Final Project Links

There are two parts to my final project:

1. An informal survey (using SurveyMonkey) of students at my college
2. 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

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

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:

1. A cover letter or introductory piece, which also serves as the reflective piece.
2. An essay of the student's choice, preferably expository or persuasive, with all drafts from first to final.
3. The argumentative research paper, with all drafts and with all cited research sources.
4. 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

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

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

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

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

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.

Analyzing My SlideRocket Presentation

A week or so ago, I posted my SlideRocket presentation, and at that time I promised to add more commentary later. Here's that commentary! Better late than never?

SlideRocket is a lot like PowerPoint, or KeyNote (on the Mac), I'm told, and there are other "presentation sites" out there on the web, such as Google Docs, VoiceThread, SlideBoom, or SlideShare. I've used VoiceThread already, so I thought I'd try SlideRocket.

An interesting assignment idea might be to have students compare-and-contrast, and evaluate, two different presentation tools, and then create a presentation about it!?! I've just done an informal survey, and students are reporting that a "PowerPoint assignment" should definitely be a part of a college-writing class ... perhaps especially since they are already required to use PowerPoint in their required Speech class.

In creating these presentations, my digital writing professor asked us to make them "as interactive as possible," and then I missed the next class where he demonstrated some very interactive ones.

So, instead of using SlideRocket as a lecture/presentation tool where A LOT of information is given, using A LOT of bullet lists, I envisioned and created it for a discussion-based literature class, where discussion rather than lecture is the dominant mode. I wanted to use it to guide the in-class discussion, to give students things to think about, to activate their background knowledge(s), to explicitly elicit comments from them, and to move us forward. (So many times, discussions can stall. However, sometimes it is also good if discussions get off track, or even back up a bit. Can these presentation tools handle that?)

I think this presentation does a fairly good job, but it is definitely for an in-class discussion, where I (or someone else) would be "moderating" and perhaps even jotting notes on the whiteboard -- or somewhere else ... is there a digital tool for that? (There's got to be; it's just not on my radar yet.)

A classmate, Brent Eckhoff, told me about a presentation he designed, with the idea that students would view it, and interact with it, OUTSIDE of class. This is my next step.

Evaluating a Podcast

I finally got back to this post, which I promised weeks ago!

I started out following the directions given in Podcasting for Dummies, second edition, by Tee Morris, Chuck Tomasi, and Evo Terra. It's a great book if you're starting out with podcasting, and the sections about finding and listening to podcasts have great examples and recommendations. I agree that one should "browse" through many podcasts before starting out ... but I plunged right in, after reading most of the book first, and only later did I start to listen to some.

I'm using both Juice and iTunes as "podcatchers," but I'm not sure which one I prefer. There are some things about the different "screens" in Juice that I don't understand, but Juice is clearer than iTunes, it seems to me, in the step about "going-out-and-seeing-if-anything-is-new," whereas this step seems more hidden in iTunes. With Juice, you get a clear list of all available "episodes" and can see at a glance which ones you have or don't have. I haven't found this yet in iTunes.

The podcast I listened to was Episode One, "Wikipedia: Friend or Foe?" produced by Digital Campus and the Center for History and New Media. It originally "aired" on March 7, 2007. I think I'm going to like the Digital Campus podcasts, if I can work more of them into my schedule. The focus is definitely more on higher education than "Teachers Teaching Teachers," but I think there'd be some good stuff there as well.

This episode had the host, Dan Cohen (?), and two guests. It was pretty informal, the three speakers seemed to know each other, they worked off of each other pretty well, and they seemed comfortable with a few seconds of "dead air" here and there.

The episode started out with a "News Roundup," which covered many different topics and was very interesting. Oddly, though, it took up about half the time of the podcast. Here's a "run-down" of the topics discussed:

• MS Vista
• Google Docs
• A reminder that "students are not automatically technology literate" -- even though we might think that since they're mostly in the 18-22 age group
• A reminder that some students do not have MS Office -- due to cost or other issues
• A discussion about open-source class management systems vs. commercial ones such as BlackBoard and WebCT -- and how "tagging" works in various systems
• Flickr -- and the Ken Albers study
  
• Delicious

At this point, the discussion about Wikipedia began, and they made many good points. Instead of saying to students that they can't use it and/or they can't cite it -- which they're going to probably look at anyway -- we should "train" our students in a better use of Wikipedia. We should even ask and discuss the question, Is an encyclopedia an appropriate college-level source?

One speaker then described an extra-credit project in his Western Civ. class, a project which soon became a required project. He asked his students to either write or substantially edit a Wikipedia entry and then to track the commentary and changes made to the page. He argued that an important part of an entry that is often overlooked is the History of a page. His students soon discovered how quickly and how drastically a page can change, and not always for the better. However, the other argument is that the more people who are involved in a page, the better the article might be. His hope was that, through this project, his students might better understand both Wikipedia and the "scholarly process," the creation (and maintenance?) of knowledge.

The discussion also included, several times, the phrase: "Community of Enthusiasts." We need to recognize that these communities drive Wikipedia and that our students probably already belong to one or more "communities of enthusiasts," based on their personal and/or professional interests. We should capitalize on this and work the concept into our classes.

