Reflections on Online Activism

               Throughout seven weeks of the winter semester, my online Composition II students completed online activist activities that corresponded with the problem/solution essay they were researching and writing. At the end, I asked that they write a reflection on what they discovered and how successful they felt they were.

The writing prompt:

Throughout almost half the semester, we engaged in online activities designed to promote a cause and bring about awareness and change. Now we are going to reflect on our experience, discussing what we learned about online activism.

Introduction:

In your introduction you want to describe your cause and what you wanted to achieve through your online activist activities. End with a thesis statement that discusses what you learned, what opinions you formed, and how successful your endeavors were.

Body paragraphs:

Make at least three claims that support your thesis statement. Back up those claims with specific examples and analysis of those examples.

Conclusion:

In your conclusion, look to the future. Do you think you’ll use these skills again? Do you feel that these skills empower you to create change in the world?

I tried not to be too leading in my writing prompt. If I were to change anything about the prompt, it would be to emphasize that both positive and negative opinions regarding online activism were acceptable if they were able to support those opinions with their own observations and experiences. However, based on the mix of feedback I received and the discussion of the assignment in my student feedback forms for the class, I don't think most of the students were simply feeding me the answers they thought I wanted to hear. It is always a worry when a reflection like this is tied to a grade.

For the most part, students seemed empowered by the process and were surprised by how social media could be used for more than sharing personal feelings and celebrity gossip. One student, who was advocating for animal writes, wrote, "I used Twitter for my awareness and was blown away by how many other people were behind the same cause. Seeing new posts everyday about a dog or cat needing a new home made me determined to spread the word... Communicating with others over the internet allowed me to learn about all the cruelty that happens with animals. For instance, I read posts and saw photos about grizzly bears being strapped in jets and ejected to see if the systems worked. Using Twitter in this way opened my eyes to things that were going on that I’d never heard of.  I began to read articles from other countries and became acquainted with organizations from around the world. My passion for fighting for animals grew even stronger." Many students had similar reactions of surprise and noted how much Twitter actually helped them with researching their topic.

Most students defended their feelings of empowerment by making statements about "making one person aware." Some, though, felt discouraged by the difficulty of gathering a large audience or getting people to comment on their work. It's not enough to simply Tweet facts or begin a blog. The most successful online activist in the class utilized his Facebook network to create an activist group of 400 members, which led to a successful online petition that garnered support from all over the world. It's not enough to have a voice, you need to have a network. As one student wrote, "In doing this project, I found out that getting your name out there, and networking with other bloggers or tweeters like you is very important. With tweeting it can be as simple as mentioning someone in a tweet, and they will most likely respond to you. On Twitter, I learned how easy it is to connect with someone, even if they live across the world or are famous. And that is why I think it is important we did this project, because it taught us that we can connect with people all around the world, and have our voice heard."

Overall, I feel that I seen enough benefits this semester to continue this assignment. However, I have realized based on the feedback of my students that I need to have this be a full-semester project with more training on building a network. The only hesitation, and why I began this project with caution, is that some students have a very set negative opinions on sites like Twitter and Facebook. Those opinions roadblock the effort they put into the project and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Online activism only works with time and effort.  This was something a number of students noted in their reflections.

Project Online Activism

To gain perspective on online activism, my online composition II class read "Hashtag Activism" and "Politics of the Internet." Most students related to the article, "Hashtag Activism," which states: "The ongoing referendum on the Web often seems more like a kind of collective digital graffiti than a measure of engagement: I saw this thing, it spoke to me for at least one second, and here is my mark to prove it." It recognizes that social media is a tool, which purpose is driven by the one operating the mouse. Liking something on Facebook is not going to make you an activist. However, if you are an activist, Facebook can help you generate support and awareness. The article many examples proving the power of social media in the right collective hands, such as how an online petition changed the film rating of the documentary Bully from R to PG.

 The "Politics of the Internet," for me, was the more interesting read. It correlates the design of the Internet to philosophical principles that could reshape politics:

•                The internet is nothing if not an exercise in interconnection. Its politics thus seems to call out for a similar convergence, and connections between the disparate interest groups that make up the net movement are indeed getting stronger. Beyond specific links, they also share what Manuel Castells, a Spanish sociologist, calls the “culture of the internet”, a contemporary equivalent of the 1960s counter-culture (in which much of the environmental movement grew up). Its members believe in technological progress, the free flow of information, virtual communities and entrepreneurialism. They meet at “unconferences” (where delegates make up their own agenda) and “hackerspaces” (originally opportunities to tinker with electronics); their online                forum of choice will typically be something such as a wiki that all can contribute to and help to shape. ("The New Politics of the Internet: Everything is Connected")

It's an interesting piece that is grounded in free data optimism. Most interesting is that the piece in The Economist only discusses economical concerns in relation to intellectual property rights. It doesn't examine the hidden cost of free data -- our attention. But I digress... ah yes, online activism. Our journey should begin in full-fledged splendor after spring break.

