Autoethnographic reflection

Autoethnographic reflection

• Default due date: 2025-08-21 17:00:00
• Points: 100
• Weight: 10%
• Length (in words): 600

Instructions

Heidegger says that “[t]he essence of modern¹ technology lies in Enframing. Enframing belongs within the destining of revealing” (Heidegger [1954] 1977, 25). In other words, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and you convince yourself you are a construction worker.

We all make use of technological objects, but we rarely stop and notice how technology (applied knowledge) is embedded into activities to make systems, or how embedded technological systems shape the world around us and each of us. We can see the picture (objects and people), but it’s hard to see the “frame.”

What’s the solution? We need to train ourselves to be dumb, naive, and open to the real world. We need to use the ethnographer’s skills of naive observation in the course of participation in everyday life.

This essay is an exercise in observation and reflection. You will do what ethnographic researchers often do, which is a lot of mundane counting and sorting. You’d be surprised what you can find when you switch off the part of your brain with convictions, assumptions, preconceived ideas, and premature conclusions and just look, note, and make piles. When you have an inventory of everything you see and touch, then you’re in a position to see the larger frame established by technology.

Procedures

1. Take an old essay draft from last semester that you printed for editing, tear it down the middle, and then tear the page halves again in half, making a stack of paper scraps 105mm by 148.5mm with one side blank. (Alternatively, get a reporter’s notebook or a deck of blank 3-by-5-inch cards.) Get some pens, too.

2. Choose a day for observation. As you go about your daily routine, note every object you encounter that serves as a tool, or means, or device. For each, note the time and place and write down your observations about it. What is it? How does it appear? (What does it look, sound, or feel like)? What does it do? How does it work? What you do with it? Do you use it? For what?

   • Do a sweep of the main spaces or areas you live and work in to collect other observations.

3. At the end of the day, lay out your cards in front of you and sort them into piles based on common characteristics or themes.

4. Describe your day in a 1000-word essay, paying special attention to the types (groups, piles) of things you observed.

5. Edit your rough draft to organize your writing into a cohesive, self-contained statement that anyone can read and understand.

   • The written report on your observation is mainly descriptive but, like any writing, it should center on one single main idea which you wish to convey to your reader.
   • Writing is meant to communicate information to a reading audience. As you write and edit your essay, imagine a naive reader who will be your audience. Write for this person, and speak to this person: Tell your reader everything that is necessary for them to understand your main idea and your reasons for why specific observations lead to and support the main idea you want to convey.
   • Your essay should aim to be no more than 1000 words, so in the editing phase you can select the best examples from your observations (and omit any details that are personal or private).

6. Did you search online, talk to a bot, or look at other sources to inform your thinking in the essay? Those are technologies too. Be aware of them, note them, and write about them. (This assignment does not require you to cite any other sources, and a good essay will not refer to any other sources or quote from other sources. You must acknowledge your use of any technological assistance—like AI tools, grammar checkers, translation tools, etc.)

7. Format your writing in a neat, presentable way that makes your report self-contained and self-explanatory to anyone who reads it. Submit it online to this dropbox on Canvas.

How your work will be evaluated

A good essay for this assignment will

• be complete, self-contained, and self-explanatory to a reader with no knowledge of the assignment instructions or this class.
• clearly express a main idea, and will guide the reader to see why specific descriptions of specific facts reinforce this main idea.
• identify the types of objects you found in your inventory or the themes you see connecting the different objects you noted.
• acknowledge any use of AI tools, and place yourself in your own writing as the author (that is, demonstrate that you are the author of the text by speaking as a person occupying a unique space and time).

This is the early feedback task for the class.² I will be looking to see who turns them in on time and who may be falling behind. It’s important to get the semester off to a good start and establish a solid weekly routine. So, while you can apply for an automatic five-day extension, my advice is to do that only if you really need to. An extension may interfere with other assignments you have next week.

If you have special consideration, you can receive a formal extension on this assignment.

Can I use AI?

This assignment is open and unsupervised, so there is no restriction on using AI tools in an honest way to improve your writing. Any use of an AI tool must be acknowledged. See the AI in Education Canvas site for tips on using AI tools and for how to acknowledge their use. Document everything. When it comes to acknowledging tools, more is better. Documenting your use of AI tools is a way to demonstrate your own independent thinking.

Here are some ways in which AI tools might be helpful for this assignment:

• If you transfer your note cards to a spreadsheet in which each note is a row, then an LLM chatbot might be able to read and reformat the spreadsheet as a neatly formatted report.
• You can ask an LLM chat bot to read your draft and then play the role of a naive reader with no knowledge of the assignment or the class.
  • It can state what it thinks your main idea is so you can check whether you have made that clear.
  • It can ask you naive questions, and you can reply with answers which you can then incorporate into your writing.