https://texttech.weebly.com/weekly-tasks

Tanya’s site is a pleasure to experience, filled with artistic and technical endeavors that show, explore and explain her play with various aspects of this course. I love my opportunities to peek into someone else’s experience and see how it differs from my own. I also appreciate her technical skills, and took away any number of valuable lessons about design, web applications, software and so on.

I disagreed with some of her theoretical discussions; e.g. Marshall McLuhan said the medium was the message, a dramatically different statement than the medium “changes the language and the message.” I also struggled with other statements such as Shakespeare, when read, “falls flat” because it was intended to be performed (not true) or that moving to written words from orality results in a “loss of intonation and feeling” . . . not necessarily, at all! I have lost my breath over sentences, poetry and stories, wept over them, tossed books across rooms because their content has so enraged me . . . but I would agree that my favorite experience is face-to-face performance–song, theatre, talks, readings–all of these things hold a special appeal for me. In the same way, I much prefer classes face-to-face, real life chatter (how can I hear laughter any way but aurally . . . and even as I write Beethoven’s 9th is calling to me, my heart is pounding to the Chicago Symphony and I can feel myself growing powerful to the Beethoven’s 9th, and now the barotone’s voice comes up from the deep . . . ) . . .

Still, I spent time on many of her pages to help me to think about delivering (what am I delivering? Am I delivering? What am I doing in a classroom at all? )  . . . stuff . . . to my own students. I am considering how to integrate technology to teach a number of things: 1. I want students to recognize that technology has political, social, philosophical and pedagogical implications; it is not neutral, it can shape who they are and how they receive the world if they are not alert to its embrace; 2. I see technology as an opportunity to teach students that the way they see and know the world is constructed, learned, taught; it is not universal or transparent and I think technology can offer a new way of seeing, but don’t want students to begin to think this technological world is not also being manipulated to seduce them; e.g. the extraordinary pseudo-personal advertising that targets particular world-wide demographics (a la Nickelodeon) and is so dangerous to true democracy (a whole new kind of panopticon–wouldn’t Foucault be proud?) . . . I want students to understand in their use of technology how knowledge is constructed and that they, too, can construct knowledge

I am deeply struggling to think about what it means to teach; I don’t know that I know any more (laugh) . . .

I was fascinated by Tanya’s handbag, and all the fantastic things she carried, and how much meaning they hold for her. I feel, by stark contrast, empty, without the anchors that define, describe and shape her life.

Tanya comments that she teaches both coding and design . . . funny, I feel like I do the same thing in English.

I was particularly interested in Tanya’s exploration of twinery.org. I love that application, too, and am playing with it and trying to decide how I can integrate it to help my students in English. Curiously, Tanya does her preliminary thinking on paper. So do I. I have never found anything as useful as a table serviette (Tanya is much more organized and carries a book and special pencil) to scratch out ideas . . . I don’t usually forget much, so I don’t worry about cataloguing or retaining creative thoughts and ideas . . .

So Tanya’s site is my #3 pick for my links, and her site reminds me that I’ll have to move all this material to my new website soon, if I don’t want to lose it when the course ends.