Pedagogy and Assessment

Kairosnews article on Writing Assessment in Comp Classes . Interesting to see some of the things I've been thinking about since last May coming into discussion.

At CCCC we saw lots of technology chats, and the beginnings of some rich talk about pedagogy, and a few discussions about assessment like Dennis' talk on grading and "forced blogging."

There's also talk about the dreaded Freshman personal writing assignments at Writing
about Life-Changing Experiences."

Writing Assessment in Comp

Kairosnews article on
Writing Assessment in Comp Classes . Interesting to see some of the things I've been thinking about since last May coming into discussion.

At CCCC we saw lots of technology chats, and the beginnings of some rich talk about pedagogy, and a few discussions about assessment like Dennis' talk on grading and "forced blogging."

There's also talk about the dreaded Freshman personal writing assignments at Writing about Life-Changing Experiences."

AcBlog

Lore showcases a few well-known academic bloggers talking about what THEY do when they blog.

LiveJournal sociology

There was discussion about some classes using LiveJournal blogs for class.

While I appreciate the idea, I'm not so sure that it's the right audience. Check out the "10-most-recently-uploaded images to LifeJournal."

LifeJournal comes with a ready-made community far more than other blogging systems. I'm not sure if you'd want to insert a class into that conversation.

Teacher as rhetorical situation

Whether teachers like it or not, the rhetorical situation of EVERYTHING students write for a grade is that the teacher is the only audience member. Everything a student writes is filtered through that lens first and through the context of the assignment only second. If I tell them to write a resume to be turned in and graded, they're writing or revising it with me in mind no matter what I tell them.

Placing student writing in a public arena changes the audience dynamics. Even if nobody ever reads it (and how would they KNOW?) the potential for a whole new audience is there. It gives students a whole other world to consider.

And who is to say that you can't "seed" student blogs with commentary from other teachers, friends, and other random individuals that might not otherwise visit on their own.

And the crowd cried out for pedagogy...

I've happily noticed that we're going to the second-tier adoption stage.

We the "early adopters"have been playing with blogs in our classes for awhile now. We're loved them just for the sake of loving them. We've evangelized them to our peers and our students, with mixed success.

But now, blogs must pull their pedgagogical weight. It's no longer enough to just put a student blog collective online and see what happens, or to send your students to Blogger and allow them to pretend like it's the same experience as writing a paper journal that they turn in to their teacher.

It's irresponsible to just dump students into a public arena without really taking some serious time to discuss the consequences of compeltely public and potentially permanent writing. Some students recognize the responsibility of publishing online, but most students may not yet appreciate the consequences for themselves both now and later in life.

I like talking about this public/private issue in the context of the expectation of privacy in a digital world. Basically, once something is put on a computer, submitted to the web or sent via email, one should assume NO personal privacy. Email gets forwarded, listserve can be publically-archived, and email is stored in university archives indefinitely.

Blogging forces students to consider their writing in a public arena, which they've been unknowlingly participating in for some time.

I think those consequences are a good thing, and I think it's vital to educate responsible online ethos and to prepare them for the eventuality of having to defend their words in a context that they did not anticipate.

Forced blogging at CCCC

Dennis Jerz from Seton Hill University talked about "Forced Blogging" whereby he created a blogging community at his university through "seeding" it with his students. He put many fewer restraints on their participation than I would, but I wonder if my students skew younger than his.

CCCC San Antonio

San Antonio is...moist.

This year, blogs too are hot. I'm in two blogging events, and there are at least three more dealing with teaching with blogs.

I just came back from the "Teaching the Blog" panel.

The audience for these things seems to be an interesting mix of "I want to get started but I have no technical expertise" to "I use them now but I'm concerned about how I'm using them and how I could better use them." Many who used the journaling approach to blogs in their class have been disappointed by the disenchantment of their students or with the quality of their production.

One panelist brought up an interesting point though. Just because it's trite and simplistic to us doesn't make it unvaluable.

Another brought up that class blogs should have rules whereby the instructor defines the rhetorical situation more specifically for the student, rather than letting the student roam.

There seemed to be a concern about being "true" to the blogging format by avoiding borders between the personal and the professional. The space between them is so-often navigated by bloggers that it's sometimes hard to reign it in for a class blog, but I think it's vital if instructors want to have a mature cross-blog dialogue going on in their class. Students should learn to recognize that different rhetorical situations demand different things of their ability to communicate. We are not being untrue to blogging by asking that they honor this. The format serves us, we do not serve the format.

This afternoon, there will be a "Forced Blogging" discussion of more structured ways to use blogs in classrooms. More then...

Enron provides yet another object lesson

In addition to their other important lessons about fiscal responsibility comes this little gem. As a part of the Enron's litigation process, the full catalogue of employee email is available via database search. Years of Enron employee's personal emails are publically-available for consumption in the comfort of anyone's home or office. (via NPR)

Do you as a writer need to consider the fact that ALL of your writing, whether intended for one person or many, might someday be public or might be made public at some time? Can you be comfortable enough with your words to let them go, and ONLY say what you mean, regardless of context?

