The Problem of Multimodality: What Data-Driven Research Can Tell Us About Online Writing Practices

This article investigates the writing mode, multimodal aspects, and folksonomic elements of digital composition gathered from a WordPress-based ePortfolio platform. Focusing on the student perspective, data was gathered through both surveys of first year students and text analysis of digital compositions in order to produce quantitative results that can be replicated and aggregated. This research demonstrates the impact of assignment design and platform affordances on student composition practices. Results show that incoming students do not fit the “digital native” myth, nor are they prepared to engage in digital scholarship at the college level without significant guidance and specific requirements that scaffold digital work

Excavating ePortfolios: What Student-Driven Data Reveals about Multimodal Composition and Instruction

The pedagogical practice of asking students to compose in open, online spaces has grown rapidly in recent years along with an increase in institutional and financial support. In fact, in July 2013, the Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL) announced the “coming of age” of ePortfolios as the percentage of higher education students using ePortfolios rose above the 50% mark in the U.S. (“About”). There are a host of constituent assertions that support the use of open online writing platforms in college-level courses. These claims include that writing publically cultivates digital literacy through broader audience awareness, facilitates interactivity and collaboration between peers, and supports the incorporation and creation of multimedia in the writing process. This dissertation project challenges the assertions about both the benefits and drawbacks of digital writing pedagogy through a mixed methods approach including a survey of first-year students at Macaulay, a distant reading of the student writing contained in the Macaulay ePortfolio archive, a close reading of three student-run ePortfolio sites, and interviews with three students who participated in a self-nominated ePortfolio competition. The results suggest that students need digital literacy training, as well as specific prompt language, in order to utilize the affordances of digital writing platforms

"Collaboration" (Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities)

Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities is a peer-reviewed, curated collection of reusable and remixable resources for teaching and research. Organized by keyword, the annotated artifacts can be saved in collections for future reference or sharing. Each keyword includes a curatorial statement and artifacts that exemplify that keyword. This focus of this chapter is "Collaboration." In research, writing, and teaching, ideas build on countless others, weaving a complex network of influences. Collaborative work foregrounds this network, celebrating the value that many hands bring to a project. It includes diverse perspectives, flips the dichotomy of expert and novice, and explores alternative ideas. The artifacts in this chapter model successful ways to design, facilitate, and evaluate generative collaborative experiences. Our hope as curators is that these resources will inspire educators to experiment with collaborative pedagogy and explore its potential to bring about more just, equitable, and innovative teaching and learning

Collaboration (Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities)

Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities is a peer-reviewed, curated collection of reusable and remixable resources for teaching and research. Organized by keyword, the annotated artifacts can be saved in collections for future reference or sharing. Each keyword includes a curatorial statement and artifacts that exemplify that keyword. This focus of this chapter is Collaboration. In research, writing, and teaching, ideas build on countless others, weaving a complex network of influences. Collaborative work foregrounds this network, celebrating the value that many hands bring to a project. It includes diverse perspectives, flips the dichotomy of expert and novice, and explores alternative ideas. The artifacts in this chapter model successful ways to design, facilitate, and evaluate generative collaborative experiences. Our hope as curators is that these resources will inspire educators to experiment with collaborative pedagogy and explore its potential to bring about more just, equitable, and innovative teaching and learning

Who Guards the Gates? Feminist Methods of Scholarly Publishing

In this essay, we explore how digital publishing can intervene in these processes and serve as a form of feminist activism. We take as our focus the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP), founded in 2011 to expand the perspectives and standpoints that count as scholarly knowledge production and provide graduate students with editorial experience. As three long-standing members of the journal’s editorial collective, we have firsthand knowledge of how JITP’s publishing methods were developed through debate, struggle, and dialogue, including many missteps and failures along the way. We argue that JITP's collaborative knowledge practices of inclusive editorial governance, open access, and open peer review are fundamentally feminist, as they diversify scholarly voices and increase access to the material channels in and through which knowledge circulates. At stake in our reflective analysis is a broader claim that extends beyond the parameters of our work with one particular journal: that feminist digital publishing methods can expand what counts as knowledge production

