Teaching College Writing and Literature

Update: It's Been a Long Time!

2015-12-18T11:35:00.002-06:00

I am on sabbatical this academic year (2015-16), and my primary project is leading my English Department in the adoption of the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) to shorten our "pipeline" of developmental-level writing courses. The ALP was created by Peter Adams and developed at the Community College of Baltimore County. It has been studied and researched intensively and has consistently found to be successful at the colleges where it is adopted.

As I am working on this project, I am continually reminded of the coursework I took at the University of Minnesota on my last sabbatical (academic year 2008-09) to complete a graduate-level certificate in Post-Secondary Developmental Education. (It was in one of those courses where I first started this blog.) In one of those courses I wrote a paper on "Mainstreaming Basic Writers," and one of the primary features of ALP is mainstreaming.

Irony? Fate? Coincidence?

Stay tuned; I may post more as the year goes on.

Using a Theme in Freshman Comp?

2011-08-02T07:50:00.005-05:00

Hello everyone! I'm back! Sorry to have been gone so long! (Yes, I know that no one is reading this blog, that it's really for me only, but I thought I'd start with some simple humor to start my day!)

The topic that is most on my mind of late concerns using "themes" in college writing classes (i.e., developmental writing and/or the standard freshman comp. class). Common themes include pop culture (such as TV, ads, music, movies, etc.), a current event (such as an election), multiculturalism/diversity, social justice, work, education, suburbia, etc.

But some articles I've come across recently all seem to argue that any FYC (first-year composition) or FYW (first-year writing) course that uses a theme is a "sham." One problem is simple "truth-in-advertising," that it's really a course about something else, not writing. Another problem is that while such a course may be attempting to teach writing as well, use of the theme takes valuable time away from the study and practice of writing. A third, and perhaps the most troubling, problem concerns the possible "indoctrination" (political or otherwise) of students through the use of a theme.

When I was first taught to teach freshman composition at Mankato State University in the early 1990s, we did not start out talking about themes. We actually started out talking about the writing process and about the "modes" of writing (narration, description, exposition, and argumentation) which, I later discovered, reflected a combination of writing-process theory with "current-traditional" theory. But it wasn't a bad way to start to learn to teach. Later, some of my colleagues did begin to incorporate a theme (often involving pop culture or current events), while others of us incorporated focuses on literature, academic writing, or the various "genres" of writing (memoir, reflection, position papers, proposals, reviews, etc.).

A decade later, after taking other graduate-level courses about the teaching of writing at the University of Minnesota, I began to experiment with using a theme for my writing courses. I first tried the theme of "Work," thinking that it would appeal to my working-class, career-minded, currently-employed community college students. It didn't, really, and, to my surprise, some of my students didn't even have a job yet, had never had one. So, I switched themes, to "Education," which at that time was the focus of the writing courses in the (now defunct) General College at the U of MN. The theory behind having students explore education includes empowering students, having them reflect on their past experiences with education and critically examine the enterprise they are currently involved in. This theme interested me greatly but didn't have the same effect on my students. Some were interested, sure, but many others were tolerant, or bored, or apathetic. And this very mixture of widely varying interests in a theme by students probably occurs in any course, comp or otherwise, theme or no theme.

So, I'm returning to a course focused almost entirely on writing, language, the writing process, academic writing, documentation and citation, grammar, etc. Sure, there will have to be "topics" to writing about, and we will have to discuss some readings (either to respond to or as models). But the focus will be on the list I just gave. And, I'm sure, I'll still have some students who are committed and interested, and tolerant, and bored, and apathetic, etc. But the course will not be a "sham," it will directly address what it's meant to address, and it will, hopefully, help students with their writing, for other college courses and for the workplace.

But I'm also still continuing to think about this topic. It's interesting, and it needs to be discussed. We also need to talk about other "add-ons" to freshman composition courses, such as Service Learning, or Technology Tools, or Digital Writing Projects, etc. Do these also take away from the writing and language focus of FYC/FYW courses, or do they complement the courses in ways that "themes" do not?

For now, here's my bibliography of the sources I've been reading. Enjoy!

Benay, Phyllis. "They Say, 'Templates Are the Way to Teach Writing'; I Say, 'Use with Extreme Caution.'" Rev. of They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. Pedagogy 8.2 (2008): 369-373. Print.

Brunner, Elizabeth. "Assignments for Freshman Composition." N.p. 24 Sept. 1999. Web. 26 Apr. 2011.

Fish, Stanley. "What Should Colleges Teach?" New York Times 24 Aug. 2009. Web. 22 Oct. 2009.

Fish, Stanley. "What Should Colleges Teach? Part 2." New York Times 31 Aug. 2009. Web. 22 Oct. 2009.

Fish, Stanley. "What Should Colleges Teach? Part 3." New York Times 7 Sept. 2009. Web. 22 Oct. 2009.

Foley, James E. "The Freshman Research Paper: A Near-Death Experience." N.p. N.d. Web. 26 Apr. 2011.

