I’m taking three courses this winter, and each professor uses SmartSite differently. One posts assignments for me to download, complete, and print – so I don’t actually submit assignments online – but she returns grades through Gradebook2 tool. Another uses the dropbox for me to submit assignments, but does not use Gradebook2 – she returns grades in class. Finally, my third professor uses the Assignments tool, but does not use Gradebook2, and her primary use of the site is as an online database of resources related to the course content.

My point is that every professor uses SmartSite a little differently, so it’s important to communicate your uses of educational technology to your students.

How do you prepare students for your unique use of SmartSite?

Welcome to installment 5/10 of “How Twitter Saved my Literature Class: A Case Study with Discussion.” For more on teaching with twitter and previous installments of this article, please visit the Wheel’s social media section. 

While I was optimistic that with Twitter I could address my timeliness and relevance concerns with the QQC assignment, I hadn’t anticipated my students’ initial objections. Student pushback was immediate, and actually rooted in impressions they had formed from media representations. Few of them had Twitter accounts, and many of them originally thought of Twitter as picayune, specious and faddish – a needless means to update friends on meal choices, or a way for Hollywood celebrities to blather about their whims to vapid fans. How could students represent or quote a meaningful or substantive portion of a literary text using only 140 characters? How could that same character limit allows students to respond to each other’s questions? What thesis statement could be that short and still make a meaningful assertion?

These were all valid concerns, and many of them were debated in class. And the debate was fruitful, for as we talked I realized that my students were learning important lessons about communication, clear thinking, and clear writing. Having taught writing classes for 20 years, I was comfortable leading debates about the tools, processes, and strategies for writing clear and substantive prose, but in the literature classes I teach I usually leave far less time for this focus on process. I enjoyed hearing my students’ comments about rhetorical strategies, the paths to successful writing, for I knew such discussions would help them deepen and clarify their thinking, and submit stronger essays about assigned stories.

As this was the first time that I taught with Twitter in a college class, I had a number of misconceptions about possible uses of the tool that my students helped me address and resolve. At first I thought that Twitter would function merely as a place to share among the students the QQCs that otherwise they would share only with me. I imagined that all the students could benefit from the opportunity to review each other’s insights, each other’s favorite quotations, and each other’s questions about the text. In class some students would reflect on another student’s submitted QQCs, but they also began registering complaints with Twitter. When Twitter was used only to list my students’ QQCs, that is, their questions, quotations, and comments, interest in reading the other students’ tweets sank.

But when certain enterprising students responded to each other’s questions, and many conversations broke out, students became deeply engaged, and ended up writing much more than was required about the stories we read. This practice by the students corroborates many lessons that we know about learning, such as the need to inspire intrinsic motivation for students to take on assigned tasks and projects (Malone & Lepper, 1987). In their discussion of an organismic (or active and volitional) motivational theory, Deci and Ryan (1985) assert that “The active-organism view treats stimuli not as causes of behavior, but as affordances and opportunities that the organism can utilize in satisfying its needs.” From my perspective as a teacher, I should have recognized that Twitter should not have been used merely as a means of enforcing preparation through the recording of QQCs. Twitter gave me another chance to focus on learning rather than teaching, and I almost missed the opportunity.

Discussions with students helped me realize that this social impetus to read, to ask questions, to hear them answered, and in short to socialize while engaging with sometimes difficult texts, would appeal to my students and drive them to make discoveries that I might not have anticipated. I listened and learned, and the class policy sheet on the desired function for Twitter evolved alongside our understanding of the texts.

Jones, A. “How Twitter Saved my Literature Class: A Case Study with Discussion.” (2011). Teaching Arts and Science with the New Social Media. A collection edited by Charles Wankel. United Kingdom: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 91-106.

Writing videos available on the Davis library site.

Do you have students who have questions about writing? Dr. James Carey (Entomology), Dr. Sarah Perrault (University Writing Program), and graduate student Shruti Dave have produced 14 great videos you can use. These 1-5 minute videos cover topics such as Picking a Topic, Types of Sources, and creating a Complete Working Draft.

The videos are housed on the UC Davis Library Instruction Services page: http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/dept/instruc/research/videos/

You can send students to this link, or embed the videos on your SmartSite.

The first time a computer crashed on me, it was devastating. I was a sophomore in college and had just finished my final papers for the semester, but I also had hundreds of photos, all of my music, and a nearly complete novel. When my laptop was stolen a year later, the loss was expensive, but less dramatic – I had all of my “personal” files saved to a hard drive, and my term papers were stored on the university server. When my desktop mysteriously deleted my files a few months ago, it was no big deal; all my personal files were on the external hard drive and everything else was on Dropbox.

