Monthly Archive for November, 2005

8th International WAC Conference

Published
by
Mikhail
on November 30, 2005
in Conferences
. 0 Comments

For all you WAC types and fellow travelers, make a note that the 8th International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference will take place on May 18-20, at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina. The conference will feature presentations from all disciplines and from cross-disciplinary teams on a wide range of topics of interest to faculty, graduate students, and administrators at two- and four-year colleges.

For more information, visit the conference website at the link above. Please also feel free to contact the conference planners at wac2006-L@clemson.edu.

Teachers and Writers Collaborative

Published
by
Jill
on November 28, 2005
in Pedagogy and Resources
. 2 Comments

Have any of you heard of the organization Teachers & Writers Collaborative? I was just looking at their site and it looks like they have good information and a smart program. Their basic premise is that professional writers can offer writing teachers innovative pedagogical tools. They offer workshops, publish books, have a resource library and center, and run the online forum WriteNet. Most these tools are aimed at teaching K-12, but some of their ideas seem valuable for undergraduate teaching. This approach is similar to one that many college theatre programs take — hiring professional practitioners to teach students — and I know some college writing programs do this as well. Has anyone ever used their books or resources, or do you know more about this organization?

Teaching Carnival 3 & Audio Responses to Student Writing

Published
by
Kate
on November 28, 2005
in Blogs and Blogging, Pedagogy and Podcasts and Podcasting
. 1 Comment

Academic Blogger Scrivener has recently compiled entries for the latest Teaching Carnival (#3) on his blog Scrivenings. In case you haven’t come across a blog carnival before, it’s a collection of entries from various blogs on a theme, and here the theme is teaching in higher education. Scrivener also offers links to TC2 (in October) and the original one. One of the nice things about what they’re calling an “ubercarnival” is that it moves from host to host. (Now where is that umlaut key when you need it?)

Entries in Teaching Carnival 3 range from practical and theoretical issues in the classroom, to pedagogical styles, dealing with tricky classroom dynamics, and much more.

I followed a link from TC3 to a post on Steven D. Krause’s blog about using audio to provide feedback for students on their written work. The key, of course, is not only whether it’s useful, but whether it’s efficient for faculty. Daniel Anderson, a commenter on this post, suggests that recording brief audio files was easier for him than writing feedback on papers.

Krause’s TC3 entry led me also to a Kairos article by Jack Wilson on the theory and practice and consequences of sending such audio feedback to students: Perception Is All: Using Audio Files To Reach Across the Divide. Though Wilson describes the technology from the perspective of a distance ed professor, he also reminds us that in a sense, “All education is distance education.” Among other things, Wilson argues that his audio feedback both increases a sense of community and closeness with his students, helps reach students with different learning styles, and offers a lasting record of the comments for both professor and student.

What’s better?

Published
by
Diana
on November 23, 2005
in Revision
. 2 Comments

I recently conducted an editing workshop where I doggedly tried to drive home the point that writing needs to be done in stages and that students should never hand in a first draft (unless a teacher specifically asks for it), etc. We were discussing ways of making sentences better and a student said that she didn’t like messing around with her writing after her first attempt. How you know if what you’re doing is “better”? How do you know you’re not making it worse?

I realized that a lot of what I try to impart to students is something that comes naturally to me. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking consciously about my own editing decisions. I chock up the beautiful and complex prose that you are now sampling to instinct. But where does it come from? How do I make value judgments about my own writing? I know “good writing” when I see, and yet I also know that’s not a good enough answer.

I told the class what I have always been told and what I also believe to be true: better writing and editing are developed over time through reading habits. I encouraged them to read as much as possible of all sorts of materials, from sports pages, and ad copy to novels. I also suggested that they read academic articles and text books out loud every once in a while.

Of course, better writing is not necessarily entirely elusive or subjective. I know that there are guidebooks about style that would probably benefit both me and my students. In fact, as I write this, I am aware that underneath a pile of papers is a book I have been meaning to read for a month: Stunning Sentences by Bruce Ross-Larson from the Effective Writing Series. Perhaps therein lies a “better” answer to this student’s question?

CFP: Computers and Writing Conference 2006

Published
by
Mikhail
on November 22, 2005
in Conferences and Technology
. 0 Comments

Given that we’ve been on this topic for a while, folks might be interested to know that the call for proposals for the 2006 Computers and Writing Conference is now available. The conference will take place at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX on May 25-28. Submissions are due January 15. Take a look at the full CFP here. This is THE big conference on computer-mediated communication.

Almost Famous

Published
by
Kate
on November 21, 2005
in Baruch College and Blogs and Blogging
. 0 Comments

Just thought folks might like to know we’ve made the Baruch news today. Check out the article about CAC.ophony on the Baruch homepage under “Campus News,” or click here for a direct link to the article.

