jason u. Kim

I missed the last two Thursdays, and so for this edition of History Thursday I am going to hit you with a double whammy!

I’ve been carefully going through the first decade of Chatelaine, Canada’s preeminent magazine for women (“chatelaine” is a French word meaning wife of a lord of a castle, or a woman who owns a large house). I’ve been going over these early editions of the magazine as part of my third and last chapter of my dissertation, which is about representations of Asians in advertising in the early 20th century.

Chatelaine was first established in 1928 and in the first ten years of publication, the magazine contained several political commentaries, serialized fiction, recipes, child-rearing and fashion advice, and  of course, copious amounts of advertising. It had a few color-printed pages, though many were in monochrome. The formatting of the magazine of that time would be quite strange to contemporary eyes and it changed quite frequently, with the table of contents many times appearing at the end rather than the front, and the articles spanning multiple and disparate pages, very much like a newspaper.

We need to think about magazine ads not as peripheral to the magazine-reading experience, but as central to it.

What became apparent to me was that far from being glossed over by readers, women reading Chatelaine were engaged in consuming the advertisements as much as they were in reading the articles. Perhaps this is too obvious a point (but one that blew my mind nonetheless!), but basically what I’m saying is that we need to think about magazine ads not as peripheral to the magazine-reading experience, but as central to it. Thus, I argue that  there are multiple layers of consumption occurring — the reader consumes the written matter as expected and her eyes carefully go over the glossy, colorful, full-page ads. These ads were specifically designed with her in mind and so they reflect (and speak to) a certain understanding of her likes and dislikes, her dreams and desires. They also represent a reality that does not exist. The ads encourage the reader to consume certain tangible goods, while the reader is also consuming the ad as a meaningful form of content in itself. In short, the ads are simulacra and are laden with certain meanings.

Based on this framework for understanding magazine ads and keeping in mind that Chatelaine was created by and for white women, I further ask what sorts of racial and gender meanings are being made in these ads?

McColl-Frontenac regularly bought full-page ads in Chatelaine in its early years and all of them featured its trademark “Red Indian” mascot. Now you may be wondering why a motor oil and gas company was advertising in a magazine for white women in the first place. This is because white women were increasingly driving in the 1920s and 1930s, and the automotive industry took note of this growing  market for their products.

But because Chatelaine was by and for white Canadian women, I argue that its ads and its articles imagined, informed, and shaped notions of an ambivalent white Canadian womanhood that simultaneously challenged and buttressed white hetero-patriarchy. I will probably write an article on these and other “Indian ads” in Chatelaine at some point because there is just so much more to say, but for now I will start with this short post on a single example.

Notice the “Red Indian’s” midriff is completely exposed, his muscular body erotically on display for his white female onlookers. From 1928 to 1938, I saw no other exposed bodies, in ads or otherwise, within the pages of Chatelaine. When white men were depicted, they were always fully clad in suits, and the contrast is not accidental. What we’re looking at is a familiar stereotype for Native people, that of the Noble Savage. What is imagined to be Indian is both celebrated for its romantic past and marked as uncivilized.

Notice also that the Indian figure is wearing a feathered headdress, a feature specific to the tribes of the Great Plains. Frontenac, on the other hand, made contact and did battle with the Iroquois Confederacy, who inhabited the Great Lakes region and the Northeastern United States, hundreds of miles from the Plains. However, it isn’t only motor oil and the naked body of the homogenized Indian that is being sold for consumption.

What is imagined to be Indian is both celebrated for its romantic past and marked as uncivilized.

Digging deeper, the motor oil company gets its name from Louis de Buade de Frontenac, more popularly known as the Comte de Frontenac and the first governor of New France. He led various battles against the Iroquois and the English in order to secure France’s New World possession. A first contact scene is depicted between Frontenac and what is supposed to be an Iroquois chief, and a sort of analogy is made between the Iroquois “welcoming” Frontenac and Red Indian gas stations welcoming new customers.