Grow, Laura M. "If They Say Academic Writing Is Too Hard, I Say Read Graff and Birkenstein." Rev. of They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. Pedagogy 8.2 (2008): 363-368. Print.

Miller, Susan. "How I Teach Writing: How to Teach Writing? To Teach Writing?" Pedagogy 1.3 (2001): 479-488. Print.

Shank, Dianna Rockwell. Rev. of Save the World on Your Own Time, by Stanley Fish. Teaching English in the Two-Year College 38.1 (Sept. 2010): 85-87.

Young, R. V. "Liberal Learning Confronts the Composition Despots." Intercollegiate Review 46.1 (Spr. 2011): 3-11. Print.

Introducing Bubbl.us

2010-08-31T10:51:00.003-05:00

Here's my BUBBL.US version of the clustering/mapping that I did on the classroom whiteboard on Monday. I'm brainstorming here about the reading and writing classes I remember taking from my 9th grade year in high school through my first 2 college writing classes. Here's the link. And here's the embedded version.

eFolioMinnesota: An Emerging Assignment

2010-08-17T14:03:00.007-05:00

For my Fall 2010 ENGL 0950 classes, we will be exploring the potential uses of eFolioMinnesota, along with initial advantages and disadvantages.

We will consider the use of eFolioMinnesota in our particular class, along with use after this class has ended.

We will also consider comparisons to other digital "tools" or "products" that might be used for portfolios, such as blogs (e.g., Blogger), MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

For now, however, here are some of the most important links:

eFolioMinnesota

Minnesota Satellite and Technology (MnSAT)

Dr. Helen Barrett's Home Page

The REFLECT Initiative

An Initial Tutorial at YouTube

More later!

Online Glossary of Usage

2010-05-05T14:18:00.002-05:00

Hello all!

I'm looking for recommendations for an online "Glossary of Usage."

Such a glossary is usually found near the end of a typical, printed writing handbook, and these books are usually used in a Freshman Writing (or First-Year Writing or Composition) course.

I, however, have abandoned these handbooks--for reasons I can write about later--and am using the MLA Handbook in my courses. The MLA Handbook, however, does NOT have a glossary of usage.

Any suggestions? Would the Purdue OWL have something like this? The St. Cloud State U. WritePlace?

Thanks!

In Cold Blood - Minnesota Monthly - January 2010 - Minneapolis, St. Paul, Minnesota

2010-01-12T14:18:00.001-06:00

Since I'm too busy and too cheap to actually subscribe to this magazine -- OK, all right, I did subscribe at one time, but . . . hmm -- I'm providing the link to a good article for my Minnesota Writers class at Anoka Ramsey Community College:

In Cold Blood - Minnesota Monthly - January 2010 - Minneapolis, St. Paul, Minnesota

Blogs for Bibs? ... Or ...?

2009-11-06T10:43:00.004-06:00

In my English 1121 class right now, we are beginning work on our annotated bibliographies for our major argument paper. One option I'm giving is to compose the annotated bibliography using Microsoft Office's PowerPoint rather than the "traditional" Word document.

To give credit where credit is due, or at least some credit, since my idea is a bit different:

A fellow classmate of mine, last year, when I was on sabbatical and taking courses at the U of MN, was Kate Peterson, a librarian at the U of MN, did her final project on "new" annotated bibliographies. If I remember correctly, she advocated using blogs for this, with one blog post for each source; the blog post would contain both the bibliographic citation and the annotation.

If you are interested, please read Kate's blog post about her final project.

I really liked this idea--for many reasons, including the use of a popular digital writing tool in place of a more "traditional" tool--but since I'm not assigning blogs (yet?) in my writing courses, I went searching for a way to modify Kate's idea. PowerPoint came to mind, not only because it is another digital writing tool that we studied and practiced last year, but also because one of its slide choices, "Title and Content," seemed to lend itself well to how an annotated bibliography is set up. In addition, another slide choice, "Two Content," might lend itself well to doing a summary annotation on the left side and an evaluative annotation on the right side.

I can also see students perhaps uploading their PowerPoint bibliographies into something like SlideShare or SlideBoom or SlideRocket and "publishing" it on the web.

I'll report back on how this works out.

A Possible Argument and Research Project

2009-10-06T17:04:00.005-05:00

Here are three related videos:

A Vision of Students Today (12 Oct. 2007): A short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today -- how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.( This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. So you are welcome to download it, share it, even change it, just as long as you give me some credit and you don't sell it or use it to sell anything.)

Embedded:

A Vision of K-12 Students Today (28 Nov. 2007): This project was created to inspire teachers to use technology in engaging ways to help students develop higher level thinking skills. Equally important, it serves to motivate district level leaders to provide teachers with the tools and training to do so.

