Welcome to the CI5475/5330

Welcome to CI5475/5330. This is my Blogger blog for this course; I also use a TypePad platform for another blog on Teaching Literature.

I'm looking forward to teaching this course. It's the third time I've taught the course--which began in Fall, 2007. At that time, a lot of the tools such as blogs, wikis, and podcasts, were just starting to take hold in secondary schools as teachers started to recognize the high level of students' engagement with these tools.

A key factor in that engagement was the fact that students could now write to audiences beyond just the teacher--that their peers and audiences outside of school were responding to what they had to say--so that writing was more then just learning how to produce 5-paragraph essays to prepare for the state writing test. Writing was now something they could use to communicate their beliefs and ideas to audiences who actually cared about the content of their writing enough to post comments.

Students would also moving towards much more multimodal forms of communication that combined words with images and video to engage their audiences. And, they liked the interactivity they've become accustomed to through texting.

Since 2007, the uses of Web 2.0 tools has exploded so that many teachers are now using these tools, as reflected in the wide-spread use of Moodle in secondary/college classrooms as well as Desire2Learn in the Minnesota State University system. Teachers also also incorporating blogs, wikis, podcasts, and VoiceThread into their teaching.

The key challenge that remains is whether teachers and students have a clear sense of the purposes for using these tools--whether teachers and students know how and why they are using the tools to communicate their beliefs and ideas in ways that are effective, as opposed to just using the tools because they are cool.

The other major challenge is that schools continue to block access to use of many of these tools, often based on fear of potential, costly litigation, so it's just easier to block the tools--use of Blogger or Ning--than to open things up. In some cases, schools outsource these decisions to private companies who arbitrarily block access to sites and tools with little input from teachers. All of this requires that teachers press for school Internet guideline policies that allow for use of these tools given sound pedagogical purposes.

So, in this class, I'm hope that you will have plenty of chances to not only acquire uses of these tools, but to also use the tools to create a sense of community for the class, whose members will assist each other in developing ideas for teaching writing using these various tools.

Bubbl.us map of debate over C & I moving to St. Paul

College of Education and Human Development, University of Minnesota

74-365 - 3/14/08 South Minneapolis Sunrise

74-365 - 3/14/08 South Minneapolis Sunrise
Originally uploaded by The Joy Of The Mundane

This photo is about south Minneapolis; it has a Creative Commons copyright.

College of Education and Human Development, University of Minnesota

Minneapolis Skyline from Dinkytown

Minneapolis Skyline from Dinkytown
Originally uploaded by dgwallick1

This photo was taken on September 9th from the 14th St. bridge in Dinkytown looking at the Minneapolis skyline,

Photo taken by Doug Wallack, Minneapolis Skyline from Dinkytown, Creative Commons copyright

Competing media perspectives on the facts

It's interesting to study how different groups' perceive the same information differently. One factor in this process has to with what could be defined as the balkanization of groups into niche media audiences.

Arguments in the media often revolves around persons’ identification with the values of certain groups as “one of us” set against the values of opposing groups. For example, in her acceptance speech for the Vice-Presidential nominee of the Republican Party, Governor Sarah Palin identified herself with the values of rural, small-town people as contrasted with the values of urban liberals. Focusing on one’s identification with certain values shifts the focus away from analysis of the validity of policy positions to audience’s emotional identification with a speaker as “one of us” or not “one of us” associated with certain constituencies, rather than learning about and accepting or rejecting policy positions that might lead to changes in their own positions.

Acquiring knowledge about and accept alternative positions is further limited by media audiences identifying with and believing only those media outlets or blogs whose perspectives are consistent with their own beliefs. While American audiences largely acquired their news from the same outlets in the 1940s to the 1970s: CBS, NBC, ABC, the AP, and major newspapers, since the 1980s, the news has increasingly been channeled and filtered by outlets such as Fox News, Russ Limbaugh, the Wall Street Journal or MSNBC, CNN, or the Huffington Post targeted to certain niche audiences who then adopt the beliefs espoused by these outlets (Manjoo, 2008).
Audiences therefore construct their beliefs about information on issues according their identification with their particular values groups—“conservative Republicans,” “environmentalists,” “libertarians,” “liberal Democrats,” etc., associated with and constructed by specific media outlets. An analysis of Fox News, Russ Limbaugh, the Wall Street Journal, characterized these outlets as “echo chambers” in that these outlets restrict access to alternative, competing news sources and negatively portray political opponents (Jamieson & Cappella, 2008).

These different audiences then adopt opposing beliefs about the same empirical information. A study by the Pew Research Center (2006) compared beliefs about the economy by Democrats’ and Republicans’ earning over $75,000 (Manjoo, 2008). While two-thirds of Republicans believed had positive views of the economy, only one-third of Democrats had positive views, views that echo the perspectives they obtain through their particular media outlet.

When faced with proposals to change the status quo, audiences then judge these proposals not according to an objective analysis of evidence, but according to their media outlet’s filtered presentation of that evidence consistent with that outlet’s values stances. While any media presented is always going to reflect certain biases, the construction of competing media world views has created polarization of how people understand societal issues, undermining achieving of consensus on how to address those issues.

Jamieson, K. H., & Cappella, J. N. (2008). Echo chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the conservative media establishment. New York: Oxford University Press
Manjoo, F. (2008). True enough: Learning to live in a post-fact society. New York: John Willy & Sons, Inc.
Pew Research Center. (2006). Democrats and Republicans see different realities: Profiling the voters. Retrieved September 14, 2008 from http://pewresearch.org/pubs/86/democrats-and-republicans-see-different-realities