Reflection Journal week 4

Reflection on this week 4:

What can I learn from my own frustration in my attempts to use the technology required for this class? I had a hard time finding two of the texts for week four: Grabe and McEneany. The first one had no link or specified site in this week’s instructions, and the second had a URL, but was misspelled in both mentions. Googling Grabe and the title took me to the book—reviews, Amazon, but not an article. When I went to the home site for McEneany’s, there were two articles, and both of them seemed possible, but I didn’t have time for both. I didn’t want to bother Ellie, yet again, because I feel like that annoying student, who just won’t let things be, and wants everything specified (and spoon-fed...that’s how I sometimes feel when I’m the teacher). So, I went to the litandwriting site to get emails and emailed a couple of classmates who had mentioned the two texts in their postings.

I couldn’t wait for the responses, because who knows when they’d get to check their email and I have to concentrate most of my work to two days (with daycare). I went to the litandwriting site and looked for both articles in every section until I found the link (and title) of the McEneany article. Then I went to webCT and finally found Grabe in the electronic reserves.

Feeling out of touch because others had apparently found these more readily than me (which means they understood earlier where to look), I realized that I hadn’t seen a reflection prompt anywhere and I remembered that I had been out of the loop with Yahoogroups. So, I went into my email and took quite a long time to get into yahoo groups (I was probably typing something wrong, maybe I confused ID or password with googlegroup, who knows?). I seemed to be signed up, but didn’t find any message—don’t really know how to get in if I don’t get an email with a link...which I didn’t have past the initial invitation to join. Now I felt more out of touch...so I emailed Ellie, feeling like more than a pest.

So much frustration, and what felt like so much time spent just trying to find the material to work with. Have I (and consequently “we”) become spoiled because the Internet is so fast, that spending an hour to “find” material seems like an unreasonable amount of time? I remember spending days in the library as an undergrad looking for just a couple of articles which would serve my purposes. Still, there is a part of the difficulty in this anecdote which seems unnecessary and unhelpful....But, is that not a natural impression when one engages for the first time with something difficult to penetrate: Did I not think Bahktin was “unreasonably” obscure the first (few) times I read any chapter?

After all, in this case, the content of this class IS the process of using the technology at hand. (Although, the fact that I must read, elaborate, post, comment, and reflect raises the stakes on avoiding that “wasted” time, since time is a limited commodity...perhaps that is the “unhelpful” feeling I have?) But, what happens when the technology is not part of the content I’m teaching students? What happens with that added work which accompanies technology-assisted learning, and the frustration it produces, when “how” to use technology is not part of the content of a class?

As I continue reading for this class, it becomes increasingly clear that when using technology in a classroom, the use of it will always be part of the content. I am beginning to understand McEneaney’s observation from his abstract (pdf version—couldn’t access the path-based one), that hypertext literacy “poses special difficulties with respect to the process focus advocated by content literacy experts.”

So, one of the main questions to reflect on this week is, “What do we need to learn from our students (and ourselves) and to teach students (and ourselves) about the issues and problems that readers/researchers will confront...?” I need to learn and teach that the content of any work I do/require using technology is also about using that technology. I, first, and my students as well, will need to consider the knowledge I acquire in using the tool to be equivalent to that which I add to my intellectual basis when I read an article which does not serve the purposes of a paper I am writing: I never consider that “wasted” time; rather, I file it away in my mind as something that enriches my potential thoughts on future material. When I learn something new about how to use technology, albeit out of frustration, I need to consider this something which will at some point be “helpful.” This is something I need to teach my students.