At the University of Minnesota, we have very distinct campuses — even within the Twin Cities itself. I’ve been fortunate enough to teach at both the Minneapolis and the Saint Paul campuses. I say this because there are differences between them. When I teach on the Minneapolis campus, I’m surrounded by people who are experiencing college in much the same way I did — immersion in letters and sciences with jobs and/or careers in more urban settings.

At the Saint Paul campus, much to my delight, I find a different set of students. These are often students who come from the more rural areas of Minnesota, who have family farms or who are more non-traditional. In the courses I teach on the Saint Paul campus, I often learn about things I’ve never known.

This semester I’m teaching a scientific and technical presentations course. In my classes, I give a lot of leeway for students to pursue their own interests in what they present, write about, and share. I think it adds to a more dynamic and interesting course. What it also does is teach me more about the students, more about different topics, and more about diversity. And as an educator, I find the process of learning while also teaching to be stimulating.

In the first part of the semester I’ve learned about how happiness has been shown to be a medical miracle, how Minnesota has a blossoming hazelnut industry, how to develop a large-scale dent corn production farm, and how to tie-dye according to the type of fiber and dye.

Then there are those presentations that always stick with you. My first year here, while teaching on the Saint Paul campus, I had a group of students make a wonderful video on how to milk a cow. One semester, I had an entire class engage in volunteer projects that they chronicled in blogs, videos, and photographs — that left us all feeling very inspired and excited about the work being done in the class. And just this week, I learned that origami is much more than beautifully folded cranes and other animals, but is the same process used in such things as making stents for medical procedures.

And then there are the ones that stick in your head just because they seem to come out of nowhere. This week one of the groups in our class was doing a demonstration on how to create a squirrel trap. Why, you may ask, would they be interested in this? Not only did they tell us why squirrel meat is more efficient than cow meat (it uses less joules per pound), but that it can be quite delicious (they gave a brochure to expound on the benefits of squirrel meat). But the part that made it most memorable was the “dispatching” of the squirrel. It was quite vivid — not in images or graphs, but in the language and body language used. We were told how to use different tools to take care of the job — and some of them were more personal than others (think hedge clippers here). And while this may seem a bit graphic, it was done in such a professional manner that it worked seamlessly and impressively.

This is why I like my job. Not because I’m regaled with graphic ways to dispatch of rodents, but because the students think outside the box to bring in information that they find interesting and offer it to the rest of the class in innovative ways (that don’t necessarily have to include technology innovations). I have yet to meet a student who wasn’t smart, funny, and engaged. Give them enough space, and they will give back tenfold.

As I write this, I’m into hour 15 of being without my beloved 17″ Macbook Pro. Her logic board failed yesterday, and I had to take her to the Genius Bar where I was told that while I had taken very good care of her over the last four years (and seriously, the Genius did say this several times), she would now be taken away from me for 5-7 days.

Gulp.

Let me set this up: I’m in the middle of writing my dissertation. I’m teaching one f2f course and 3 online courses. I’m doing a video research assistantship. I need Photoshop for my photography – the thing I do to relieve my stress from the previously mentioned work.

Five to seven days seems like an eternity.

But, those of you who know me, may say, “Dawn, you have an iPad and a Transformer Prime, both with keyboards. Won’t those suffice for 5-7 days?”

That’s the million dollar question. What I am noticing is that I turn to the Android tablet more because the websites I need to access are rendered better on the Chrome browser (as well as the native browser, and my newly added OverSkreen (which is a cool browser that gives that “window” effect by allowing it to overlay an app that is already in play).

What I’m also noticing is that I can’t be bothered with most social media because mobile apps just don’t give me the experience that my desktop apps do (and because of the lack of multitasking abilities (aside from the aforementioned OverSkreen) on the tablets, it is unwieldy to move back and forth quickly with copy and paste, deleting, unsubscribing, etc. These functions have come a long way from where they began, but holy cow these things are still very immature.

It’s forcing me to slow down, which drives me a bit crazy. I want to move quickly between browser tabs, classes, writing, data, etc. And don’t even get me started on data. My data is all in .jpg format (visual rhetoric IS fun, really!) and to look at it while writing about it is impossible, unless I print it all out (which would be 240 pages of printing (in color)).

Whine. Whine. Whine. First world problems. Yada-yada-yada.

I know this isn’t a big deal in the overall scheme of things, and I will manage over the next week. But what it has made me realize is how much I take for granted in the availability of my laptop. I love my tablets, and I find them to be excellent for short-term work management. But I haven’t found that I’m able to do everything I need to do, yet, with these magical little electronics — as much as I’d like to.

This is not meant to be a whining post. It’s more of a sharing of “what I’ve learned while in grad school” post, I hope.

Justification out of the way. Check.

I’ve always been a loner. Well, I don’t know if everyone would have seen that of me, but that’s how I’ve always felt. Sure, in high school I was in all of the right organizations and hung out with some really awesome people. But at the end of the day, I was happiest curled up with a book, losing myself in some other world (typically horror and/or fantasy). Maybe that came from moving around a lot as a child. I came to depend on my family for my social connections. I mean, they were always there; they typically got me (except for that time in my late teens when I shaved designs in my hair and my Dad definitely DID NOT GET ME). But overall, I had pretty cool parents and siblings I liked (despite the fighting).

That was a long time ago.

Insert domestic violence, geographic isolation, and aging through my teens, twenties, thirties, and forties here. These things affected my feelings of isolation even from the foundational support of my family. While somewhat pertinent to my state of mind, not at all interesting in this story. Check.

So I’m a loner. Add grad school in. Add in that I’m 1800 miles from the support foundation that I’ve relied on most of my life. Add in the lack of funds to travel home (unlike most of my fellow students who seem to be able to do this easily, or at least often). Add in the confusion about what “home” means anymore. Add in that I’m a 45-year-old woman without many relationships outside of family (I am lacking in the expertise to make this happen well). Check.

So my loneliness is not necessarily related to grad school, except that it is. I’m in dissertating mode, and I’ve become more of a hermit than I ever was. I have gone days without talking to a single person. I have gone weeks, especially during holidays and summer break, without seeing another person. And I don’t have my nieces and nephews (or even my parents and siblings) to call me up and ask me to come out for the day.

Add in the holidays. Since starting my PhD program, I hate the period from Thanksgiving (traditionally my family’s big holiday, but this seems to have waned) through New Year’s Day. There is Thanksgiving, my sister’s birthday, my birthday, my mom’s birthday, Solstmas (Solstice/Christmas/whatever), and New Year’s. Add in that my family is not really one for gift-giving, but we would go out for dinner on one’s birthday, so I don’t typically get anything on these days (and sometimes a phone call or card is even a miracle). (And really, I don’t care about gifts, I care more about knowing that someone took the time to think about me. And before you wonder if I give gifts, I do. When I’m able to go home, I go with gifts for everyone, and remember them all on their birthdays. It’s not because I’m better than them. I’m not. I just like to give gifts.)

And this has officially become a whining post. Argh. Check.

So I will end with one thought: pet-sitting has saved my life. Had it not been for the good fortune of meeting people who trust me with their homes and pets, I would have spent all of my holidays and birthday alone. Instead, I’ve spent this time (and during all of the previous years I’ve been here) with some really lovely furry critters who give me lots of unconditional love. And who make me smile. And who don’t mind that I’m a loner, because I do it with them.

Brought to you by the “This is all about me, belly-button gazing, lint pickers society of the Internet.”

I had moved across the country, nearly 2000 miles away from anyone I knew, and had left behind a life that I knew well, one in which I worked full-time and went to school full-time, to embrace a different type of life. It was expected that I would have a full-time academic career, but leave my full-time work career behind, at least for the foreseeable future. It was, to say the least, culture shock. I didn’t know what to do with myself because I didn’t understand how to work successfully without working constantly and, to put it mildly, in a suffering way. What I mean by that is that I had come to understand success as a grueling, difficult path that required me to suffer in order to progress.

Why Krista mattered so much to me at that time (and I still consider her a cherished mentor) is because she suggested that I read Those Winter Sundays, edited by Kathleen A. Welsch. It is a book about female academics who come from working class families. She said it would help me put things in to perspective, to understand that I wasn’t alone, and that this did not have to be a struggle (a lesson I still haven’t learned, by the way – I am, even this semester, teaching 3 classes while working on my dissertation).

Fast forward to this October (2011). I was at a conference in Arizona, where I’m from, and was able to visit with family. During a family outing, we found ourselves in a lower-economic area of Phoenix and were looking for a place to get something to drink. My brother pulled into a 7-11, but some of us were reluctant to get out of the car because there were many people standing around looking like they might ask for money. My brother said to us, “That could be us.” My brother, an assistant professor of education at a university, reminded us that we weren’t far from those very people, and that at a point in our lives, we were homeless.

I came home, thinking about this. Thinking about being poor and destitute and disenfranchised. We were the working class poor at one point in our lives. There were times when we, as a family, and sometimes individually, did not have a home — or the place we called home was the back room of a business, the makeshift cots in a van, a sleeping bag in the back of a station wagon, or a very small motorhome parked outside of a business. I’m not there now, but I often feel as if I’m only a step away from being there again. And as I pondered this for the next few weeks, a friend suggested that I may wear that as a guard against being privileged, against being amongst those who are privileged.

That brought me back to the book that Krista had suggested a few years prior. In the foreword, Janet Zandy writes

Class differences are measured by the absence of the right clothes, the best early medical and dental care, and, perhaps more importantly, the intangible psychological lift of the privileged, of growing up economically secure with space and time for play instead of constant work, where one explores options rather than settles for what is available. Class status and circumstances shape, perhaps determine, choice.
(viii)

I needed a moment to catch my breath. I had been struggling with trying to understand the Occupy movement. It seemed, to me, to be a lot of privileged people making a stand. I didn’t see my people out there. And why would I? They couldn’t be there. They are at work, struggling to make ends meet. They don’t have the option to go there. They don’t have the choice.

Throughout this occupation of parks and campuses across the country, I’ve tried to connect with this movement. I’ve tried to understand it, to make sense of it. And still, I struggle. Maybe that is because I don’t see the choices available, even to this day. Maybe it’s because I do still feel underprivileged in many ways (although, I know I’m not — I have an education that many people dream about, a roof over my head, and food in my kitchen). What all of this makes me wonder is if I’m the one who is occupied; am I occupied by a past that has become such an integral part of me that I only see a life of few choices? Or has it always been that those who need change the most are the least able to make it happen?

I teach thinking through the exercise of writing and reading. Ok, so officially I teach writing. But when a student walks into my class , I can guarantee that there is far more deep critical thinking going on than there is writing and even reading.

Why do I think this?

First, I’m interested in what students think about issues – and this means any issues. I’ve learned about the best places to buy vinyl (and why they are the best places) in Saint Paul. I’ve discovered that volunteerism means different things to different students and they can give strong arguments for their ideas. And just this week, I had discussions about why Ironman is better than Batman, why the 99% of the US is the 1% of the world, and why Ritalin is not a performance enhancing drug – all instigated by FYW students.

Second, I grew up in a blue collar household where skepticism was encouraged. We we encouraged to think differently than our peers, to think outside the box, and to question everything. While this has led to difficulty in fitting in with peers at times, it has also given my siblings and me the strength to not only believe in what we thought, but to be able to argue it effectively because we would know both sides of an argument and know them in depth. I grew up watching more news programs than anything else, and it showed when I wrote papers or engaged in formalized debate on the various debate teams I was on. What all of this means is that I encourage the same in students I work with. If we watch a documentary, we spend far more time on what we didn’t see than what we did because it’s as important to the story as what was included.

Third, while I am skeptical, I also give the benefit of the doubt when it comes to students exploring their ideas. I want the classroom to be a safe place to explore all kinds of ideas, not just the comfortable ones. While I may not agree with them, I work hard to assist them in thinking through their ideas and their arguments. I throw opposition at them while giving them ideas on how to bolster their own arguments.

All of this sounds so simple and matter of fact when I read it, but I think that anyone who teaches knows that this is often much more difficult than it would appear. And if I wasn’t skeptical when reading back through this, I would be disappointed in myself. The skepticism forces me to think more critically and challenge myself more stringently in each class period. I hope that never ends.

While the Today Show clip reminded us of a time when many people didn’t know what the Internet was or how it worked, the Science Friday showed us that some of the same issues that concerned issues then still concern issues today.

Some of the topics we found pertinent:

information
-ignore (usually advertisements)
-disinformation/misinformation
-trust
-amount of information
-size of information (files/streaming, etc.)
prime sources
-copyright
–direct contact between creator and consumer
commerce
media of the people (democratization)
-public access
–accessibility speed (modem)
synchronous/asynchronous communication
MUDs/MOOs/MMORPG
Machines know everything about you

This was not only a great exercise in listening, but in also assessing what the real issues were and are in understanding the Internet.

Group A

This group is collecting donations of CDs and DVDs to send to a local Minnesota National Guard troop stationed overseas.

OperationTroopDonation website

http://www.wix.com/operationtroopdonati/operationtroopdonation

UMN CD/DVD Drop boxes

Drop box set up now in office of Veteran Services in the Science Teaching and Student Services building.

Drop boxes at Coffman Union and St. Paul Student Center will be available March 28 – April 8th.

Group B

Postcards Anonymous and UMinnesotaNice

This group sends anonymous postcards to people who are doing good works throughout the world. Next week is Japan week (they are translating English to Japanese and mailing postcards to people in Japan) followed by Libya week (again, translated and sent to Libya). If you are interested in helping out, please let me know. Since this is an anonymous group, they have to give you permission to their site.

They have also set up a Twitter account for http://twitter.com/#!/UMinnesotaNice to send thanks yous, accolades, and appreciations to others, capitalizing on the idea of Minnesota Nice (and UMN).

Group C

This group has set up multiple sites to record, encourage, and initiate volunteerism at the U. They have participated in the Polar Plunge for Special Olympics and are participating in Meals on Wheels for National Volunteer Week. In addition, they want to know what others are doing to volunteer. They plan on taking pictures, interviewing volunteers, and posting the information to their sites.

Tumblr site: http://turnup-volumn.tumblr.com/

Facebook site: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=149449328449007

Twitter account: http://twitter.com/#!/TurnUpTheVolUMN

I am near the end of this pet-sitting visit. Another day or so, and you’ll be free of me. I “say” this, that you’ll be free of me, as you rest comfortably on my lap, listening to the BBC and avoiding being upset by your pet brethren who surround us in various states of repose.

You and I formed a new bond on this visit. If I miss saying goodnight to you, you sit outside the bedroom door crying until I participate in the ritual.  Then you are happy and go off to do whatever it is that you do while the dogs and I sleep.

You are a sweet cat. I enjoy my time with you. You’re also sneaky, ducking your head in at the food while I prepare it, trying to get a quick bite. You make me me laugh.

Concepts of pedagogy are reflected in nearly everything I do that requires interaction with others, with technology, and with media in general. Having had a background in educational technology / instructional design/technology, I find that every decision I make in regards to technology comes down to a few basic questions that I ask of that technology:

1. What is its impact on the targeted audience?
2. Does it fulfill a need that is not otherwise fulfilled?
3. Am I engaging technology for the sake of the technology, or for the sake of improving communication?
4. Who does this implementation benefit?
5. What is the purpose of the implementation?

I think some of these questions come from my technology background, some arise from my rhetorical training. In all dilemmas, I am thinking about audience and purpose. While doing so, I’m considering new ways to engage my audience (whether that is in the classroom, at a conference, or with colleagues).

It boils down to the question of “Am I using the right tool for the right situation?”

I think, with all of the tools at our disposal, we often rush in without considering the need or purpose of the tool. Why should we? It takes 2 seconds to make it happen.

But the ramifications are that we may establish a foundation that leaks. If that technology is not kept up, if it is abandoned mid-building, what does that say to the authority of the developer, the construction of a cohesive identity, and the ability of us, as rhetors and instructors, to anticipate the needs of our audiences?

I love technology. I often rush into it with abandon when applying it to my own desires. This often helps me define how it will be used in a larger setting. When it comes to implementing it on a grander scale, especially in the classroom or for colleagues, I’m much more restrained and thoughtful, using the knowledge I’ve gained from personal use and interactions, to determine its purpose within the greater network.

Finally, I adhere to the adage that “just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.”