Internet Linguistics and Informality

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When I first started teaching, I admit that I was very dismayed to receive very informal emails from students. To give you a sense, the most formal ones began with “Hey Professor,” and then would actually follow a letter format. I know that colleagues will spend time during their first class session to teach students how to properly write an email to their professor, thinking that this would later help their students in their professional careers.

My thoughts on this began to change when I read an interview with a young CEO in her 20s, who advised others (particularly young women) to send quick one-sentence emails. She made the case that this is what people (particularly men) who have powerful and time-sensitive positions are doing, who respond right away from their smartphones and do not have time for formality.

I believe, of course, that there is a context for everything, and sometimes it is important to be more formal, even today, but emails and text messages do not need to follow the same time-honored formulas that Catherine of Siena did as she echoed the Pope, invoked God and the Virgin, and put herself in an extremely subordinate position to her addressee. We know who has sent an email because their email provider generally supplies their name, and we know who we are. When our students do submit an inquiry email to apply for a job, it is probably best to be formal, but if once they are hired they notice no one else uses “Dear” and “Kind regards” they should probably follow suit, which makes the case that it is perhaps more worthwhile to teach critical thinking skills rather than formulaic email standards.

As I previously touched on in my post on Digital Writing, I believe that it is important for educators to give some leeway to the changing language that younger students are working with and helping to shape. Even newspapers are accommodating – an article by Elliot Ross published on The Guardian closes with a paragraph that begins with “Btw” instead of the slightly more formal “by the way.”

Dante’s Tomb, Ravenna || Lisa Tagliaferri, 2013

Shifting language is nothing new, one only needs to look to the move from Latin to the vernacular in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance to see its very real dramatics. Dante himself championed this change in his Latin piece De vulgari eloquentia, which implored using the Italian language as a standard. In a similar spirit, Tia Baheri recently defended Internet linguistics in her essay that centers on the phrase (or rather, sentence) “I can’t even.” She defends the evolution of language and speaks to the need of users on the Internet to convey emotion through symbols alone. Rebecca Cohen also considers the need to convey emotion in rapid text-based communication, on Slate she discusses the withholding of the question mark within tweets, pointing out that it is often used deliberately to convey rhetorical questions.

This is not to say that educators need to accept language usage they are uncomfortable with, but rather to work toward an open-mindedness about students’ writing and the contexts in which they write. Modeling is still a great way to show students what they are expected to do, but it may be even better to encourage them to write in different registers, as that would further develop their writing abilities and push them to employ the analysis necessary to deliver certain kinds of writing in appropriate contexts.

Using Word Clouds to Foster Online Discussion

There are simple online tools available to generate world clouds (or tag clouds), which are visual representations of text data that can emphasize frequently-used words by giving them a larger font size or a different font color. They allow viewers to quickly see the most prominent words in a text set to see their relative ranking.

Word clouds are a fun way to get students to engage more with online discussion by generating word clouds once a board is closed in order to see what terms were most significant to the class. From this, students can consider what was most important to the group about a given discussion. Word clouds can also set the tone for subsequent online (or in-person) conversations. Additionally, these can provide valuable feedback to the instructor as an assessment as to whether the course is producing the desired outcomes, and can serve as a talking point that instructors can bring up with their students.

Above is a Wordle-generated word cloud that was derived from an online discussion board discussing the text of Ana Lydia Vega’s short piece “El día de los hechos” (“The Day It All Happened”) and its relation to short documentary films about groups being denied citizenship in the Dominican Republic. As shown in the word cloud, there is a lot of emphasis on questions of nationality and citizenship, including familial descent versus birthright.

With word clouds, students can often configure the text in different ways and assign different colors to the visualization, therefore creating additional meaning to the final product. Each week a different student can generate the word cloud, and post it to the previous online discussion, or create a new thread for some analysis by classmates.

Some free word cloud generators to get you started:

Wordle — This is what I used to generate the example above. You can input text right into a text box or have the toy scan a URL. It is a Java Applet so would require a screenshot to make a JPG or PNG image.

Jason Davies’s Word Cloud Generator — This is also a simple toy that will let you type or paste text or alternatively provide a URL. There are different options for weighting word prominence, as well as how to display the cloud. You can generate a PNG with this that will open in a new window or tab.

Tagxedo — This is a URL and search-based tool, so you can plug in a URL or a news item, for example. If you use Twitter often in your classroom, you can visualize a Twitter handle’s entire output, or a blog’s RSS feed. It also has more options for fun shapes, as in my visualization of this blog as a star, below.

