Memes as evaluation opportunities (#UCTL16)

I am still smiling about this tweet


It is the first time I have looked closely at a # meme. (The origin of the meme is here.)
Perhaps it is because I have been reading around perfomativity that I was drawn to the wonderful humour and insight on display within the meme.
The two connect for me through this quote from John Austin:

The words which are used to express ourselves are also means by which we enact ourselves.

All of which encouraged me to think about how teachers and learners might evaluate their shared learning experience through a variation of the meme.
These are my thoughts as an example of an imagined unit at the University of Canberra.


I imagine a rich conversation emerging from this parsimonious observation. This approach resonates, I think, with Mary Ryan’s (2012) contemplation of teaching discursive and performative reflection in higher education:

Teachers need to provide opportunities for students to develop meta-discursive skills, whereby they not only engage in the different discourse communities of the different disciplines, but they also know how and why they are engaging and what those engagements mean for them and others in terms of social positioning and power relations.

If students are to enact particular identities within the discipline, they should be provided with opportunities and pedagogic scaffolding to represent their reflective learning in different modes.

As I conclude this post, Scott‘s tweet has received 7,000+ likes and 4,000 retweets. Imagine what this level of engagement might do for personal learning conversations.

2 COMMENTS

  1. Hi Keith
    … strikes me as a poet, that what is appealing about Scott’s 22 word meme is his syntactic-meter. The BIG moment is well captured. Likewise, your own 21 word tweet is imbued with free-verse features and a strong narrative structure … got me!
    A few years back, I realised the last couplet of a sonnet often forms a nice meme: https://plus.google.com/collection/k1mYHB
    Cheers Tim

    • Hello, Tim. Thank you for reading the post and adding a delightful comment.
      I love the idea that you became an accidental sonneteer. I am looking forward to our conversation about poetics and the possibilities of memes.
      Salinger’s absence all those years ago and the alphabetical proximity of Shakespeare prompted a memory of this post https://keithlyons.me/blog/2013/11/18/tony-and-amy/ (We were playing Boulez but we were listening to James Brown).
      I trust you have a delightful weekend, Tim.

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