I invite you today to examine with me some stories that emerge as students use digital platforms as spaces to showcase their “intellectual” or academic work. I’m interested in how digital artifacts -- which I define as a system of devices, applications, and networked spaces -- mediate academic literacy. It’s also one of my goals to help students embrace the academic and intellectual selves they are developing in their experience with higher education. This is especially important in the 21st century as the “intellectual luster” of higher education is eroded as it continues to be seen as a “training ground” for jobs or as irrelevant to people’s “real” lives. Many of the students I work with are first generation college students and students with diverse cultural and linguistic background -- populations who may not see themselves as doing “intellectual” work and who may feel uncomfortable or unwelcome entering academic and civic conversations in English.

Today, I’m going to talk a little bit about how I’ve used Twitter, a digital artifact that many of my international students are “experts” in, in an ESL academic writing class. (slide quote) After detailing how I’ve used Twitter in my context, I’ll provide some practical strategies that can be used to shape and mediate student interaction and initiation into academic communities through social media across disciplines.

There has been quite a bit of recent research about students everyday literacy practices, which inevitably involves digital artifacts (Pigg, et al, 2014; Buck, 2012, etc.). But relatively little has focused on Twitter, language learners, and academic writing, despite evidence that the microblogging platform is increasing in use by young people across the globe and increasingly employed by teachers in the classroom. Many of studies, like one in 2012 by Lara Lomicka and Gillian Lord, look at Twitter as a community building tool. Juno (2010) claims that Twitter can increase student engagement and encourage faculty participation with students. While I certainly have noticed this in the various ways I’ve used Twitter in my classrooms, my focus on Twitter is its capacity for live commentary of events and creating conversations in public spaces.

First, I’d like to elaborate on what I mean by public intellectual: I draw my definition from Michael Berube + Ellen Cushman. Essentially, I view this person as someone who:
addresses social issues important to communities in underserved areas
strives to affect policy making -- even the most local level
designs academic/scholarly research results or data for a broader public audience
Essentially: someone who works toward transformative engagement in the world -- designing better social futures.

Before students can choose to act as public intellectuals, they first need to see themselves as academic actors. Providing students opportunities to publicly tell their stories is one part of this process. Carrying the discussion forward, in the way that social media affords, is another.

Fortunately, I am at an institution with an existing on-campus public forum where students can gather to share developing academic ideas about language, culture, and identity. Each semester, students in the ESL academic writing classes -- usually about six -- put on the Conference of Language, Culture, and Identity. The conference was created by Gail Shuck as a forum to give the growing number of multilingual students enrolled in the institution an academic space to share and theorize their literacy experience with the broader campus community. Beginning in spring 2013. As an instructor of these classes, my students present. Because I also teach first year composition, I regular invite all my students to attend. To give all my students -- those presenting and those attending -- the opportunity to discuss academic topics in "public" ways," I began inviting all of them to Tweet at the conference. Since then, my students practice and prepare to Tweet and then invite the audience members -- a mix of students and faculty -- Tweet along with them. I have been compiling the Tweets using storify to share with my colleagues -- and to use as an introduction to the conference assignment each semester.

Here are the links to the past two conferences. You can check them out now or later. I’m going to show you a couple of examples where I see students engaging in academic discussions in productive and novel ways. This, I argue, does mediate academic literacy, crossing boundaries, transforming academic discourse, and providing students an opportunity to test out the identity of public intellectual.

Example One: The Language Metaphor

Example Two: World Englishes

Access/Privacy/Agency: Tanita Saenkhum defines agency as the capacity to act or not to act contingent upon various conditions, including acts of negotiation and making decisions (2012). I’ve been hesitant in requiring my students to Tweet at the conference. What choice do they have? If they don’t have smart phones, if they don’t want to use tool, if they don’t want their followers to be surprised by a sudden shift in discussion from soccer to World Englishes.

Overenthusiastic Teachers: David Russell uses Activity Theory as a lens to “tracing students’ and teachers’ mutual appropriation of new discursive tools within and among genre systems and the activity systems they mediate” (p. 21). It’s important to look at how Twitter as a “tool” and how it is used is mediated by students, teachers, and time. One thing that I’ve noticed over time is that teachers have gotten significantly more adept at the Twitter and may be taking over the conversation.

See my web site at boisestate.digication.com/emilysimnitt for handouts, syllabi, and sample assignments using Twitter.

Is Twitter a space that can go about “(re)constructing systems of human activity” (Russell, 1997, p. 6)? I think it, or emerging digital technologies can do this. In the conversation, you will see librarians and instructors and students alike express how their thinking is changing on both the topics discussed as well as what is possible for multilingual students to contribute to academic discourse. The key, I believe, is identifying the digital artifacts that are relevant to students and working together in recognition that public and classroom systems do and should transform each other

References

Buck, A. (2012). Examining Digital Literacy Practices on Social Network Sites.Research in the Teaching of English, 47(1), 9–38.

Fraser, Nancy. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: a Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy." Social Text. (1990): 56-80. Print.

Junco, R., Heibergert, G., Loken, E. (2010). The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades. Journal of computer-assisted learning.

Lomicka, L., & Lord, G. (2012). A tale of tweets: Analyzing microblogging among language learners. System,40(1), 48–63.

Pigg S, Grabill J.T, Brunk-Chavez B, Moore J.L, Rosinski P, & Curran P.G. (2014). Ubiquitous Writing, Technologies, and the Social Practice of Literacies of Coordination. Writ. Commun. Written Communication, 31(1), 91–117.

Russell, D. R. (1997). Rethinking Genre in School and Society: An Activity Theory Analysis. Written Communication., 14(4), 504.

Saenkhum, Tanita. (2012). Investigating Agency in Multilingual Writers’ Placement Decisions: A Case Study of The Writing Programs at Arizona State University. Unpublished dissertation.

Shuck, G. (2004). Ownership of texts, ownership of language: Two students’ participation in a student-run conference. The Reading Matrix 4(3): 24-39.