Another way of thinking about geoblogging in a composition course is through mobile learning (or m-learning), which is essentially the use of mobile devices in the service of knowledge-making. As Tara Brabazon has suggested in “Mobile Learning: the iPodification of Universities” (2007), m-learning is certainly not a new concept. Aside from its associations with over ten years of adding “e” and “i” (p. 24) to a wide range of technological practices, m-learning may also be tied to the role of, say, audio cassettes by university faculty in the dissemination of lectures and course materials to students (p. 22). More importantly, as Brabazon has added, “When placing attention on how people, money, and ideas move, mobility becomes a new marker of class and power” (p. 24). Accordingly, as instructors, we must remain aware of whether and how students are using technologies in the service of knowledge-making, as well as whether our technology-integrated coursework reifies consumption and reproduces privilege. With these concerns in mind, the Virtual University Geoblogging Project accepts Brabazon’s challenge: “M-learning must be transformed—from signifying mobility to motivation. Moving ideas between media platforms is not helpful if a student does not have the context, framework or incentive to study” (p. 25). Rather than understanding it as merely a trendy instrument to facilitate certain course goals, our investment in the Geoblogging Project is to situate it as the focus of composition through which students collaboratively generate a representational space that stresses how technologies shape culture, knowledge, and genre. In so doing, it allows students to consume and produce knowledge. Furthermore, it not only draws attention to how a specific situation is captured, but also becomes more than a neat gadget that is tacked on to an assigned reading or writing prompt. It is, in short, a mode of social, multi-modal production, a way to motivate students to actively (re-)read and (re-)write through what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1998) have called “remediation” (p. 5). We would like to think of Bolter and Grusin’s notion of remediation, or “the representation of one medium in another” (p. 45), as a compositional strategy through which geoblogging and m-learning intersect in several ways. In the following paragraphs, we use the example of a mobile phone as a vehicle to unpack the connections between remediation and the Geoblogging Project. Obviously, not all students may have mobile phones. As such, courses should be constructed with alternatives and an institution’s media services in mind. We also recommend a quick survey of students’ “technoliteracy” and personal resources at the start of the quarter or semester. Such pedagogical gestures are responsive to Brabazon’s challenge. Now, to begin with our example, students can use technologies such as mobile phones to capture a variety of situations through a variety of media. Consider the following three captures from the Geoblogging Project:

 

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With a mobile phone, each of these situations was captured and forwarded to an e-mail address. And while most people may tend to use a mobile phone for calls and text messaging more than anything else, it can also serve as a multi-modal research tool, which adds layers of complexity to arguments and interpretations. Of course, per Bolter and Grusin’s argument in Remediation, mobile-phone-as-research-tool does not imply that media such as photography, e-mail, radio and film are suddenly transcended through a single device (p. 50). None disappears; each simply converges, with the phone as a node. The mobile phone can therefore be understood as an opportunity for students to learn more about media, genre, and the material histories of remediation. Assignments might prompt students to use the geoblog to analyze how mobile phones influence their compositional strategies and their awareness of generic conventions. That way, both the geoblog and the mobile phone are sites of what Bolter and Grusin (1998) have referred to as “hypermediacy,” the logic of which “acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible” (pp. 33-34). (Given the examples embedded above, we might also add “audible” to Bolter and Grusin’s equation.) Clearly, students will not reduce their phones to solely research tools. All of the other purposes will remain, without being flattened or homogenized. How the phone is used (and, in fact, what it is) becomes a matter of context and motivation.

Secondly, through mobile phones, students can take the opportunity to make the familiar strange. That is, they can use the devices that they are comfortable with and interested in to document quotidian spatial practices and “encounter-possibilities” (Sirc, 2001, p. 15), which they might otherwise overlook and ignore. Rather than just being means of “tele-escape” from dull situations, mobile phones can facilitate close reading and help students locate themselves in particular spaces. Plus, through the repeated application of mobile phones for capturing evidence, students can become more aware of how the technologies that they use on a regular basis function. Here, remediation is nearly synonymous with “‘repurposing:’ to take a ‘property’ from one medium and reuse it in another” (Bolter and Grusin, 1998, p. 45). Through this repurposing, instructors and students can better understand media by attending to how media converge through devices such as mobile phones and to what effects. They can then consider how these effects can be mobilized to generate purposeful, new remediations. And, of course, one of our hopes is that a better understanding of media intersects with students’ re-thinking their “consumer-centric ideology” (Brabazon, 2007, p. 25) through social production and self-awareness.

As a remediation of blogs, photographs, audio recordings, film, maps, and other media, the Geoblogging Project is not just situations, posts, and time-stamps. It is also a site where the media that are familiar to students meet and interplay. Moreover, it does not privilege the classroom as a learning space. If we accept Geoffrey Sirc’s (2001) invitation for thinking about the classroom “as a sector in a larger zone of unitary urbanism” (p. 17), then learning is not fixed in a sanctioned location, not quite as rigid and static as what Sirc wrote about as the “permanence of ‘good writing'” (p. 17). This way, mobile learning motivates students to pick up the pieces as they go, databasing them for future analysis or discussion in class, and circulating them for others to see, hear, and comment on. (Consider, for instance, asking students to compose and/or argue for new campus maps that emerge from the Geoblogging Project. See Example Writing Prompt 5: “This Map Matters” for more.) Moreover, it does not trivialize students’ everyday compositions as secondary to scholarly articles and books. Captures-on-the-fly matter, too. They are part of the process through which students routinely construct situations (Sirc, 2001, p. 17).

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References:

Bolter, Jay D., & Grusin, Richard. (1998). Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Brabazon, Tara. (2007). Mobile learning: The iPodification of universities [Electronic version]. Nebula, 4(1), 19-30. from http://www.nobleworld.biz./nebulaarchive/nebula41.html.

Sirc, Geoffrey. (2001). Virtual urbanism. Computers and Composition, 18(1), 11-19.