If it hasn’t already, your computer will crash at some point. Here are a few backup options (if you use something else, please share!):

• External hard drive
• Mozy (automatically synchs your files to an online server)
• Dropbox (stores your files online and allows you to share with other users)
• Time Capsule (automatic wireless backup for Mac)
• Create a SmartSite (allows you to share with others, but limited space)

Frequently backup your data so you don’t feel like this guy!

Welcome to installment 4/10 of “How Twitter Saved my Literature Class: A Case Study with Discussion.” For more on teaching with twitter and previous installments of this article, please visit the Wheel’s social media section. 

I first encountered Twitter as a journalist. Having hosted a humanities computing public affairs radio show since 2000 (called “Dr. Andy’s Poetry and Technology Hour“), I knew about the importance of Twitter from a social networking and business standpoint. In 2007 Time Magazine had written that Twitter was “on its way to becoming the next killer app” (Hamilton), and the New York Times said that Twitter was “one of the fastest growing phenomena on the internet” (Pontin, 2007). Twitter’s growth has been sustained over the last few years, as evidenced by the 1100% year-over-year growth from the beginning to the end of 2008. 75 million people visited Twitter.com in January of 2010, and all those twitterers sent about 1.2 billion tweets, each 140 characters or less, and most of them read by fans and followers (Schonfeld, 2010). During the summer that I taught the short fiction class, huge numbers of Iranian dissidents had used Twitter to circumvent state run media and their government’s attempts at censorship to communicate with each other and with the world. The evening news ran “illegal” YouTube footage of millions of protesters marching through the streets of Iran, and newscasters and other journalists began describing the unrest as a “Twitter revolution” (Morozov, 2009).

2009 Iran Election Protest

I was covering the Twitter phenomenon and the use of Twitter by Iranian dissidents on my radio show, so I was sold on the idea that this new social networking interface was becoming increasingly important, as well as adaptable. If millions of dissidents could hatch complex protest strategies using Twitter, I thought, then my students and I should be able to use the same tool to discuss Edgar Allan Poe and Anton Chekhov. I hoped that I had discovered a way to make QQCs more relevant and helpful, and that we could use this trendy tool to share our thoughts, paperlessly, with everyone in the class.

Jones, A. “How Twitter Saved my Literature Class: A Case Study with Discussion.” (2011). Teaching Arts and Science with the New Social Media. A collection edited by Charles Wankel. United Kingdom: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 91-106.

If you have ever reported a bug or concern to IT Express, or requested a feature request that you think would make SmartSite more functional to you, you probably received an immediate, automated reply, as well as a personalized response with some helpful information soon thereafter. IT Express is the best contact point for UC Davis faculty with straightforward requests for information or explanations of the uses and intricacies of SmartSite tools, but that doesn’t mean that the IET team can immediately fix a perceived problem. Fixing bugs is a multi-step process, and one that depends upon (and starts with) a user request.

Instructional Coordinator Steve Faith recently shared the steps of that process with us:

Step One. You request changing a feature or fixing a bug in SmartSite by contacting IT Express (smartsite-help@ucdavis.edu or 754-HELP).

Step Two. People like Steve search through the UC Davis ticket system, the ticket system of rSmart (the company that hosts SmartSite for UC Davis), and the Sakai Foundation’s ticket system to see if someone else already submitted a similar request. If that’s the case, Steve will reply to you with an update on how the issue is being resolved.

Step Three. If no one else has made a similar request, Steve creates a new ticket with the appropriate entity (UC Davis, rSmart, or the Sakai Foundation), and then closes the IT Express ticket.

SmartSite Ecosystem

If you get curious and request a status update from Steve, then he reopens the IT Express ticket, repeats Step Two, and replies to your email with an update on the ticket.

You can see why the IT Express system exists – it’s much easier for a professional like Steve to interpret where the ticket should go – but you may still wonder why there are three separate ticketing systems at all.

The Sakai Foundation includes 6-10 collaborative partners, who all have their own versions of SmartSite (that is, Sakai-driven learning management systems with other names). Tickets get sent here when it’s a system-wide issue that affects all partners. rSmart hosts UC Davis’ version of Sakai, meaning they are responsible for all Davis-specific issues, with one exception: Gradebook2. UC Davis programmers designed Gradebook2, we are proud to say, so we resolve those issues through the UC Davis ticket system.

If the ticket goes to UC Davis, we can resolve the issue fairly quickly, but if it goes to rSmart or the Sakai Foundation, then we have to wait for a system-wide release, which only happens once a year. Meanwhile, Steve, Andy Jones, and the entire SmartSite team meet once a week at SmartSite Support and Training meetings to review individual tickets, and trends in expressed faculty concerns about our learning management system.

Please always be in touch with IT Express about your instructional technology (especially SmartSite) needs; that way, we can better understand how we can continue to improve SmartSite, and all the players working to maintain it.