(As a side note, I already often teach my First-Year Writing course, especially when I focus explicitly on "academic writing," using the ideas of "community" and "conversation." Students need to recognize that, in coming to college, they are joining a new community, and they are going to be "listening to many different conversations." And every conversation is going to have different "conventions" to follow when/if one joins the conversation. We then start in with summarizing, then analysis, then evaluation, then synthesis, then argument, where they actually join or contribute to a conversation after doing all the "listening.")

Finally, the podcast ended with some recommendations for the listeners. If you want to use a wiki for personal or professional reasons, these two were highly recommended:

• wetpaint.com
• pbwiki.com

If you teach history or geography, you might be interested in:

• worldmapper.org

If you teach your students research skills, you might be interested in:

• the Open Content Alliance, a rival to Google Books (the Google Library Project), which has upward of 187,000 books online with searching and downloading capabilities -- archive.org/details/texts

I'm glad Digital Campus was recommended to me by my Digital Writing professor. I've already downloaded several more podcasts and hope to listen to them soon. I tried to listen while doing other things on the computer, but I'm not one to be able to do that, whereas I know others who can multi-task. It makes me question using podcasts for my classes: Will my students be paying attention, or will they be distracted with other things and come away with only a fraction of what was on the podcast? Maybe in asking them to find and evaluate some before actually doing their own, they might actually realize that their audience won't be paying as much attention as they hope? Is this too much to hope for?

My Professor's Audio Feedback on My Blog

I can't get this to open in my email, so I'm going to try this:

Click here to listen to Dr. Richard Beach's feedback and evaluation about my blog. He's a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota. The course is CI 5330: Teaching Digital Writing.

Reflecting on Creating a Podcast and Editing Audio

I've already posted my podcast, as you might already know, but I promised to come back and blog about the process and how I might use it in my teaching. And, if you've already read my reflection on editing video, you might already be able to guess what I'm going to say here.

I HATED the podcasting assignment, but I'm not quite sure why. It might have to do with struggling to find a topic that others might be interested in hearing about. But are my students always interested in what we talk about in class? No, not really, I'm a realist, but at least they are "present," with few distractions, to be able to take in, and perhaps contribute to, the discussion. With a podcast, they can listen to it whenever, wherever, but I'm guessing that they will NOT be sitting, listening, and doing nothing else.

Hating the podcasting assignment might also have to do with never having done any audio editing before, and the "learning curve," at least for me, was steep. Downloading Audacity and LAME wasn't a problem, but it seemed that "fine-tuning" the volume and other set-up things, and then actually recording the podcast, was excruciating. However, the editing was better, and was more fun the more I played with it. I even managed to find the Podsafe Audio site and was able to include some music in my podcast for my "intro" and "outro." Really cool music, I might add. (Thanks, again, to Mauricio Cuburu for "Disco Viejo.")

I should also say here that the Podcasting for Dummies book, second edition, by Tee Morris, Chuck Tomasi, and Evo Terra, was helpful ... but it was also a way for me to prolong the project, because I convinced myself that I had to read almost the entire book first, before sitting down to do anything.

Finally, how might I use podcasting in my classes? I'm not sure, but I do know who I could talk to, to get some ideas. A former colleague of mine, Jerry Shannon, who is now a Ph.D. student in Geography at the U of MN, used to teach freshman composition, both at ARCC and the U of MN. He was light-years ahead of me, and many others, in terms of technology, and he also had a service-learning component in his classes. While teaching at the U of MN, he affiliated his classes with a radio station somewhere, perhaps in one of the Minneapolis high schools, and he had his students create podcasts. I'm not sure what they created podcasts about, but here might be some ideas, based on the kinds of writing normally assigned in freshman comp:

• Personal Writing -- create a podcast about an event in your life that changed your thinking about others. Use the podcast to tell the story, to set the mood, and to get people thinking and reflecting on their own lives. Check out NPR's "This I Believe" for some ideas.
  
• Informative Writing -- create a podcast to inform your listeners about a process they know little about. Use the podcast to teach your listeners the process, to introduce them to an expert in the process, and to let them know where to find more information. Check out various NPR/MPR "stories" for some ideas.
  
• Argumentative Writing -- create a podcast to state your position on a local controversial issue, or to present your solution to a problem in your community. Use the podcast to state and support the reasons for your position, to acknowledge and address the various opposing arguments, and to persuade your listeners to either change their thinking about the issue or to at least consider your position more carefully. Check out various NPR/MPR "editorials" and "opinion pieces" for some ideas.

All of these podcasts would, of course, be preceded by the full reading, research, and writing processes, resulting in at least one draft, a peer review, a revision, and then a "script" for the podcast. Digital recorders would be required for interviews in the field, and microphones and headsets would be required in the computer labs. Skype interviews might have to be arranged and recorded somehow (Camtasia Studio? Gizmo?). Arrangements would have to be made with my college's Technology Department for storage space and for "processing," similar to the U of MN's Media Mill, so that the MP3 files could be "subscribed to" using RSS feeds or downloaded for playback.

And, now, all of this seems so clear and straightforward, and yet so time and resource intensive!