The all-important moral, in my opinion: Expect that ALL of your writing, whether intended for one person or many, is public or might be made public at some time. Be comfortable enough with your words to let them go, and ONLY say what you mean.

Whee! Blogging at CCCC

Looks like Barclay Barrios' blogging consortium will be presenting at CCCC.

The blog consortium that I have been corresponding with was accepted for two presentations at CCCC: "U Blog: A practical introduction to using weblogs for the classroom and research" and "Calling All Bloggers: Academic Bloggers Sharing Strategies and Resources."

Exciting, no?

Copyright and Fair use

I've posted information to VisRhet about fair use and copyright, something I now realize should have been done much earlier.

For a class that will be conducting itself partially online, that discussion is crucial. It is a conversation that should begin in 101 and 102 with things like the library tours and discussions of source evaluation, but the discussion gets richer and deeper in upper-level classes because there's more talk about repurposing information.

VisRhet discussion about weblogs

We had an interesting, if impromptu, discussion this week in the Visual Rhetoric and Design class. We talked about blogs, specifically, we talked about using them in the classroom, what people liked and didn't like about them.

Since I really appreciate the blogging format, I was most interested in what they didn't like about blogs. Those places of discomfort often reveal more about someone then their likes.

This class has a greater number of professional writing majors then the lower-level classes, which to me made it a perfect choice for blogging since so much of professional writing happens, or is distributed online now, a trend which shows no sign of slowing down.

One student expressed a discomfort with the use of such public medium in education. They felt that the education process should be one that allowed for mistakes to be made and progress to occur in private.

It really made me think about the value and energy that goes into thoughts of failure and being wrong and the process of growth and change. I think that in online culture, much like entrepreneural culture, failure is just seen as a part of the process of growth and not necessessarily as something earth-shattering or permanent. That is not how much of the culture thinks about failure, however.

The loboblogs are off

The 102 classes are off and running. Shari's class has begun blogging after a brief introduction.

She chose a controlled form of blogging; she posts and they comment.

up and blogging

Slowly and surely, the blogging teachers are discovering their blogs and figuring out what they want to do with them.

This week, for Visual Rhetoric, I'll be assigning a word document redesign as an introduction to dealing with graphics and styles. Word's style begin discussions about separaing content from design, providing the metaphor for beginning html, if any of them want to get that far.

Having to look at graphics and styles and layouts also draws home for some of them that writing is more then just thinking about words. How your words look can influence how they are received.

Other University courses using MT

The "Introduction to Multimedia" course at the Rochester Institute of Technology is the first MT-enabled course I've seen.

As seen on Shifted Librarian.

Blog teach-in Part I: The Teaching Technical Writing Students

A few weeks ago, I had a blogging day with the "Teaching Technical Writing" students and a few of Susan Romano's 537 students who will be teaching Comp 101 and 102 in the Fall. I gave them access to CompTheoryBlog as their test blog, which seemed appropriate considering we used it for CompTheory for much the same purpose.

I decided to begin the class by talking about the Teaching for Technical Writing student experience, since it's the class I was actually in, and I'm extremely interested in the dynamics of the class.

Background:

The class (12 students) was pretty evenly divided between Literature/Creative Writing students and Professional Writing students. Many of the professional writing students had experience in technical writing.

What happened:

When everyone arrived in the lab, I handed out my MT Posting Instructions and told them to log in and change their password (it was explained in the handout). As people had trouble, I wandered around answering questions when people appeared to be having trouble.

Then I started my talk. I explained the structure and purpose of blogs, both individual and group. I talked about blogging as a project management tool, and why it was valuable to have a central location for interactions and documents related to a specific project. I talked about community warrents and online ethos, and how important they are in an online world when nobody knows you personally. I then talk about rhetorical situations and how it prepares students to deal with multiple audiences for their writing, and how it can give shy students the opportunity to contribute.

I answered a few questions, and then set them loose blogging.

Arguments that I expected and got:

• "How is this valuable."
  Personally, I find it annoying to have to constantly communicate the real need for writing instruction that goes beyond the played-out five-paragraph essay.
  
  To respond to this "why does this matter," argument, I tried my best to explain that 99% of the writing that most students will do in their lives won't be in essay form. Because a writing teacher cannot prepare students for every form of writing they'll need to someday undertake, it would help to expose students to a wider variety of writing situations. Blogging gives students the opportunity to write for multiple audiences and in rhetorical situations that are unstable, just like what they'll need in their lives. Most students won't end up in writing careers, but they will end up having to compose email where they won't know all of the recipients, they'll have to write a huge variety of other things as well. Preparing them to examine the rhetorical situations in which they write prepares them to handle any writing situation. It's hard to vary the rhetorical situation when the audience is always the teacher.
  
  Having students produce publically-available material also forces them to really consider the implications of their language and their views. It raises the possibility for feedback. Most people get little feedback on their writing, and aren't really forced to consider what the language they use says about them. I usually insert the reputation management discussion here, where I have them google me on groups.yahoo.com and view the results, and what it says about me as a person.
  
