English 505t

Technology Practicum for First-Year Instructors

Course Texts

There are no texts for this course--the emphasis is on multimedia production. I have created a number of resources for this course, listed below.

Course Website

Technical Mentoring at Purdue

Course Description

I serve as one of two Technical Mentors for Purdue's ICAP program. As a technology mentor, I help first-year instructors incorporate multimedia technologies into both their pedagogy (ways of teaching) and curriculum (whats of teaching). I create and run workshops in a number of areas: visual rhetoric, web authorship, social networking, image manipulation, video production, etc. While these workshops often cover tools or applications, they aim to successfully integrate these tools into the classroom in accordance with Purdue's emphasis on multimedia composition. We don't want technology to determine pedagogy; we do, however, want technology to improve upon and contribute to our teaching.

This semester I have worked especially hard on developing what I term "object-oriented instruction" (and presented a paper on the topic at Purdue's "Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference"). Essentially, I want my mentees creating things rather than watching me create things (or even following along as I create things). As I discuss in my teaching philosophy, the idea is to stimulate invention by fostering personal investment in a project; this kind of stimulation requires people to get their fingers dirty, or as I refer to it, to forge their own path (rather than following the linear and explicit kind of directions provided by a tutorial). Often an equal mix of frustration and excitement, playful exploration of technology increases the potential for powerful, long-term learning. By working their own path, instructors invent ways to incorporate technologies into their own classes.

Selected Course Resources

Below is a list of resources I have compiled or created for this course:

Visual Rhetoric Workshop (focus: analysis)
This workshop focuses on analyzing visual texts, providing mentees with helpful vocabularly and heuristics for introducing visual analysis into their first-year composition classes. We draw upon Robin Williams' core design concepts, fundamental principles of color theory and symbolism, and genre / traditional literary analysis to examine a series of advertisments and artworks.
Visual Rhetoric Workshop (focus: production)
This workshop focuses on the rhetorical skills needed for visual production. As with the analysis workshop, we cover Robin Williams' design principles and princples of color theory and symbolism. Additionally, I created a PowerPoint on basic typography (once again drawing heavily upon Robin Williams' Non-Designer's Design Book). For a practice exercise, I introduce mentees to visual editing software by having them crop, highlight, and manipulate several photographs and them integrate the photographs into a PowerPoint.
Introduction to Image Manipulation Workshop
This workshop is a continuation of the production workshop above. I run several different versions of this workshop, although all are quite similar: in one session we create a CD cover for a favorite band, in another we create a picture that captures the essence of their favorite quote (using BrainyQuote), and in the final and most popular, I have them use a digital camera to create themselves on the cover of their favorite magazine (or I have them attempt to recreate a famous magazine from the American Society of Magazine Editor's top 40 magazine covers).
Windows Moviemaker Workshop (a favorite among my mentees)
I have presented this workshop at the Teaching and Learning with Technology workshop here at Purdue: it is quite a popular workshop that a large number of instructors have incorporated into their curriculum. The tutorial covers the use of still images, making it more accessible (you don't need a digital video recorder). Furthermore, this tutorial can be used to create 1) narrated documentaries, 2) family histories, 3) music videos, or 4) artistic expression pieces [my catch-all for everthing else]. To facilitate incorporating Moviemaker (which comes packaged with virtually every Windows PC), I created a detailed Microsoft Word handout.
Introduction to HTML & CSS Workshop
This is an extended workshop (usually 2 hours) based on the first two sessions of my Web Standards Project. I show mentees how to turn a Microsoft document (generally their syllabus) into a standards-compliant (x)HTML document. We cover basic HTML tags and concepts including: structural tags such as the paragraph tag, the heading tag, unordered list and line item tags and the blockquote tag. Additionally, we cover some of the basics for creating a CSS design for their site, including: setting margins, creating font-families, and choosing text and background color. We also cover the emphasis tag, the strong tag, and the anchor tag. The purpose of this workshop is to provide mentees with the fundamental skills for building a sustainable web presence. Many students choose to follow my entire web presence tutorial, examples of instructor websites created through the tutorial (some by people with no previous web experience) are provided below.
(Electronic) Teaching Portfolio Workshop
Forthcoming
Social Bookmarking & Networking with del.icio.us Workshop
Forthcoming, outline and materials available on the Tech Mentoring website

Selected Mentee Projects

Jeff Spanke's Time & National Geographic covers
Thanks to Jeff Spanke for allowing me to link to his outstanding images (both were finished after the image manipulation and visual rhetoric workshops). Jeff continues to create these covers as gifts for friends and family.
Jack Raymond Baker's Web Presence
Result of HTML workshop, teaching portfolio workshop, and personal consultations. Thanks to Jack for allowing me to link to his site.
Michael Covarrubius' Web Presence
Michael had previous experience with web design. He used the beta version of my Web Standards Project to convert this existing homepage into (x)HTML and CSS.