Week Six

Beach et al’s story about Derek was a good example of how students can express themselves through other multimedia. Students who might have a potential for developing great critical thinking skills might become bogged down by their difficulties with writing mechanics. Given how second nature writing is to us, we often forget that writing is a very technical activity. Many students have more experience speaking than they do writing. Students can expand their critical thinking skills and later perfect their writing style and mechanics.

I believe that critical thinking skills are far more difficult to teach than writing skills. Students are drawn to different kinds of literacies, perhaps through their own competencies or perhaps through various features in their personalities. Students who are allowed to gravitate towards their preferred literacies can spend more time focusing on rhetorical choices and less time trying to master unfamiliar literacies.

Also, oral communication skills and public speaking skills are almost as important as writing skills in life outside the classroom and may be more important to some students. Beach et al pointed out that students do a lot of writing when creating the scripts used for the podcasts. Maybe the fear of embarrassment plays a role in encouraging students to get their writing just right, since they will have to be actually speaking in front of their fellow students.

I wish more instructors would record their classes in a podcast format. I’ve listened to several podcasts released by instructors from other universities on subjects that I’m interested in but do not have the time or money to take courses in. I almost pursued a degree in psychology and I still enjoy learning about psychology. I’ve listened to plenty of podcasts released by university instructors that include recordings of the entire classroom discussion. The only downside to these podcasts is that I had to listen through parts that were not very interesting like the parts where the instructor was taking attendance. The podcasts were very long, so I could not realistically skip through parts of the podcasts without losing large chunks of the material. Turning classes into podcasts seem like a complete win-win situation. Students have a place where they can refresh themselves on the content of the course. Interested listeners can have access to information that they normally couldn’t afford to have access to. Most excitingly, Beach et al told the story of Sprankle’s third and fourth grade classes where students dramatically improved their writing when given a real audience. This is not surprising, given that one of the main reasons why people write outside of the classroom is to reach an audience.

Whenever I look at some kind of technology like blogs, videos and audio, I always wonder what one technology adds over another technology. With videos, certain images or scenes can serve instructional purposes, especially when the students are demonstrating something visual such as how to create a poster. But if the topic is not visual in nature, such as if the class is simply having a back and forth conversation with each other about To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, I wonder what the point of a video conference might be over simply having an audio conference, especially since some students might feel self-conscious about how they look. Maybe video conferencing vs. audio conferencing could be the choice of the students, since some students might find video conferencing cool. Beach et al seemed to be getting at the idea that with Vlogs, students might make a variety of rhetorical choices such as how the camera is positioned. Beach et al also pointed out that some of the students started off simply as “talking heads” and later began incorporating different features such as a cowboy hat.