This is a Photograph of Me

It's an old photograph, taken when my glasses were big and my hair was long and I wore a braid to tame the curls. It was taken during the early days of my digital teaching, and appears on the first web page I ever constructed. This web page is still my official (though very outdated) personal web page.

Do you know the poem, "This is a Photograph of Me"? I encountered it at my very first workshop on computer-based classroom discussion; it was the powerful discussion of this poem that sold me on the virtues of CMI (computer-mediated instruction, as it used to be called, back in 1991). We were handed a copy of this poem to read but were not given its author. We were then directed to a discussion site, where we were greeted with a single question: Is the author male or female? Why?

The online discussion that ensued spanned pages, grew more intense over time, and led us to full and rich analysis of the poem. As we "talked," we were forced to refer to specific phrases and words from the poem to justify our points. At the end, when class was finished, we were told the author of the poem, a nice bit of closure. Needless to say, we were quite surprised to learn that the poet was Margaret Atwood. I have since used this very exercise in multiple ways--with students in class; with faculty in workshops; and as part of a study on the impact of computer-based discussion on students' writing. It never ceases to amaze me for its simple power.

The power lies in finding the right question to ask.