WordSift — Developed by Stanford University, this tool accepts typed or pasted text. Upon generating the simple word cloud, it provides a thesaurus mapping of the prominent word and points to the use of that word within the text. It also allows the user to click on other words in the cloud to in turn generate their respective map and usage. This was created with English language learners in mind and may be useful to classrooms with students working with English as a foreign language.

Tagul — This site requires a free sign-up and has more options for designing word clouds (it is also linked up to Zazzle to custom print your word cloud on various items). The ability to customize your shape is a nice feature, which you can achieve by uploading an image of the shape you want. Below is an example I made of a word cloud using Samuel Butler’s translation of Book XXIV of Homer’s The Odyssey shaped as a basket (don’t worry, there is no significance here!).

It is worth keeping in mind that a word cloud is a very simple tool for data visualization, and has its critics. You may want to discuss its limitations with your students (maybe they should avoid using them in term papers), but I think it is a fine creative tool for livening up online discussion and fostering community.

MMORPGs in School

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Video gaming within the classroom is often considered to be an alternative approach to learning, as in the Quest 2 Learn school curriculum mentioned in my last post. However, computer gaming can be fully integrated into traditional learning environments as well, and MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) such as World of Warcraft are finding their way into K-12 classrooms.

WoWinSchool is a Wiki that details how to incorporate MMPORGs into a classroom, outlining their own foundational story as initially an after-school program that morphed into a fully-developed Language Arts course. They provide a creative commons licensed sample curriculum by Lucas Gillipsie and Craig Lawson, that targets the Middle School age group, available here. Additionally, there are other project files including math worksheets that incorporate problem solving that a player may need to do during WoW gameplay.

Additionally, teachers have been able to integrate video games into the new (often-criticized) Common Core State Standards. Peggy Sheehy, a teacher at Suffern Middle School, has been able to successfully align a World of Warcraft curriculum to a Common Core unit on myths and heroes. She likens the richness of WoW to the Iliad and the Odyssey due to its richness.

As Maxwell Neely-Cohen argues in his essay “Appetite for Risk: At the Intersection of Video Games and Literature,” there is substantial intersection between the medium of the video game and literature, and also a lot of opportunity for collaboration between writers and game developers. Because video games are largely based on storytelling and narrative, they can serve as a very viable avenue to get students to understand literary devices and literary references (many games do reference literature as well as the other arts) in a hands-on and interactive manner.

Algorithms for Learning

Online-based subscription services such as Netflix and Pandora are incredibly popular, in part due to their predictive algorithms that can match users up with new favorite movies, TV shows, and songs. Similarly, social media companies and retail stores collect and analyze information about their users in order to direct appropriate advertisements to them, and even to know what they may want before they are even aware (which may be where this stuff gets a little unsettling).

Though television, radio, and retail have all changed significantly due to the digital tools now available to us, education has largely remained stagnant, using technology more as a static supplement than a game-changer.

Lisa Tagliaferri, 2013

There is, however, an increasing call to action to use technology more aggressively within the education sector.

Freakonomics Radio did a podcast in 2010 comparing a bad radio station to the public-school system, because a traditional radio station (unlike Pandora) is trying to throw a pitch down the middle to appeal to the whole spectrum of listeners, similar to what an instructor may have to do in a classroom. They profiled School of One, which creates customized learning for individual students that is reactive on a day-to-day basis and module-based.

The education and creativity expert Ken Robinson has also been discussing education reform for years, stating that the education system needs to break out of its Industrial Revolution structure, as in this 2010 video. Cathy N. Davidson has also discussed how education has not been as transformed by technology and recent scientific findings as it could be, and suggests new directions to take in her 2011 book Now You See It.

More recently, Daniel Jarratt has worked on an algorithm to transform college recommendation, which is available via PossibilityU. The Chronicle of Higher Education calls it a “Netflix-like algorithm,” that uses 80 variables to suggest colleges similar to ones that a student is already interested in.

What if program-based algorithms could also be used in higher education to assist with choosing a major or take the discomfort out of semester-to-semester scheduling? Programs could discover what interests a student and how she performs in certain disciplines within the first two years of coursework, then predict and suggest a suitable major. A database could hold all of the required core courses of an institution, and match a student up to an ideal schedule while keeping him on track to complete his degree in four years.

On a daily basis, algorithms could react to students’ performance, as with School of One, to help students with the autodidactic learning that is often required at the college level. The program may be able to take into account how students may spend their time in general terms — that is, perhaps a gaming curriculum as followed at the Middle School level at Quest to Learn could also work for an individual undergraduate student with a penchant for gaming.

Scavenger Hunt Assignment: Literary Devices in Texts

Another use of digital Scavenger Hunt that can be reported online via a Discussion Board or Blog in a course can be the definition of terms relevant to the discipline and using examples of the terms in texts (online or otherwise) you are reading as a class.

