Digital Arguments in the Classroom

As an incoming honors freshman to GSU in the fall of 2015, a student will find themselves going home from orientation with instructions to sign up to retrieve a laptop to be used for your first year at GSU. I was one of those students, and found myself mystified as to how this laptop was going to be critical to our work this semester, besides writing papers on it and my frequent visits to Wikipedia to look up things I have no idea about.

I found in one of my honors classes in the course of the year that I will be using the laptop in a different way than usual. In my honors English class I bring my laptop every day, and almost solely use it to do my assignments in class. As the guinea pigs of the initiative, even our professor is unsure on how to integrate a 10 page paper into the curriculum as anything but a 10 page paper. However, this changes the way we think about how we get collected information together and present it as an argument in fewer words, but more pictures and videos.

My most recent assignment was to create a timeline using technology found online, and to use that technology to create my argument. I used pictures and videos explain something, and had very few words on the project itself. These ideas are incredibly important, as while the Internet becomes more and more of a medium in which we express ourselves and our thoughts, the classroom should also strive to adapt and use the medium to spread its arguments and lessons to those that aren’t interested in reading a scholarly article in the library.

In my honors class we keep running into roadblocks in terms of how these projects should be graded. Should we grade holistically, or should there be a strict rubric on how this project should look finished? As we go through this first semester we will have to adapt what a project means and how the meaning and ideas behind the project can be explained, whether in lecture or in words. What makes an argument proper? Do you have to use words that are more than 3 syllables and never use contractions? Or can a more informal way of thinking present an argument better to more people? These questions are ones I’ll keep in mind as I go forward in the class, and hope to get even the smallest glimpse of a theory or answer in the process.

My First Post!

I’m Sydney Mathis Adams, and I am a freshman at GSU. I’m working on my bachelors in Computer Science. I’ll be working in SIF starting this semester, the Fall of 2015. I’m from Dunwoody, not very far from the heart of Atlanta. I’ll be working on some super interesting projects in the SIF program, and I’m excited to meet and work with everyone.