I’m finding that summer is blogging season for me. Maybe it’s just that during the academic year I’m so busy with teaching and service (and what research I can squeeze in) that I don’t have much time or energy to blog, which is first and foremost a reflective practice for me.
Anyhoo, I’m kicking off the blogging season with a link to a TED video featuring Salman Khan of Khan Academy, who describes what he and his team are doing to revolutionize education. I’m interested in what he has to say about using video outside of the classroom as a kind of self-paced lecture or discussion that students engage with in the time typically spent on homework and using class time for practice and individual instruction, including peer mentoring.
I would like to try to do something like this in my literature classes. It seems that this could work well if I’m planning to discuss some kind of concept and use it to set up discussion. An example might be “autoethnography,” which I use when we discuss texts like Zitkala-Sa’s “Impressions of an Indian Childhood.” Why not produce a video (perhaps based on Keynote slides?) that describes the concept in the way I might in class, have students watch that video and spend more time in class working out textual readings and analyses that allow us to see how the text is autoethnographic and testing some of the limits of that idea?
But why not just have students read about the concept, Mike? Wouldn’t that be the same thing? I don’t think so. I have a feeling, unsubstantiated, but a feeling, nonetheless, that my framing of the concept and even my voice would have more of an impact.
I don’t think that the model as Khan has it is completely exportable to the college literature classroom, but the idea of using technology in this particular way seems very sound to me. I’m eager to give it a go.