Embedded:

A Vision of Community College Students Today (29 June 2009): Inspired by mwesch's YouTube video, "A Vision of Students Today" . . . For more information on Sussex County Community College and its anthropology department please visit http://sussex.edu/

Embedded:

Here might be one more video to consider:

Shift Happens

Embedded:

Possible Assignments:

1.) Write a response to one of the videos:

A personal response--how do your own experiences connect to the video? do your experiences further support, demonstrate, or illustrate ideas in the video? or, do your own experiences refute or contradict the video? etc.
An analytical response--what is the purpose or intent of the video? who is the intended audience for the video? what rhetorical strategies are used in the video (ethos, pathos, logos)? etc.
An argumentative or a persuasive response--do you agree with the ideas in one or more of the videos? do you disagree with the ideas in one or more of the videos? can you offer further support? can you offer counter-arguments? etc.

2.) Compare and contrast two of the videos

3.) Synthesize the main ideas in the videos

4.) Research

5.) Other

Revision Activity #2

2009-09-16T20:19:00.006-05:00

A set of related sites that I learned about last year on my sabbatical involve taking a text and creating visual depictions of it. (For more information, here is the "Tag Cloud" Wikipedia article.) These sites include:

Tag Cloud -- currently getting an overhaul, apparently.

Wordle

Make Cloud -- to make a Tag Cloud from an RSS feed.

Tag Crowd

and Many Eyes -- which is apparently a kind of user's guide (I'll have to explore this more).

Again, to try things out, I submitted the text from my short non-fiction piece, "Where's the Whistle," to Wordle, which has a nice "Randomize" feature and a print feature, but it does not allow me to embed it to my blog.

Tag Crowd allows for different submissions--web page URL, uploading a file, or copying-and-pasting text--and it also allows for embedding to a blog and sharing on FaceBook, del.icio.us, and Stumble It! Here's my Tag Crowd for my narrative essay:

created at TagCrowd.com

Again, I would be interested to see if my writing students, when using this, find any inspiration for further writing or revision--or for some sort of digital publishing. By allowing us to visualize word frequency, we might discover that our words are matching our message or that our most frequent words are really not that important. Try it out and let me know how it works for you!

Revision Activity #1

2009-09-16T20:04:00.004-05:00

I was made aware of "Gender Analyzer" and "Gender Genie" in one of the classes I took (EngL 4722: Alphabet to Internet: A History of Writing Technologies) at the U of MN last year during my sabbatical. I'm wondering if having my writing students use one of these sites during the writing process might somehow inspire revisions of a different sort--perhaps word choice, tone, etc.

"Gender Analyzer" seems to be strictly for online sites--one cannot upload a paper or text to this site for analysis.

"The Gender Genie" does allow for typing or pasting text into a box for analysis.

To try it out, I copied and pasted the text from a short non-fiction piece I had written in 2000 for the Minnesota Writing Project. The narrative is titled, "Where's the Whistle," and all of my current students have access to a copy of this.

Unfortunately, and embarrassingly, for me, "The Gender Genie" analysis determined that the writer of the piece was FEMALE! Yes, I kid you not. Here's the analysis:

Words: 1210
Female Score: 1690
Male Score: 1561
"The Gender Genie thinks the author of this page is: female!"

Hmm. I guess I've always been bookish and sensitive, but this is a little much. I'm going to go cry now. (Just kidding!)

I then tried typing my blog URL into "Gender Analyzer." This didn't help my ego much either. Their guess was 51% that it was written by a woman, but they admitted it was quite "gender neutral." (Thanks!) Hmm. I'm starting to think about the skit, "It's Pat," from Saturday Night Live, years ago!

Have fun with it. Does it change your opinion of your paper at all? Are you going to rewrite in any way based on this analysis? Let me know!

Group Project for CI 5410 (Fall 2008)

2009-09-16T19:53:00.002-05:00

I've just completed my sabbatical report for 2008-2009 and, while composing it, I realized that I had not yet posted this presentation to my blog.

In the fall of 2008, I took two classes at the University of Minnesota. One of those classes, "Special Topics in Literacy: Struggling Adolescent Readers," required a small-group project/presentation, which resulted in the following slideshow.

I gratefully acknowledge my two collaborators, Katie Bruhn (high school) and Emily Olson (middle school), for their contributions to this presentation; it was probably the best group project I was involved in during my sabbatical year and classwork. Thanks!

