Writing Across the Curriculum in a Technology Class

Writing Across the Curriculum in a Technology Class

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Technology courses are not typically thought of to be writing-intensive, even though programming is certainly a kind of writing — if not considered to be a traditional genre — and good programming has many elements in common with any type of good writing, such as clarity, organization, and elegance.

Still, it is beneficial to technology students to engage with discipline-specific writing outside of programming within their courses. This can include commenting their code, writing up descriptions and deliverables for larger projects, and writing abstracts summarizing the research of others (or their own).

For those in graduate-level courses or with an interest in pursuing a graduate degree, it would also be useful practice to write literature reviews. Additionally, students can write pieces in the style of academic articles, with introduction, theoretical background, research model and hypothesis, critical analysis, conclusion, and further work.

Here are some specific ideas for using Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) principles in a general technology course, with a focus on using writing as a vehicle for critical thinking:

• You just got hired at a company as a junior-level developer, but for the work that you are doing, you are expected to use a programming language that you think is not well-suited to the task. Write a persuasive email to a senior-level developer telling her what language you think would work better for the task, and support your view with evidence. 

• A fellow Computer Science student at another school is learning a different programming language than you in his introductory programming course. Write a dialogue between the two of you, with one arguing why it doesn’t matter what programming language you learn first, and the other insisting that the first language does make a difference. (This can also be done in pairs rather than with an imaginary student.)

• Your parents have an old CRT monitor that they don’t want to give up because they don’t want to buy a new one. Create an online slideshow (such as a Prezi or Google Drive Presentation) to email to your parents explaining why it is worthwhile to purchase a new LCD monitor.

• Create a short video (appropriate to upload on YouTube) explaining to someone your age that is not tech-savvy the difference between RAM and hard drive in terms of memory/storage. Now create a second short video explaining it to your grandparents. 

These assignments are all designed to give students a particular audience in mind, which is helpful when they attempt the prompt. They also allow students to reflect on their own learning through writing, and to communicate their knowledge in a way they may have to do outside of the classroom. For technology students in particular, balancing traditional forms of writing (as in the first two prompts) with digital writing (the last two prompts) can be valuable to their future work in their field.

GIS: Digital Humanities & Classroom Applications

GIS: Digital Humanities & Classroom Applications

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Google Maps can be used for dropping pins and creating itineraries through directions.

A geographic information system, or GIS for short, utilizes computer imaging to visualize geographical data for researchers to analyze, interpret and understand it. This can be useful for academics and students alike to reveal geospatial relationships, patterns and trends.

GIS is an increasingly important tool being used in Digital Humanities work. At the recent Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting in New York, one of the plenary speakers, Nicholas A. Eckstein of the University of Sydney, spoke about projects used in History to build interactive maps of Florence based on texts. Additionally, Cameron Butt of the University of Waterloo gave a presentation on “Geography, Performance, Technology, and Spectatorship in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” which utilized The Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) to visualize stage and city landscapes, to explore space and place in Renaissance playtexts.

There are also mainstream applications of this technology. PBS uses Interactive Maps as part of their Rise and Fall of Jim Crow project. New York City has a practical map, NYCityMap, for its residents and visitors to look up information geographically. Other historic applications include SepiaTown, which users can contribute vintage images to in order to show old photographs in their original locations on the map.

GIS can be used effectively in scholarship, particularly during talks about topics with a geographic component, as well as part of an undergraduate assignment.

Here are some free tools to get you started: (Click on images to make them bigger!)

Roadtrippers is similar to Google Maps, but, as the name implies, is geared to road trippers! This can be great for educational trips students may take, to plot their itineraries, or can be used for historical or literary plotting, especially for those taken in recent history. Here is a map I made based on an itinerary provided in Jack Kerouac’s diary, taken from July to October 1947, and an inspiration for his seminal work, On the Road:

National Geographic Education also has a simple-to-use MapMaker Interactive tool that allows users to select for Physical, Environmental and Human Systems in order to explore the contemporary planet. This can be equally useful to both science and humanities disciplines. Here is a map generated with this tool that looks at Ocean Surface Currents, Sea Surface Winter Temperatures, Volcanic Eruptions and Major Religions in South America, to show you the breadth of uses available:

Pinterest, which I’ve included in a previous assignment post, can generate pin boards with maps (by selecting “Yes” to the “Add a map?” question when creating a new board). Users can pin their own images or link relevant websites to the map, which uses Foursquare to accurately map pins. I find this option to be very aesthetically pleasing. As an example, here is a board I made that showcases sites and artifacts related to Lewis Carrol’s Alice books that are in England today:

For more advanced users, especially those looking to incorporate interactive JavaScript-based maps into their web projects, there are a number of open-source tools available, that you can also contribute to. Modest Maps is a small and free library in JavaScript (there are also other implementations) made for designers and developers. Kartograph is another simple and lightweight framework, created with designers and data journalists in mind, available in both JavaScript and Python. Maphub, with its entire code on GitHub, is based on historic maps, which used to also keep up a Web application for casual users to work with and annotate historic maps, though this does not appear to be live at this time.

Map Projections, a Kartograph project

For those of us working with historical data, it is useful to keep in mind that there are a lot of maps available in the public domain and through libraries, including The Library of Congress, The New York Public Library, and The British Library just to name a few.

If you will be using a GIS-based assignment in your college classroom, it may also be worthwhile to discuss some of the ways in which mapping can be problematic.

