Teaching and Technology: Will the Students Collaborate?

This semester I'm giving my American Lit & Culture students several semester-long projects to work on. I've warned them that they will need to be disciplined and do a little bit of work for each class, because the project requirements are simply too great to put off until the last minute.

I suspect that students may be feeling overwhelmed, so I wrote them the following message in which I encouraged them to collaborate on the courses electronic discussion board, which is part of the BlackBoard software platform used at UIC.

Use this forum to post quotes, annotations and comments related to your semester-long project "The Rhetoric of Freedom: Annotated Quotes." I encourage you to show class solidarity and to help one another on this assignment. Your annotated remarks, of course, cannot be plagiarized directly from someone else, but you can and should share ideas.

One of my research interests is new media studies, and I'm particularly interested in communicative systems that emerge in networked environments such as this. I'm curious to see whether you, as a class, harness the potential inherent in this software platform to develop an efficient collaborative system for (re)marking on the course texts.

Good luck! 

Based on past teaching experiences, my sense is that most students resist using BlackBoard, which is fine with me, if that's what they choose. My primary concern is that they read the books and other texts and learn various analytic strategies. However, I do think that electronic collaboration offers them opportunities that were unavailable when I was an undergrad.

But is it Activism: Springsteen Plays Seeger

Ron Radosh reviews Springsteen's Seeger Sessions for the right-wing American Interest. It's a pretty well-written piece that raises an intriguing question: But is it activism? My quick-and-dirty and a-bit-too-easy answer would be that the songs are a mode of activism if Springsteen intends them to be. Of course that assertion says nothing about the song's effectiveness as a form of activism. As the article notes, some in Springsteen's recent concert audiences are apparently finding it more difficult to 'connect' with Seeger's folk songs than with Springsteen's rock anthems. Go figure.

Is the audience's disconnect due to hearing an out-of-style musical genre or the unabashed socialist content of the songs? Probably both, particularly insofar as form and content inform and shape one another. I'd like to remind Radosh, and others on the right who often make similar arguments when they find artists mixing pop and politics (to quote the great Billy Bragg whom I heard live again a few months ago): The fact that the leftist artists are making money from their art and perhaps even getting rich doesn't count as an argument against their progressive conviction in the necessity of eliminating material inequality around the world.

AOL Said, 'If You Leave Me I'll Do Something Crazy' - New York Times

I've been warning of the evils of AOL for years, but for those of you who are still using AOL to access the internet, please read this horror story: AOL Said, 'If You Leave Me I'll Do Something Crazy'.

Damned to Fame

Leland de la Durantaye comments on Samuel Beckett's cult of impersonality and the surprisingly enduring popularity of Beckett's art of subtraction.

File a copy for students to read the next time I teach Beckett.

Ambush in Afghanistan

War correspondent Christina Lamb reports on being cornered with her photographer and British Army troops during a Taliban ambush in Zumbeley, Afghanistan. Lamb's essay, 'Have you ever used a pistol?', offers a gripping first-person account of the dangers coalition forces are facing in Afghanistan, where, contrary to previous claims of victory, the Taliban remain a powerful presence. Would the situation in Afghanistan be better today if the U.S. military had not rushed to wage war in Iraq? The deteriorating conditions in Afghanistant suggest that the U.S. military should have been allowed to soundly defeat the Taliban and Al Quaida in Afghanistan rather than being forced to redeploy its resources for the invasion of Iraq.