Reflecting on Editing and Posting Video

While this project was actually for an assignment in the Digital Writing course I am taking, it began at home with my wife and I anticipating some fun with our cat, Charm. We set up a black-cat Halloween prop for Charm to find, and at the last minute we thought to get the camera. I should say here that Charm is extremely sensitive to anything new and she especially does not like other animals about. I should also admit that we weren't as prepared as we should have been. Good photographers and videographers know to always have their equipment pre-checked, ON, and ready to shoot. We were a bit slow, but we still managed to get some good material. We should have gotten the camera sooner, and we should have made sure we had fresh batteries! Live and learn, I guess.

Even though we shot the video on the Kodak EasyShare Z885 camera, we were able to use a cable we got with our Canon camera to transfer the video files to our PC. No problem so far. But then when I went to begin editing the video in Windows Movie Maker, problems quickly arose. The video was in Quick Time Movie format (.MOV), which is not supported by Windows Movie Maker. So I had to take A LONG TIME searching the web to find a file conversion site that was reviewed well on several discussion boards. I settled on Media Convert, and was eventually able to successfully convert my four .MOV files to .AVI files. Since I am, by nature, obsessive compulsive, this whole ordeal probably took me much longer than it would take anyone else, but slower is sometimes better.

Ironically, by this point, I had to leave for class, so I took all the video files with me, on a USB flash drive, and I ended up beginning the editing process, in class, ON A MAC. So, I didn't need to do the conversions after all, but I do eventually want to go back and learn Windows Movie Maker, if only because my college does not really support Macs, except for the Art Department.

As you might already guess, the video editing took me A LONG TIME also. I began it in class, but had to spend about three-and-a-half additional hours outside of class to produce a 3-minute video. I was then able to compress it, upload it to the U of MN's Media Mill, process it there, and have it ready to embed on my blog and upload to YouTube. The first upload to YouTube did not "take," for some reason (which, based on past experience, I'm guessing had to do with my poor relationship with the U of MN's servers, or with doing it on a wireless laptop), but the second upload to YouTube from my PC at home was successful.

In all, however, in spite of the video file format conversion problem, and in spite of the uploading to Media Mill and to YouTube problems, I enjoyed the video editing process MUCH MORE than the audio editing process (for the podcasting assignment) even though the two processes are very similar and the editing environments (Audacity or GarageBand, and iMovie) have many similarities--e.g., multiple "tracks," adding in music or sound effects, cutting, rearranging "clips," etc. And I'm not sure why I enjoyed it more. Was it because I had already gone through the "hell" of podcasting and editing audio, so I had more "background knowledge" when it came time to do the video editing? Or was it because I am a more "visual" person so I enjoyed that element more? (This second reason I'm not as sure about, since I also tend to learn better from reading than from hands-on lessons--for example, I loved the chemistry formulas, math, and "book work," but I hated the chemistry labs.)

So ... would I use this in class? I'm not sure yet. I would first want to learn Windows Movie Maker, so that I could "teach" it to my students, at least in a rudimentary way. Second, my college does not loan out cameras, I don't think, whereas the U of MN does, either in the Curriculum & Instruction Library or out of Walter Library, so I'm not sure if my students would have as good of access to equipment as I did. Third, I'm not sure yet what assignment I could give that would lend itself to video. I could see an argumentative-inquiry project involving not only research but some type of video component, but that's as far as my thinking has gone.

Charm's Writing Process

Our cat, Charm, is finally a "star" on the famous YouTube site! And it's actually related to writing! Check it out:



The video was recorded on a Kodak EasyShare camera and transferred to a PC--the file types were "Quick Time Movie." The editing was done, however, on a Mac laptop, using iMovie 2006 (I think). The video image was sharp on iMovie, but when compressed and uploaded to the U of MN's MediaMill, and then "processed" there, the image quality has decreased. Obviously, as soon as I get a second (or three hours), I'm going to look into improving the quality.

American Literature to 1865: Literary Periods

First, check out this SlideRocket presentation:



I will ADD MORE commentary later.

Using Podcasting in My Classes

Forthcoming. Stay tuned!

My First Podcast

There. It's done. Finished. I've finally done it. And who says that worrying and carrying on aren't useful?

This particular podcast is "Episode 2" (no, there's no "Episode 1" yet) from a podcast "show" which might be titled "American Literature to 1865." Oddly enough, this "show" also happens to be a course that I teach at Anoka Ramsey Community College. (But I won't get into educators as entertainers in this particular blog post.)

In this podcast, I talk about why we are reading some texts but not others; particularly, why we are not reading exploration narratives/reports by Spanish, French, Dutch, and other non-English writers, and why we are not reading the Native American Origin and Creation Stories.

So, without further ado, here are the various links created by the University of Minnesota's Media Mill:

Public Download URL

Public Playable URL

RSS2.0

This podcast was created on a PC using Audacity and LAME. The podsafe music by Mauricio Cuburu was found on PodsafeAudio.com. The mp3 file is stored on (hosted by) the U of MN's Media Mill, which also generated the RSS feed.

Thank you, thank you very much!

Planning an "Interview" Podcast

As you discovered in my previous post, I'm a bit behind on these two podcasting assignments. But that's not to say I've been doing nothing. Hardly. I've been obsessing. I've been reading. I've been worrying. I've been reading. I've been frustrating. (Just ask my wife!)

