In a previous post I discussed the bidirectional capacity of telescopic text to help students gain deep ownership over complex ideas. I continue to like the app, and to believe there are plenty of ways of using it that might be beyond its original intention for pedagogical purposes. I’m not as convinced anymore that its usefulness derives from visualizing logic trees, and it’s not even the most efficient way of tracking chronological changes to a document in the way you can with wikis. But as my colleague Enoch Hale points out, there may be no simpler mechanism to force close attention to the language of a brief sentence. Change one word and the entire sentence subtly adjusts, and I think he’s right to see a universe of potential reflection activities to probe the ways we think about knowledge intake. (more…)
Month: February 2017
Exploring Analogy and Applicability
For this experiment, my objective was to demonstrate how useful prominent ideas and theoretical ways of thinking about data could be. The most important point was “portability” — that knowledge gained in one context, even if acquired through the empirical study of a very specific data set, can be extracted, made abstract, and then reapplied to a similar context with its own quirky data.
So although in semesters past I had given my students core readings and then spent a good deal of time locating and defining those key terms (in this case within Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point), I thought perhaps skipping the first step and getting immediately to abstraction and analogy was worth a try. We call them warrants in the Toulmin system of rhetoric — principles or beliefs that allow an interpretive move to take place — and the claim of another author, if appropriate to the occasion, properly sourced, and explained as an analogy, can function like a warrant’s IF/THEN logic. I gave my students the rough synopses of key terms a previous set of students had extracted from the same readings and then asked them to create telescopic text explorations of the concepts. (more…)
Incubating with Telescopic Texts
This semester I am experimenting with, on the one hand, drastically reducing the number of different apps I use in the classroom (both F2F and online), and on the other, finding as many ways as possible to exploit the affordances of the technology. I will not of course be the first person to write about using telescopic texts in the classroom; Enoch Hale was the person who first introduced me to it, and Keith Schoch’s discussion is an admirable first step in thinking through its uses. I love the idea of keeping a telescopic text character synopsis that evolves over time as students read farther into novels. That’s a wonderful way of tracking a student’s progression through not just the pages but their own reconnaissance of how the character unfolds before their eyes, too.
My UTAs have asked me why I’m so insistent to use the app every Tuesday, and my best answer to that is that Telescopic Text acts as a metaphor for what a good research writing course should do. The act of unfolding an initial, superficial definition until it seems capacious enough for all students in a group to include the examples they have in mind — that is a way of creating depth while simultaneously visualizing the expansion of sophistication that happens when one bores into a subject tenaciously, determined to get as much out of it as possible.
Jellyfish State 