Update: It's Been a Long Time!

I am on sabbatical this academic year (2015-16), and my primary project is leading my English Department in the adoption of the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) to shorten our "pipeline" of developmental-level writing courses. The ALP was created by Peter Adams and developed at the Community College of Baltimore County. It has been studied and researched intensively and has consistently found to be successful at the colleges where it is adopted.

As I am working on this project, I am continually reminded of the coursework I took at the University of Minnesota on my last sabbatical (academic year 2008-09) to complete a graduate-level certificate in Post-Secondary Developmental Education. (It was in one of those courses where I first started this blog.) In one of those courses I wrote a paper on "Mainstreaming Basic Writers," and one of the primary features of ALP is mainstreaming.

Irony? Fate? Coincidence?

Stay tuned; I may post more as the year goes on.

More Education Videos

Here are two more videos that I might use for my writing classes--for discussion and/or for research.

The first is about a professor supposedly smashing a student's laptop!



The second is about "Your First College Year." I found out about it in a book the ARCC faculty are reading in preparation for the 2010-11 academic year:

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future: Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30, by Mark Bauerlein (New York: Tarcher-Penguin, 2009, p. ___).

When I followed the link, however, there wasn't a video there. Here's another related link that actually appears to be the same page.
More later!

Blogs for Bibs? ... Or ...?

In my English 1121 class right now, we are beginning work on our annotated bibliographies for our major argument paper. One option I'm giving is to compose the annotated bibliography using Microsoft Office's PowerPoint rather than the "traditional" Word document.

To give credit where credit is due, or at least some credit, since my idea is a bit different:

A fellow classmate of mine, last year, when I was on sabbatical and taking courses at the U of MN, was Kate Peterson, a librarian at the U of MN, did her final project on "new" annotated bibliographies. If I remember correctly, she advocated using blogs for this, with one blog post for each source; the blog post would contain both the bibliographic citation and the annotation.

If you are interested, please read Kate's blog post about her final project.

I really liked this idea--for many reasons, including the use of a popular digital writing tool in place of a more "traditional" tool--but since I'm not assigning blogs (yet?) in my writing courses, I went searching for a way to modify Kate's idea. PowerPoint came to mind, not only because it is another digital writing tool that we studied and practiced last year, but also because one of its slide choices, "Title and Content," seemed to lend itself well to how an annotated bibliography is set up. In addition, another slide choice, "Two Content," might lend itself well to doing a summary annotation on the left side and an evaluative annotation on the right side.

I can also see students perhaps uploading their PowerPoint bibliographies into something like SlideShare or SlideBoom or SlideRocket and "publishing" it on the web.

I'll report back on how this works out.

A Possible Argument and Research Project

Here are three related videos:

A Vision of Students Today (12 Oct. 2007): A short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today -- how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.( This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. So you are welcome to download it, share it, even change it, just as long as you give me some credit and you don't sell it or use it to sell anything.)

Embedded:



A Vision of K-12 Students Today (28 Nov. 2007): This project was created to inspire teachers to use technology in engaging ways to help students develop higher level thinking skills. Equally important, it serves to motivate district level leaders to provide teachers with the tools and training to do so.

Embedded:



A Vision of Community College Students Today (29 June 2009): Inspired by mwesch's YouTube video, "A Vision of Students Today" . . . For more information on Sussex County Community College and its anthropology department please visit http://sussex.edu/

Embedded:



Here might be one more video to consider:

Shift Happens

Embedded:



Possible Assignments:

1.) Write a response to one of the videos:

• A personal response--how do your own experiences connect to the video? do your experiences further support, demonstrate, or illustrate ideas in the video? or, do your own experiences refute or contradict the video? etc.
• An analytical response--what is the purpose or intent of the video? who is the intended audience for the video? what rhetorical strategies are used in the video (ethos, pathos, logos)? etc.
• An argumentative or a persuasive response--do you agree with the ideas in one or more of the videos? do you disagree with the ideas in one or more of the videos? can you offer further support? can you offer counter-arguments? etc.
  

2.) Compare and contrast two of the videos

3.) Synthesize the main ideas in the videos

4.) Research

5.) Other

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.

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?