This is my second post in a small series, exploring how I might incorporate blog/s/ing into a course I’ll be teaching for the first time this spring, “Writing for the Social Sciences.” (WFSS) I suppose I’m cutting it a bit short here, in terms of decision-making, but I’ve still got several weeks left to make some final choices.
In my last post I noted my WAC professional development as a CUNY Writing Fellow. That experience has taught me to begin my planning by considering: What are my goals for this course? What do I hope that students come away with from WFSS?
Initially, I want to be aware of contextual issues that will affect my goals. The Center for Worker Education (CWE) is a small liberal arts school within the City College of New York, CUNY. Students at CWE are adults working full-time, and I am told that many of them come to the program because they need a bachelor’s degree to move further on in their field. The average student age is forty. I also want to consider the fact that the degree offered is broadly oriented and interdisciplinary.
With those factors in mind, and given that this is my first time teaching the course, I have decided to use a textbook, Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Ways of Reading seems to be intended for First-Year Composition courses, but the excerpts they include come from challenging yet readable texts by scholars and writers such as Gloria Anzaldua, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, John Berger, Adrienne Rich, Edward Said and W.J.T. Mitchell. The readings are also organized in ‘sequences’, for instance, Autobiographical Explorations, Truth and Method, History and Ethnography, or Language, History and Identity, and frames such as these will nicely address a range of topics across social sciences. The sequences take students and professor through a series of writing assignments that can eventually connect into a larger project. For the final paper, I plan to have students select their writing from one sequence and build on it with additional readings and outside research.
So back to my original question, What do I want students to learn how to do? 1)To read challenging texts carefully and to engage with those texts. 2)To make connections: between texts, and between life and text. 3)To provide written summaries, analysis, and critique. 4)To become familiar with one or two discipline-specific styles of writing. In addition to these more outcome-based goals I have for students, I also want to make sure that what we do helps them engage further with the world, whether that is within themselves, family life, work life or some other arena. This may be where blogs come in. Blog/s/ing may partly be about connecting.
I have been wondering how adult students with full work and personal lives would feel about taking time with blogs. Are blogs interesting to people beyond a small technophilic world? I don’t think I want students just reading live journals. If we’re reading blogs, I’d want them to read something substantive, that relates to their professional field or to what we’re reading. I’m not sure that exists. I’ve done some searching for blogs relating to Social Services and Social Work professions and haven’t found much. It occurs to me now that I might look for Teacher Education blogs.
Why even use blogs in a course? Well, I do think it’s beneficial to be aware of the new forms of technology and writing that are out there. In a sense, I think it’s good to ‘keep up.’ But I want more than just keeping up with the Joneses… Of course, there are blogs on writing—I could always have students read and respond to more general writing-focused blogs. These questions I’m asking are about content. The content of the blogs matters to me. I don’t want to waste students’ time, and I guess I’m aware that my own entry into the blogosphere has taken place over a number of months. I am leaning toward having us engage with other blogs that are out there, rather than say, do a course blog, or have students write their own. I’m thinking of this as a baby step, I suppose. Anyone have any thoughts they’d like to share?
I,as teacher in higer education, am also exploring blogs as a teaching tool. My concern is one of teaching the content of the course becomes one of teaching the tool used in the course.
Prof. Karl Lang at Baruch uses blogs extensively in his MIS Honors Courses and they seem to work well. Perhaps it worth a visit with him to get his views on the matter.
I’ve been using some sort of course management system in all my college courses since the spring term of 2002. This experience has led me to look at the student more so than the tool. Teachnology toolsare useful to students who 1.) have the desire to learn, and 2.) have the self-disicipline to manage their resources effectively, and 3.) have a comfort for technology.
One dimension of the learning experience is the student-tool couplet. Perhaps, in this case, we sometimes focus too much on the tool.
Blogs, and I may be showing some naivety here, seem to me to be somewhat one-sided when it comes to conversation. Take the present case.
I’m reading your post not because I went to cac.ophony.org to see what was new, but because bloglines alerted mt there was a new post. No doubt you will be alerted by cac.ophony.org that I have posted a comment. I’m not sure I will be alerted if you comment on my comment. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be coming back to this spot on a daily basis to check whether you have. Hence, my concern about the one-sidedness.
Which leads me to wikis as possible teaching tool.
Which leads me to the line from a Grateful Dead song; “Where did the time go.”
Regards,
Jim
Just a quick plug for W of R: I’m really happy to see that it’s made it beyond Freshman English. In my opinion, it is miles ahead of other composition readers in that it encourages thorough, complex engagement with long, difficult but ultimately rewarding readings. The idea behind the book is that stiudents read only a few, sequenced readings over the course of the term — 3 or 4 max. Other readers tend to anthologize brief (4-5pp) exerpts from longer readings which students tend to read for the main idea (”the point of this reading is . . .”) which tends to encourage superficial engagement and platitudes.