Much like the Thanksgiving Day story that many North American schoolchildren are taught, the ad conveniently erases the memory and history of Indian genocide while incorporating the imaginary Indian into the national mythology.

Unfortunately, we still can’t get enough of consuming the imaginary Indian in our ads today. This Cadbury “Old Gold” chocolate ad from 2008 repeats a lot of the problematic aspects of the “Red Indian” ad discussed above, though instead it features what are supposed to be Aztecs/Mayans(?)

Recommended Additional Reading

• Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
• Green, Michael K. “Images of Native Americans in Advertising: Some Moral Issues.” Journal of Business Ethics. Vol. 12, No. 4 (1993), 323-330.
• Huhndorf, Shari M. Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.
• Korinek, Valerie J. Roughing It In The Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine In The Fifties and Sixties. Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 2000.
• Merskin, Debra. “Winnebagos, Cherokees, Apaches, and Dakotas: The Persistence of Stereotyping of American Indians in American Advertising Brands.” The Howard Journal of Communications 12 (2001): 159-169.

This week, we’re looking at a rather well-known anti-Chinese pamphlet by Samuel Gompers, long-time president of the American Federation of Labor, one of the largest and most powerful labor organizations in the United States (Gompers’ AFL was the precursor to today’s AFL-CIO) . In addition to advocating for an 8-hour work day, women’s suffrage, and other progressive measures, the AFL was an ardent supporter of anti-Asian legislation, such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

While many historians who have looked at this pamphlet have tended to focus on the infamous “Meat vs. Rice” argument, i.e. that Chinese workers live so cheaply that white workers could not hope to compete with them, I am more interested in examining how these labor men understood the Chinese Question as a problem of both race and gender (this is, after all, the focus of my dissertation).

Beyond Meat vs. Rice and Chinese “coolieism,” the AFL was also opposed to the Chinese on moral grounds. As the passage below shows, the supposed immorality of the Chinese was tied to their deviant family structure, sexuality, and gender roles. In a section of the pamphlet entitled “Do the Chinese Have Morals?,” the pamphlet clearly demonstrates that family life and gender roles were key areas of scrutiny which informed perceptions of the Chinese and shaped the nature of the threat they posed.

Perhaps the quotation that best summarizes the passage is found at its conclusion:

…It is impossible to tell by a survey of their domestic customs where the family relationship leaves off and prostitution begins.

In short, the threat that the Chinese posed was more than simply a matter of cheap labor, even for the working men of the AFL. The Chinese household was supposedly somewhere in-between a “normal” family with defined parental and gender roles, and a house of ill-fame with children and prostitutes living together.

Recommended Additional Reading

• Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Rev. and expanded ed. Haymarket Series. London: Verso, 2007.
• Saxton, Alexander. The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the anti-Chinese Movement in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
• Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. American Crossroads 7. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

A topic I’ve been following more closely these days is the idea that being in the U.S. and Canada is physically harmful to immigrants and people of color, that simply living here is killing us.

This idea is not borne of some grand conspiracy theory (e.g. “AIDS is a biological weapon designed to wipe out blacks and gays“), but rather due to the ways social, economic, and ecological pressures shape our bodies and lives, and how they encourage or discourage conditions for living well.

Basically, the scholarly and medical evidence suggests that immigrant health outcomes come to more closely resemble that of native-born people over time — in short,  the longer one is in the United States and Canada, the less healthy one becomes (see bibliography below for sources).

The NYT put out an article today about the growing scientific literature on this phenomenon:

A growing body of mortality research on immigrants has shown that the longer they live in this country, the worse their rates of heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. And while their American-born children may have more money, they tend to live shorter lives than the parents.

via The Health Toll of Immigration – NYTimes.com.

