Abstract - By Alaina and Jessica--In Process
Trapped in the confines of the concrete walls and concretized halls of higher education, twenty two graduate students sought a way out: a way to expand our required course, Rhetoric of Technology, beyond the stagnant space located in the staid syllabi and stolid seminar all too square, too standard, to graduate education. As teachers and students of Rhetoric and Composition, we have long discussed theories and enacted practices to engage play in our undergraduate classes. Upon recognizing that we made few earnest efforts to introduce such strategies into our own graduate coursework, we unearthed a research question: (How) can play transform a graduate space, the process of learning, and the work of knowledge building?" Using a methodology we have coined "Autosynthography," each of the students have taken it uppon themselves to reflect upon the ways play invited meaning into his or her experience. Putting our scholarly and digital training to the test, we collaborated to compose a 21-person authored, dgital text which presents our collective reflection. We hope you will enjoy playing with our narratives.
Our study, written from the perspective of 21 MA and doctoral students at a large state University, explores the role of play in learning at the individual and communal level. Broadly written, as 22 authors exploring new scholarship in the emerging fields of technorhetoricism, and social pedagogy, we question "How can bringing play into our graduate space open/create place (group 1), agency for humans and non-humans (group 2), intercultural and e-learning environments (group 3), student led backchannels (group 4), subversive play and exclusion (group 5), objects of ownership and property (group 6), and ways of copping with frustration and difficulty (group 7). These questioned were birthed out of a methodology we will call "Auto-synthography" a self-reflexive inquiry into how we, as a collective, were impacted and reconstructed as a result our class experiences.
Common Goal/Rheotirca:
to reflect on how we as students, teachers, practitioners, researchers, and people were changed by our time/experiences in this course.
Questions/text we eliminated from the abstract (as of now)
21st Century Update.
"How do learning communities (schools/virtual spaces/groups of allied citizens bunkered down in ideological silos) need to reconceptualize the role of play in teaching and learning contexts to better meet students and teachers and to make the most of new learning modalities?
Group Summaries (reconstructed from 3/7)
Group 1: How agency is articulated by play; how play gives us ways of seeing agency which illuminates the work of non-humans; how non-humans enable play; Jouissance as an aspect/product of play; enrolling connections which articulate an emergent knowledge and knolwedge making practices
Group 2: How play turns a space into a hybrid pla(y)ce, via backchannels such as twitter, the ball, etc. How these forms of play transformed our experiences.
Group 3: How can the play produced in this class be translated in the inter-cultural, e-learning environment?
Group 4: How does student-led play differ from teacher-led play? Is the authority and control of play positive or negative? Is student led, subversive play on backchannels a distraction, or productive?
Group 5: The underworld of the classroom: who is excluded, both intentionally and unintentionally, from concepts of play? Who feels like they belong, who doesn't and in what ways? What are the risks of play in the classroom?
Group 6: Who owns this text? How does technorhetorical play blur our definition of ownership and copyright of digital and collaboratively created texts?
Group 7: How do we find ways of negotiating work and play that alleviated our frustrations with our learning environment?
Methodology: auto-synthography - writing about our learning experiences
How did our experience as learners and writers using alternative play modalities effect our work as teachers, researchers, and graduate students?
Abstract - By Alaina and Jessica--In Process
Trapped in the confines of the concrete
walls and concretized halls of higher education, twenty two graduate
students sought a way out: a way to expand our required course, Rhetoric
of Technology, beyond the stagnant space located in the staid syllabi
and stolid seminar all too square, too standard, to graduate education. As
teachers and students of Rhetoric and Composition, we have long
discussed theories and enacted practices to engage play in our
undergraduate classes. Upon recognizing that we made few
earnest efforts to introduce such strategies into our own graduate
coursework, we unearthed a research question: (How) can play transform a graduate space, the process of learning, and the work of knowledge building?" Using a methodology we have coined "Autosynthography," each of the students have taken it uppon themselves to reflect upon the ways play invited meaning into his or her experience. Putting our scholarly and digital training to the test, we collaborated to compose a 21-person authored, dgital text which presents our collective reflection. We hope you will enjoy playing with our narratives.
Building
on Place Theory and the idea of Place as a meaning-infused space,
we
went about the work of using play to bring meaning to our space thereby
creating a Pla(y)ce. Wanting each student to reflect on
his or her own understandings of the way play invited meaning into
his/her experience required us to offer not only the new concept of
Pla(y)ce but also the new method of Autosynthography as a shared
authoethnographic account of our findings. The overlapping
areas of reflection revealed six select categories in which students
found meaning through play: digital spaces, agency, displaced voices,
aesthetics . . . I don’t remember these . . .
Susan and Sandy
Ella, Roni, Jason, Kristen
Kristen, Barbara, Mike
Susan, Zach L., Betty, Alaina, Kathleen
Jessica, Nick, Lauren
Super Awesome Team Alpha
Laura, Sarah Beth
Dr. Moxley
---------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------
learning ecology (willing, ready, want to learn) splayce
agency
non-humans and agency and digital ecosystem
how to facilitate play in the eLearning space/culturally contextual ideas of "play"; vlogging and the combination of space (please see the hyperlink of "play" in the above paragraph as well as this abstract and this abstract)
*
though this may start with the American classroom it implicates itself
to include the opportunity and the burden of intercultural relations
the affect of play
the pragmatism of play
y
Rhetoric,
We
will begin with a poem/abstract that we will collaborate on. Each word or even letter in the abstract can hyperlink out to something an individual or group writes. The poem/abstract then is our focus/node. Each of us need to produce our own text that speaks to what we want to write about/think about; the “substance” of the text will emerge through this peer production.
. / exPlay, connectivism Knowledge production in a tool-rich ecology works between the inter-play between rhetoric and .
Following our own bliss will “naturally” lead to new forms of knowledge
…arrive at a common ethos When is someone ready to learn something? Where are our own filters?
Our vision should be: Can 22 people collaborate on one project
How do you do group-based Autoethnography???? What kind of negotiation happens?
We need a better word for Autoethnography that captures what we are doing.
“Autosynthography” taps the core of collaboration-driven group ethos
In the center of the nodal design could be a poem, of which we all write a few words, and each word link to different parts of the project. This way, hyperlinks branch to different areas but it keeps the whole thing connected to the hive. Poem would consist of buzzwords.
What if the poem was "magnet poetry" so that each vistor to the space could arrange the buzzwords however they wanted? What if they could take a screenshot of that and upload it to a Slideshare coll
ec
tion
?
P
erhaps each nodal space can have a link that will lead to an open public space which will allow for produsers (visitors) to participate/leave feedback.