And, as I mentioned in my previous post, I'm not only trying to figure out all the technology, but I've been trying to focus my attention and efforts on PC applications, rather than Mac applications. So, in this case, for an interview podcast, I've been focusing on Gizmo, rather than Skype, along with Camtasia Studio and Sound Tap.

I've read the U of MN's "position" on Skype, since I was warned about Skype ahead of time by my wife (a U of MN employee), and I was swayed by the arguments. I do not at all like the idea of Skype "using" my computer to "route" other people's "calls" while I'm online. I also do not like Skype because, currently, Skype offers no way to record conversations.

Thus, I've found a reference in the Hendron book (p. 86) about Camtasia Studio for recording Skype video -- if I decide I need to use Skype for video -- and I've found references in the Podcasting for Dummies book (pp. 71-72 and 95-99) about using Sound Tap to record "any" audio being played through the computer. And, Gizmo, a Skype competitor (?), seems to be similar to Skype but it has the capability to record audio. I still need to check into Gizmo about video capabilities.

But my planning for the interview podcast is nearly complete. I plan to interview a friend from graduate school who is also my "adjunct" colleague at my college and who teaches English at Irondale High School. He is currently using a PBWiki in his classes -- after talking to me about them, and, after actually learning from me about them -- and I'm going to talk to him about how it's going, how he's using it, how his students are responding to it, etc.

So, again, stay tuned! I hope to have that podcast up soon!

Planning a "Solo" Podcast

Just when I thought I had a handle on the technology -- on Nings, on Blogs, on Wikis, on VoiceThread and digital storytelling, etc. -- along came the Podcast ... and BOOM ... I'm paralyzed with fear ... again!

I've spent the last week, and more, pouring through the Hendron and the Podcasting for Dummies books -- I've read the whole PFD (not .pdf) book now -- and I'm still tentative about actually sitting down and doing the podcast. My next task is to review the tutorials on the wiki, again, and the plan is to sit down on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, and record, and edit, and complete the ID3 info, and complete the show notes, and complete the FTP of the mp3 media file to the U of MN Media Mill, and finally generate the RSS 2.0 feed.

See, I have the process down now. It's just the bells-and-whistles of all the software to worry about. But it's not like I've done nothing. I experimented in class last week with the Mac's GarageBand. I definitely like GarageBand, but since my college only supports PCs and Windows, I'm focusing more on the software applications related to PCs, particularly Audacity.

And, I've already recorded two files on Audacity: a personal introduction for my classes, and a short story I wrote a few years ago -- which would actually work well as a 2-3 person "radio play," or whatever it might be called, if I scripted it that way.

Audacity does not have all the bells-and-whistles that GarageBand does, which might lead one to think it's easier, but it then requires other downloads for music and sound effects and whatnot. Maybe that's what's tripping me up?

But my preparation or planning for my "solo" podcast is done. It will be a monologue about the reasons why I do not currently spend very much time on Native American literature (or orature?) -- especially on the creation tales, the trickster tales, the ghost dances, the songs, and so forth -- in the American literature survey courses. It's a question I ask myself every semester, it's a question I wrestle with frequently, and it's a question sometimes (OK, rarely) asked by my students. So it will be a "talking through" of the rationale I use ... and perhaps the rationale I've heard from others.

So stay tuned! I hope to have a post on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, with at least two things: a link to the podcast itself, and, hopefully, an RSS feed to "subscribe" to the post ... and perhaps to future posts.

Listening to and Evaluating a Podcast

Forthcoming. Stay tuned!

Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor in Am. Lit. I

I sat in again on Donald Ross's EngL 3005, American Literature and Cultures I, course at the University of Minnesota on Monday, September 29, 2008. The course schedule for that day indicated that Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor would be taught together. Since I also teach both of these Puritan poets near the beginning of my own American Literature to 1865 course, and since they are two of my favorite poets, I thought this would be another good session to attend.

Donald began the session by looking ahead to the recitation sections for that week. The topic would be Jonathan Edwards' Personal Narrative, a "conversion narrative," and his Images of Divine Things. The comment that I found most significant, in terms of connecting various writers together, which is something I continually try to do in my own course, is that "Edwards takes John Winthrop's ideas of Justice and Mercy and turns it into a story." I'd have to go back and check my own notes to see if I bring that point out in my own class. For some reason, I'm not sure if I do, but then again, I don't teach Edwards every year.

(But that is a topic for another post, or two topics for two other posts: (1) allowing students to "vote" on who they want to read, thus letting them become the "anthologizers," and (2) slowly reducing the number of Puritan writers I teach, since, almost to a class, one common comment at the end of the course is that the Puritans are not really all that interesting to read.)

Donald then moved on to Bradstreet and Taylor, and he made the comment that we would be studying "parallel poems" between the two poets. Again, my ears perked up, since this is also the approach I take. However, I normally teach Bradstreet first, over two days, since I also use her poems to introduce various literary terminology (e.g., couplets, stanzas, rhymes, end-rhyme scheme, iambic feet, tetrameter, pentameter, etc.), followed by a day or so of Taylor. I looked forward to which poems Donald would pair together.