The NYT article mentions some of the factors that lead to this: overworking, easy access to fast foods, and increased levels of smoking and drinking (we’ll just ignore the “culture” factor cited in the article for now, because “culture” is used to explain  everything from Asian whiz kids to black criminality/poverty, and is thus a lazy and pretty much useless explanation).

Other factors that the article fails to mention are the effects of coping daily with racism and feelings of alienation, not having the free time to exercise, and lack of access to health insurance.

There are also environmental and ecological factors such as living in areas with little to no access to fresh and affordable produce, and working in occupations that are correlated with serious illness (e.g. construction = asbestos, agricultural labor = pesticide exposure, dry cleaners and nail salons = carcinogenic solvents, etc.).

In short, this place is toxic for many people of color — and it kills us, if not first our souls, then inexorably our bodies — slowly, but surely.

Recommended Additional Reading

• Kasl, Stanislav V. and Lisa Berkman. “Health Consequences of The Experiences of Migration,” Annual Review of Public Health 4: 69-90.
• Laroche, Mireille. “Health Status and Health Services Utilization of Canada’s Immigrant and Non-Immigrant Populations.” Canadian Public Policy 26(2): 51-75.
• Marmot, Michael G. and S. Leonard Syme. “Acculturation and Coronary Heart Disease in Japanese- Americans.” American Journal of Epidemiology 104(3): 225 -247.
• Marmot, Michael G., A.M. Adelstein and L. Bulusu. “Lessons from the Study of Immigrant Mortality.” Lancet 30: 1455-1457.
• McDonald, James Ted and Steven Kennedy. “Insights into the ‘Healthy Immigrant Effect’: Health Status and Health Service Use of Immigrants to Canada.” Social Science and Medicine 59(8): 1613-1627.
• Steingraber, Sandra. Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment. Da Capo Press, 2010.
• Vega, William and Hortensia Amaro. “Latino Outlook: Good Health, Uncertain Prognosis.” Annual Review of Public Health 15: 39-67.

We find the spectacle of girls of from 18 to 25 years of age going to dances in hotels and between dances slipping upstairs to have a drink. The whole thing is the debauching of our women.

And in the spirit of the Age of Gatsby, this week we’re looking at how young women get drunk while dancing. Sort of.

I like this source because its got a lot of what I call “quotables” that are just begging for analysis and also because it succinctly demonstrates how processes of defining the nation are inextricably intertwined with race, gender, patriarchy, and morality.

In the old days men drank alone, but now women join them openly.

Recommended Additional Reading

I’m going to be doing a weekly bit called “History Thursdays” to get me to post more regularly on my blog, with the point being to educate, entertain, and to open up new ways for thinking about the past.

The material I’ll feature are primary sources that I feel are in some way interesting or telling. These sources are either actually used in my “real research” (i.e. my academic work), or are stuff that I otherwise can’t (for now) more fully incorporate into my usual work.

Consider it a kind of “Antiques Road Show” meets “This American Life.”

Next Thursday’s inaugural segment will feature an article from 1921 entitled, “Hotel Drinking Debauching Women.” Hope you guys enjoy it!

I’ll be teaching this summer again, for what in all likelihood will be my last teaching assignment at Cal!

The course is a small 18-student seminar based on the summer course I taught last year. This year, the seminar has a new title, "Race, Gender, Science, and American Empire," and fairly large additions and subtractions to the readings.

I will be teaching Claude Steele’s very readable "Whistling Vivaldi" for the first time, which is a book about a series of psychology experiments conducted by Steele and others on the effects of subtly "being made aware of your race and gender" on academic performance. For example, Steele and others found that if women were reminded of their gender in a questionnaire before taking a math exam, they performed significantly poorer than women who were not.

Currently the course is under-enrolled, but hopefully in the coming weeks it starts to fill up!

es103flier.pdf

So I’ve been approved to teach a summer course on a topic of my own choosing! Here’s the flier I made for it. The awesome art was provided by my brother. 

