Robots and Revision

Every semester my face-to-face students have an activity hacking the design of Ozobots to create maps where the bots navigate a process – the bots demonstrate process flow.

So today, in first year composition, the students drew on their reading of a chapter in our open source textbook to 1) draw a map of breaking down a writing assignment, OR 2) draw a map of breaking down audience for an assignment. Students self selected groups, then worked together on their maps.

In typical fashion, this elicited a lot of “what SHOULD this look like”, “what SHOULD we use these colors for” type questions. Students are both nervous about and unused to free range creative assignments. These students were also not as prepared as they should have been from the assigned reading.

What I found really interesting was the revision. These students naturally, or through group feedback, performed a lot of very sophisticated revision practices in creating their maps. Almost all the groups brainstormed, organized, and sketched out their plan before committing to the activity. While this meant most groups needed 30+ minutes to draw, the final maps were well designed, well thought-out representations of assignment and audience analysis processes.

Additionally, most groups revised their map once they ran the robot through it once. While the robot requires Crayola Marker, so revision ends up ‘looking messy’, the though process to revise, the desire to revise despite the messiness so the map better demonstrated their process, and the recognition that the situation (as with all writing) called for revision was AMAZING.

I did not prompt for revision, per say. I offered the robot so the groups could ensure everything worked.

I did tell them, when I handed over the robot, that they needed to share a video or image of the robot in their map on Twitter.

As I’m self-reflecting on the overall assignment design, I’m even more impressed with the complex revision practices students chose to engage, and work out with each other. I’m wondering if timing played a role, at what point I told them to share on Twitter. Or, if the public sharing of twitter was the driving force for better revision. I’m still flushing out what a social media pedagogy means, and why the practice with public communication should be such an important component of academic writing in higher education. Finding the balance in kairos – when to tell students what to share, connected to the public sharing to model the need and urgency of revision for public writing seems to be the important space to consider in course design. But how do we (educators) know how to find that balance on any given day?

Social Media and Digital Citizenship

Yesterday, one of my graduate students shared news articles with me that discussed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) has announced she will be walking away from social media.

Earlier in the day, one of my undergrads came to office hours to update me on her social media account lock-out issue. Her account is still locked. We discussed her creating a new account (for class purposes). During this discussion she burst into tears. She lost her followers, she lost her ethos with the lock-out from this account and she’s really struggling to reconcile being cut off from a major component of her life.

And then,

And then, AOC publicly announced she would walk away from social media. A politician, whose campaign used social media effectively, who connected with constituents because digital citizenship and digital culture matter, is walking away. Meanwhile, my student cries because she can’t access her account. Because she is cut off from her cultural connection to those people who have supported her writing.

I know many will read the tears as addiction and withdrawal, but that misinterprets the identities we construct within these spaces. That undermines the strong ties users of social media can build. That undermines the subcultures that fly under the radar and produce beautiful writing, beautiful connections, beautiful support groups for all, but especially for women of color, for men of color, for disenfranchised people, for fandoms that we don’t share publicly, for so much more.

As we head into another American political cycle i’m interested in the ways social media bolsters citizenship, and the ways individuals recognize their digital citizenship practices. I’m really interested how this continues when the politicians we look up to for their effective social media use walk away. Will my student’s tears being further misinterpreted because public figures like AOC continue to walk away?