Programming Concepts for the Humanities: OO Programming || Objects

Programming Concepts for the Humanities: OO Programming || Objects

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Although some aspects of object-oriented programming, such as abstraction, are not too hard to grasp for Humanities students (we do love the abstract), I remember my gender theory radar going off (and the idea of not objectifying women…) when I saw this slide in my Java Programming class:

That is, in Java, “everything is an object,” and for some reason a “person” (and a female person!) was the first object that was defined by my instructors, with “cars,” “mobile phones,” and, you know, other objects (even as a feminist may define them) following suit. You see, no one thought to gently break this to a theorist-minded comparatist in the MSc program I was in, but I think if I were to teach fellow humanities grad students how to program I would approach this in a different way. (In fact, a year after my disgruntled sitting in this class, Arielle Schlesinger proposed a feminist programming language that doesn’t “[reify] normative subject object theory.”)

Without the feminist programming language, I would have to apologize for the language once I came to the idea of people being objects, but only after I discussed the desks, chairs, houses, and then the biological amoebas, plants, etc., being objects as well. Actually, probably the semantic shift to a “noun-oriented” programming language may make more sense all around (I am a language instructor after all, and we are talking about languages), with abstract nouns inherently more sensical than abstract objects, but no matter.

Gustave Doré || Canto X

To follow with the Dante’s Inferno theme from some of my previous Programming Concepts for the Humanities series, and in a manner that would even satisfy the medieval time-traveling programers among us who may consider those in Hell to be less human than those alive, I offer the Sinners as objects.

So, a Sinner would have attributes or states (or “adjectives”), things that describe or quantify it. A Sinner, at least the kind in Hell, would have the attribute of “dead,” as well as “disembodied.” She keeps her earthly name, at least according to Dante, as well as the descriptor for her place of origin (Francesca is from Rimini, Farinata is a Tuscan and also a Ghibelline), and from there students should get the idea.

Sinners also have operations or behaviors (or “verbs”), such as “cry,” “wail,” and “receive torment.”

From this basis, and perhaps explaining aspects of object-oriented programming with parts of speech, we can continue to flesh out objects with the literary example for humanities students, and also discuss class, abstraction, and inheritance.

Webcomics as a Digital Writing Assignment

Webcomics as a Digital Writing Assignment

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Comics and graphic novels are an increasingly popular literary medium that current students steeped in visual culture can readily understand. The form can be used creatively as an in-class assignment to imagine dialogues between historical figures, summarize recent learning, or approach writing in a targeted way that incorporates a visual component. Sketching out a comic in class can easily be transformed into a digital writing assignment with the use of art programs, simple web tools or apps that enable millennial Rembrandts and stick figure-artists alike to create comics fit for a classroom blog.

There are a number of intellectual web comics that can serve as an inspiration to your class. Philosophy in particular has been a ripe field for web artist-writers, with Existential Comics and Dead Philosophers in Heaven both using historical philosophers as characters, and making jokes about their texts and personas. The equally funny Hark! A Vagrant often uses literature and historical figures as characters in strips, like this one called “Dude Watchin’ with the Brontës.” The poignant comic of stick figures, xkcd, may sometimes tackle pop culture and love but tends to feature mathematic, scientific and philosophical in-jokes.

Comics like these can be achieved with any drawing program, even the freeware that is loaded in an OS, like MS Paint on Windows, or the free Paintbrush for Mac, which is how the webcomic Hyperbole and a Half is drawn. Photoshop or its freeware counterpart, GIMP, can provide higher-level platforms for freeform webcomic making, like for this Thomas More quote stylized as a comic I made, inspired by the style of Dead Philosophers in Heaven:

For students or instructors that are more interested in dragging and dropping to make more of a webcomic collage, there are a number of tools available.

Bitstrips, which was very popular on Facebook a few months ago, is available to use as an app across mobile device platforms, or on the web. You will need to use a Facebook account. You can customize the stock characters a great deal, choose from a number of scenarios to put your characters in, and modify text. Here is a Thomas More character (maybe not quite in historical garb) I made with Bitstrips:

Make Beliefs Comix is designed with educators in mind, but allows much less customization, and seems to be targeting elementary school kids. It is still a quick way to get ideas across, though with limited art, and does not require signing up. For my example using this tool, I casted Utopia’s Raphael Hythloday as a zen alien (it kind of makes sense) and the character of T. More as a middle-aged mid-level manager (sorry):

Strip Generator is a little more slick. It has clean black and white lines and has a wider cast of characters with a greater ability to modify the panels. You also don’t need to sign up for this. Here is some dialogue between Peter Giles and Raphael Hythloday, who now can almost look like they’re from the Renaissance for real:

Pixton allows greater customization of character movements but seems more limited in terms of character and scenario design if you’re a casual user. They do target schools in particular, but are not a completely free service in any case, and require a sign-up just to play around. I could not get any of their characters close to looking like More for this one.

A lot of the mobile apps use photos as the major element for comic creation, which make me think of the a softer world webcomic. Some of the apps available (none of which are free, although they’re not expensive) include Comic Book!, Strip Designer and PhotoComic (this looks a little less slick than the other two judging by the previews). If you are teaching a philosophy class and provide students with one of these apps it may be additionally entertaining to have students act out scenarios in class (may I suggest historically-inspired paper dress, à la #FashionbyMayhem?), and working on the digital comic as a group.