viz.

Image Credit: Screencapture of graph created by the Collusion for Mozilla add-in.

I'd speculate that every instructor is familiar with the feeling that comes with anticipation and apprehension battling each other out before the first day of the semester.  Maybe I'm just too easily flustered, but the prospect of standing up in front of a group of heretofore-unknown students, while pretending to be the infallible instructor of heretofore-unknown material always rattles my cage a bit.

Of the two aforementioned fears, the latter is always more menacing than the former for me (to the extent that you can actually separate them).  This being the case, I was thrilled to find out before the start of the Fall 2012 semester (my first semester as a PhD student and as a UT Associate Instructor) that the book I would be engaging with my introductory rhetoric students was Eli Pariser's "The Filter Bubble."

The reason that this was such good news for me was that I had already read the book earlier in the summer for "fun."  And this was no superficial reading, either; my paranoia and indignation over the sort(s) of information gathering and content filtering taking place on the Internet had led me to copiously annotate the book throughout.  For the first time in my life, there was the distinct possibility that being a cynical alarmist would work to my advantage!

What's more, I was certain my students would be every bit as enthusiastic about the subject matter as I was.  Hell, I thought to myself, they'll be far more knoweledgable in these areas than I am!  I had better bone up on both the technical and cultural state of online affairs, 'lest their suspicions that their rhetoric instructor was a total douchemobile become certainties.

However, I soon found that, despite (or perhaps because of) their total immersion in the technology that drives our day-to-day lives, I knew more than they did with respect to the "ins-and-outs" of our digital lives.  This was a dubious discovery: it meant that I didn't have to worry as much about sounding like a clueless Luddite on par with their parents, but I would have to really work to get them involved in the course materials.

But we forged ahead.  There were times when I'd see signs of life, usually at those points in lecturing wherein I'd inadvertently get so worked up talking about these issues about which I was so emphatic, that they took my paranoia for passion, and there eyes would follow my flailing arms with what looked like rapt attention.

By week 3, however, I realized that I wasn't the impassioned, young, mind-opening instructor that I had fancied myself.  Rather, I was the neurotic, old (yes, when you're 18, 34 is old) instructor that really needed to get a life if he was this excited about online marketing tactics.  It was high time that I employ the incredibly advanced equipment in the classroom I was given to teach in by the DWRL.

I showed them a TED Talk given by Eli Pariser on the very subject he engages in his book:

They took in more during the first 5 minutes of Pariser's talk than they did the first chapters of his book.  I don't mean this as any sort of criticism of Pariser's writing.  To the contrary, the speech served as the spark that got my students to reallyread his book; seeing an actual person has added a face to the pages.  The book transfomed from textbook to extended blog.  They were now reading, digesting, and synthesizing the course materials, as was evidenced by the next essays they submitted. 

Still, I could tell that they were looking at this whole thing in a "this is interesting, but they're not actually tracking me" sort of way.  For them, "The Filter Bubble" was eye-opening, but they still weren't grasping the full extent of what this book was telling us.  They weren't thinking about what it meant for a company to go past the anonymous tracking, to a point where somebody out their knew your name, address, hobbies, names of relatives, etc.

Wanted terribly to get them to that next step, I put together a lesson plan that was going to be multimedia in nature.  I began with another TED Talk.  This one was by Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs, who was unveiling a new Firefox add-on called "Collusion,"

Collusion was created by Atul Varma, who says that it was reading "The Filter Bubble" that inspired him to crerate the program.  Collusion examines some of the websites that silently track visitors long after they've left a site.  More unsettling, Kovac's visual representation revealed the groups collecting information and following their every move around the Internet were sites that they'd never even visited.

I encouraged them to download the Collusion add-on and see what they found.  We all took a screen shot of our "Collusion charts" at the end of a typical day of Internet usage (my chart is at the top of this post; to be fair, my chart represents heavier Internet usage than typical), and posted them on the course wiki.  As I did not wanted to be yet another authority forcing them to divulge personal information, this assignment was 100% optional, and they had the option to submit anonymously, if they so desired.

The chart illustrating the extent of sites gathering my information without my knowledge (much less consent) wouldn't completely fit onto my screen.  Hence, they aren't completely depicted on the screen capture above, which is unfortunate, because one of the most unsettling aspects of these charts is the visualization of the extent to which the web sites collecting my data were several steps removed from any site I ever visited...and they were sharing with sites even further removed from any online activity I personally engaged in.

With the Collusion charts, students saw all-too-clearly what they had previously understood only in the abstract.  So long as it remained an abstract notion, it was never going to inspire a feeling of having a vested interest in these practices.  Now that they'd seen what was going on, they were mad as hell, and were sufficiently knowledgeable that they could articulate the reasons behind their opinions effectively.

However, after a day or two of almost managing to convince myself that it was my vast knowledge and dynamic classroom persona that had made the course materials "real" for my students, I finally embraced the fact that the kudos would be more appropriately directed toward the videos and interactive add-ons that we had incorporated into our class time.

(As an aside, I felt compelled to temper their newfound disdain for the entities engaged in the practices exposed in "The Filter Bubble" with editorials defending those practices.  I (hopefully) conveyed to my class that there are always multiple sides to any issue, and that the ability to argue one's opponent's case was the hallmark of a skilled rhetorician.)