It's complicated

In the last week or two we have had some excitement in the course. I tried to introduce a couple more websites--deli.cioi.us and zotero--but they didn't go over too well with my students. They are fed up with having to manage all the sites and passwords. I don't blame them. I am so gungho about this web2.0 stuff and just imagined that they would be too but it's not that easy.

I went back to the Research Plan assignment and revised it to include the old standard methods of gathering sources and citing them. I've given them more choices and will encourage those who want to join me on those new websites that help people write and collaborate better. I've put up a group to that effect in Ning. I don't imagine I will have many takers but so be it. The rest of the semester will be about the writing and less about the technology.

I also went through the process of asking them if they wanted to make our Ning network a public network. The vote was 70% in favor but I decided not to change it. If 30% didn't want to change it to public that seems a goodly amount. After all, it would mean that some of them would have to go in and edit out certain things they have put up in the network. Sometimes you can't go back on decisions that were made because people get used to how things work and don't want to change. Next time I will make it public from the beginning. They should experience what it means to write for the open Web.

Facebook1

In Saturday's NYT there was an interesting OpEd piece by Alice Mathias entitled "The Facebook Generation." Mathias is a recent graduate from Dartmouth and might know a thing or two about how college students use Facebook. And she does! She says that since Facebook has been opened up to everyone earlier this year, that it has been trying to become a more traditional, functional networking tool between people with common interests instead of what it has always been for students: "online community theater." What does this mean for me and my class which is trying to use a the networking site Ning?

Ning could be said to be a ripoff of Facebook. It has all the components of Facebook--profile and comment page, forums and groups, the ability to upload media. I do operate it as a closed space, a
"walled garden" so to speak. I have not defined it as different from Facebook. I expect students to use the skills they've honed in Facebook and use them for academic purposes. But now I learn that the skills they have are skills that relate more to self display then to actual networking or collaboration, so it seems that I have to more rigidly define our Ning space and oppose it to Facebook then to say: Ok, now do what you've been doing on Facebook but make it some how a part of the course work that allows you to become a better writer. Or, I could try to interrogate how self display could become an asset to learning to write better?

Another idea has come to me from reading the discussions in the Ning network: College 2.0. Laura Gibbs talks about the biggest difference between Facebook and a network such as Ning is that Facebook is "locked down". You can open Ning up to the public. For instance, College 2.0 is open to everyone but you have to be a member to post. My classroom Ning network is private. I thought that would be a good idea for the privacy of my students but she says that it's better to open it up so students can write to a wider audience and experience what that is like. Opening up our Ning network might emphasize my desire that students learn to write for a particular audience and might give them a clear distinction between Facebook and our "academic network" for first-year writing.

6th week course survey

I surveyed my two seat classes yesterday (using fo.reca.st) to see how we were doing. The verdict was ok, not great but ok. Forty-five percent gave the class a 3/5 and 36% gave it a 4/5. No one gave it a 5 and only 10% and 8% gave it a 2/5 and a 1/5 respectively. Forty percent gave the qustion: "Does my professor care about my learning" a 5/5. The areas that need more attention are "explaining the course concepts"--54% gave it a 3/5. And, the question "how capable do you feeling to write the rhetorical analysis paper" (due in a week) only got 18% at 4/5--the highest rating. Most (69%) were in the 2 & 3/5 range. (see the full survey link-forthcoming)

Next class I intend to work more on the language of the analysis so that they can see what analysis writing looks like.

Mixed Bag

The Rhetorical Analysis Assignment

I was talking with a colleague today about teaching the rhetorical analysis. I wondered out loud about the sequence of course assignments I had set them up to do for the semester—Media Literacy Narrative, Rhetorical Analysis, Research Plan Paper, and Project. They are having trouble with the RA assignment I think because it didn’t seem to fit in the sequence. It’s a heuristic to get them to understand how writing works so that they can be better writers but it seems to be a futile exercise to a large degree mostly because it is not about them and their writing. It’s about someone else’s writing and whether it is effective our not. Perhaps, I mused, the sequence should be to write an essay in a format that you are interested in, then find someone else who had written the same sort of essay, do the rhetorical analysis of their essay, then fully research and rewrite the original essay using the rhetorical analysis as a revision tool.

Tool Time

I’ve just spent a week trying to implement a couple different Web2.0 programs in my class and failing. First I tried to use Diigo, the social book marking tool. It allows the user to highlight and put sickies on web pages and then share those web pages with others. The problem is that no one could see the stickies or highlights on the document that I put up on the web pages. There was an immediate confusion with how to share bookmarks. This had something to do with using the applet Diigo supplied or the toolbar which you had to download. The toolbar seemed to work better—that is, you could share bookmarks better with the toolbar. But my students weren’t getting it. My idea was to have them annotate an essay so that we could all see the suggestions and participate in putting them on the page and see the process of revision. It was not to be.

The second site I wanted to use was MyComLab/Exchange to do peer reviews. It however has a problem with downloading Shockwave on Vista 64bit machines so I had to scotch it in favor of Wikispaces. Last term I did peer reviews in Google Docs with only moderate success. I am more hopeful this time. It’s convenient that Wikispaces has the discussion areas on every page to enable my students’ comments.

Over doing it.