The first pair was Bradstreet's "The Author to Her Book" and Taylor's "The Preface." The second pair was Bradstreet's "The Flesh and the Spirit" and Taylor's "The Soul and Christ's Reply" (actually, these are two poems). The third pair was done with students pairing up with each other and doing a 4"x6" index-card quiz: Bradstreet's "Before the Birth of One of Her Children" and Taylor's "Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children."

Donald ended the session on two notes. First, he talked about Philip Freneau's "On the Causes of Political ..." as a way to illustrate the short paper that was assigned. Second, he talked about Bradstreet's poem on Queen Elizabeth and likened it to current events about Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin.

Interestingly, there were some similarities and some differences between the pairs of poems Donald chose and the pairs of poems I normally teach. First, I pair Bradstreet's "The Author to Her Book" with Taylor's "Prologue," since they are both poems about the act of writing poetry. Second, I pair Bradstreet's "Here Follow Some Verses Upon the Burning of Our House" with Taylor's "The Preface," since they are both poems about God both giving and taking away. Third, like Donald, I pair Taylor's "Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children" with Bradstreet's "Before the Birth of One of Her Children," since they are both poems about marriage and rearing children, but I also use other Bradstreet poems here as well, such as "I Had Eight Birds..." and/or one or more of the poems to her husband.

Furthermore, I teach some other poems by each poet, but not in pairs. For example, for Bradstreet, I also teach "The Prologue" and "The Flesh and the Spirit." I sometimes also teach her poems to her parents. And for Taylor, I also teach one of the Meditations, usually #150, I think, "The Joy of Church Fellowship Rightly Attended," and "Upon a Wasp Chilled with Cold." I sometimes also teach Taylor's "Huswifery."

In all, a most enlightening reflection, and it was nice to see that Donald and I are not so far apart in the pairs we construct. While I normally teach all of the Bradstreet poems first, and then the all the Taylor poems after, I will rethink this part of the course and perhaps proceed, next time, pair by pair, rather than asking students to recall the Bradstreet poems of Monday or Wednesday when encountering the Taylor poems on Friday.

Participating in an Online Role-Play Debate

The role I created for the online role play was "Dale Mikkalson, School Board Member, Neutral." The name comes from my Junior High School Band Director, a man whom I admired and respected, a man somewhat reserved at times, but otherwise very friendly and kind, inquisitive, sensitive, thorough, always available, and very encouraging. You could show up to his house, on a Sunday, with a dented trombone slide, and he'd gladly take it from your hand, take it downstairs to his workshop, and straighten it out for you. And you got the idea that he didn't mind at all--even though, inside, he might have been really steamed!

What I think I changed about this basic characterization is that Dale in the role play is probably a bit more liberal, a bit more of a "rabble-rouser," than the original model. He is definitely more extroverted, more inquisitive. He really wants to get to the heart of the debate, but being on the school board and probably also busy with a job, family, and other community activities, he sees himself as not having the time to do any research of his own, so he's really relying on the research of others.

And he definitely wants to stir things up. For example, he takes on Arv, another school-board member, head on, challenging him to avoid campaigning during the "debate" and to avoid the "business model" of education. (And here's where I think I lost some character consistency throughout my posts: I wasn't exactly clear about whether Dale's seat was up for re-election or not, and Dale is awfully concerned about finances.) Another example is that Dale "goes off" on the Katherine Kersten article in the Star Tribune, an article mentioned by the third school-board member, and tries to bring in to the debate the tension between "liberals" and "conservatives" and a possible hidden conservative agenda in all this talk about single-sex classrooms. Dale's purpose here was not to side-track the debate, I don't think, but to stir things up a bit, perhaps to encourage other characters to respond, if they didn't want to respond to the "research-heavy" posts. School board, and city council, meetings are always like this: There's always someone there, either on the board or in the audience, who likes to bring up tangential issues, either to make things more colorful or to deepen or broaden the debate.

Instead of long posts, Dale read everything but responded briefly and frequently, asking questions, pointing out some trends or observations, and perhaps very subtly indicating that he's probably opposed to this proposal of single-sex classrooms, if for no other reason than no one has explained how much this is going to cost or how it's going to work. Dale is very pragmatic and wants to know the "logistics." A typical school-board member perspective, I think. And, from the assignment of the role play, Dale, as a school-board member, was supposed to be neutral, so I also think this influenced my approach to the character.

In reflecting on the role play so far, I agree with the other student who has already posted her reflection on the Ning. I don't think the "conversation" sounded authentic. It seemed piecemeal, bit-by-bit, rather than interactive, and this might be due, in part, to the asynchronous tool we're using. But, in addition, alliances didn't seem to be formed; characters did not often recall or quote other characters. The other student was, I sensed, frustrated that no one else had responded to her posts, and her posts were good: well researched, well thought-out, and well presented. I agree with her that our students would also be frustrated if this happened to them. They would put all this time and effort into researching and crafting a position, and then they wouldn't get the acknowledgement or satisfaction or affirmation of someone else responding to them, either to counter-argue or to advance their own argument. And I think this would ultimately be deflating/defeating for students.

I wonder if this other student is also right, that readers might skip her post, and others like it, if the posts were too long or "too full of research." Here's where Dale might have some advantage, in that all his posts were very short.