  My advisor was also rather dismayed at the reductive way in which some approached the writing needs of their students. At the same time, however, the blogging format was compelling enough that they sat down and wrote for almost a solid hour. The lab was silent except for the click-click-click of their keyboards. For that alone, I think blogging is valuable for a writing class.

Things I didn't expect:

• I didn't expect the positioning that I saw, where it was apparent that statements were being made that weren't the writer's opinion, but were intended to elicit discussion on a particular topic. In blogging communities, of course, this is discouraged because one should never say what one doesn't mean because of the damage to one's ethos. I have to think more about this because, frankly, it was so unexpected for me.
  
• The "how is this argument." It's tough to talk about my ideas about argument when people's opinion of what constitutes argument are so different. There was some outright rejection of the "every communication between or among people is an argument."

Lessons

I don't know that I'll do anything differently next time, but as always I wanted to do more. I'd delve as deeply into argument theory as I could manage, and link it to online argument and the idea of reputation management as an online form of ethos.

Elementary Blogging

This article discusses blogging in elementary classrooms for writing instruction.

The beginnings of blogging pedagogy?

Instructors express what they believe to be their best practices for incorporating blogging into their classes, largely journalism it looks like. What I'm not fond of is that it "teaches blogging" rather then using blogging to teach something else, like the codifying of argument through blogging illustrations. I see this in other technologies that make their way into teaching. Suddenly there's a lot of teaching the technology rather then using it to reinforce some core value within the discipline being taught.

Blogging as writing practice

Two brief forays into the potentials for blog use: Blogging as Writing Practice examines blogging as a tool to integrate student writing into their lives, like creative writers are encouraged to do. Blogging as Class Content examines blogging content as a text itself.

Dialectical Blog?

Chuck Paine suggested an excited new way of looking at the blog/meta-blog construct. "Dialectical blogging," similar to the dialectical journal like the one illustrated here.

It's a simple visual way of looking at the act of meta-commentary without having to go into theorhetical mush. This teacher used dialectical journals with her seventh grade class in a way very similar to how we'd use them in a blogged 102 class.

Blogging Critical Thinking

Fisking as a rhetorical construct examines "fisking" as a cultural construct.

Dennis_Jerz gives a great definition of fisking in rhetorical terms, describing it as:

point-by-point critical annotation of another text. It is a mode of criticism well-suited to the WWW, since it begins by copying the full text of the target text, and proceeds to point out logical flaws and raise doubts. Since the fiskee's fixed text cannot respond to the challenges, the fisker can without too much trouble make the fiskee look ridiculous. While the term seems to have originated in conservative attacks against liberal positions, I recently came across a postmodern blogger who fisks an anti-postmodernist.

While it sounds somewhat benign, and it can be when it is done in the spirit of discussion rather then diatribe, the word "fisking" brings with it the contentious baggage of Fisk's experience and the one-sidedness that it implies. Fisking denies dialogue.

This is something increasingly common in our culture, and blogging reflects that at times.

Perhaps providing people with broader tools to help them develop an argument would mean fewer people resorting to Crossfire-like ambush. I think blogs can be one tool of many to address the decline of dialogue and the rise of the rant.

Megnut illustrates why blogging matters

Megnut's powerpoint presentation defining blogs to the initiated. She also details how they pull writing out of the book metaphor and well on our way towards content creation free of wordcount worries (via Plasticbag.org)

Some of these points are very similar to ones I would make to a classroom full of 102 teachers.

NCTE recognizes media literacy

This NCTE article criticizing online censorship points out that students have a need and a right to understand and critically analyze the powerful nonprint media sources of their daily information and entertainment. " (via Kairosnews.org)

What if I taught 101?

This is my 101 syllabus for a blogged 101 class.

There are some changes from the normal 101 syllabus in that I've reduced the number of formal writing assignments, with the intent of making up that work by use of the blog.

The class will also need to me more interactive and more attuned to peer review, so the participation grades go up and a new participation grade specifically for the blog appears.

The next step is to adapt some of the writing assignments for use on the blog. The assignments will end up being shorter, but it evens out in the end with the amount of commentary on each other they need to do.

Media Literacy

Lyn Oshima of the College of Ed strongly advocates media literacy for students. She's a part of "Shared Visions", a program at UNM that encourages educators to use technology in education by setting up mentoring programs for teachers with "Master Technology Teachers" and developing best practices guidelines.

Another class-blog advocate

Blogged Classrooms on The Subtle Knife offers practical uses for blogs in Composition classrooms. The rationale for using blogs falls right into line with my interest in them.

Beene's been blogged!

Lynn Beene is beginning her blog, Beeneblog, using it to catalogue and distribute the Department's Calls for Proposals.

Yay Lynn Beene!

Blog usage

I've met with three people so far.

I've tracked their movements through the posting process, and I think I'm going to customize the posting screen for MT on the English dept install.

Also, I've talked to Matt Allen, who is interested in what might come of the blogged English faculty.

Next step: getting the expense authorized.

Write once - read in perpetuity

A good object lesson for beginning bloggers is the proliferation of content beyond the control of the original author. Lawmeme published the story of an unlucky pulitzer-prize-winning journalist and her frustration with a piece of private mail going public on a grand scale. Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet