[Peter] My name is Peter Allan Froehlich. I'm an assistant professor of English at Penn State Hazleton.
This is my first year on the tenure track.
I spent two years at Penn State Shenango as an instructor of English.
And then a long time before that I was a graduate student at University Park
in '91 to '93. [Maggie] My name is Maggie Gordon Froehlich
I'm an assistant professor of English at Penn State Hazleton.
I've been with the University College of Penn State for
three years now. I started, I did two years at Penn State Shenango,
the Shenango Campus, and I've been here at the Hazleton campus for one year.
The course that I was using digital media in most of the semester is
English 15, Rhetoric and Composition, it's a first-year writing course
that just about everyone in the university is required to take.
It's a general education course, so it's a freshman
writing course. The objectives are to familiarize
students with issues of rhetoric, that is being
conscious of writing for an audience, being conscious of writing with a purpose,
writing for an audience, and the composition side of it is
actually doing writing. [Peter] For our class we wanted them to do
something that was historical or culture studies
based. So we said today year in American history, research
what happened in that year. And all the different p rojects came out of
that research so for the first project they simply defined
things that happened in that year. Then they picked an artifact
from that year to analyze what it said about American culture
that this artifact, it could be an iPod, it could be a
board game, it could be a car. What does a product say about
American culture based on how it was marketed or how it was
used by people. They wrote a story set in
their year. They analyzed a film from their year.
And then traditionally what we had them do was to come back to the year in
review assignment, that first assignment were they just said what happened
and we ask them to set the size this time, to take all the
analysis that they did over the course of the semester and pull it all
together to say what was it that made your year distinctive
in American history? How can you connect the personalities
from your year, the major events, the film that you analyzed
and the cultural artifact. How do they speak to each other?
And so for this semester would turned that
assignment into the final film project.
[Maggie] Our assignment was, we asked them to do a 10 minute video
or 10 minutes or less video
in which they came up with a thesis
that characterized that particular era.
Some thesis and then organize their content to
support that thesis. Each of their years have to be represented.
We wanted to insist that each of them had to be on camera for
at least some period of time. That was part of the
requirements and so we worked out at the end of the semester to have
them work in groups and teams, and that actually work much better for them
assignment, to get them to synthesize the information
from the from all of their years.
So we tried to put them in groups, so that instead of having a student working on
1965, we had a student working on the 1960s.
[Peter] Even if the group got together and said the
1960s was all about the Vietnam War, they couldn't create a video about
the Vietnam War. They had to show us how the Vietnam war
was somehow connected to psychedelic music,
to the hippie fashions, to
Richard Nixon speech, and that sort of thing in order to
really get full credit for the assignment. And we asked them to find
period video they could find some
something that was not under copyright or Creative Commons
licensed. We asked him to find period
or appropriate music. So for instance they might not be
able to use the Beatles song that they wanted, but they might be able to
find some kind of psychedelic inspired contemporary
song that was Creative Commons licensed. So it would give them the feel of
1969 without breaking any laws. [Maggie] In the group
that did the 1960s, they decided revolution was going to be
their theme, and so everything they did, everything that each of the students
had gathered all tied into that
theme of revolution. And I think that the
variety of content was a real strength.
I think the strongest videos were ones that where students were able
to tie in a variety of content using
the tools that we were giving them.
There was a lot of anxiety about it.
I think talking about it a lot in class, showing them
example videos of giving them a sense of
what is acceptable, what they could do, giving them lots
of ideas for what other people in other freshmen classes
were doing or what other people at Penn State were doing. Seeing that
other people like themselves were doing these things and could do these things
I think they very quickly became very excited.
[Peter] I think our students were anxious about the idea of a video project, because they thought
the skills that were wired would be video editing skills or
something to do with camera work. That actually turned out to be the easy part.
And the skills that were required
or ones that would be familiar to any teacher of a freshman composition
class. They had to devise a thesis, they had
to research their topic, they had to
creatively incorporate
various elements and organize their thoughts,
they had to work together as a group,
and so time management was a huge part of that.
Overall, I think
those traditional elements of
compositional strategy in terms of finding a topic,
fleshing out the topic, organizing your thoughts,
polishing your thoughts, editing the final product, those things
are part and parcel of all the papers that our students write.
And the process of putting the video together followed that
same pattern. And so in the end, I think our students found that
the actual work with computers
was new and different, but that it followed
the expectations that they had for how work in an English class should proceed.
On the days when we actually had our students screen
their videos for each other, there was a real excitement and a real sense of pride
in what they had accomplished. And the only specific complaint
I heard from our students was a wished we had done a short
video project at the beginning of the semester so they knew what
he could do, so that they could make their final project
that much more complete and
really show off what the project was capable
of doing.
But we tried to do was to get them to think about their
writing as something that was going to be published before
a general audience on the World Wide Web. So instead of saying
right is if you are writing for a magazine, now we said right a blog
and hit publish and it's on the web, and anyone can read it.
So think about who you're writing for, think about who would have an interest in your writing.
And so every assignment had to build in sense
of purpose and exigency built into it.
[Maggie]Having them make a video was actually a much better project than
that's straightforward conventional essay had been.
Because it asks them to conceive of
how do I bring this material together? How am Igoing to, what
content my going to bring together? Am I going to use still images?
Am I going to use video? Am I going to try to find
original music, original content to the period.
Am I going to create content for this? Are we going to use voice over for this?
And so, even the act of creating the film,
creating the video itself, is asking them to think about
how do we synthesize information? Since they want to create this content themselves,
I think they see it as far more valuable to
their real-world experience. And so I think in that sense
it very much supports the
a central idea of English 15, which is getting students thinking about
rhetoric and composition. It is extremely useful for them
not only in their subsequent college career, because they're coming in the door
as freshmen, as as first semester second semester freshman, taking these
taking this course and being exposed to creating a
podcast, creating a video, creating a website, writing a blog
doing these things in their freshman year, so that when they're
in their major, when they are specializing
in college and being asked to do these things, it's not the first time they've been
asked to do it. So they have more confidence to go out and try new things
in their field. I think that's really important, and I think that what we're
seeing in the workplace, I think that these are skills that
students are going to be asked to have in the workplace. So I think
that even if they never make another video, enough they never make
another podcast at Penn State, they've had this experience so that
when they go off in the workplace and someone says can you do this?
They say yeah, yeah I can. [Peter] Audio podcasts and video
messages are how people were going to communicate with their constituents
it's how businesses are going to reach out to each other. We're not going to be traveling
for business. We're going to be doing video conferencing, and if this is the world that
our students are going to step into, then as a university
I think we have a responsibility to introduce them to the
that world, get them used to working with these technologies.
And if freshman English can be a part of that, then I want to be a part of
making that happen.