Going Public

As we're in the final stretch of Argument as Inquiry, I'm looking ahead to the rest of the semester. It's all new.

This semester, my students are going public. I've moved the "final paper," the academic position paper, from the last week to week 11. I'm now calling it the "academic argument" to distinguish it from the new project: "the public argument."

My students are conducting quality academic research that doesn't go anywhere. Their "academic audience" is a false construct (they're not *really* going to publish in the Journal of Social Psychology as freshman college students), and most of what they write in my class is "just for English."

I hate that, as do many in my field. So, I'm handling this by having them publish their research findings online. Their last "paper" will be targeted to the public, to the blogosphere and twitterverse. I've made a class twitter (@LyraBL101) and asked all of my students to make new Twitter accounts for themselves and follow us at #Lyra101. They're to follow any author or source that they use in their research and later, will tweet at those authors, telling them that they're using their work in their papers. When they publish their work online--on Blogger, Weebly, or Wix--they're going to tweet about it, tell people on Facebook and Tumblr (neither of which I go near--that's their world, not mine), and, I hope, get people to comment on their work. 

Students will repurpose their papers and small assignments from earlier in the semester for a public audience. They might turn some of their earlier work into a series of blog posts, or keep the larger papers as stand-alone arguments but cut them in half, from 1500 to 750 words. 

I theme my class around media, technology, and education, so students research something that nominally is related to one of those fields. I try to group students together by topic for peer review groups. Those groups will stick together for this last project.  I want them to build these websites in groups, and then each of them will have a portal or something to their individual research. 

I don't think it's reasonable to have each student build his or her own website. A simple blogger, fine. But I want more than that. I want them to have a website that can house a Twitter feed, a blog, a full paper, an annotated bibliography with hyperlinks, etc. I think that this needs to be a group effort. Some students will do it easily; others will be completely intimidated. So, building this website as a group seems like the way to go.

The sticky area is privacy. I've asked students to make new Twitter accounts specifically for this class so that they keep their private and professional worlds separate. I know that several other professors require students to use Twitter, so this won't be the last time they're asked to make a "professional student" account. I've asked students to use a name that I will recognize, but it doesn't need to be their full name--they can just use "Stan ENGL" as their full name for this assignment. While part of my objectives are to teach them digital literacy skills and how to conduct oneself online in a professional manner, I still want to protect them. They may not want their employer in five years (or five months) to read their college papers.

I'm walking an interesting line between encouraging my students to publish their work online so that their research actually matters to someone other than me and wanting to protect them from their "future" selves. I'm asking them to follow people on Twitter and tweet about their research. My students need to be "real people," but they don't need to be identifiable to the point where their Twitter and Weebly for this class is easily linked to their personal Twitter or Facebook. It's a Brave New World in higher ed and literacy studies...