Volume 10, Number 3: January 15, 2004
Online Oral Reports:
How a UW-Madison Professor Used Technology to Expand Course Community
by Tammy Kempfert,
TTT Editor
Robert Howard believes his rhetoric students--in fact, all college students--ought to experience speaking before an audience. Moreover, in a course he offers called Rhetoric of Religion, he wanted students to think about how they might communicate the sometimes sensitive issues they study to a larger community, one that reached beyond their classroom. So, with the help of campus technology experts, the UW-Madison assistant professor of communication arts had his students present their final oral reports in front of a television camera. Using streaming media technology, these presentations were made available to anyone with Internet access and a Windows Media Player. As well, the students' audiences would not only see and hear the live presentations online, they would also be able to interact with the presenters via Internet chat. For the assignment, Howard required his students to locate participants who would have a stake in their chosen topics and to invite them to the online presentations. Students promoted their streamed presentations in online chat rooms, discussion forums, and listservs associated with their topics. Howard too publicized the streaming presentations through his department and among colleagues, both on- and off-campus. To prepare for the presentations, students wrote 6-8 paged papers and formed panels with two or three classmates who were working on similar topics. Discussions among panelists "allowed students to improve their arguments, because they get responses to their assertions," Howard says. Students remained in their panels for the online discussions. After the streamed presentations of students' papers, audience members had the opportunity to post questions to the panel. To keep the discussions focused and reduce the pressure on students to read all the postings, Howard screened the questions posed to panel members. This was the main challenge technologically--to devise a way to view two browsers streaming competing formats. But Howard says the synchronous audio chat worked fairly well. "It was rushed sort of, but fun," he adds. Howard feels his own goals for the course were obtained. Access to a sizeable audience furthered his students' thinking about religious issues in the United States today and how citizens communicate about them. As a result, students did seem to take fewer risks in their assertions and to make arguments that were less critical than those he had observed in previous semesters. "Students--really, speakers of any kind--who know that they're going to engage a broad audience will feel a level of responsibility to that audience," he says. Yet Howard believes the expanded, real-world activity had legitimate pedagogical value for his students. "It helped students think about balancing our inherent pluralism, which makes public discussions about religion problematic, with a public secularism that is respectful. How do they negotiate this fine line between being considerate and maintaining their individual voices?" he says. His sense was that the students appreciated the experience of presenting their learning to people who actually chose to tune in. Howard also noted his students' ease in front of the camera. In spite of this potentially intimidating setting, which he calls "very big, very tv studio," they readily took on a "televisionesque" demeanor. He says, "They adjusted their speaking style, and they dressed up much more than I've seen. Certainly, their awareness of television media exists on a very native level." All students had the opportunity to opt out of the Internet portion of the course. None did. According to Howard, the
technical goals of the project were achieved as well. UW-Madison's Learning
Support Services, who provided funding and technical support, has since
improved its technology for encoding and streaming live video and audio.
Faculty interested in trying a similar project would find the process
much easier. "In that way alone, this was very much worth it,"
Howard says. |