I would like to share experiences and ideas about the opportunities and dangers that come from taking our teaching practice out of the sheltered space of the classroom and into the open internet. More and more instructors are requiring students to participate in public online spaces for their classes –– whether this is a hashtag on Twitter, the online worlds of multiplayer games, or the better-established practice of blogging for class. Discussions of this practice often center around important questions of privacy and ownership of information, and I hope that we will discuss these in this session. But I am especially interested in exploring how different online participatory practices can merge in the space of a class’s online component. In the fall of 2012 I used Twitter extensively in my teaching, and was confronted both with students’ wide range of out-of-class Twitter practices, which often shaped the course’s online component in unpredictable ways, and with an unexpectedly productive episode of trolling from students not in any of my classes. I would like to discuss these and others’ similar experiences, and to ask what these unruly digital spheres can offer us by way of models for knowledge production and pedagogy.
I’ve never run into any trolling from my students’ activities in digital assignments, so I’m definitely intrigued to think through before I have it happen. And I’m particularly interested to hear more about how the trolling started from outside your classroom.