Friendly reminder that I will be giving a public talk tomorrow from noon to 1:30 PM at 223 Moses Hall (Institute for International Studies). 

The talk is based on research I’m currently doing for a chapter of my dissertation.

Hope to see you there!

Presentation Abstract:

On July 26, 1924, a young nursemaid named Janet Smith was found dead in front of an ironing board in the basement of her master’s residence located in the affluent neighborhood of Shaughnessy Heights in Vancouver. Six years later, matronly socialite and amateur actress Rosetta Baker would be found dead in her luxurious downtown San Francisco apartment on December 8, 1930 with two broken ribs, damage to her chest and throat, and a bed sheet tied around her neck. In both cases, a Chinese “houseboy” stood trial as the primary suspect, with Wong Foon Sing being accused of murdering Smith and Liu Fook for allegedly murdering Baker.

Drawing upon these cases, I ask: in what ways are transformations to the domestic sphere and the Oriental Question connected? As frontier and gateway societies, how were Vancouver and San Francisco troubled and shaped by the emergence of an idealized white womanhood on one hand, and the total success of the anti-Oriental movement on the other?

I was thinking of going old-school and using a large piece of chart paper the size of my bedroom wall to organize my research data, but decided to look for a digital solution first since so much of my data is in digital form. 

Also, I can’t exactly carry around a wall of information with me when my research and writing takes me outside of my apartment. 

After some research, I decided to go with Tufts University’s Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) program since it’s geared towards academics and is very easy to use.

I’ve said elsewhere that I’m currently working on a chapter on murders involving white women and Chinese servants. As you can imagine, these cases attracted a huge amount of public attention, and were quite complex with many moving parts, with tons of rumors and innuendo, and a strange and varied cast of characters.

In the course of my research, I quickly discovered that I needed some visual way to organize all my information. Large blocks of text and lengthy outlines do you no good in giving you the big picture, nor are they useful for showing relationships.

I’m continually adding to and adjusting the visual map above as I continue to process and organize all the information I’ve collected. 

There’s something very satisfying about visual mapping. It’s certainly something I think more academics should be doing. 

Last year, I was approached by the department to start an e-journal.

I’m a fairly technologically savvy person so I didn’t think publishing an e-journal would be all that difficult since everything would be done online or on the computer, but of course, things aren’t that simple.

The good news is that e-publishing is booming right now, and there are many free resources to help produce professional-grade publications.

Thinking about Levels of Interaction

An e-journal has at least two levels of interaction:

1) the front end, i.e. the public face of the journal, which includes the journal itself, as well as the journal’s website, and,

2) the back end, i.e. the behind-the-scenes administrative view of the journal, including the manuscript submission and revision system.

Content Managment System aka the back end layer

By far the most technologically demanding aspect of running a journal is the manuscript submission and review process, or the back end part of the e-publishing process.

Traditionally, one submitted manuscripts in hard copy (many times in triplicate) by snail mail. Reviewers are then assigned a copy to review, and a response is sent back, again by snail mail. Nowadays, many journals accept manuscripts via e-mail, though this process resembles the old school way of doing things as authors and editorial staff still shuffle files back and forth. 

Many journals have instead been turning to the web to streamline the entire process, taking cues from the explosion in user-generated content, new media, and cloud computing. 

What has made the launching and management of journals easier and far more accessible is the development of online content management software, the most prevalent being Open Journal Systems.

Content management systems like OJS generate everything you need to manage a journal, all in one place. No knowledge of programming or web design is necessary, which is a good thing since developing such a back end interface from scratch is no easy task!

If I’ve lost you already, think of it as a more robust form of a blog interface: authors can upload their manuscripts through the journal website, while journal staff can log into their website and manage all submissions online.

Once revisions are completed and the manuscript is ready for final copy, OJS then moves everything along to the front end, and generates an electronic version of the journal, complete with indexing, downloadable PDFs, etc. 

