My Jamaican sister-in-law shared this with me. The Real McCoy, a British sketch-comedy show that aired on BBC in the early 1990s, offers up one example of cross-cultural interpenetration… Dr. Who translated into Jamaican.

Click here to view the embedded video.

How about using this as a model for an assignment on mash-ups, taking advantage of Web 2.0 to explore processes of translation/cultural exchange? Taking students inside the productive process, getting them to exercise knowledge in creative ways? It could work for anthropology, sociology, philosophy, history, literature, language, or sketch-comedy classes.

One of my favorite methods of procrastination is contemplating what I’ll do whenever the project that I’m not working on at the moment is complete. Luckily, some of my work at the Institute has involved trying to anticipate where instructional technology will go in coming semesters, and what kinds of demands for support this will create.

In that spirit, I’ve been thinking that next Fall I’d like to build a blog that aggregates coverage of the 2008 Presidential Election and uses it as a jumping-off point for a current events course about politics and convergent media.

I think such a course would work well as a first-year seminar, and could expose students to rigorous engagement with contemporary issues while helping them critically examine the quickly changing processes by which we produce and consume information. Students would be asked to learn about the policy issues at play in the election, and the blog would provide a tool for the teacher to guide their inquiry through directed readings of more in-depth pieces of analysis as well as selected reportage. The presentness of the topic would infuse the course with energy. Students would write regularly to better understand the rhetoric of presidential politics, to debate issues, and also to examine role of the media in the electoral process. Once the election is complete, students would then be asked to place the events in a historical context and to produce a final paper on some element of the election or its coverage.

Anyone know a faculty member interested in teaching this class?

The primary innovation that makes the expanding use of instructional technology in the classroom so exciting, for me, is that it empowers students to disseminate their own work. Such empowerment can have unintended consequences, and creates new challenges for us as teachers. One faculty member with whom I discussed blogging said “I don’t want my students analyzing Plato for each other; their understanding of Plato is shit.” Aside from the fact that the statement might have been true (if loathsome), it further illuminated for me the tension between writing as process and writing as product. Exploration of this tension is central to the WAC/WID way, but seeing it played out in a couple of the course blogs that I’ve launched this term has been illuminating.

In a first-year writing course, students were required to attend a reading and then to post their reactions on the blog. The first blog post was from a student who railed at length and in detail about how boring the reading was and how uncomfortable he felt at the venue. The post wasn’t nasty at all, but it was quite negative in tone.

Rather than taking the post personally or defending the assignment, the Professor praised the student on the blog for his honesty and, importantly, for his willingness to reflect upon his disengagement. She also devoted much of the next class session to a discussion of “what it means to be liberally educated,” and how we can find value in things even if our reaction to them is negative. She had been disappointed by the behavior of some of the students at the event, but she didn’t let this filter onto the blog, preserving that space as an area for students to work out their ideas and write without her hovering judgment. It would have been easy for her to chasten the student (whose post actually begat more complaining), but that could have negatively impacted the virtual space the remainder of the term. Instead, the faculty member modeled for her students an approach to studying the world that found value in what on the surface–complaining and rejection–held little at all.

All writing is both process and product, though some types of writing assignments necessarily emphasize one element over the other. What was successful about the teaching described above was its loyalty to the goal of the assignment within the context of the class. That faculty member who was concerned about his students’ grasp of Plato was seeing their writing exclusively as a product, and missing the extent to which informal, public, process-oriented writing can open areas for responsive teachers to intervene.