Reconfiguring “Song of Myself” Using the Walt Whitman Digital Archive

I’ve had a lot of negative emotion surrounding the assignments for this poem. As acknowledged by Professor Hanley and greatly addressed by the class, Diigo, while a great idea in theory is terrible in execution. Just thought I’d join the collective – done and done.

During lab on Tuesday I “explored” the Whitman Archive by mostly peeking over Joseph’s computer because my “workstation” (can you believe that’s what office people call it?) was slow. One of the things that I saw him try was using Token X to do word searches. The results would show the line in one row after another with the highlighted keyword within the line centered so that the lines on either side would be asymmetrical. Here’s a picture to better illustrate what I just said:

LEAVES OF GRASS [1855]

... probably the fullest poetical	nature	. The United States ...
... The largeness of	nature	or the nation were ...
... the citizen. Not	nature	nor swarming states nor ...
... and the motion of	nature	and of the throes ...
... sea, Master of	nature	and passion and death ...
... flow out of the	nature	of the work and ...
... of the oneness of	nature	and the propriety of ...
... my soul reflected in	nature	. . . . as I see ...

This was a cool way to recreate the poem. It was automatic – no printing out a hardcopy, no manual highlighting, cutting and pasting. Seeing how lines were broken up, what was included and what was left out by ellipses was interesting as well. I’m sure there’s some logical way the computer figures it out using punctuation but hey, I enjoy a lot of science fiction so why not think that a computer (or compy as I like to call it- thanks, Strongbad) can create something that would make me go, “interestiiing.” Talk about FREE VERSE, having a keyword centered wherever it occurs in the line?! On a side note I was surprised by how little some of the keywords that we tried came up in the poem – “Kiss,” for example only had ___ lines.

There’s a lot of well-organized material on this digital archive. Well-organized and digital archive doesn’t go hand in hand very often, either. Stephanie was looking at some poetry where the original scanned manuscript was on the left side of the window and the typed, legible version was on the right, which is a simple idea that would make exploring digitized documents A LOT easier and more interesting. This should be essential for the people working with archives and primary documents online. Yes, Leaves of Grass is a long one, but it would be very cool to read the poem in such a format rather than have a clickable icon above each section to get to the original page – I want to see that pretty handwriting that is much better than mine.

The BIG question we have on our Wiki is, “What is the relationship between the self and the other, the you and the me, etc.?” The first thing (and kind of obvious) idea that popped in my head was to use word searches to take all the lines in the poem where Whitman talks about himself (or uses the I/me pronoun) and do a sort of conversational, call-response weaving of the poem with all the mentions of the you. Somewhere the blending sections of “we,” “us,” and “all” would get pushed somewhere, maybe at the end. Then again, if this idea were put to music, I’d have all those we/us/all’s as a chorus with one consistent melody, the you’s to another melody and the I/me’s to another – hmmm, that was very tangential.

This project got me thinking about the quality of digital archives and how much better it could/should be. I did a lot of competitive analysis one summer for an online advertising company, which sounds fancier than it is – looking at similar websites and reviewing them. We looked at online archives and it seems like the better they are (Whitman archive) the more one could do with the work – reconfigure “Song of Myself.” I can’t imagine doing something like this with a poorly constructed site with non-enlarging images, side by side comparisons of primary and typed versions, and keyword searches.

Archives - Something big, old[er] and local

My three blogs are the Edgar Allen Poe Digital Collecttion, Immigration in the US, 1789-1930 and Charles Bukowski.

How is the archive portal designed? text-based? image-based?
What kind of use and users does it seem to invite? those who already know what they're looking for? those who are just exploring?
How easy is it to search the archive? how flexible are the search tools?
How structured or open is the archive interface? does it guide the user through the collection? does it offer few guided paths for the user?
How are the primary (archival) materials presented? with lots of context? without any context? are the primary materials manipulable? i.e. zoom in and out? with and without fram

Backward Design

I first thought backward design was partly just forward design in disguise. The first step of content-focused design versus results-focused design seemed the same. Teaching a lesson on racial prejudice was the same as the more results-focused, "What are the consequences of racial prejudice?" Bottom line: racism bad. What was interesting was when Professor Hanley advised that the point of the first step isn't so much as to plainly state what we want students to learn but to open the topic up so that the students could THINK about the lesson and not just binge and purge lectures and activities. This was difficult to do as a group because I didn't quite grasp this idea till the end of class. The next two steps were also difficult to do as a group because we tended to slip into forward design by thinking of actual activities tasks before coming up with the evidence - did these two steps go hand in hand or is it strictly one then the other? I'm still struggling with this.

Given the difficult climate teachers and students have to deal with I don't see backward design as a practical method of teaching despite it being ideal - time consuming, really hard. However, I do think the thought process of backward design is a healthy way for teachers to engage their students and I'm glad I learned about it now rather than when I'm a grumpy, old teacher set in my ways.