For the journal I’m working on, nineteen sixty nine, I decided to go with the University of California’s eScholarship platform as our back end, which is actually a modified implementation of OJS specific to the University of California’s journals. 

I decided to go with eScholarship for our journal because they host everything and provide tech support for free (since the journal is being produced by UC Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies department), and because being affiliated with the University of California and California Digital Library raises the profile and academic credentials of the journal. 

The Website and E-Journal aka the front end layer

The front end is actually the easiest part of the e-journal equation. nineteen sixty nine uses Posterous to host the website. I selected Posterous for our journal because it’s very simple to use when compared to something like WordPress (updates to the website can be made via e-mail for example), and because it integrates well with our Facebook Page and Twitter out of the box.

The design of the site itself is a modified version of one of the many beautiful themes available through Posterous.

As for how the journal will eventually be presented in digital form, we could have gone the route of simply providing a PDF of the journal for download on our site, or linking to the eScholarship-generated version of the journal like many professional academic journals do, but there are a few problems with these approaches.

First of all, simply presenting the journal via a link to a downloadable PDF really takes away from the reading experience. Doing that is no better than me forwarding an attachment of the journal to a friend, where the PDF would then be opened in Acrobat Reader, which would likely appear too zoomed in or too zoomed out, and remind you just how much PDFs really suck the romance out of reading as you fiddle around with the hand tool. 

Displaying the journal through services like eScholarship is also quite an unpleasant experience, though I do like their platform and mandate very much. eScholarship outputs each article as a separate webpage, meaning it looks something like how journal articles look on JSTOR. The pages are static and load slowly, and it is difficult to jump from page to page. There is also a lack of polish in the presentation. 

It’s great that you can read the article right from your browser without having to download a PDF and open it in Acrobat, but it’s sluggish and difficult to read. 

Enter the brilliant e-publishing service, Issuu.

Issuu is a service that turns PDFs into full-fledged online publications. As you can see above, Issuu renders pages beautifully in full-screen, allowing for a pleasant and dynamic reading experience without the hassle of fiddling around with settings.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how our inaugural issue will end up!

So my friend was in a cafe in Berkeley and a random dude approaches her and offers to write her a poem. He asks for a friend’s name and a word that describes the person. She said “Jason” and “rational.”

This was the poem he wrote:

Jason Rides a Rational Wave

Jason is Not so Very Pationate
His Trip is to Be So Highly Rational
That those Around Him Give Respect Times Eight
Give him Space, Don’t call Him an Irrational

Ay, His Deadly Reason Most Arguements Will Win
His Analytical Skills are Frightful as Sin
He Approaches an Apple in Computing Power
His Power of Reason Seems to Grow by the Hour

But Rational Jason is Missing the Point
For Man is Not an Apple nor Computer
People are Pationate Emotional Slobs
T?here’s More to this Life than Money and Jobs

There’s Sailing and Surfing and Ridiing the Wave
Of Romance, the Love Dance in Musical Haze
The Torment, the Torrent, the Laughter Insane
There’s Much More Than Logic in Jason’s Unruly Brain

A Spontaneous Poem

by iDj Apple Seer

jon.b.spaulding@gmail.com

I want to first make it clear that I’m not a die-hard Twitter fanatic, nor did I have much experience in using it until very recently. I jumped on the Twitter bandwagon very late.

I signed up for my Twitter account in March 2009 and tweeted, “I’m new to Twitter and am highly confused.” As that first feeble tweet hinted at, I had joined Twitter to see what all the fuss was about and I was not impressed. I mostly thought I didn’t need it because nobody I knew used it. 

Two and a half years later — an eternity in Twitter time — I had the sudden urge to give Twitter a second chance. What drove me back to Twitter wasn’t teaching, but learning. I wanted to do a better job of keeping up with current trends in the scholarly world, particularly with new books on race. I had a hunch that many academic publishers would have a presence on Twitter, and it turned out I was right — well over thirty five academic publishers are active on Twitter, including some of my favorites such as UC Press, Duke, and Minnesota. 