Graphic Novels

2009-05-21T15:49:00.007-05:00

As recently promised to a fellow teacher-scholar (Brent, teaching in Hopkins), here are a few of the graphic novels I'm considering for near-future literature classes. The first one is a collection of graphic short stories, all based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe:

I discovered another graphic novelist in a class I just completed at the University of Minnesota, Spring 2009: EngL 4722: From Alphabet to Internet: A History of Writing Technologies (Prof. Michael Hancher)--and I really recommend this class! The writer/artist's name is Adrian Tomine, and apparently he's done some really cool cover art work for The New Yorker magazine. Here's the book I'm considering:

A third novel under consideration is pretty obvious, I guess--obvious to those in the know, which doesn't always include me! Also, apparently, one of my nephews just did a presentation on this one for his Popular Literature class at University of Minnesota, Morris:

And finally, just because I love this comic strip. And, yes, I know that comic strips are not the same as graphic novels. But this cat is too funny:

That's all for now. Let me know your suggestions. I'm just getting into the groove ... or do I dare say it, Groovitude:

ARCC English Division Meeting 2009-04-08

2009-04-08T09:07:00.003-05:00

Here are a few links I might be mentioning in my presentation at the English Division meeting today:

Video:

YouTube Video: "A Vision of Students Today"

Wikis & Wikibooks:

Tag/Text Clouds:

Podcasts:

EdTechTalk
Teachers Teaching Teachers
EdTechWeekly
Women of Web 2.0
Digital Campus
EdTechCrew
The Tech Teachers

Let me know if you have any questions!

Book Recommendations & Practicing APA Style

2009-04-07T14:33:00.008-05:00

Some people have been asking me what I've been reading in my UMN classes on my sabbatical, so here's a reading list for everyone, in APA style (for some reason, the preferred style in most education courses). I've just included the many books; there have been many, many more articles. If you're interested in the articles, let me know and I'll show them to you; I also have digital copies of nearly all of the articles, if you want one or more.

EngL 4722 / "Alphabet to Internet: History of Writing Technologies" (Spring 2009)

Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.
Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy. London: Routledge.
Tribble, E. B., & Trubek, A. (2003). Writing material: Readings from Plato to the digital age. New York: Longman.
Zaid, G. (2003). So many books: Reading and publishing in an age of abundance. N. Wimmer (Trans.). Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books.

EdPA 5704 & EPsy 5451 / "College Students Today" (Spring 2009)

Baxter Magolda, M. B. (2001). Making their own way: Narratives for transforming higher education to promote self-development. Sterling, VA: Stylus.
Colby, A., Beaumont, E., et al. (2007). Educating for democracy: Preparing undergraduates for responsible political engagement. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Harper, S. R., & Quaye, S. J. (2009). Student engagement in higher education: Theoretical perspectives and practical approaches for diverse populations. New York: Routledge.
Kuh, G. D., Kinzie, J., et al. (2005). Student success in college: Creating conditions that matter. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Levin, J. S. (2007). Nontraditional students and community colleges: The conflict of justice and neoliberalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CI 5330 & CI 5475 / "Teaching Digital Writing: Blogs, Wikis, Online Talk, Podcasting, and E-portfolios to Teach Writing" (Fall 2008)

Beach, R., Anson, C., et al. (2009). Teaching writing using blogs, wikis, and other digital tools. New York: Columbia Teachers College Press. (?)
Gardner, S., & Birley, S. (2008). Blogging for dummies (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Hendron, J. G. (2008). RSS for educators: Blogs, newsfeeds, podcasts, and wikis in the classroom. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.
Morris, T., Tomasi, C., & Terra, E. (2008). Podcasting for dummies (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

CI 5410 / "Struggling Adolescent Readers" (Fall 2008)

Schoenbach, R., Greenleaf, C., Cziko, C., & Hurwitz, L. (1999). Reading for understanding: A guide to improving reading in middle and high school classrooms: The Reading Apprenticeship guidebook. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass and WestEd.

EdPA 5704 Article Presentation

2009-02-22T18:21:00.005-06:00

Citation:

Bartholomae, David. "Inventing the University." When a Writer Can’t Write: Studies in Writer’s Block and Other Composing Process Problems. Ed. Mike Rose. New York: Guilford, 1985. 134-165. Rpt. in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. Ed. Victor Villanueva, Jr. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1997. 589-619.

Summary:

"Inventing the University" means learning to speak the language of higher education--more specifically, having to speak (and write) the discourses of the various communities (usually, academic disciplines) of college. This skill is asked of students quite quickly, usually before the skill is "learned," and this can cause problems. Most college freshman do not yet know the conventions, they do not yet know the jargon, and they cannot yet create (or sustain) a voice of authority, particularly when the audience is their professors; the students may be aware of this "privileged" language, but they cannot yet control it. In section II, Bartholomae reviews the general theory of audience awareness, the cognitive theorists’ view of the composing process compared to the social theorists’ view, and contemporary rhetorical theory’s concept of “’codes’ that constitute discourse” and applies them to the idea of "inventing the university." In section III, Bartholomae provides and then analyzes five representative samples of student writing (out of 500 placement essays reviewed), eventually ranking them based on how the writers’ "ability to imagine privilege enabled writing" (607). Ultimately, educators must accept that as our students struggle with a difficult and unfamiliar language, their papers will not be error-free nor have elegant syntax.

