The Frame Strategy

November 11, 2008 By 1 Comment

In Engaging Ideas, John Bean discusses “the frame strategy” for use with small groups. “Using this strategy, the instructor gives students a mapping sentence that predicts the shape of a short essay but not the content. Students have to create content topic sentences to head each predicted section and develop a supporting argument for each one. Often the instructor can include in the task a blank tree diagram or an outline indicating the slots that students’ ideas must fit”

This sounds very interesting to me, but rather challenging. Even though he provides an example, I still can’t quite envision how to actually do this. It seems like it would require a lot of prep before hand: envisioning a full essay and mapping it out. I also can’t quite picture how students I’ve worked with would take to the task.

Has anyone done this before? Could you let us know how you prepped the task, what it was exactly, and how it worked out? Thanks!

Filed Under: Group Composing, Low-Stakes Writing, Pedagogy

Purpose-built Wikis

September 29, 2006 By Leave a Comment

EdTechPost brought me a post NoteMesh – another student-centric note taking service.  Upon first read, I thought this sort of collaborative approach to note-taking — an essential skill in my estimation — to be detrimental to learning.  Maybe not.  Maybe collaboration between the stronger and weaker students could result in “the rising tide lifting all boats.”

After all, an essential element of education is, in my view, the development of knowledge, skill, and experience in working on teams.

Filed Under: Group Composing, Peer Review, Revision, Wikis

Veni, Vidi, Wiki

September 7, 2006 By 2 Comments

Wired online has a nice article today talking about Wikis beyond WikiPedia. In particular, it explores some of the other programs that are useful for groups creating a WiKi:

Several companies are trying to cash in on wikis by making it easy for non-techies to start sites allowing quick and easy collaboration. Among them are Jot, Wetpaint, PBwiki, Wikispaces, Wiki.com and Wikia, started by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

Some of these wikis already allow WYSIWYG editing. “I’d like to see the PTA wiki. We are on the cusp of making the tools simple enough for the Parent Teacher Association,” said Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield. Socialtext is attempting to make its WYSIWYG click-and-type editor more widespread; at this year’s Wikimania conference, Socialtext announced it was working with Wikia and Wikimedia to integrate Wikiwyg into Wikipedia’s software.

I am wondering if any of our readers (or bloggers) have used any of the above Wiki sites for course-related wikis.
Check out the article!

Also: file under meta-blogging, I guess, but I just copied and pasted from Wired’s website and noticed that all the hotlinks carried over. I never noticed that before. WordPress (the blogging medium we are using here at http://cac.ophony.org) is good.

Filed Under: Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Group Composing, Technology, Wikis

writely.com, anyone?

February 22, 2006 By 1 Comment

Have any of you tried using Writely? It’s a site where you can share the writing and editing of documents, collaboratively. Teachers are beginning to use it as a space where students can write a document together, or do peer review. It would be useful for faculty who are co-authoring, too. Registration is free and takes two minutes. You can create documents there, or upload and download them in various formats (Word and others).

Filed Under: Group Composing, Peer Review, Resources, Technology