I plan to use Ning and Wikispaces in my comp classes plus Blackboard but I might be over doing it. And, I forgot, students will also be going to Pearson's MyComplab, to get instruction and examples on good grammar, style, etc. Then I thought we could do Twitter, too. Well, what I will do instead is give students the choice to do their project in/on Twitter and then have them persuade others in the class to participate with them instead of having everyone do it. That way I can also encourage collaboration among my students. I want them to work together on projects although they often don't want to. Studies of work in the future provide evidence that they will have to collaborate to do their jobs. Why not begin now. Creating interesting projects is the key: projects where everyone has a stake in the work.

About the technology I want them to use in the class. I will introduce it based on some near term assignment (e.g., the wiki for the Literacy Narrative) and then leave it up to them if they want to use it further in their other assignments and the course project. Should I allow cross-class groups to work on projects together? They will be making these groups in Ning. I should probably make it an option to work in teams or individually. But I want to highly recommend that they work together. The sad fact is that I don't worked as a part of team in academe (except perhaps on committees), so I can hardly model it for them. Yet I envision a class where "co-creation of knowledge" takes place(see Will Richardson's "work" link above) . I am at the very beginning of understanding what "co-creation" means for me and my students.

Assessing Network (Ning) Play

I sent my students all an invite to start accessing the class academic network, Ning (CANN).

Question: How can I assess their work in CANN? Hmmm. I have asked them all to join this network to work on academic issues related to writing and the web among other things. They expect grades. Although the course will try to leverage their already substantial investment in social networks (i.e., facebook, et al), I'm not naive enough to think that CANN will operate like their friends' network. I am hoping that it will operate like a network made up of individuals who have common goals and interests. Businesses like IBM have massive networks that connect their employees around the world and help them do their work. I want CANN to help my students do the work of a first-year writing class.

Since I have two populations of students to work with in my courses (f2f and online), I need to have two strategies for giving credit for work in CANN. I propose that both groups compile an e-portfolio of the work they do in the network and present it at the end of the term. Each week we will have a CANN-do day (ha!). A day, in my f2f classes, where students will work in the network and a "day" where my online students will post to the network. This will be a minimum requirement and more points for further, more substantial engagement, will be possible.

Examples of posts: an intriguing and helpful addition to one's homepage, an insightful post to a discussion in a forum, a new website (w/ annotation) added to an interest group, a helpful comment posted to a class member's wiki.

And, might it be too much to ask to have the class think about work in CANN as play? Even serious play? I wonder. More about the CANN e-portfolios soon.

The Literacy Narrative Assignment

I'm going to have my students write a literacy narrative for their first assignment. They will be asked not only write about themselves as writers but also say how the things they view--TV, movies, the Internet, video games, etc.--contribute to the sort of writers they are. I'm especially conscious of the fact that these students don't read as much as past generations and get most of their information on screen, but they nevertheless need to be good writers because the academy and the workplace demand it. That is why my class is going to write for the increasingly read/write web (Web2.0); the perfect lab for them to learn to be this new writer. I've come to this conclusion in several ways.

The conundrum for me as a writing teacher is that I learned to write by reading so it's hard to put myself in their shoes and ask them to participate in a classroom that is read-to-write when it should be one where we read/view-to-write. That's my goal, then, to provide a read/view-to-write writing classroom. And the first step is to get them to tell their read/view/write literacy stories.

I am going to use DeRosa's article "Literacy Narratives as Genres of Possibility: Students' Voices, reflective Writing, and Rhetorical Awareness" to jump start the discussion. She maintains that a course based on literacy narratives as reflective heuristics gives students a better way to subvert what she calls "literacy myths" that encourage labeling and discourage improvement. What she calls literacy narratives, I would simply term personal rhetorical analyzes. Her students are a model in how they learn to see their public writing positioned rhetorically. She denigrates the first and done literacy narrative that serves as a soft diagnostics at the beginning of a course. I see it more as a beginning that can be built upon.

My literacy narrative assignment needs to shock students out of the usual school-doesn't-have-anything-to-do-with-my-life syndrome by letting them read/view and be critical about how they learn in their day-to-day lives. I want to use this awareness of the read/view/write process to have them write the other assignments in the course. They will learn that writing has always been about reading and now it is also about viewing, too. And, if they want to be better writers they have to identify themselves as a reader/viewer who can more clearly write in this new era where the demands of communication are the same but they have changed as learners and writers. Knowledge of how they have changed can allow them to become better writers.

Web 2.0 sites I want to use in my first-year comp classroom

First, I will stick with Blackboard to do my gradebook but that's about all.

Second, my website will still be the place where they will access the course schedule and syllabus as well as all the assignments and other ancillary documents that go to explain the assignments and course procedures.

Third, I will have my students get a Google acct. w/ an IGoogle page if they don't already have one. It will be my start page for my class. Linked off their IGoogle page will be the social network (Ning), the blogging portal (21Publish), and the wiki (Wikispaces) that we will be using.

Students and web 2.0

Beginnings are hard so . . . here goes. I want this blog to be a reflection of my thoughts as I prepare for the new term at MU where I will be back teaching freshman comp. I am creating this new course (3 sections--two f2f and one online) based on the interactive free web resources lumped under the title Web 2.0.

My idea is to get students engaged in the ideas that construct and control their world. The first task, therefore, is for them to tell me what their world is like. My first assignment in the course will be a text/visual literacy narrative where students will bring in the writing, the visuals, the music, the videos, etc that define who they are as they transition from high school to college. More about this later.