Here is the assignment:

As we research our causes and later argue for solutions, I want us to document and promote our findings online. Online activism can take many forms through social media, blogging, website creation, petitions, videos, and memes. Because of the various options and because we will be working independently, I will expect you to keep track of your posts, Tweets, and work to submit in a portfolio on April 18th. For blogs, all I need is the URL. For the Tweets and Facebook group posts, I need an actual word documents with the Tweets and posts copied into it.
If you get behind on one of your tasks or decide you want to switch to another activity, that is fine. The flexibility of having the project submitted as a portfolio allows us this freedom.
More details on the requirements of each option are listed below. The Youtube video and website options are listed last, as they are the most detailed.

Option 1: Facebook group posts and comments
For this option you can start a Facebook group or join an existing group. Each week you will post or comment on a post at least five times. These posts and comments will need to be submitted in a word document at the end of the project. I suggest updating a word document every week.

Option 2: Twitter Feed
For this option you will need to have 10 tweets a week. Three of these can be retweets. You can always Tweet news stories or websites you like. There should be a hashtag related to your cause or created by you that you will use in your feed. Avoid plagiarism.

Option 3: Blog
For this option you will need to maintain a blog and post to it weekly. Blog posts need to be at least 200 words, proofread, and contain no plagiarism. You should also use tags or keywords in your posts so that you blog can be found through a Google search.

Option 4: Online petition
For this option you will need to create an online petition. You should have a strong written portion of 250-500 words.

Option 5: Three Memes
Your memes must not violate copyright laws or contain plagiarism. See examples of memes here: http://knowyourmeme.com. I suggest images with captions or parodies.
due dates: March 14^th, March 28^th, April 14^th

Option 6: Youtube video
Youtube due dates:
Storyboard: March 14^th
Email progress/youtube rough draft: March 28^th
Final video: April 14th
Your youtube video should make a compelling argument for your cause and/or solution. My suggested length is three minutes. However, we can negotiate this when you complete your rough draft. If you don't have a video editor you prefer to use, I suggest using wevideo.com, which is a cloud-based editor. I have a tutorial for the program here: http://youtu.be/35pnAQnMdgc.

Option 7: Website

·       Create a website using www.weebly.com, www.wix.com or site builder of your choice

·       Repurpose your 5-7 page Problem/Solution essay to fit the conventions of writing for the web (see online activism module under content)

·       Have at least four distinct pages

·       Choose or design a fitting template

·       Pick images that communicate your message (www.creativecommons.org, www.flickr.com, www.morguefile.com, or http://photobucket.com)

·       Avoid plagiarism or copyright issues

Examples from my Winter 2012 English 112 class:

http://poverty.natemealey.com/
http://childabuseprevented.weebly.com/
http://solvepoverty.weebly.com

Youtube, Your Voice

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            For a democracy to function…citizens must actively engage in public debate, applying reading and writing practices in the service of articulating their positions and their critiques of the positions of others. To have citizens who are unable to write and read for the public forum thus defeats the central purpose of the notion of democracy. (Berlin “Rhetorics” 109-10)

            Most of my assignments in this half of the semester have to do with changes to the public forum. To be civically empowered, students must be able to navigate and create in the interconnected multimedia environment of the web. Mashable declared 2012 to be the year of Youtube, where 7,000 hours of news-related video was uploaded daily. If students want a voice in today’s media landscape, they need to be able to do more than write a letter to the editor. They need to be able to articulate an argument in a multimodal fashion.

            My basic writing students are passionately committed to wanting to improve their city. Most believe the answer lies in targeting the youth – the youth who are discarding their education and pursuing a lifestyle fueled by drugs and money. Reaching today’s youth will not be achieved through letters to the editor. To reach the broader demographic needed to make change, our students need to go through the channels of social media and Youtube.

            After spring break, my English 090 students are going to create their first digital stories, a collection of personal testimonies regarding violence in Saginaw. They will be personal and driven by narrative elements, as this will anchor the unfamiliar video components in mode of storytelling they are comfortable with. Honestly, having done my first testimonial video on the topic of urban violence, I can say it is a more raw and powerful way to tell a story. Writing allows for a bit of distance, in fact distance is necessary to achieve perspective and reflection. However, the sound of your own voice reading the story and the images of real places and people removes the distance. The story becomes more immediate, the pathos stronger. Multimodal storytelling has more affective bandwidth – it’s able to convey more, faster.

While I’ve done a lot of video editing and remixes and mashups, this is my first personal digital story. Somehow that makes it seem less polished and more earnest. It makes me uncomfortable, and I take this to be a good sign:

Connectivist vs. Participant, Dewey vs. Freire

I remember when I first heard about Gregory Ulmer coming up with his own terminology to reflect the evolution from literacy to a new symbolic, visual practice needed to thrive in digital environments, Electracy. Reading about digital pedagogy lately, it no longer seems radical to invent one's own term. It seems a new term crosses my Twitter feed on a weekly basis -- participant pedagogy, peeragogy, hybrid pedagogy, connectivism -- each indicating some new practice or means of interaction in a networked, online environment. Perhaps, I should be looking to coin my own term in my dissertation instead of trying to connect a very non-technical practice that is most often linked to Brazilian peasants to new media ecologies.