Why It Was Important to Me:

"Discourse communities"--also, "interpretive communities" (Fish)
Definition(s) of "basic writers"
Definition(s) of "commonplace"
"Writer-based prose" vs. "reader-based prose"
Cognitive vs. social-epistemic composing theories
Types or frequencies of error

Why I Find It Professionally Useful:

"Much of the written work that students do is test-taking, report, or summary--work that places them outside the official discourse of the academic community, where they are expected to admire and report on what we do, rather than inside that discourse, where they can do its work and participate in a common enterprise" (599).
"One response to the problems of basic writers, then, would be to determine just what the community’s conventions are, so that those conventions could be written out, 'demystified' and taught in our classrooms" (601).
"In fact, one of the problems with curricula designed to aid basic writers is that they too often begin with the assumption that the key distinguishing feature of a basic writer is the presence of sentence-level error" (612).

Final Project Links

2008-12-16T09:54:00.005-06:00

There are two parts to my final project:

An informal survey (using SurveyMonkey) of students at my college
A wiki

A "summary report" (a brief version of the survey and results) is available here: a Google Docs Presentation.

Embedded:

The full version of the survey (including results for each question) is available here: a Google Docs Presentation.

Embedded:

The wiki is a revision of the WritingMinnesota wiki I started on weeks ago.

I'm glad we had the freedom to do what we wanted to do for our final project. I think both parts have been and will be very helpful to me in planning my courses for next year.

Final "Portfolio" Reflection #4

2008-12-15T17:04:00.004-06:00

Of everything we've covered in class, what are two examples of things that I will definitely use in my teaching?

My final project, which I will probably post next, should answer this question clearly, but I can summarize that here.

First, I will definitely be assigning an "interactive presentation" of some sort, but for which assignment, or using what topic, I am not yet sure. For this, students will need to use PowerPoint, KeyNote, Google Docs, SlideRocket, SlideBoom, SlideShare, VoiceThread, or something similar. They will not be able to "talk at us," and the criteria for slide composition will be strict -- slides will definitely not be "text dumps." And I think my colleagues in the Speech Department will love me for teaching this unit; I think they already require the use of PowerPoint in student speeches.

Wait, Here's An Assignment Idea:

I could have groups of students (3-4 per group) do "research" to look for and analyze images or portrayals of contemporary college students in the media--print media (books, newspapers, magazines) and online media (websites, podcasts, blogs, video, etc.). The groups could then present their "media" (and their "remixes"?) and their analyses using one of the presentation applications mentioned above. Ooo, I think I like this idea!

O.K., Now I'm Back:

Second, I will definitely be rethinking "peer review" in my courses. I might do one, the first one of the term, the "traditional" way, in class, face-to-face, in pairs, trios, or groups of four. Let them experience it, and then really talk about it afterwards--"deconstruct" it and evaluate it. After that, I'll probably have them try Google Docs, since Professor Beach mentioned in his midterm evaluation of my blog that it will be the easiest, as opposed to using a wiki or a blog. And "training" students for peer review is always important--training and modeling--so I will need to rethink how I will present and have them carry out the peer review.

An "Aside":

(Is peer review going the way of citing sources ... in the digital world? It seems like citing sources has become a lot more informal ... "hey, just create a link, that's good enough." Is peer review merging with collaborative writing? Instead of just responding to a "text," or inserting comments into a "text," are students going to start just "playing around" with the text themselves, in an attempt to help out the writer? Is this bad? But what if the assignment is not a collaborative writing assignment? Or is all writing becoming collaborative? And do we need to start re-envisioning peer review to be something else?)

O.K., Now I'm Back:

Third, I will definitely introduce "Bubbl.us" as a prewriting and an organizational tool!

Fourth, I will definitely have a class wiki, but as you've read in other posts, I'm not sure yet what I'll have students contribute to that.

In Conclusion:

I am excited about all this! I'm interested to see how my students will react to all this. I'm interested to know how many have already done things like this. (And that's kind of what my final project was getting at. So I suppose I should end here and embed that project in the next post.)

Final "Portfolio" Reflection #3

2008-12-15T16:43:00.003-06:00

Will I have my students keep and present a final portfolio of their coursework? Yes, definitely.

How will I have my students keep and present their final portfolios? Their individual blogs? The course wiki? Individual wikis? The "eFolio" from the State of Minnesota. Ugh! I don't know. Yet. Perhaps I should let them choose? Or would that cause too many headaches?

What will I have my students include in the portfolio? The answer to this one is easier. Our English Department at Anoka Ramsey Community College already has a portfolio process and committee -- and I have participated in this process in the past, but not consistently. If my memory is correct, the current portfolio process for English 1121, our college-level first-year writing course, asks for the following:

A cover letter or introductory piece, which also serves as the reflective piece.
An essay of the student's choice, preferably expository or persuasive, with all drafts from first to final.
The argumentative research paper, with all drafts and with all cited research sources.
An in-class essay.

A student can, of course, include more, but these are the minimum requirements.

I see now that some things are going to have to be modified if I'm going to have my students do this "digitally," especially the last two items.

