I have a voice recorder on my PDA, and I use it to blurt out general comments that I want to use later for the whole class. It keeps me on task.

  Everything in moderation. At the moment I don't see myself using this in a freshman writing class. But I can always try it and see how the students react.

  I'll keep asking students to submit rough drafts only online, but it's actually more efficient for me to have students submit revisions as a printed document, with the freshest version on top and all previous drafts stapled beneath. Now that I've learned from that experiment, and now that my journalism students have expressed excitement at focusing the next version of "Media Lab" around podcasting, it seemed natural to explore other uses of audio.

  Just as I realize I can't make the entire course revolve around blogging, since some students simply don't like blogs, I realize I can't make the whole course revolve around audio.

  If I can continue developing new strengths as a teacher, I'll continue loving my job as much as I do.

• I can see the validity here and it SOUNDS good...the novelty of it might even be appealing to some students. I've even heard of others using cassette tapes to successfully do this in the past.

  But I have a few concerns with the idea in practice and minor issues with the foundation of the author's argument in general. The longer I teach, the more I see media only getting in the way between student and teacher communications, and this is an example of a good idea that could potentially go horribly wrong. I would only advocate for it in a distance learning class, perhaps. But even then it would probably be better to simply pick up the telephone.

  I realize that the asynchronicity of the audio conference/paper review is appealing to a professor who feels beleagured by the demands constantly made upon his time, but, seriously: you might as well do a telephone conference, when you can be guaranteed that the student is actually listening to what you ARE putting your time into and can ask questions in a call-and-response manner. Even the author of the article writes: "this new space is one where the professor, through the act of engaging in a kind of imagined dialogue, is continually, actively, aware of and sensitive to audience."

  Yeah, but it's an 'imagined dialogue.' In other words, a MONOLOGUE.

  You don't get more 'continually, actively, aware of and sensitive to audience' than live over the phone or sitting across from one another. Foucault himself would see the economy of power at work with this sort of approach: it's a one way line of communication, and, the power of the voice that cannot be answered or questioned is being applied. Liberal arts teaching should break down such a political economy.

  I like the attempt to use Foucault in this article, but I think opposing written marginal notes to the live office conference is a false duality anyway, because aural space and visual space are two different spaces, even if words are invoked in both of them. That doesn't entirely discount Simple and Sommers' point, but I think it's a huge assumption that conferences are "frustrating and intimidating" for students. Some, true, will quake in their boots no matter what the situation -- and these are the students who might not respond to ANY kind of feedback that isn't written and depersonalized. Besides, if a teacher is intimidating, that probably will only be recorded in the audio, too. There are more humane ways of reducing the intimidation-level of a conference, as well. To reduce the natural fear of the teacher-student power relation, do a lot of peer reviews and the professorial conference feels all the more 'natural' AND professional. A comfortable space, a cup of tea or a bowl of candy... there are so many ways in which an office visit can be much less intimidating than vocal 'commands' from a disembodied professor.

  I could go on and on, but let me conclude by suggesting that written comments amplify and make concrete spoken comments in class. If a student isn't 'getting it' when you say it in a lecture, they won't 'get it' when you say it over a microphone, either. Which is another way of saying, the people who aren't aural learners will suffer a bit. And those who are taking an entry level writing class might also need to learn the editing skills concomitant with written editorial feedback as opposed to scatting on the mic. You as the commenter/editor are more likely to edit yourself on paper than you would be to rewind and respeak and so forth.

  Still: give it a try, see what happens. I'm just taking issue with the author's arguments and pointing to some potential hazards that you might consider before you begin.

• I just did a presentation on A Clockwork Orange comparing film to book text, and typed in selected passages into a Word .doc, hit "Insert" - "Object" and selected "Wave Sound". When Windows Sound Recorder popped up, I read the passage into that. I'd think that would be a fairly easy way to add comments as embedded notes on the papers as you read them. When the student gets the paper back, he just clicks on the icons to get your remarks.