The reaction to the reflection

School started about two weeks ago, and of course, I haven't necessarily made good on my promise to blog more frequently. My bad. I have a great deal to read, and as I wrote in my most recent post, I chose to try some of the Web 2.0 tools with my students.

Google documents, presumably singular when one refers to the online tool, is awesome. I can tell when my students submit their work, they can upload from Word, and they can work with one another on the same document while they are all logged in. I began the semester by asking them to sign up for Gmail, to access the documents. Being undergraduate students, they rarely do as asked at the beginning of the semester. This is the honeymoon period, when an educator must approach students with a compassionate, loving smackdown.

48 students, several mislabeled documents, and three assignments. One word: Clusterfuck.

However, I managed to work through it, and still maintain a bit of sanity. For I know when they come out on the other side of this situation, my students will have taken away much more than simply persuasive writing or public speaking. They will understand, hopefully, how they work in certain group settings, how they adapt to technology that they are unfamiliar with, and how to use these tools to collaborate within their chosen profession. Specifically, though, I wanted to provide them with an alternative way to think about social networking and collaboration, namely tools that exist outside of the Facebook/Myspace universe.

For the first couple weeks, I sent them out to work on specific things. I had them sign up for a Gmail account; I had them use documents that I set up for them; I had them work on assignments that required them to open and save documents. It's misleading sometimes to think that American students should be technologically proficient. While the numbers indicate a large proportion of Americans are wired, there still exists a digital divide; this fact makes implementing technology in the classroom risky. In fact, at a recent conference many made sure to reinforce this idea; some were even disparaging. While I took heed at the warnings, I have proceeded. Few students have complained of difficulty, and given that one of the classes is in a computer lab, I have no reservations about what I have asked of them.

On Wednesday, I finally decided to have the students collaborate online. I have split my persuasive writing class into groups for in-class activities. They have worked to come up with an issue for in-class group work, through brainstorming and blogging. After some deliberation, they reached consensus; after some inquiry about where they stood, I felt it a good time to push them ahead. I asked them to go over what they had discussed with their groups, open their group documents, and write their own impressions about their groups' issues.

After answering the usual I'm-confused-whattya-mean questions, they jumped in. And then they freaked out. They seemed to feel a number of emotions as they realized they were in the same document with their peers. Some were excited, some were a bit confused, and some just thought it was creepy. It was almost like watching a child who realizes the image in the mirror is its reflection. So after their emoting crescendoed - brought about by the picture of a fuzzy kitten placed no doubt by one of their more technology proficient peers - I put my hands up and said, "HANDS OFF THE KEYBOARDS!"

Both the typing and the noise began to subside, and I once again revisited the purpose of the exercise. That seemed to center most of them. We had other problems. Some students couldn't find the document, a couple had not signed up for Gmail, and some had difficulty working with the documents. Once they calmed down, they managed to get through the exercise.

My own classes have had a rocky start, too. I'm not sure I'll receive graduate credit for one of my classes, and I'm trying to figure out my employment situation in the summer. I'm also searching for research project topics. I haven't heard anything about the graduate forum that I submitted to, so I have a feeling that won't pan out. But I hope to submit my case study on Kosovo to AEJMC as a student paper. Again, I would simply like feedback that will enable me to proceed with the project.

Overall it will all fall into place; until it does, I feel same the vertigo that I see in my students. Will it work? How will it work? WHEN will it work? How do I fit into this? In the end, the world is created by those brave enough to seek and present their answers to these questions. When we challenge ourselves to answer, then we possibly come close to touching a dream of freedom, perhaps the one true freedom each of us possesses: the freedom to imagine the world as it could be.