Wikitopia

Published
by
Mikhail
on November 17, 2005
in Peer Review and Technology
. 10 Comments

A few people have already mentioned wiki, a content management system which allows all users of a given site to create or edit all content – to write collaboratively, in other words. The implications of this for teachers interested in collaborative writing have been explored in a number of fora. (Take a look at this discussion of wiki in composition classes from Kairos or Collaborate!, Stanford’s collaborative writing site.)

Wikipedia, an open source encyclopedia is probably the best known example of wiki in action. When I first learned about Wikipedia, I browsed the site for a bit and decided to give a shot to contributing to it. When I came across an article which referenced the famous song, “Fly Me to the Moon,” which did not yet have an article of its own, I figured I’d write one. I did a little Google-powered research and this is what I wrote:

Popular jazz standard written in 1954 by Bart Howard and made famous ten years later by Frank Sinatra. Originally entitled “In Other Words,” “Fly Me to the Moon” is frequently identified with Sinatra although it has also been performed by Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Johnny Mathis, Wes Montgomery, Diana Krall, Al Hirt, Groove Armada, Bobby Darin, Doris Day, Paul Anka, Shirley Bassey, Tony Bennett and many others.

My article included the links you see above plus the lyrics as well as my name and the time I created the article. Within 5 minutes, this was posted on my “Talk” page by someone named RickK:

Hi, welcome to Wikipedia! Enjoy your stay! I had to make some changes to your Fly Me To The Moon posting. We use standard capitalization here, we don’t sign our articles, and we can’t post lyrics — they’re copyrighted.

How dare he fault me on my capitalization?! — Since then, that article has undergone a number of significant revisions by a whole host of people and now looks like this. You can look at the history of the article and compare versions here.

This brings me to my point. A number of people I know are skeptical of Wikipedia because they don’t trust a source of knowledge whose content can be modified by anybody at any time — something about it just doesn’t seem right. What’s fascinating to me about wiki, though, is that it enables all users to discuss what sort of changes should or should not be made to a given article. (RickK didn’t do a whole lot of discussing before he changed my post, I’m sure, but he did offer a rationale.)

Wikipedia, then, works the way it does because it enables a large community of dedicated folks to keep a pretty close eye on what people contribute. The site, in other words, has a built-in and more or less democratic system which regulates what is or is not included in a given article. (Note, though, that this doesn’t always turn out for the best – if you look at RickK’s Talk page, you’ll see that collective knowledge making has its discontents.) All changes are tracked by the software so that anyone can see any previous version of any article. Some articles undergo hundreds and hundreds of revisions both major and minor – take a look, for example at the history of the article on Helsinki, Finland. (I’ve never been to Finland, but would love to go.)

Interesting stuff. It seems to me that wiki could be a tremendous tool for writing instruction especially in addressing revision. The question is whether it is useful in the right way. Does it, for example, help us address concerns regarding style and correctness that many folks seem to prioritize above all else in writing? If not, should we really care? That’s another matter though.

Some Thoughts about Cross-Cultural Communication

Published
by
Chihping
on November 16, 2005
in ESL
. 0 Comments

A recent workshop I sat in struck me in various ways that I almost had a moment of epiphany, a learner’s realization. In that workshop one activity suddenly summoned up my past educational experiences and made me realize that even an unintended moment of communication may surprisingly impact an ESL audience in ways that evoke different cultural habits and thinking patterns that have long submerged into one holistic culture of interactions. Yet that remembrance resurfaced through an exchange based on mutually yet unconsciously kind intensions to get meanings crossed.  And it could happen in an ordinary daily life.

It may begin like this.  Early one morning, as usual, I sat in on one of my tutoring sessions to collect data for my WAC research project. Due to some personal issues the former tutor yielded the floor to the current one, who had to make up all that had been left undone with tutoring and in the meantime get to know the students and new topics of subsequent workshops. Roughly speaking, I sat in mainly for the purpose of observing students’ learning process in order to figure out how the tutoring sessions may be intergrated most effectively into the 2100 class. As usual still, I tried to jot down whatever things that would contribute to that understanding. As the workshop meandered half way through after we (or they) discussed evaluating sources for their research paper, the tutor gave each student an article and asked each to proceed to something very specific and share back.

