Assigning Journal Writing

December 18, 2007 By 2 Comments

 In my freshman composition class, my instructor required that we fill up a certain number of pages in our journals by the end of the semester.  He specified that we could write “Don’t Read” across the pages with things of very private nature.  Once I taught a composition class to a group of older students who had been out of college for a long time and froze every time they needed to write a paper. I thought it would be useful for them to keep a daily journal for a couple of weeks at least.  And, yes, I did something I probably wouldn’t do now – I said they could write “Don’t Read” over certain pages.  The things I did get to read revealed great thinkers and writers.  Many who were against journal writing at first continued writing in their journals till the end of the semester.  They shared personal, not necessarily private things; they shared things that could be easily put in and add tremendous depth to their essays.  Journal writing became a great extension of the writing they produced in class, not an appendix to it. 

I think journal writing can be a great learning tool and not just in a composition classroom.  We know that many professors do not see the value in encouraging students to relate their personal experiences to the readings.  And, journal writing is certainly not a common practice outside of the composition program.  But it is no news that the making of new meaning is always connected to the previously gained knowledge and experience, to the things that go on in the students’ lives currently.  Why not let our students make that connection not always on the spot in the classroom, but in their personal writing space? 

Filed Under: Low-Stakes Writing, Process, Writing Instruction

Some Thoughts on ESL Oral Communication

December 7, 2007 By 1 Comment

This semester’s work supporting an accounting course group presentations has been a great experience for me. I worked with a lot of different groups with their own characters. One thing that surprised me a bit was how many of them are actually ESL students (international students or recent immigrants), and as an ESL person myself, I was interested to encounter some of the challenges they face in tackling this task. I thought I would share some of my stories here, and would like to invite others to share their experience working with them as well.

The two different sections of the course I worked with (taught by two different instructors) had a different set-up for their presentation component. In one of the sections, students were allowed to choose their partners, so I encountered groups who consist of native (and near-native) English speakers only, while some groups had ESL students only. This created situations where some groups struggled in preparing and performing due to language issues and having no one in the group to watch out for them. However, the team dynamics were generally good and some groups actually really got into it and produced excellent presentations.

In contrast, in the other section, where the instructor did the grouping, I observed some nice teamwork where native speakers are supporting the ESL students and the presentations are generally easier to follow languagewise. However, I did see more intra-group communication difficulties, unfortunately. Some students had a hard time understanding each other in the process of working together, and/or some of them get frustrated because their partners are not performing up to their expectations.

From the two sections that presented different types of issues, I see not only language but cultural difference behind their ‘communication difficulties’. I can imagine some of the students might be less experienced with public speaking (as I discussed in a post on class participation), or working extensively with classmates. Although I practiced a lot of group work in my own teaching at CUNY, I never had the experience of working on a big group project as a student back in my country. It is not really a common practice there.

So much for the analysis, but what could we do to best support ESL students and help them (and those working with them) succeed in their presentations, then? Their trouble with English could be remedied by extra language coaching, or so it appears, but that is really just giving them a band-aid (as Jennifer nicely put it). We would want some more fundamental solutions, but it is too ambitious to hope that they will become a significantly more competent speaker of English between today and 5 days later. So far, I am limiting myself to giving them one or two pointers that they could use for now and later, so that it is not too overwhelming or takes too much time (especially when non-ESL students are present). I share my own experience as an ESL student (if I can do it, you can do it too!) and cheer them on. There is not much one can do in one sitting, but I hope a tiny step today will lead to a big leap for them.

Filed Under: ESL, Oral Communication

Writing Diagnostic Assessment: Some Preliminary Findings

December 5, 2007 By Leave a Comment

As many of you know, last month BLSCI applied for external funding from an organization that recognizes exceptional faculty development programs focussed on enhancing undergraduate teaching and learning. In order to make our case for the award, we included some preliminary results from the Writing Diagnostic Assessment data. I’d like to use this post as an opportunity to share some of these results with readers to demonstrate the effectiveness of the work that many have been doing over the years and get some feedback regarding ideas for future analyses.

When looking at the data, on average, students start the semester with scores on both the expectations and writing quality variables in the “middle” range (scores around 3). When we then looked to see if students’ scores significantly improved over the course of one semester in a CIC, there were no major findings. This was because many students started the semester out scoring high (scores from 4 to 5) on many of the variables, and thus did not have any room for improvement (as measured by the diagnostic scoring criteria).

However, when we looked at students who scored in the “low” to “middle” range on all of the variables (thanks Diana for this suggestion!) we observed statistically significant increases from the beginning to the end of the semester on all variables. These increases were consistent across disciplines and schools as well. The figures below illustrate the changes we observed in the data separately for the Weissman and Zicklin Schools.

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Although these results are based only on a subset of the data we’ve been able to clean, match, and analyze (~ 5,000 students), they nonetheless illustrate that the work of BLSCI in creating and implementing CICs seems to be paying off for students across the board. Although most probably knew or were able to sense this already, it’s always great to have “hard data.” We would love to hear readers’ thoughts on these findings and how you see these data stacking up next to the work you’re doing with students in your own classes. Also, as always, any general thoughts and/or questions on the assessment data are welcome.