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In an African-American Literature course, for instance, the instructor can ask students to define and then find examples of imagery in a novel that employs a lot of imagery, or metaphor in a short story that uses metaphors as the most common point of comparison. Additionally, to add a creative element, students can write their own sentence utilizing imagery or metaphor after they provide an example from the author.

In a text that is particularly rich in various literary devices, or as part of review for the entire course, students can again do a game of telephone, where the first student may discuss simile and provide an example, then “tag” the next student to discuss allegory, and the second student will define allegory then provide an example. This is an example of students playing a game of telephone using quotes from a text.

For our example, we can use Nella Larsen’s Passing, which is available for free to students online.

A student who will discuss metaphor, whether she is already familiar with the term from the class or not, will develop a working definition for herself and her classmates, present a metaphor from Larson’s text, and then write her own metaphor:

“Metaphor” is defined as “a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable” (dictionary.com), meaning that metaphors are saying that something is something else without using “like” or “as,” and is pretty much a comparison. 

Nella Larsen uses a metaphor on page 10 of Passing: “The automobiles parked at the kerbs were a dancing blaze, and the glass of the shop-windows threw out a blinding radiance.” The metaphor part is where she says that “automobiles…were a dancing blaze,” because this is not literally true, but it gives the reader an image of the cars being very hot and shining in the sun. The reader can see this because of the context around this sentence, below:

My example of a metaphor is “The trees are dancers swaying in the wind.”

This student example actually cites a definition, which is not required, but shows that students can also hunt for definitions they are not familiar with online, therefore teaching themselves and their classmates. More importantly, she defines the word using her own language. Next, the “scavenger hunt” component is finding a use of metaphor in the text at hand. She explains the quote she uses, and because this is an online text, she also points to the page using an online share tool, provided by archive.org. Finally, she comes up with her own metaphor.

In addition to having students interact by tagging each other with different literary devices (or other relevant terms to the class), students can also explicate each other’s creative example. So the student after the example above can explain that her sentence, “The trees are dancers swaying in the wind,” is comparing trees to dancers because with the wind it looks like their movements are graceful and intentional, like a dance.

Programming Concepts for the Humanities: Recipes

It is helpful to think about programming as a set of very specific instructions, like the ones that come on the back of a shampoo bottle, except even more fleshed out and more specific — if you tell a computer to “lather, rinse, repeat” then it will be stuck in an infinite loop. You would have to really break it down and instruct the computer to wet its head with some water first, then pick up the shampoo bottle, open the lid of the bottle’s cap, squeeze some shampoo out, etc.

Recipes are a great textual form for thinking about programming in a real-world context, since they supply specific instructions. In foreign language classes, recipes are an engaging way to get students interested in language-learning, especially if they get to eat the spoils that come with recipe preparation! Recipes can also engage the budding computer programmer who may be used to Humanities coursework.

Google, known for infusing fun into its brand, has supplied this Google Talk Support page, How to make AWESOME guacamole!, which instructs how to make guacamole with some JavaScript instead of pure natural language:

Don’t be fooled, guacamole is both healthful and delicious, AND - for a limited time - we’re sharing our AWESOME implementation with YOU!

Ingredients

Let person_count be the number of people snacking on your dip. Then…

• avocado_count = Math.max(person_count, 4)
• tomato_count = Math.ceil(avocado_count / 3)
• onion_count = Math.floor(tomato_count / 2)
• jalapeno_count = Math.ceil(onion_count / 2)
• cilantro_leaf_count = avocado_count * 10
• salt_grain_count = avocado_count * 100
• lime_count = Math.ceil(avocado_count / 4)

Steps

1. Instantiate a large bowl
2. Peel avocados, remove pits, and add to the bowl
3. Dice tomatoes, onions, and jalapenos and add to the bowl
4. Chop cilantro leaves and add to the bowl
5. Add salt grains to the bowl
6. Slice / squeeze limes and add emptied juice to the bowl
7. Instantiate two large spoons
8. Gripping one spoon in each hand, mash ingredients in the bowl together until a smooth consistency is obtained (note: mashing action should reflect the sound of a galloping horse)
9. Serve with your favorite bag of tortilla chips
10. Enjoy :)

Interestingly, the instructables on How to write useful programs in Java also uses recipes as a metaphor. The Guacamole, for example, would be written down step-by-step (methods) and then that would be its own class, which can be called up by, say, the Burrito class. That way, the programmer would only need to write the instructions (recipe) for the Burrito, without having to write the instructions for the Guacamole again.