I think the two role-play characters with the most "power" right now are, interestingly, on opposite sides of the debate. Con Expert (Amy) and Pro Teacher (Brent) seem to have the most power--and maybe I shouldn't say "power" but "credibility" (not that the other posts/characters are not credible). But I wonder if this also has to do with the frequency of their posts: they seem more actively involved in the role-play debate at this point.

Finally, I'm not sure how Dale is going to vote tonight. For lack of any good explanations about finances, lawsuits, hiring more teachers, and scheduling, he might side with the "cons" and vote to keep things as is. In terms of my own personal beliefs, Dale's vote might be opposite of how I would vote myself. In terms of if my own personal beliefs on this issue changed over the course of the role play, I'm still thinking about that.

The 12.5 Rules for Writing -- 2nd Attempt

I know, I know. This is the same image as the previous post. I know. But since I had a technology glitch yesterday, I thought I'd try it again and see what happens.

This time, I tried using DashBlog again, but I took the image from Rachel Tholen's blog, just to see if that would make a difference. And. Ugh. It happened this time too. DashBlog not only captured the image I wanted but it also captured a video--and, again, the video was in a DIFFERENT post. Why, oh why, is it doing this?

However, this time I must have deleted the code correctly. I went into the Edit Html view again, and I was just as careful as I thought I was yesterday, but I paid attention to the closing code, and I think I got it right. There was NO error message when I went to publish. Yeah!

The 12.5 Rules for Writing -- 1st Attempt

I originally saw this image on Rachel Tholen's blog and really liked it. However, in this attempt to capture the image to blog about it, I took it from Leeshi's blog. I tried using "DashBlog" to "Grab an Image." But what happened is that it grabbed more than just the image I wanted; it also grabbed a YouTube video or a VoiceThread that Leeshi had put up--in a different post. I then tried to go to "Edit Html" in Blogger to delete the code for the embedded video, but apparently I also ended up deleting the closing code for the image. I ended up getting an error message when I went to publish the revision. However, when I chose the Compose view, rather than the Edit Html view, the post published successfully. I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENED! Ugh.

Anyway. This image of the 12.5 Rules for Writing would make a nice introductory image to a course blog or a course wiki. Ironically, there's nothing here about digital writing, or about digital writing tools, but the composing process--and all the rules--are similar in all writing situations.

This image also reminds me of when I first started teaching college composition, back in 1992, as a teaching assistant, and all the things we TAs had our students do. Getting into a routine. Making lists. Having an implicit thesis in a narrative essay. Experimenting with different styles. Having writing implements and materials always handy. Doing an observation on campus. Where did all the "basics" go? With increasing interest in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and the ever-increasing technology tools, somehow I think the "basics" got misplaced.

This relates to an earlier post I wrote, the one about Freshman Comp. no longer being a "Service Course." There are so many different approaches to a college comp. course, it's hard to know which is "best." It's even harder when one sees advantages and possibilities in different ones. And combining the best of different worlds isn't always possible. Sometimes, I think it'd be easier if I had a single-track mind, where I "knew" one approach to teaching was the best, and I didn't let any of the others distract or lure me!

Walt Whitman's Astronomer Poem

Here is my first attempt at "digital literature" or "digital storytelling." I'm sure it does not exactly meet what was asked of me, since here I use Walt Whitman's words mixed with some "Creative Commons" images from Flickr. I'm sure I was supposed to use my own photos or images, and my own writing, to create "this"--a digital poem or story. But I had fun doing it. And I'm sure my students might have fun doing something like this as well.

But what's the point? Why did I do this? (Other than to complete the terms of an assignment?) And why would I have my students do this? (Other than to complete the terms of an assignment?) What would be the purpose? Who would be the audience?

Would including a project like this in my course challenge my students academically in some way? (The technology challenged me a little bit, but the concept of the VoiceThread came to me almost immediately, and I had fun doing it.) Or would it be only for fun, a new way to look at and think about literature? A pop-culture approach to American Literature?

Would doing a project like this give my students more insight into a literary text? (For me, the insight might come in the way of requiring them to choose the "best" images for the project. It was impossible for me to find "applause in the lecture-room." I guess I could have "staged" it--and students might have fun doing these stagings. But, I think I did pretty well with "the mystical moist night-air," when I thought that was going to be the hardest phrase to capture.)

I definitely see much potential here, but like all the other tools I've been introduced to so far in this class, I'm still falling short of brilliant ideas and insights for incorporating them into my courses. Maybe it'll come to me later ...?

Using a Wiki in My English 1121 Course

Despite being a teacher who gets irritated when my students don't follow my directions, I didn't do a very good job at all of following Rick Beach's directions this week. I set up my wiki first, before checking out other wikis or even doing the assigned reading. I used PBwiki to create my wiki, and my wiki's name is WritingMinnesota. Wiki. Wiki. ;-)

I set up my wiki first because, as you might have already read, I've already been toying with ideas in two previous blog posts and I was pretty much ready to go. I finally decided on "WritingMinnesota," mainly to tie it in with my community college's visiting writers program.

But also, just as a history class focuses on history, or just as a chemistry class focuses on chemistry, a writing class should focus on writing. And not just the students' writing either, as some writing-process advocates might argue (such as Donald Murray and Peter Elbow). Writing should be not only the process(es) writers use but also the "content" -- the study of "text" and how it works ... student text, professional-writers' text, printed text ... and now ... digital text or media ... in all its forms. We should be writing, and studying our own writing, and writing about writing.

