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

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

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

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.

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.

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?

A Possible Wiki for Next Year's Classes

I've definitely heard more bad than good about Wikipedia, and I usually try to steer my students away from using it. If anything, I tell them to start there, but then to dig deeper to find better sources. So my initial impressions of wikis aren't that great. However, I'm starting to see the positive possibilities.

Last night in class, Richard Beach showed us several wikis created by students who've taken his classes in the past. And Rick has at least two of his own wikis. And we're going to be creating a wiki of our own, apparently. So what would my topic be? What would I really USE in my classes, and what might interest my students, and what might be able to "grow," from class to class, as new students add to the wiki and to the work of previous students?

I was already thinking about this during last week's reading. In the Beach, Anson, Breuch, and Swiss book, Engaging Students in Digital Writing (draft copy, 2008, p. 6), the authors write:

In his first-year composition course at St. Cloud State University, Matt Barton uses a wikibook, Rhetoric and Composition (en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Rhetoric_and_Composition) to which students add material related to topics on rhetoric and composition. Barton finds that, rather than writing papers only for himself, his students are highly motivated to add material to this wikibook knowing that it is being employed by their peers and by [a] larger audience interested in composition.

At this point, I had an immediate topic: "Minnesota Literature." Of course, perhaps there's another one out there, but why can't there be two? And, this one would be primarily for me and my students, though anyone else out there could access it. At this point, however, I don't know if I would have it open access for people around the globe. I need to know more before decisions are made.

The reasons for this topic? First, my own interest in Minnesota Literature, going all the way back to Dr. Ronald Gower's Minnesota Literature course at Mankato State University in the Spring of 1992. And my past students have often reported that my interest in and love of literature in general is infectious and is definitely a positive part of the class.

Second, the community college where I teach has a fairly well established "visiting writers" program, going on 10 years now, where one or two Minnesota writers come to campus each semester to give a presentation. Before each presentation, our college loosely follows a "common book(s)" program, where as many faculty as possible assign the visiting writers' books in their classes, so students have already read and discussed the book(s), and maybe have even written about them, before the writers arrive.

This topic could then be the over-arching "theme" for my first-year writing courses. The first part of the semester could be spent reading the books, talking about them, writing about them (perhaps in Phases I and II as described in the Beach et. al. book), and beginning to gather resources. Rick describes some wikis where the high-school teacher has already gathered some resources for the wiki, to get students started. I could either do that, or let/make them do it. At this point, we'd be concentrating on research methods and skills, searching databases and the Internet, and maybe even starting to evaluate sources.

The second part of the semester could then be spent on further evaluation of the sources gathered, on gathering "multimedia" sources, perhaps including video of the visiting writers, on choosing and defining a "research" topic, and on proposing and planning the paper. The last third of the semester would be spent on the writing process of the required "argumentative research paper" for the course.

Sounds good to me so far! I wonder how my ideas will change over the course of this semester?