Incorporating Student Experiences

VoiceThread is a user-friendly way to share power point presentations, videos, photos, and other media. Students and professors can record video or audio responses, draw on the media to highlight certain points, and comment in text form. This site is useful for discussion outside of the classroom, allowing students to focus on the topic at hand and reflect in a collaborative way.

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Read how VoiceThread describes its capabilities.

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Capabilities

Through VoiceThread...

Professors can:

• Upload power points
• Upload question slides for comment
• Comment on students’ writing in video, text, and visual formats

Students can:

MediaThread, a project created by the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning through the Digital Bridges Initiative is a service that allows you to blend your thoughts with multimedia sources and share them with others. MediaThread supports video, images, metadata, and many content websites listed below. Most compatible with Firefox, MediaThread is currently being used by Columbia, MIT, Wellesley, Dartmouth, The American University in Cairo, and many other institutions of higher education.

Who can do what with MediaThread? Through MediaThread...

            The phrase "feminism unbound" is strange to me. I thought at first I understood it, but when we began to discuss this phrase in class, I got even more confused. So I sat down to think about it on my own. I thought about the rigors of society, the boundaries have set for ourselves and others, the world we have been told should exist. As someone who has chosen to go to an all-women's college I know I follow certain boundaries within the walls of Bryn Mawr College, regulations the college sets for me. I began to think of similar institutions. A friend of mine also goes to a single-sex institution, Wabash College, an all-men's college in Indiana. Wabash sets regulations for its students as well. A potential new regulation is a gender studies graduation requirement. This debate struck a chord with me, especially when I discovered the contorted view of gender studies some members of the institution had created around this issue . . .

            "[The] wimpy, neutralized guys that gender feminists are trying to create:  men who are not committed to constructive struggle and conflict and fighting for a cause and coming out the winner." (Michaloski and Allman) This statement was made by Dr. David P. Kubiak, a Classics professor at Wabash College in relation to the debate at Wabash over the proposition of a gender studies graduation requirement.

I felt like this unit was a good introduction and laid down the foundation for the class: defining the terms and posing the big questions to contemplate over the course of the semester. It has encouraged me personally to engage with and explore technology that I have been reluctant to experiment with in the past, including prezi and instagram, and I am excited to continue to learn. We have also established initial contact with our pen pals in Ghana and while we are uncertain about the development of that relationship at this point, I am excited about the possibilities. The prospect of an undeveloped structure to this part of the course is exciting but at the same time, a bit anxiety provoking, and so I hope we can help future participants by laying down some sort of structure for them.

Here is the link to my inquiry project:

 http://prezi.com/_5bxmjewqcgt/ebonics-and-spoken-word/?kw=view-_5bxmjewqcgt&rc=ref-1780966

February 12th, 2013 

How do you know the difference between abuse and discipline? 

Abuse                vs.                     Discipline 

types of Discipline: 

• Threats 
• writing lines
• spanking 

Similarities? 

cyclical/cultural 

Traditional vs. Progressive Discipline 

Hey everybody, I don't really know if this has any place in this Ecological Imaginings class, but maybe if we can imagine the preservation of women to be a form of ecology, not unlike the preservation of all plant life, animal life.

I just wanted to call everyone's attention to this excellent documentary currently being shown on PBS on Mon & Tues nights at 9:00 PM.  I imagine you guys have lots of time to watch films, yeah!  But this is an amazing series.

"Half the Sky" about gender based violence.

Here's the link to the first & second segment:

http://video.pbs.org/video/2283557115   

http://video.pbs.org/video/2283558278

recall - - Discourse = “set of values and viewpoints in terms of which one must speak and act, at least while being in the discourse” (Gee)

So Mia and I were talking about going to this country club/Alumni benefit/conference. (we went to an alumnae conference in Santa Monica over the weekend to represent the 360 program - this is a post that we wrote together on the airplane on the way there)

We started talking about clothing. We both realized that we had no idea what would be appropriate to wear in this environment – as neither of us has spent a significant amount of time in a country club (and by that I mean that I have gone to one once, and she has never gone to one). Should we wear skirts? Dresses? what length is appropriate?

So we’re wondering: what kind of discourse are we entering? Are we actually going to have an opportunity to speak frankly and genuinely about our experiences, or will the discourse silence some aspect of our behavior? It’s certainly silencing our creative fashion sense!

Clothing is a perfectly reasonable cause for concern – every time I’ve done any career counseling, I’ve been told that first impressions are essential. So appearance is essential. Uncertain about the kind of discourse you are entering + wearing the wrong thing = making your illiteracy obvious and embarrassing.

So that’s we were so worried about this on our trip to Ghana – we had no idea what our clothing would say about us. Legitimate? Eh, I think so.