Then I began to think about my students. I’ve been teaching non-stop since I entered grad school — as a teaching assistant (or “GSI” in Berkeley-speak) from 2007 to the present, and as a lecturer earlier this year. Though I’ve taught the same course for four years, I’ve always tried new things in the classroom. In my early years, I was quick to adopt online forum postings and Skype for teaching, and later experimented with more traditional assignments such as in-class group presentations and weekly quizzes. 

I figure with all the years of tinkering under my belt by the time I complete my degree and go on the market I’ll have become a better teacher, one who’s able to create a dynamic and fun learning environment with minimal effort.   

With this in mind, I thought if Twitter could help me learn better, could it also not help me teach better? 

I began to research if others before me had thought the same way.

Researching Twitter for Teaching

I found a series of articles and websites devoted to Twitter and teaching spanning mostly from 2008-2009, when a few professors across the country were experimenting with Twitter in the classroom. I haven’t found much buzz about it since those years. 

My biggest inspiration was from the work of Prof. Monica Rankin, who teaches history at the University of Texas at Dallas. Rankin’s experiment with Twitter was widely reported in the popular media at the time, and the fact that she was a historian like myself made me particularly interested in her usage of and experience with Twitter. A YouTube video of her experiment can be seen here.

Rankin’s rationale for her usage of Twitter was simple. She identified a key problem of the traditional lecture format: too many students + one expert yammering at the front of the room + no real interaction = ineffective pedagogy. I, too, share this sentiment with Rankin, and am loathe to carry on this draconian tradition. 

But I wasn’t totally sold on Twitter being the solution to such a problem. 

As the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote in 2009, Twitter is no magic bullet for the tired lecture format. Rankin herself is quoted expressing this sentiment:

“There is certainly the potential for disaster,” she agreed when I reached her on her cellphone last week. During one class session about abortion, for instance, students began an argument on Twitter that Ms. Rankin characterized only as “nonproductive and nonacademic.” She said her teaching assistant quickly brought the flame war to her attention, and “we basically kind of changed topics at that point.”

The article also includes a very insightful student’s perspective, from a different Twitter experiment:

I asked Mr. Van Wye, the student, whether some students end up derailing class sessions thanks to Hotseat [Purdue's customized Twitter application]. “Yeah, perhaps, because sometimes you have people writing funny comments, and we have to stop and kind of acknowledge that it happened,” he said. “And sometimes that takes away from it a little bit.”

On balance, though, he would vote to keep the software: “It does more good than it does hurt.”

The article also notes one attempt to cheat using Twitter, where a student tweeted a request to his fellow classmates for an answer to an exam question while the exam was taking place. However, the attempt was easily tracked and really, you can’t get much of an answer in 140 character messages unless its for multiple choice, which I would never do in a history class. 

Last, I consulted Dr. Barbara Nixon’s use of Twitter-based assignments, something that Rankin and many others did not seem to be interested in implementing. While I disagree with a lot of Nixon’s design decisions (see below), I do think getting students excited about using Twitter as a “discussion enhancer” is important, and the teacher should take an active role in guiding the students into using Twitter for maximum educational benefit.

Furthermore, I found the idea of Twitter-based assignments intriguing because the majority of students still mostly do not participate in discussions in smaller venues. Typically, about 2-5 students end up being the main contributors, while the rest coast along, perhaps because they’re shy, or perhaps because they don’t know how to get a foothold in the discussion. 

Some of you might say that if the students aren’t participating, that’s the teacher’s fault, and so the teacher should just do a better job and not rely on a gimmick like Twitter to do his job for him. This criticism could be valid for inexperienced or just plain bad teachers, but most educators know that even the best of us often fail to teach to our own high standards not because we are lacking in some way, but because there are things the teacher cannot control — such as the dynamics between students, students’ personalities, even the day and time of the class — that make the instructor a less effective teacher. 