As an aside, a few years ago, I filled out a faculty survey of suggested readings for a new edition of W of R. One of them was the first chapter of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, a notoriously difficult and, I’d say obscurantist, theoretical work. I’m glad theyt didn’t include it as I think it would be a nightmare to teach but the point, I think, is that the selection of readings is in W of R is underwritten by the idea that students will be able to meet any expectation and challenge if provided the right tools.
I agree with you to a point, Jim. I think that much of the one sidedness you refer to is a product of 1) the fact that blogs, by nature, tend to privilege the author over the commenters — so that the main attraction is the author’s post and the comments are secondary; and 2) that, to build on 1, the way that blogging software typically handles comments discourages dialogue which is exactly what we don’t want. Perhaps we ought to look into a plug-in for Wordpress which makes the comments work as a threaded discussion — those tend to work much better for that sort of thing. This way, each new comment could be the beginning of a new thread on some aspect of the original post.
Oh and, by the way, you can be alerted of new comments to any post using RSS. There’s a link to an RSS feed for comments in the footer — just scroll down all the way.
Deborah– I think this is a good process to be going through as you plan: what do I want my students to get out of the course? If I use blogs, what will they get out of that? How else could that be provided?
One idea is to use the blog as a space where students can respond to the reading they’re doing in class, and interact (to some degree) with one another about that reading. Another idea is to have students “bring” reading from news articles online, other blogs, etc. to your class blog. Blogging, after all, is all about linking out and having a wider conversation. Either/both of these approaches could suit your four goals listed above.
Of course, as Jim notes, the blog entry itself can be one-sided. Commenters like Jim may never read this posting again. (I would argue that students in a class could reasonably be expected to subscribe to and read all the course’s blog entries and all the resulting comments. Or not. But the point is that students in a class can, if there’s a good reason for it, be asked to do things the general public won’t!)
On the other hand, that one-sidedness comes from the fact that the blog writer has primacy over the commenters (in a way a writer in a threaded discussion board doesn’t.) And I think that that can be good for students, if they have something to write about. It can give them confidence. It can–but does not need to–also lead to more polished writing than some forms of online communication (IMs and discussion boards come to mind). I am not saying that blog writing should be high-stakes writing, but it can go some way towards providing a space for students to write (semi-)publicly, and that can be a good practice.
I am not trying to sell blogging. It is a highly versatile medium, and can be used in horrible ways as well as mundane ones, and wonderful ones. (And of course, whatever we plan to do with students may end up having quite different effects due to class chemistry, individual student goals and needs, etc.) I would suggest looking at as many course blogs as possible. I did this about a year ago while preparing for a seminar teaching teachers to blog. (I did it just by googling relevant search terms, “course blog,” college, and terms representing individual subjects.) The range of ways blogs were used was very wide. Some seemed to be vehicles for professorial lectures and announcements (with students asking brief questions in the comments), and others were communities where students wrote to each other about what they were reading (this is the model I am personally drawn to). Other courses had a blog for each student, and they linked to one another and commented on one another. Looking at blogs also gives you some ideas about how professors are intending the blog to fit into the course, their goals and requiements, etc.
Thanks, Mikhail, for the direction to the comments feed.
Kudos also to Kate for her insight.
We’re struggling at my institution with these issues. It’s not always clear how to proceed, but then that lack of clarity is part of the joy (can I call it that?) of taking on the tough problems of teaching and learning. Whick reminds me of John Herschel (1830): “Who the deuce ever did anything worth naming without sacrifice?”
Anyway, I found the the comments of the both of you from an alert by Bloglines. So perhaps it picks up comment changes as well.
The question that keeps running in the back of my mind is whether these technological tools create a richer learning space (which I think they do) that results in the emergence of students better prepared to thrive and make a positive difference in the world (which I think does happen). Although I wrote a paper on the subject — Connect, Communicate, Learn (http://jmsdrgn.squarespace.com/storage/Connect Communicate Learn.pdf) — I continue to think that most evidence in support of these technological tools is anecdotal.
We lack, at my instituion, the resources to conduct institutional research and the sorts of pre- and post-diagnostic studies I observed at, for example, Baruch. Perhaps you know of studies that address the hypotheses mentioned above.
You may also find How to Use Computers and the Internet in Daily Transactions (http://jmsdrgn.squarespace.com/storage/How to Use Computers and the Internet in Daily Transactions.pdf) of interest in the context of this discussion.
Ray Kurzweil also makes for a good read on this subject.
I’m happy we live in interessting times.
Jim
A curiosity: the word pedablogy (pedablogía in spanish) was invented by Chilean Teacher Benedicto Gonzalez V., in 2004.