For item #3, including all cited research sources shouldn't be too difficult -- most of this should be possible with hyperlinks. And, if a source is not "online," hopefully we'll be able to attach PDF files somehow. And, even better, I ask my students to highlight in their sources the material they cite in their paper, and they should be able to use the highlighter feature in Adobe for this! If nothing else, I can have my students do what I had to do for Professor O'Brien's "Struggling Adolescent Readers" course: they can send to me a compressed/zipped folder containing all their documents.

For item #4, this will be trickier. The intention behind the in-class essay is to see what a student can do on his or her own, without multiple drafts and without peer feedback. Partly, it exhibits a student's writing fluency, and partly it is a plagiarism check. To have students write this on a computer, or online, does present some challenges to both of these purposes, since blog posts or Word documents can be easily changed, after the posting or initial draft, and it is pretty much impossible to prevent this ... and useless, hopeless, unnecessary, etc. ... to "police" it.

Including other digital projects -- such as VoiceThreads or SlideRockets or YouTube videos -- should also be easy. Hyperlinks can be created and copied, or HTML code can be embedded.

Ultimately, for me, the first decision seems to be the "form" the portfolio will take ... blog, wiki, or eFolio?

And, ultimately, for the students, the reflective piece will hopefully be the most important.

Final "Portfolio" Reflection #2

2008-12-15T15:15:00.003-06:00

What have I learned in class, and how have I changed because of the class? Wow! This post could be lengthy, but much of it I covered in the previous post, so I'll just add a few more comments here.

This class was the perfect class for me at the perfect time. First, both "fortuitous" and "serendipitous" come to mind as I try to describe that day back in August 2008 when I decided to check the UMN course schedule one last time. I don't know how I had overlooked the course before; I don't know if the double-numbering (5475/5330) threw me off, or if the 5330 description wasn't added until later on. However, I do know that the certificate program I am in did not leave a lot of "wiggle room" in terms of electives; perhaps that also partially blinded me, until I decided I might be able to petition for a change, which I did.

Second, I am grateful to be on sabbatical, to have the time to devote to the course, to be able to find my way about the course and all the "digital tools" without the distractions I would have if I were teaching at the same time. I don't know how my colleagues/classmates in this class, who are also teaching, can do it. I'm sure they're doing just fine, but I've never been one who works well with many things going on all at once.

Finally, this class provided the structure and learning environment I needed, especially for this particular topic. I don't know if I would have taken on "Digital Writing" on my own, and I don't think I would have learned as much if I had tried to do it on my own. But I do know that my comfort level -- with technology in general, and with the "digital tools" we've covered in particular -- has risen immensely. I feel I will be able to return to the classroom in the Fall of 2009, not only ready to include some of these things in my courses, but also able to introduce them with a fair measure of confidence.

I do know, however, that I need to do more thinking and brainstorming about specific applications of the digital tools I have learned:

What, exactly, am I going to ask my students to contribute to the class wiki?
How, exactly, am I going to ask my students to conduct peer reviews?
Am I going to ask my students to blog, and, if so, about what?
I know I'm going to include an "interactive presentation" as part of my course, but what is going to be the assignment, or the topic, for these presentations?

I expected that this course would answer many of my questions about technology, and about teaching with technology -- and it has. It has even answered questions I didn't know I had. But, equally importantly and frustratingly, it has raised even more questions that I still don't know the answers to. But this happens to good teachers, right? It's the not-so-good teachers who neither ask questions nor seek to answer them -- the "cruise-control-set-on-retirement" teachers. And, unfortunately, they are out there.

Final "Portfolio" Reflection #1

2008-12-15T13:46:00.006-06:00

Well, it looks like I've written 35 or 36 posts since I began this blog back in September! Wow! Time sure has flown. And, I can't believe I've written that much. I had figured 1-2 a week for the 15-week semester, which would be about 15-30. Well, I guess it's close. (Too many "wells"? I'm still not sure if I've found my "tone" or "voice" yet!)

The first major thing that comes to mind when reviewing my posts is something Alyssa R. said to me in class a few weeks ago: "These blogs sure are public." When I asked her what she meant, she replied that someone from SlideRocket had found her blog, and her post about SlideRocket, and they had left a comment for her. Like me, I think she thought no one would find these blogs except our classmates. But someone had found hers! Then, just a day or so later, I saw a comment to my podcasting post, and Chuck Tomasi (one of the co-authors of Podcasting for Dummies) had left a comment thanking me for using and mentioning Podcasting for Dummies in my blog! Then, a few days after that, the SlideRocket people had also found my SlideRocket presentation and blog post, and had left a message as well. Of course, it's all about recognizing "product placement" and advertising, but it's also "cool" to think that these blogs are "out there, and lovin' every minute of it," as Kramer once said on Seinfeld.

My best blog post? Maybe the two posts about American Literature, and comparing my course to a course Donald Ross is currently teaching. But why are these the best? Maybe because they were not assigned for my Digital Writing class. (Which is where we want our students to also end up, eventually.) But also maybe because I'm really enjoying my sabbatical and having the time to do things like this, to take this Digital Writing course, and to sit in on another course that I enjoy teaching. So, I don't know if the two posts are necessarily "good" because of the writing itself but because I enjoyed the creation of them, the experiences which led up to them.

Likewise, my "worst" blog post ... perhaps the one(s) having to do with podcasting ... because I struggled, at first, and partly throughout, with the podcasting activity itself, with figuring out Audacity, with take after take, with finding music, with editing. But by the time I was looking for music, and editing, and using the envelope tool, I was actually starting to have a bit of fun.

So that may be the "key" for me, the criterion that I would use for evaluating my blog posts: Which activities gave me the most frustration and struggle, and which activities were fun (or even became fun as time moved along)?

Frustrations:

Podcasting (recording and editing audio) ... the first three-quarters of it
Vlogging (recording and editing video) ... I don't actually consider what I did to be a vlog ... OK, it's definitely NOT a vlog, I do know that ... and it took a long time ... but again, the fun came later, when I got the "hang" of iMovie ... and it was fun to use video of my cat and creatively connect it to writing ... and it was fun to actually post something to YouTube!

Enjoyments:

Creating the WritingMinnesota wiki
Bubbl.us
Flickr SlideShow
VoiceThread (x2)
SlideRocket Presentation

These were all "new" tools for me, they were fun, I had to be somewhat creative (although I'm not creative at all), and I tried to always connect it to my teaching, although often in somewhat goofy ways. But, hey, it's a start ... and I might even have the courage to show these to my students as "rough models."

And that's what I have to keep doing: reflecting on HOW AND WHY I might have my students use these tools. Yes, I want them to have fun, to be motivated and engaged, but I also want them to be writing and to be improving their writing. And I want to be confident that these tools are indeed helping them to do that.

Connecting My Reading Course to My Digital Writing Course

2008-12-12T10:45:00.003-06:00

I found an interesting quote, when I was reviewing my notes in my Reading course, for my final paper, which I thought applied to my Digital Writing course as well.

Donna Alvermann, in her "white paper," "Effective Literacy Instruction for Adolescents" (2001), offers the following analysis:

Without critical literacy instruction that is sensitive to youth’s and adults’ needs, however, little may be gained from venturing into these environments. For example, in a study of two girls’ out-of-school instant messaging (IM) practices, Lewis and Fabbo (2000) documented the girls’ intricate manipulations of friends and social situations as the two adolescents simultaneously went about constructing their own identities, seemingly with little critical awareness for how the chat/IM technology might be manipulating them and their literacy practices. Adults who worry about young people’s identity constructions vis-à-vis the new technologies would do well to examine the parallels and disjunctures between their own such constructions and those of adolescents (Hagood, Stevens, & Reinking, in press; Lewis & Finders, in press). For in doing so, they may come to understand better the futility of asking young people to critique the very texts they find most pleasurable. For such a request, as Luke (1997) has adroitly noted, would likely “cue a critical response which can often be an outright lie…[because while youth] are quick to talk a good anti-sexist, anti-racist, pro-equity game…what they write in the essay or what they tell us in classroom discussion is no measure of what goes on in their heads” (p. 43).

This calls to mind my previous post about asking students to analyze and evaluate a blog or a website. Will their analysis be critical, in-depth, and honest, or will they just be telling me what they think I want to hear? Will this be a problem with any inquiry-based project? I definitely need to give this more thought!

Work Cited

Alvermann, D. E. (2001). Effective Literacy Instruction for Adolescents. Executive Summary and Paper Commissioned by the National Reading Conference. Chicago, IL: National Reading Conference.

Giving Digital and/or Online Feedback to Students

2008-12-12T10:04:00.004-06:00

The presentation by Kristen Jameson and Linda Clemons, from the University of Minnesota's "Student Writing Center," in class on November 25, 2008, was very eye-opening for me. It looks like they are doing some great things with "SWS Online"--very much advanced from the traditional sit-down-together-one-on-one writing conference. See their website for more information. Also, check out the more general website on the writing center at UMN.

My first reaction to their presentation was, "This would be great to do with my own students, especially if I begin teaching fully online courses, or even partially online "hybrid" courses. I was a big "fan" of Donald Murray in graduate school--and one other guy who's name I can't think of right now--and I have twice tried courses where the students and I met as a group very infrequently, and the rest of the time was spent in individual conferences.

My second reaction to their presentation was, "Wow, this would sure take a lot of time" ... time, Time, TIME ... which is already an issue for all writing instructors who use a process-approach to writing and who try to provide their students with various forms of feedback, both formative and summative, throughout the process of each paper and throughout the course. (And not an issue at all for more traditional teachers who don't assign or read multiple drafts, and who only put a few comments and the grade on the final product ... much like my own freshman composition instructor!)

Of course, an "online" conference, using IM-ing or even Skype, might help to engage and motivate students who are not challenged, engaged, or motivated with more "traditional" teaching methods. But it would have to be carefully thought through and planned.

And I even like the idea of online peer review, but again, sorting out all the logistics seems daunting! And, would an online peer review even make sense to do in a computer lab where students are sitting right next to each other? Maybe, even quite possibly or probably. Students might write more, and they might approach response differently, given this new "medium" for peer review. But what would I use: a wiki, a chat room, a discussion board in D2L, ...?

I also like the idea, given either in class or in the textbook, Teaching Writing Using Blogs, Wikis, and Other Digital Tools, where a rubric is kept in digital form, opened each time a professor grades a paper, comments inserted directly into the rubric, the rubric saved under a different file name, and the rubric then attached to the paper, or, more digitally, emailed to the student. But, again, my concern is TIME.

TIME is also a concern for students emailing their papers to me, me saving and then opening each one, me reading and commenting using MS Word's Insert Comments and/or Track Changes features, and then me saving and emailing the paper back to the students. I like the idea, in theory, but in practice it still seems daunting. But I might have to give it a go to see how it goes.

Finally, TIME is also a concern for me if I choose to digitally record comments about a student's work, as both of my professors--Dr. Richard Beach and Dr. David O'Brien--are doing for me/us this semester. I think I heard that I would actually need two computers, one for the blog, or wiki, or document, or whatever, that I was looking at, reading, analyzing, and evaluating, and another one for the recording, with Audacity open and ready to go. The recording would have to be made, the MP3 encoding would have to be done (using LAME), the file would have to be saved, and then the file would have to be emailed back to the student--perhaps along with their paper. My college doesn't have a Media Mill server or feature, as the U of MN does, so I couldn't just email students a link to their comments.

And I wonder if students would listen to their comments, right away or even at all. When I received my digital comments from both professors this semester, I didn't immediately "open" them and listen, as I would if I got a hard copy of my paper handed back to me with notes in the margins. It's a new way of thinking for me. Maybe my students are already there, maybe not.

Also, my regular teaching load is 3 writing courses and 1 literature course each semester. Writing courses enroll 26 or 28 students, depending if the course is college-level or developmental, respectively, while literature courses can enroll up to 50 students. With this load and number of students, I don't think there's any way to give the kinds of feedback I've gotten this semester. Prof. O'Brien not only gave me recorded comments but also used the Word commenting feature to insert specific comments throughout my paper. And Prof. Beach gave me extended recorded comments. (Of course, there's also the difference between undergraduate and graduate level courses, I don't think my UMN professors are teaching more than 1 or 2 courses each semester, and my Reading course has only 12 students in it while my Digital Writing course has between 20 and 25.)

Analyzing Readability in a Blog or Website

2008-12-11T16:12:00.004-06:00

This was the suggested blog post/topic assigned for my digital writing class on Nov. 18, 2008, in preparation, I think, for our creation of interactive PowerPoint (or SlideShare, or SlideRocket, or VoiceThread) presentations.

However, instead of doing the assigned post first, I jumped right into the creation of my interactive SlideRocket presentation, which has already been posted on my blog (see past posts below), but I thought I'd return to this post, if only for some reflection on the assignment ... since I don't think I'm going to actually do the assignment!

I think that this would be a great assignment to give to my college students, but I think the key ingredient for the assignment would be to make sure students have clear criteria for analysis and evaluation in mind before they go out in search of a blog or website to analyze/evaluate, but especially before they begin the actual analysis and evaluation. And, like I've done in the past, discussing and creating/developing this criteria together as a group is a better use of time than me just lecturing to them about what to look for.

I don't remember, now, if we discussed potential criteria for analysis/evaluation in class, but I remember that our course text, Teaching Writing Using Blogs, Wikis, and Other Digital Tools, includes a nice discussion of this topic. My intial thoughts about criteria include:

General, overall structure of the blog or website: top banner(s)? sidebar(s)? construction of the main body--one column, two columns, three columns, etc.? bottom banner(s)?
Specific construction within these main structural components
Use of colors
Use of fonts
Use of "graphics"--still images, and/or video, and/or other graphic-design features
Use of "sound"--music, voice, etc.
Use of text
Length of text
Readability of text
"Interactive" components--comment sections, chat rooms, surveys, quizzes, games, etc.

This assignment now seems somewhat similar to two other assignments I used to give:

A "rhetorical analysis" of an essay, focusing on how the "techniques" used in an essay (usually narrative or expository)--such as structure/organization, examples, details, introductory strategies, conclusion strategies, syntax, diction, style, tone, etc.--helped the writer accomplish her/his purpose for his/her audience.
A "critique" of an argumentative/persuasive essay, primarily focusing on Aristotle's "three appeals"--ethos, pathos, logos--but also on other argumentative/persuasive strategies used by the writer to accomplish her/his purpose for his/her audience.

Yes, yes, I know: fairly straight-forward and very traditional assignments--and, students would say, both challenging and "boring." And not at all "digital" or Web 2.0.

I think a "blend" of the old and the new will be where I start, when I begin planning my courses and assignments for next year.