I am writing with this latter group of teachers in mind. No amount of pedagogical skill will turn around that dead silent 8am class filled with clique-y students that would sooner spit in each other’s faces than collectively discuss Manifest Destiny.

Thus, I view my tinkering around with different teaching tools less as the actions of a daredevil wanting to redefine what it means to teach and learn in the 21st century university, and more as the actions of a decent teacher wanting the best out of himself and his students.

My mantra for this particular experiment with Twitter is this: Twitter enhances, not replaces. It enhances but does not replace a good discussion; it enhances but does not replace a good teacher.  

Guiding Princples for Twitter-enhanced Teaching

This finally brings me to my envisioning of Twitter as a “discussion enhancer.” You can access my implementation of Twitter for classroom use here to see how the principles I outline below guided my course design. 

1) Twitter is fundamentally about broadcasting short messages to anybody willing to listen. It is a form of micro-sharing. This has certain pedagogical benefits, including forcing students to condense complex subject matter into simpler, more manageable parts. This is a fundamental skill for life just as much as it is a critical learning skill, and it should be nurtured and encouraged. In some of my early years of teaching, I had students post bi-weekly 250-word responses to a message board, but found even these short pieces to be far too onerous for myself and my students to read. Rather than sharing, this ended up being more akin to dumping. 

2) Twitter is mostly wide open to the public, and caution needs to be exercised, and this is where I strongly disagree with Nixon’s pedagogical design. In her implementation of Twitter, Nixon has every student follow the instructor as well as every student in the class. Though well intentioned, this is a bad idea because it forces students to follow people they may not want to, for personal or other reasons. I strongly feel students have the right to decide who they talk to and befriend in class, and should have a semblance of that right online. Thus, in my implementation, only the instructor and student are required to follow each other because only the instructor can guarantee her own behavior. As such, connections between students should be made or broken organically, with students themselves being the arbiters of who to follow and who to avoid.  

3) The conversations on Twitter should be purposeful, though organic. Sometimes the instructor should step in to provide structure by tweeting out a question to the class, but ideally students themselves will be generating purposeful discussion in a dynamic fashion. Some funny or off-topic remarks are to be expected, but I don’t see them as a barrier to discussion. Rather, it makes people follow the general discourse more intently, just as I do whenever Conan O’Brian or Steven Colbert send out their funny, but timely, tweets.  A smart-assed quip is much more useful to an educator than is total and prolonged silence. Laughter is an entry point and not a road block to learning. 

4) By following the discussion on Twitter, the instructor has a far better idea of how to facilitate the real world discussion that will take place afterwards, meaning that Twitter is a kind of warm up or opening act for the in-class discussion. In short, Twitter provides clues to what people are interested in, what kinds of questions students have, and whether students are actually doing the work or not. I strongly believe that the best educators are those that are the most prepared, and not necessarily the most charismatic nor the most knowledgeable. Twitter allows the instructor and the students to prepare for the nitty gritty of the in-class discussion, while still allowing a high degree of spontaneity and dynamism too. It gives otherwise hesistant students the foothold they need to discuss things seriously.  

5) Twitter broadens out the discussion to a level you cannot achieve through traditional discussion. The best tweets are the kinds that share information via links, images, YouTube videos, etc., where you are directed to a related source you weren’t aware of.  Establishing these different connections in digital space encourages establishing similar linkages in the mind. We’re reading about Orientalism and stereotypes of Asians; why not link a clip from “Sayonara” on YouTube to get the point across? Doing so creates a mental connection between the theories and concepts that are read about, and whatever is linked. Much of what we do in academia — in science, the humanities, and social science — is linking complex theories or analyses to everyday examples. Why shouldn’t we enable our students to make those same linkages too?  

Later on, I will be blogging about the outcome of my class, and hopefully include some comments from my students as well.