"Phoning it In": Audioblogging Poem Performances in English 218

I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it.

--Frank O'Hara, "Personism: A Manifesto"

Materials and Methods

For the past few years, I have been using blogging technology in my classroom for a variety of reasons and in a variety of classes (links to current classes here, here, and here). Before a semester begins, I set up a Class Blog for each of the courses I teach. There are a variety of blogging technology websites (WordPress, LiveJournal); I use Blogger.com. I may use a Class Blog as a virtual blackboard, with students posting up informal writing or work from an in-class exercise. I may assign students to use a Class Blog to complement an oral presentation with media elements, such as a photo or a clip from YouTube.

Using audioblog technologies, I have found, has helped students interact with each other and the class material in a new way, as well as setting up a second, online conversation, one that it is often very different than the one we have in person. Using blog technology, a medium familiar to many student's everyday life but perhaps less familiar in the classroom, has demystified the learning experience and can make it, I daresay, fun.

About one-third of my English 218 class sessions, which is taught as a once-a-week marathon session on Thursday evenings (6-9:30pm) are composed of field trips to public readings of published poets, both on- and off-campus. To prepare for these readings, I assign students to read a sampling of a poet's work, the links to which I place on the Class Blackboard site. Students then select a poem to perform and chronicle their performance on our Class Blog.

A screen capture of the blog setup page from Hipcast.com

They do this, as the title of my talk indicates, by literally "phoning it in," using audioblog technology. This technology is fairly simple. Before the semester begins, I will have connected an audioblogging service to our Class Blog. In Spring 2006, I used the free Audioblogger service, which is now defunct; last Spring, I used Hipcast.com, which requires a small annual fee. Both services post a mini-player for each students' performance.

All the complicated technology stuff happens in the background. Students follow the directions and call into the service and leave what is essentially a voicemail message as their performance. Their performance/voicemail message is then converted into a small mp3 file and is posted online to Class Blog, usually in a matter of seconds.

The rationale for having students audioblog performances, at least at first, was a logistical one: having 18 students line up to read 2-3 poems each week would take up a huge chunk of our class time.

But then other reasons emerged. In the beginning of my first semester teaching English 218, it was immediately evident that many students needed to really wrap their heads around how to read a poem aloud. In this instructor's opinion, students hold poetry on too high of a pedestal and regard it as some hidden code that cannot be unlocked with their own voices.

Audioblogging gives students some time to deal with reading a poem in more concentrated way, while also giving them some time to deal with their nervousness from public speaking.

Students' audioblogged readings as the semester went on, I would say, helped build their confidence in their in-class readings and public performances. I also started to notice that many students' audioblogged readings, often performed from home or work or a dorm room, took on a more intimate quality. They had much more control over their speed, volume, and voice inflection, with just their voice and a phone receiver to deal with.

In the process, students also learned how reading in front of people requires one set of performative qualities, while reading for electronic media requires another, more subtle approach--much the same as stage acting works with different skill sets as film acting.

One Case Study: Marilyn Nelson's "Mama's Promise"

Before our class attended a reading at Sage College by Marilyn Nelson, an award-winning poet and emeritus professor of English at University of Connecticut, I posted links to her poems online in a folder on our Class Blackboard site. Students selected a poem by Nelson and posted an audioblog reading. The thinking behind this and other readings was to have students inhabit a poem and read it in their own way, then go and see and hear the author herself read the poem.

Many students selected Nelson's "Mama's Promise" (student performances here). The title poem, from the award-winning poet's 1987 book of the same name, looks at the idea of dying child on the news, the poet's own imagined death, and a mother's lullaby.

Attending the reading and meeting Nelson in person brought the online experience full-circle. Before the reading and after students audioblogged their performances, I emailed Nelson, a former teacher of mine, and sent her links to the student's performances. After the Sage reading, Nelson was kind enough to come to our section of the Bush Auditorium and compliment the student's performances, bringing the online experience full circle to face-to-face contact with the writer.

How Do We Assess a Performance?

From my vantage point as a teacher, tracking a student's progress with audioblogged performances was fairly straightforward. I tag each post with a student's name, pull up a their audioblogged performances over the course of a semester, and review the performances. In conference, I can play excerpts to demonstrate a point I am trying to make, or to compare different readings.

We also use a rubric. Many of my students are future educators, so using some sort of assessment tool resonates with them. For the past two years, I have served as one of the three New York State judges for Poetry Out Loud, a nationwide high school poetry recitation contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and The Poetry Foundation. We use a version of the rubric given to the judges to assess performances, rating each category (examples include Volume, Speed, Voice Inflection, Level of Difficulty, Overall Performance) on a scale of 1 to 4, from Weak to Excellent.

In class, students use form to assess each other's performances, while for some of our more important audioblogged performances, I use the applicable criteria and return to the student. I also encourage students to use the rubric for their own self-assessment.

Pros, Implications, and Challenges of Audioblogging

Some issues still need to be ironed out, and not all of them technical. In the interest of online privacy, I have been stressing to students to use their first name and last initial. Student compliance in this regard has been sometimes spotty. Some students have told me the phone number they call turns up as long-distance on their parents' phone bill, and so I have thought about stipulating in my Class Syllabus that students should budget a couple of dollars for phone calls as part of the class expenses. I also have to label all the audioblog posts myself, which is labor-intensive unless I am making assessment notes at the same time.

All in all, however, assigning audioblog readings has been successful. I plan on continuing the practice next Spring, and have been trying to figure out new ways to have students phone in performances in other classes. My initial fears of students wrapping their heads around the technology usually dissipate after the first week of audioblogging.

Even the most Luddite student isn't scared off from leaving a high-tech voicemail message. For others, using the old-school phone technology humanizes the whole enterprise. Reactions from students has been mostly positive: They enjoy getting to practice their readings from home or their dorm, and also to listen to other students' performances to get ideas. There is also the novelty of the technology, their being able to showcase their performances with friends and family.

One Last Thought

I bring up my Case Study of many students--4 out of 16--selecting a particular Marilyn Nelson poem one that is emotionally charged, because it leads me to mention to another, unintended pedagogical result: Students tend to take more chances, both in poem selection and performance, when audioblogging their readings.

This, I would say, is very much an online phenomenon. As Susan Hum and other education researchers note, students construct partially seperate identities online. Perhaps the armor of solitude or a measure of online anonymity leads to more daring on some students' part.

Hum, Susan. "Performing Gendered Identities: A Small-Group Collaboration in a Computer-Mediated Classroom Interaction." Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 18(2) Summer 1992: 19-38.

Nelson, Marilyn. "Mama's Promise." Marilyn Nelson's University of Connecticut Faculty Page. 13 October 2007 <http://web.uconn.edu/mnelson/poem9.htm>.

O'Hara, Frank. "Personism: A Manifesto." The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara. D. Allen, ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995.

Labels: Poems, Saint Rose, teaching