I'd be curious to see how backward design could be executed on all levels besides literature. Can it work for something like math, where there usually only one answer? What about learning how to bake a pie, a very step-by-step process? It seems like for these kind of subjects forward design would be the go-to method, just a rambly thought.

Ilearn

It is Tuesday evening, 8:00 pm, and I am writing under some ironic circumstances. The power on my entire block is out so here I am, “blogging” on a Word doc by candlelight.

We pretty much all established that learning took place in the presence of others last Thursday. While the Coopman and Kotkamp articles criticized the power and hierarchy of these CMS tools, I think that in the learning environment, hierarchy is good so long as intention is in good faith. I might have a pretentious teacher that garbles on and on but that garbling is what I am learning. It’s not good learning, by any means, and I think what these articles are trying to do is encourage the dynamic environment that is ideal learning – where both student and teacher learn and grow with strong interaction on all sides. One problem I had with these articles was that they seemed dated but then I saw that they’re quite recent, the Coopman being written just a few months ago. Thus, I agree with Professor Hanley in that these articles undermines the potential of CMS – for example, both articles criticize the fact that students cannot upload files because they do not have access unless the teacher allows it. This is simply a critique of the teacher that exercises such power rather than the CMS programs.

I frequently used Ilearn last semester. It was a good supplement to my classes for forums, posting articles and getting and turning in assignments. I would stress the word supplement. In order for Ilearn to come near an in-class learning experience there would have to be a lot more functions – chat, video capabilities, etc. On a side note, chat would even be limited to having students online at a coordinated time. I certainly did not feel like I was equally engaged as a student in Ilearn with the times I was in class.

I wished the minute we started sharing our learning experiences in class that I didn’t pick diaper changing – let me just get that off my chest. With regards to new media, I think videos are an excellent tool and would be great if incorporated in CMS’s. I learned how to play basic accordion over the summer just by using youtube, and accordion is no easy instrument! If most of our learning involved someone else, then a video would be the closest we could get to a typical education using just new media. Anyone can read and learn but in terms of that dynamic, interaction learning that we’re striving for, there CMS should branch out to video- be it clips or video chats. There will always be limitations to this interactive learning that would be sacrificed in place of in-class learning – facial and vocal expressions, the convenience and immediate response of Q & As and an overall social quality that engages people rather than people being engaged with their computers.

RSS, Function or Fashion?

To me, Real Simple Syndication, otherwise known as RSS, means user-friendly convenience- Convenience to those that have an abundance of websites that they want to keep track of. RSS feeds simply let you know when a particular site has had an update so you can check it out rather than going through your entire list of sites to see which ones have changed. Therefore this function seems only practical when one follows a plethora of sites with diligence.

I never used an RSS feed until now because I do not diligently follow very many sites. My internet time is normally used to pass time or for entertainment. But now that I'm thinking in terms of academia and new media, I can see some potential in RSS.

I can't imagine RSS working in a classroom environment unless it went hand in hand with student interaction involving giving one another comments and feedback. There should be some incentive for students to look at each other's blogs because the internet is one mighty distraction highway. That said, I think RSS would only work in a small group environment where one could keep track of updates without being overwhelmed by too many of them. I think I have a pessimistic mindset in terms of the attention spans of students, eegads. Having RSS work in a small group setting seems counterintuitive of the prolific way RSS offers to consume content on a large scale, but I think it would be more conducive in a learning environment and not a personal one, you know, keeping track of the next Woot items and such.

There's an interesting article on TechCrunchIT about the death of RSS with Twitter becoming it's replacement. It sort of relates to the idea of RSS being useful only for those that routinely follow certain sites. Well what about finding new sites? The post talks about how RSS was once very useful and important but is now dated by not just Twitter, for new content, but Facebook for upcoming events and social networking. Since I'm a novice at this reader thing, I'll question how big a role RSS played with social networking. I'm sure it did or does for some.

"OO," Oh?

The closest I could get to understanding object oriented programming or OOP (more like "OOPS" har har har) is that it's interactive - maybe something like Microsoft Paint. I wonder what non-OOP is then because at this point I can't imagine a non-interactive program except for programs with limited interactions like a media player. Am I way off? I am totally unqualified to speak competently in computer lingo.

Otherwise I thought the Kotkamp article was quite interesting. The question of what comprises a quality education as something that's dynamic and leaves the teacher-student somewhat unresolved and thirsting for more, followed by how online platforms could match that demand was a good setup. I've never really thought about the theory of pedagogy except in terms of, "This teacher good, this teacher bad."

Both articles addressed the problems of hierarchy in Blackboard and webCT. I wonder how far and open these writers imagine their online classrooms to be. I think there needs to be some kind of structure to a classroom based on some authority figure - the teacher. The articles criticized hierarchy as having a sort of power struggle but I saw it as more of a practical means to build an online classroom. Perhaps I'm overlooking the point, in fact, I probably am. My only experience with online classrooms have been with the DMV driving test to get rid of a point for speeding and what's a more hierarchical institution than the DMV?!