That was the moment when I felt struck, the moment when all the accumulative effects materialized. He asked them to circle two words they didn’t understand, write two questions, two comments, and two critical marginal notes, the kind of exercise that belongs to conducting a research. What struck me, if never before, was the specificity of the exercise, the instructions. It certainly was not the first time in my life to hear of the instructions or do an exercise so specific; a large part of my past schoolings was taught by English-speaking teachers. And I think when I taught at City Tech I also tried to be specific and gave specific assignment (now when I come to think of it I really need to seriously reconsider that…). Nor did it seem unusual for me to hear people even while they were deliverying speeches use terms and expressions quite straightforward or personal–gesturing toward their friends, etc. However it has not struck me until that moment in the workshop that the kind of specificity and straightfowardness run counter to my Taiwanese/Chinese culture as a whole, which promotes generialization, ambiguity, and understanding through continuous internal workings and realization. That is, crucial things may get hinted at and left unsaid in order for the students to lumber up their mental muscle.

In this way my cultural upbringing encourages kids to think the unthinkable, to do something that goes beyond their age. Oftentimes interpersonal communication also becomes ambiguous since people are accustomed to referring to things in a roundabout way. If you look at a Chinese painting, for instance, a huge empty space may catch your attention; that’s where the meditation should fall. So the ambiguity is the underlying focus of communication and the inherent asthetics of a meditative culture.  In any event the exercise put forward in such a way in that workshop may appear quite natural to many of you and to me most of the time as I become more immersed in this culture; however, at times such as this one I was reminded yet once more of the differences of cultural habit and behaviour just in that seemingly ordinary endeavour, and was wondering if our presence has brought anything into this melting pot, not to mention just the take-out food. But overall, my feelings would be that the workshops I’ve sat in are like cultural enhancers or fusers. They serve as an interface bridging me, an ESL learner, and the new culture, also a mixed kind, in an interesting way. I have yet to find a chance to talk to the tutor about this and am quite curious whether the similar situation has dawned on any ESL students in those workshops.

Speaking of Low-Stakes Writing . . .

Published
by
Cristina
on November 15, 2005
in Low-Stakes Writing and Technology
. 3 Comments

Michael Leddy’s entry on How to Email a Professor made me think of when, way back when I was teaching, I somewhat irritatedly clamped down on how students emailed me. After the first few “hey prof,” “im ur student,” or “IM CONFUSED. HOW DO YOU CALCULATE GDP PLEASE HELP ME” volleys of the semester, I’d come to class and insist to students that I was not their chat buddy and that therefore their emails should reflect our professional relationship. While they did not need to overdo the formalities, at a minimum they had to sign their emails (haironfire@xxxx.com leaves no way of identifying the student, let alone course and section) and attempt to use proper punctuation and grammar. Students might as well use emailing professors as a dress rehearsal for future workplace communication, where they might be more harshly judged. Whether or not the course is a CIC, students can practice trying to carefully phrase questions, articulate positions, and apply common rules of courtesy. Having professors set minimum email standards seems like a low-cost way of getting students into the habit of thinking about what they write. What do others think of this?

Learning in the Age of Podcasting

Published
by
Nida
on November 14, 2005
in Podcasts and Podcasting and Technology
. 4 Comments

The “Education Life” supplement of the New York Times on November 6 had a short article about the use of iPods as instructional technology in American colleges. Podcasting lectures, that is, audio-recording lectures for students to download on their iPods, or other portable players is becoming increasingly common in universities nationwide, starting with the well publicized case of Duke University. Last year, Duke gave its entering students free iPods with which they could listen to lectures whenever and wherever… that is, not in the classroom.

One of the main arguments in favor of podcasting in academia is that it makes it easier for students to just listen to the lecture and participate without getting frantic about taking good notes. However, it is also feared that students will increasingly desert the classroom if they have auditory access to what is going on in the classroom. Podcasting does not seem radically different from lower forms of technology college students and faculty have been using for decades, such as tape recording lectures, or more recently, posting lecture notes on Blackboard. All these practices aim to facilitate learning. However, I wonder to what extent making learning “effortless” leads to better learning. There are already online debates about the use of podcasting in college in several blogs expressing different opinions about how this tool could be most effectively used. While I see great value in these aids, especially for students with disabilities or for those juggling college with a number of other responsibilities such as parenthood, full time work, etc., I also see the risk of mass producing higher education. For our purposes, I wonder how it would affect what we are trying to accomplish as writing and communication fellows as it changes the nature of classroom interaction.

Because it is a recent development in instructional technology, I did not see many evaluations of its impact on learning. Duke published an evaluation of its iPod initiative in June 2005. While it seems like students just loved using their iPods, the evaluators admitted that “the extent to which having access to lecture recordings improves student performance, impacts class attendance, or enhances students’ course experiences remains unknown.” That is, we don’t know if it actually does what it is intended to do.

Well, this might be the cynicism of a technophobe who never made the move from a Discman to an mp3 or an iPod… Does anybody know any research evaluating the impact of podcasting or similar technologies on learning?