Filed Under: Administration, Assessment, Faculty Development, Funding, Higher Education

Musings about social networking sites

December 2, 2007 By 1 Comment


This recent New York Times article provides an interesting perspective on the popularity of networking sites. Some academic researchers argue that the recent growth of online social networking and the popularity of sites like Friendster and Facebook are reminiscent of ancient patterns of oral communication in tribal societies. One of them argues that “the popularity of social networks stems from their appeal to deep-seated, prehistoric patterns of human communication” because “we evolved with speech, we didn’t evolve with writing.” The way we express ourselves online is more like talking and this “orality”, which is participatory, interactive, communal and focused on the present” is what “unites people in groups.” (Walter J. Ong, coined the term “secondary orality” in 1982 to describe “the tendency of electronic media to echo the cadences of earlier oral cultures.”)

An anthropologist studying a tribe in Papua New Guinea now applies the same ethnographic research methods to the rites and rituals of Facebook users. He sees parallels between how ones’ identity in tribal cultures is wrapped up in the question of how many people one knows, not unlike on Facebook, where you define yourself by the friends you have.

Obviously in virtual reality it matters much less who you know, because your real, and not virtual, survival does not depend on it. The biggest difference is the superficial nature of online “friendships” but it is this shallow bond and the elimination of the need for physical proximity which stimulates online intimacy. “That distance makes it safe for people to connect through weak ties where they can have the appearance of a connection because it’s safe.” So how does all this new way of relating to each other affect the way we… relate to each other? Some “worry that the rise of secondary orality may have a paradoxical consequence: It may be gobbling up what’s left of our real oral culture.”

I wonder about one more thing. Apart from their use as purely networking/fun/hobby spaces, these sites are used as pedagogical tools, for instance when we start a Facebook page to encourage semi-academic discussion among our students. And so, when we employ these methods to reach out to our students, who are obviously well versed in them, are we risking that we will make them less “cool”, thus subverting our own purpose and making students less likely to use them in learning/teaching processes? Or maybe a question like this is redundant. In the time I spell-check this message and click the “post” button, a brand new networking site will be up, starting as a small, “cool” outlet, and spreading through the virtual world, until us educators get a whiff of it and make it “lame.”

This article from The Independent finds that students are weary of allowing academics to intrude into their spaces, while teachers often find that their students’ Facebook pages provide insights into the students and offer an opportunity to connect. These sites are private, independent, and can decide on membership, content and the discussions that take place there are not sanctioned by the universities, even if often there is some learning going on and students may be building real connections, something a university will welcome. Some professors are weary of using such a private forum for knowledge sharing and argue that academic work on Facebook is inappropriate while there are plenty of new technologies that can be used in teaching, such as discussion groups, wikis, or Second Life, but social networking is not one of them, unless it’s restricted to an institution’s virtual-learning environment.

Filed Under: Interpersonal Communication, Oral Communication, Pedagogy, Technology

Important Questions from the CUNY IT Conference

December 2, 2007 By 2 Comments

I broke away from productive dissertating last Friday to attend a panel on innovating with open source at the 2007 CUNY IT Conference featuring our fearless leader, Mikhail Gershovich, City Tech English Professor Matt Gold, and University of Mary Washington Instructional Technologist and frequent cac.ophony reference, Reverend Jim Groom. Each brought his “A” game.

Mikhail showed off this blog and some of the course blogs we’ve been running, and also demoed to oohs and ahhs VOCAT (which, hopefully, will get a more detailed presentation on this blog once it’s rolled out) while touching on the benefits of “soft money” when trying to break out of traditional teaching and learning molds. Matt talked about his experiences teaching through WordPress, MediaWiki, and SMF Discussion Boards in the CUNY Online BA program and in a traditional face-to-face class, and displayed how distributed class blogs (each student has his/her own) empower students to see their educations as tied into broader communities of knowledge. These approaches also helped his students develop technological “fluency” as they mastered the material of the course, a project that colleges should be grappling with when they discuss their general education curricula. Jim played the part of the prodigal son, sharing with us what he’s achieved using WordPress MultiUser at UMW. In a community of approximately 3200 teachers and learners, UMW has 800 individual and course blogs up and running on one installation of this software. “Running” is the key word. With Jim as their muse, users–students and faculty–are finding creative ways to connect within courses, across disciplines, and beyond the boundaries of the university. To explore this fantastic project, click here.

This was a truly inspiring panel, and raised some important issues. Though Jim put his finger most solidly on the question (and just built it out here), each presenter touched on the tension between administrative concerns that usually favor proprietary software solutions and innovative teaching and learning achieved through open source. For instance, Blackboard is successful primarily because of its strength as an administrative tool– students are auto-enrolled, grades can be calculated and submitted, it links with e-Reserve. Blackboard, however, rarely wows or gets students excited about participating, and applications like the blog and wiki feature in JournalLX simply fake the funk when it comes to the malleability and connectedness we saw displayed by the presenters. Applications like WordPress, MediaWiki, and SMF each empower users to shape information and experience however they need to.

Jim argues in his post that this tension is at the very core of what it means to be an instructional technologist. Joe Ugoretz, who is the Director of Instructional Technology at the Macaulay Honors College (Jim’s and my former stomping ground) echoes the question, and points out that information technology and instructional technology aren’t the same thing. Joe hopes that a more mutually beneficial balance of power between “administrating” and “teaching and learning” can be worked out. The MHC is a hotbed of experimentation in teaching and learning, like the BLSCI, and with Joe now running the show over there it would be great if we could explore connections and partnerships. There is great work being done on teaching, learning, and technology throughout CUNY but, in part because the ultimate target of such work is the classroom, few apparatuses exist for such knowledge to really resonate out and through the lives of CUNY folk. That the panel on open source at the CUNY IT Conference was much more highly attended than last year was promising. Perhaps next year these questions can be better represented in the design of the conference.

Filed Under: Conferences, Pedagogy, Technology