Today though (and this could be may lack of sleep and excess of coffee talking) an interesting distinction emerged that could connect to the differences between critical pedagogy forefathers, John Dewey and Paulo Freire. In one vein, you have connectivism, which discusses knowledge building as an associative activity, tied to experiential and active learning. In the other vein, you have the emerging peer-based learning, tied to participant driven MOOCs. One is a radical new framework for education and the other is a more pragmatic approach to using the online environment to enhance learning and increase student engagement. One can more clearly be related to the work of Freire and the other to the work of Dewey. I'm not sure what I'll do with this discovery....

Let the journey begin...

The diagnostics have been written, the goals have been stated -- I'm beginning to see this semester more clearly now. I realize now that I have two distinct groups of students this semester, which hopefully will yield some interesting comparisons. My online students are very diverse in their interests, causes, and life circumstances. They see their personal and civic empowerment coming from an array of places, from Youtube to Jesus. Their causes are national and even global causes, citing desires to change tolerance, gun control, violent media, government corruption. However, they all see mostly the same hinderances: money and time.

My basic writing students are located in a satellite campus of Delta College in an economically depressed area of Saginaw. They are united in same cause -- to make Saginaw a safer community with more positive activities and employment. When asked about what they can do, most state that they can use their voices to demand change. A significant number of students are studying criminal justice. They are a united community.

The question is what role can social media or digital skills play into these students making a change? In the first group, social media seems a necessity. They are students who have no common community in the class -- they must find community elsewhere. The issues they are exploring require national attention and action; hence, they need to connect with people throughout the country.

My basic writing students see civic action in a more direct manner, volunteering at their church, speaking out to others in their community, etc. What role can online tools/sites play? I no longer see social media as a key player in this class, as they have community. What I see being a key issue is creating a public voice and awareness. For this, I believe a website with a collection of digital stories and essays will be key.

What I see emerging is two different approaches to advocacy based on two different rhetorical situations.

The Year of the Sabbatical

Though the placemat at the Chinese restaurant I frequent may declare this is the year of the snake, I declare it to be the year of the sabbatical. It begins with classroom research and then tapers off into seven months of reflection beginning in May. Usually I lay my courses out fully and methodically with the entire 15 weeks planned out to the smallest homework assignment. This semester, I am being true to my Freirean roots and beginning the semester by listening to the needs, interests, and goals of my students. 

The central question will be can students harness/tame the online environment to serves these needs, interests, and goals instead of being driven to distraction. Can they direct information to serve their values? I hope by building a curriculum with the students instead of for the students that I will not only be empowering them but increasing their motivation. In Drive, Daniel Pink highlights three key motivators: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Integral to these motivators is students having an interest and a personal investment in what they will be learning this semester.

After taking in the desires of the class, the challenge will be integrating those desires with the key skills sets and literacies that are integral to becoming critical prosumers in the digital age. Let the intellectual puzzle begin...

Adding voices to the Echo Chamber

As I continuing toying with assignment ideas that reflect a new approach to critical pedagogy, I find myself enamored with a classic rhetorical assignment, arguing a different point of view. It's relevancy to my dissertation, though, depends on the validity of the echo chamber effect. The echo chamber effect is the concept that in the hyper nich-ified and targeted world of Internet news and blogs that people only read information that reinforces their own beliefs. However, recent studies indicate that Internet surfing and social media sites lead to a wider exposure to a variety of viewpoints.

One of the landmark studies focuses on Facebook. Scholars from the University of Michigan discovered that people shared more links from "friends" they have weak ties with than with "friends" they had strong ties with. While they shared with higher frequency links from strong ties, cumulatively more links were shared from weak ties. They define strong ties as the friends whose pictures you comment on, who you message privately, etc. However, they don't establish that weak Facebook ties automatically mean that these individuals hold different values or viewpoints. My weakest ties are professional "friends." I don't comment on pictures of their kids or message them about getting together for dinner, but I am much more interested in the links they post than those of many of my close friends. So until they finish their more nuanced study on the sharing of political stories, I remain skeptical.

In Future Perfect, Steven Johnson cites another study by two University of Chicago business professors, who discovered the echo chamber effect was only a shade more significant for web users than traditional consumers of newspapers and TV news. He quotes David Brooks, who states, "This study suggests that Internet users are a bunch of ideological Jack Kerouacs. They're not burrowing down into comforting nests. They're cruising far and wide, looking for adventure, information, combat and arousal" (103). While Johnson diminishes the significance of the echo chamber effect, he does still stress the importance of diverse viewpoints when it comes to problem-solving. Johnson uses the term diversity broadly: "we are smarter as a society--more innovative and flexible in our thinking--when diverse perspectives collaborate...the emphasis on diversity does not revolve exclusively around the multicultural diversity of race or gender; it's as much about professional, economic, and intellectual diversity as it is about identity politics" (99). So what remains as in the next week and a half of class planning is how exactly I will have students capitalize on "the network" to grow as writers and thinkers. I do like the idea of group projects, but they are usually a hard sell and can limit students from pursuing topics that they are more interested in. Will this semester be the one where I finally master the online group project? Stay tuned...