"Teaching #BlackLivesMatter: Countering the Pedagogies of Anti-Black Racism, A Collaborative, Crowd-Sourced Syllabus"

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: “Teaching #BlackLivesMatter” was an event organized by the Mentoring Future Faculty of Color group at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, that explored “how to address racialization and state power as scholar-teachers, working at the level of both immediately executable plans for teaching/research, and longer term strategies for making the academy accountable to racial violence.” In order to extend this conversation to as many voices as possible, the organizers set up an open syllabus using Google Docs. Contributors are invited to share resources, activities, discussion questions, and assignments related to teaching anti-racism. The use of simple technology helped advance the group’s objectives for the event and enabled it to reach a wider audience. This syllabus includes many activities, assignments, and readings that anyone can use in the classroom. It also provides a model for creating a collaborative syllabus, something educators may wish to try in their own classes

SerpinA3N is a novel hypothalamic gene upregulated by a high-fat diet and leptin in mice

Background: Energy homeostasis is regulated by the hypothalamus but fails when animals are fed a high-fat diet (HFD), and leptin insensitivity and obesity develops. To elucidate the possible mechanisms underlying these effects, a microarray-based transcriptomics approach was used to identify novel genes regulated by HFD and leptin in the mouse hypothalamus. Results: Mouse global array data identified serpinA3N as a novel gene highly upregulated by both a HFD and leptin challenge. In situ hybridisation showed serpinA3N expression upregulation by HFD and leptin in all major hypothalamic nuclei in agreement with transcriptomic gene expression data. Immunohistochemistry and studies in the hypothalamic clonal neuronal cell line, mHypoE-N42 (N42), confirmed that alpha 1-antichymotrypsin (α1AC), the protein encoded by serpinA3, is localised to neurons and revealed that it is secreted into the media. SerpinA3N expression in N42 neurons is upregulated by palmitic acid and by leptin, together with IL-6 and TNFα, and all three genes are downregulated by the anti-inflammatory monounsaturated fat, oleic acid. Additionally, palmitate upregulation of serpinA3 in N42 neurons is blocked by the NFκB inhibitor, BAY11, and the upregulation of serpinA3N expression in the hypothalamus by HFD is blunted in IL-1 receptor 1 knockout (IL-1R1−/−) mice. Conclusions: These data demonstrate that serpinA3 expression is implicated in nutritionally mediated hypothalamic inflammation

Composition and Writing with Sources

Course Description: Develops the ability to write clear, coherent, and well-developed expository prose. This course requires analytical reading and critical thinking and includes instruction and practice in research methods and writing from sources

Major Author: Margaret Atwood

This undergraduate seminar on author Margaret Atwood fulfills the Major Author course at Stevenson University. Students will read A Trio of Tall Tales and The Year of the Flood, as well as both read and watch The Handmaid's Tale. The course assignments include live-tweeting, creating a webtext, and an intertextual analysis essay

The Cyborg Apocalypse

Is the divide between human and machine becoming harder to maintain? From the Golem of folk tales to Frankenstein and even Siri, the concept of the semi-artificial person, or cyborg, is long-lived, appearing across popular, religious, and scientific imaginations. As technology becomes more personal, the cyborg becomes less alien, and the prospect of our own transformation into technologically enhanced organisms seems imminent. In this course we will investigate posthumanism through a critical look at cybernetics in our culture, examining representations in media such as literature, film, television, advertising, video games, and comics. Students will research the current state of modern medical and robotics science and use this to inform their readings of the cyborg in our society. Critiques will be framed through the lens of gender, race, and labor using the theory of scholars Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, and Lennard Davis. The class will engage in multimodal research projects on a WordPress blog that focus on building written and visual rhetorical skills. Readings will include fiction such as Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which will be paired with films such as The Stepford Wives and shows such as “Black Mirror.