The Sound of One Hand Clapping?

Although it may not relate explicitly to teaching, this is just too good to pass up. This preview sample of Clive Thompson's "I Chat, Therefore I Am..." from the May 2007 issue of Discover magazine consists primarily of transcribed snippets of conversation, giving us a kind of text-based eavesdropping. The dialogue, like so much of what we overhear on buses, elevators, and sidewalks every day, meanders here and there, touching briefly on a wide variety of topics. The subjects under consideration here, however, do seem to be a bit deeper than usual--the meaning of the universe, life and death, God and creation--as if the two speakers are either philosophy majors or major potheads.

What we have here, though, is not the script from some ill-conceived Cheech & Chong reboot, but something that is both far funnier and much more surreal--two computer programs talking to one another. The fine folks at Discover set up a play date of sorts between famous chatbots A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) and Jabberwacky, and these are the results of their interaction.

Think Inside the Bubbl

If you have not yet seen this interesting little tool, take a minute to check out bubbl.us, a free, online, flash-based idea-mapping application. You might want to start with the "Features" page, which does an excellent job of using bubbl itself to explain the basics of the application's minimalistic yet intuitive interface. As with most technologies, however, it's often best to jump right in and start playing around, which thankfully you can do without having to create an account first.

Bubbl may seem at first glance to be yet another instance of technology making a simple pen-and-paper process exponentially more complicated than it should be. Upon closer inspection, however, bubbl offers several interesting features that significantly improve upon the process of idea-mapping by hand. Creating a bubbl account allows you not only to save, print, link to, export, and embed your maps, but also to share and collaborate on them with other bubbl users, who may be given either read-only or full access. Unfortunately, the map is "locked" while one user is editing it, so users cannot collaborate in real-time, but this restriction is true of other collaborative websites as well, such as wikis.

I can see bubbl having a variety of pedagogical uses, both individually and collaboratively, both inside and outside the classroom. From teaching brainstorming in composition courses, to having students work together to trace the genealogy of the novel, to providing a graphic representation of intertexuality or patronage networks to accompany a lecture or in-class discussion, potential mapplications of bubbl abound.

Here's an example of bubbl at work, attempting to explain the organizational structure of the Emory English Department:



P.S. There is also a beta version of bubbl, which offers a slicker interface and a few additional features.

P.S.S. You may also want to look at Mindomo and Mindmeister, two other mind-mapping apps.

"The Explainer" Breaks Down Web 2.0 for Us

One final video, entitled "The Machine Is Us/ing Us," by the amazing Michael Wesch.

More from Michael Wesch

A sequel of sorts to "A Vision of Students Today," Michael Wesch's "Information R/evolution" illustrates the ways in which computers and the internet have drastically altered the ways in which we perceive and work with words, texts, and information.

Welcome

What does it mean to teach--particularly English; even more specifically, English composition--in 2010? What role(s) can/does/should technology play in the classroom? Does there even need to be a physical classroom? How can instructors most effectively adapt our traditional teaching techniques to fit a world in which both learning and living increasingly takes place online? Should it actually be the other way around, with a focus on adopting technologies rather than on adapting our teaching? Is it even possible to do one without also doing the other? What attitudes and assumptions about technology do students bring into the classroom with them? How accurate are our assumptions about what students do and do not know about technology, about how and when and where and why they use it in their daily lives?

That's an awfully long list of questions, but I believe that they are of critical importance to the future of academia. I cannot possibly hope to answer all, or probably even most, of them in a lowly blog, but I would at least like to try.

The following video, created in 2007 by Dr. Michael Wesch and 200 students in his Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course at Kansas State University, vividly illustrates many of the issues and ideas that I would like to explore in this space: