SECRETS AND LIES"Secrets and Lies is about roots and identity, the ever-changing Director of photography we all have of ourselves and each other, and our compulsive need to reaffirm constantly who and what we are, and where we come from. It is also a tale of love and caring and deep longings and of the awesome relentlessness of the passage of time."
--from the 49th Cannes Film Festival Home Page
--Reading a Critical Review of Secrets and Lies
--Constructing an Essay in StorySpace
--Critical Response to Secrets and Lies (handout)
--StorySpace Documents (constructed by students)
A. For today's class, students will have seen the film Secrets and Lies and will have been asked to brainstorm some general reactions to the movie. Today students will be asked to read a brief review of the film and write a response using StorySpace. Because only 10 copies of the program should be in use at one time, and because peer collaboration is such an essential component of this course, students are to work in pairs. They will have one hour to construct their responses. This will be an evaluative assignment; that is, it will be graded.
B. In the last half-hour, students will share their responses with one another. Each pair of students will move to another computer and navigate through a student-constructed Storyspace document. Students should be encouraged to consider the following questions: Do they agree with the other students' responses? Is reading in StorySpace different from writing in StorySpace? Did other students make use of associative links, multilinearity, or diverse navigational possibilities? How?
Earlier in the semester I received an email from Krissi Jimroglou, one of my classmates here at Georgetown. I'd been trying to start a conversation about technology and pedagogy on our listserv. Here's what Krissi sent me: "I'm really wondering the same things about how associational thinking transforms the 'essay.' I was an English major undergrad, and I think the thesis focused essay is now part of my genetic makeup. I like 'good' aruments. I think we should NOT give up linearity, but see what kinds of possibilities non-linear thinking opens to us (BOTH/AND). What do you think?"
Although my response to Krissi is about three months late, I agree with her statement 110%. This final lesson, in which students are asked to view a film, read some reviews and write a critical response, is a common exercise in critical thinking and writing (that is, it "preserves expectations in place"). My goal is for students to present an argument, to react to moments from the film and critical statements made by a reviewer. But by asking students to construct their responses in StorySpace, I am altering both the form of the writing assignment and the thought processes students must go through in order to compose their texts (that is, my assignment takes "advanatge of new learning opportunities").
Electronic technologies are transforming the way we read, think, write and learn. A program like StorySpace, when used in a larger educational context, has the capacity to transform the way teachers and students think about the conventional thesis-type essay. Students are used to "vertical" writing. They are taught to work from top to bottom, constructing ideas in a kind of hierarchy; you start with a big point and support that idea with lots of baby points. This final lesson attempts to move student writing from the "vertical" to the "horizontal." Like Krissi, I am interested in how associative thinking will "transform the 'essay'". Will multilinearity change the way students construct arguments? Will recursiveness help students look at textual passages more carefully? And, perhaps most importantly, will "horizontal" writing help students explore more of the writing process?
Finally, I believe this lesson will allow students more creativity and "play" in their writing. As a writing tutor at Georgetown University, I have seen so many students create rigid outlines for their essays, outlines that never allow them to explore contradicting points or new ideas that arise through the writing process. In education, technology gets a "bad rap" for being playful and game-oriented. But there are many elements of technological "play" that can actually empower student voices in education. We simply need to be willing to take that risk, to explore new technological mediums with our students and see what happens.