So back to my wiki. It will probably end up being the new course website, and I will probably begin to reduce what I do and how I use my old website. The course I am going to begin my use of wikis with will be our college's college-level writing course: English 1121: College Writing and Critical Reading.

So what will the course look like? What will change, now that I've taken this course in digital writing? What will the students write? How will the students use the wiki to collaborate?

I'm guessing the first two papers for the course will be more in Phase I and Phase II (see Beach, et. al. on pages 9-11 and 17). At this point, the wiki might be used as Hendron describes on pages 184-188, where the collaboration is more in the form of students providing "models" for other students and of students providing "peer review" for other students.

After this, hopefully I would be helping my students shift into Phase III (and maybe Phase IV) where students form "Affinity Groups" (see Beach, et. al. page 47) as we move into the argumentation and research portion of the course. The affinity groups would be based on the type of Minnesota writing they would like to study -- e.g., a particular writer or a particular genre (such as sports journalism or children's literature).

I could see the third paper -- instead of a typical review of literature, or a synthesis paper, or an annotated bibliography -- be more about gathering the sources they will eventually use in their final papers. I could even see the third "paper" being something other than a paper, like, say, a PowerPoint production of the best sources they've found -- and, maybe, importing the PowerPoint into a VoiceThread, and then doing a voice-over, explaining the sources and how and why they are "good sources." These VoiceThreads could then be presented to the entire class, possibly for feedback, or maybe just for informative "fun." Obviously, this might have to be a group effort, and, obviously, this could get out-of-hand, overwhelming, and unwieldy, if I don't think it through more! The wiki, for this paper, would be the repository of all the sources they've found AND the place where they would collaborate on their PowerPoint and VoiceThread "scripts."

Finally, the fourth paper would be the "argumentative research paper," where the students would have to state and then defend some debatable thesis about the type of writing they've been studying.

This all sounds great on "paper," but how am I going to pull it off? Will it work? And how much work will it be? Will the students buy into it? Will the "guaranteed audience" of the wiki -- of either their peers or anyone surfing the web for information about Minnesota writing -- motivate the students to do their best, and to better understand purpose and audience, as Hendron suggests on page 188?

Or, will anything resembling "community building" serve to make the students rebel, or just not buy into it, as students might value the American ideal of "individualism" more, as Rebekah Nathan suggests in her book, My Freshman Year (2005). This increasing individualism in American society is also documented in Robert Putnam's book, Bowling Alone (2000).

Maybe individual blogs are the better answer? Ugh. No. Yes. No.

A Brief VideoThread Survey of American Literature

Here is my first experiment with composing "digital literature" using VoiceThread. The images are all from Flickr and are licensed under "Creative Commons."

This VoiceThread is an audio and video tour of some of the writers I cover in the two-semester course sequence of American Literature: ENGL 2230 and ENGL 2235 at Anoka Ramsey Community College.

Flickr Slideshow of Mankato, MN, and American Literature

The slide show you've just seen is, apparently, an odd miscellany of images from Flickr. There's no explicit, coherent theme, I don't think, so don't think you've missed anything! (Sounds a little like Mark Twain at the beginning of Huck Finn, don't you think? "Persons attempting ....") However, being the English professor that I am, I suppose there's something lurking under the surface. Maybe we can find something there?

Also, Flickr does not let me organise my faves, so there's no way I can impose upon my choices a coherent, linear narrative. Maybe that's where VoiceThread will come in handy? Moreover, my faves seem not to be organised in the order I chose them on Flickr, so that's not even helpful, where one might try to choose images in a certain order so that the faves are organised. (Did you like the British spelling of organize? I hope so. I also think we should go metric! Powers of 10 are so much easier.)

The coherent narrative is this: I went to college in Mankato, and in college I studied American Literature, first with Dr. Robert Houston, and then with Dr. Ronald Gower, both excellent professors--perhaps more on them later, in another blog post. Literature has an imaginative, playful component, much like I'm trying to adopt in this blog post, which some of these images demonstrate, and Mankato has a picturesque past and present, which also lends itself to the imagination. For example, while I could not find any images of the Dakota Sioux hanging in Mankato (it happened around 1862, I think), I did find the image of a Mankato-area man tarred-and-feathered for not supporting the war. This stuff should only happen in the imagination, right?

So there's the coherent theme or narrative. Of course, you might also see things I didn't, and that's OK too. It's what we English professors call "reader response," where the act of reading, or viewing, or interpreting, is as much a creative act as the act of composing. There are no wrong answers, right? Not as long as one can support their "reading" with evidence from the "text." (Sorry! Don't know where that lecture came from.)

NOTE: All images in the slide show have a "Creative Commons" license, which is great, and I thank the artists for allowing their use. (However, limiting a Flickr search to only those images with the "CC" license does, sometimes dramatically, limit your choices. Using your own images and/or checking other image repositories on the web, such as Google Images, might be even better.)