Welcome to installment 3/10 of “How Twitter Saved my Literature Class: A Case Study with Discussion.” For more on teaching with twitter and previous installments of this article, please visit the Wheel’s social media section. 

My thinking about how best to use Twitter was informed by a teaching technique that I borrowed from a mentor of mine, Professor emeritus Jon Wagner of the School of Education at UC Davis. Wagner requires students enrolled in some of his large enrollment classes submit daily responses to assigned readings. Rather than creating study questions for each assigned text, Wagner requires only that students submit a single one-page document that include salient quotations from the text, one or more questions about difficult concepts or obscure passages, and one or more comments about a crucial or central topic or concern raised by the previous night’s reading (personal communication, 2007). These documents are called QQCs, standing in this instance for Quotation, Question, and Comment. The best of these comments function as the equivalent of thesis statements: interesting and debatable assertions that require supporting evidence from the text. By collecting these QQCs, and offering commentary on students’ thinking, the instructor can provide necessary feedback on a student’s understanding of concepts encountered in the assigned texts as well as answer questions posed directly to the instructor.

The QQC approach helps to ensure that students complete the reading for class and gives the instructor a sense of students’ discoveries and misconceptions; however, a number of concerns remain: first, at least in a summer class, the course moves so quickly that timing alone makes the instructor’s comments decreasingly relevant and perhaps decreasingly helpful. General concepts can be illuminated by an instructor’s comments, but generally an instructor will find it challenging to offer responses that are both substantive and still current. The second concern is that faculty cannot provide feedback in time to improve classroom discussion, the class activity that determines the success of a class. Students who dutifully complete their QQCs would come to class better prepared to speak, but they would not arrive with the benefits of having those ideas subjected to peer or instructor review. The time-delayed insights are revealed only to the instructor, and his insights sharpen student thinking only on stories that had already been discussed. I decided for my summer literature class that it was time for a new tactic, a new tool to make the daily assignments of the submission of QQCs more interactive, social, and immediate. For our fast-moving summer class, I told students, they would be using Twitter as a means of submitting and sharing their QQCs.

Jones, A. “How Twitter Saved my Literature Class: A Case Study with Discussion.” (2011). Teaching Arts and Science with the New Social Media. A collection edited by Charles Wankel. United Kingdom: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 91-106.

At the FUSS meeting on Friday, Steve Faith gave a great presentation about lecture capture. Read the minutes, or check out his Keynote presentation.

On Thursday, February 2, the fifth annual Academic Literacy Summit, an all-day event for regional K-12 educators, explored the question: What’s at the core of academic literacy?

The day began with a keynote by Carlston Family Foundation outstanding teacher award winner, Jose Rivas, who essentially taught us a high school physics lesson, but also narrated the process so we understood the reasoning behind his techniques. I was blown away by his use of technology and his emphasis on learning via exploration. In one hour, Rivas showed six video clips (including Action Figure Slow Motion Punches and F = MA music video), assigned two interactive activities (we built a catapult for a marble and tested whether a marble or our neighbor was harder to move), and suggested multiple reflective activities (via journal and mind map).

Our marble catapult

The afternoon keynote was UC Davis alumna Luciana de Oliveira (now at Purdue University). She shared her analysis of the California Common Core standards for language arts, highlighting the continuum of expectations these standards create across grade levels. (For example, kindergarteners are taught the concept of “linking words,” which is developed into “transitions” by high school.)

In addition to the keynote speakers, there were several morning and afternoon breakout sessions. I enjoyed UNR writing center director Bill Macauley’s morning session, which explored the transition between high school and college writing. Our group included middle school, high school, and college instructors, as well as librarians, which made for a fantastic conversation about lower- and higher-order writing concerns.

Bill Macauley's "Audience Analysis: What should we be asking of student writers?" breakout session

In the afternoon breakout session, “You Can Have it All: Academic Literacy, Critical Thinking, and Student Engagement through the Common Core,” Nicole Kukrai led us in an analysis of Anna Quindlen’s “A Quilt of a Country” and simultaneously explaining her classroom “routines.” Because the Common Core standards emphasize collaboration and independence, Kukrai purposefully creates an environment in which students are expected to model “real-world” behaviors and productive adult conversations. There is no hand-raising, she frequently asks students to elaborate on their peers’ ideas, and she requires multiple readings of a text.

It was a thought-provoking day!

When you go to a conference for teachers, there's a lot of hand-raising.

The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning is offering a faculty workshop series, “Designing Courses for Hybrid Delivery.” The eight-week course begins Tuesday, February 14, and faculty who participate in seven of the eight workshops will receive a $250 mini-grant.

Space is limited, so register early by emailing Rosemary Capps at rcapps@ucdavis.edu.

For more details, including a description of each week’s activities, please visit http://cetl.ucdavis.edu/designing-hybrid-courses.