Interesting Class Topics/Themes

In an earlier post, I was all excited about an idea for a class wiki: "Minnesota Literature." Since then, I've been toying around with variations on the theme, since "literature" is sometimes thought of narrowly as only poetry, drama, novels, and short fiction. But I don't want the class or the wiki to be that limiting, especially since some/many students might have reading (and, thus, research) interests in other forms of "literature"--memoirs, autobiography, biography, history, self-help, letters, essays, all the various forms of journalism, etc. Not to mention all the various forms of novels--romance, mystery, science fiction, historical, etc.

So I was thinking of "Minnesota Writing." Or "Writing Minnesota." Or "Minnesota Writers." And I was still excited about the idea.

Then we went to a confirmation party last weekend, where I visited with my nephew who is in his first year at the University of Minnesota at Morris. He was telling me about his first-year writing course and how excited he was about it. And the class topic/theme? Was there one? What was it?

Conspiracy Theories.

And he was saying things that every writing teacher would love to hear. "The readings are so interesting and engaging." "It's fun to go to class and listen to him try to convince us of things." "The topics really get me to think and keep me thinking." "The writing we do is real. We're not just writing to him; we're writing to people we hope to convince about our ideas." "My friends in other writing class aren't reading and writing about anything nearly as interesting."

(When I got home and looked at the UMN-Morris bookstore website, I could kind of see what he meant. A few sections were using a straight "inquiry and academic writing" kind of text. I've done that a lot in the past. One section seemed to be focused on Nature Writing. Seems to make sense for Morris. And one section, well, I couldn't really figure out what they were doing.)

And his enthusiasm is infectious. But I know NOTHING about conspiracy theories--although I've always been interested in them. I love the Dan Brown novels and all the JFK information, among other things. But I've never formally studied conspiracy theories, so would I really feel comfortable about using a theme like that in my classes?

And what would my students think? Some would love it. Some might wonder if it's a history class instead. Some might hate it, have no interest in it. And what about my students from many other countries and/or cultures? What would they think? Would any of the topics even interest them or apply to them? Could they relate? Would they have any background knowledge to draw upon? And any of the "Christian" conspiracy theories might not interest my Jewish or Muslim or Native American students--and might in fact irritate my very deeply religious Catholics or Lutherans. (It is Minnesota, ya know!)

What now?

Experimenting with Bubbl.us

Here's my experiment with Bubbl.us. I was brainstorming about possible final projects for CI 5330.



Let me know what you think. Thanks!

Mankato State University ... Picking a Major

minnesota state - mankato
Originally uploaded by goatopolis

This is where it all began. I began my college career at Mankato State University as a "pre-med" major. But since there wasn't a major called "pre-med," I had to choose something else. So I started with Chemistry, then I switched to Biology, then Environmental Science, then Chemistry, then Math, then Chemistry, then Biochemistry, then English. (But I minored in Chemistry after all that!) The reason for all the switches? I was interested in too many things! With each class I took, I could see myself majoring in that field.

But I was still interested in medicine through it all. (I still am.) So interested that I applied to the Medical School at the University of Minnesota through its Advanced Admissions Program, a program targeting college sophomores. (I think medical school admissions were down at the time.) You could apply at the end of your sophomore year of college. They looked at your grades, your activities, your writing sample, and your interviews. If you were accepted, that was it. No MCAT! You had to complete your B.S. or B.A. degree, of course, and keep up your grades and activities. But you were in!

My interviews were a dream! The first interview was with a professor of public health whose brother played the trombone. And since I knew of his brother because I played the trombone myself, we started talking about music and the interview took off from there. It couldn't have gone any better. The second interview was with an ophthalmologist who turned out to be the assistant of the ophthalologist who had performed three surgeries on my eye when I was about 2 years old--I had remembered his name through my mother's stories. So that interview was more about my eye and him digging around for my file--but he also asked the questions he needed to. Again, it couldn't have gone any better.

And so I was accepted to the U of M Medical School. And then things changed. And it was all their fault! Part of the acceptance agreement was that I could major in anything I wanted, as long as I completed all the Medical School requirements--they wanted well-rounded physicians, not all science drones. So I changed my major, one last time, to English. Another part of the acceptance agreement was that I was assigned a mentor to "shadow" once a month for my last two years of college. He was a professor of Radiology and I met with him for a full day, once a month, for two years. But in talking to him and his residents, it became clearer and clearer to me that the "culture" of medical school and I weren't going to "jive." (Especially when most residents, when I asked, said they wouldn't do it again.)

And at the same time, I was having a blast in my English courses. I had always wanted to teach, and I knew that by going to Medical School, I wouldn't be able to teach for at least 6-8 more years. Then, a bulletin board outside the MSU English Department office caught my eye. Teaching Assistantships were being offered for incoming graduate students. To make a long story short, I applied to the graduate school at MSU, in English, and I applied for a Teaching Assistantship, in Composition. (I didn't know at the time that, usually, one does not go to graduate school where one was an undergraduate--but it made little difference in the end.)

When I received my graduate school acceptance letter and my Teaching Assistantship contract, I applied for a one-year extension from the Medical School ... just in case the English gig didn't work out. But it did. I was having a blast, both with the teaching and with the coursework. So the next year, I notified the Medical School that I wouldn't be joining them after all.

I haven't looked back. And, I have wonderful memories of Mankato State--now called Minnesota State Mankato. Fancy!

NOTE: This photo has a "Creative Commons" copyright.