Still using online media for writing-to-learn--and how!

Now that a school year has passed since the Calderwood Writing to Learn Online Fellowships has passed, I'm curious about what my fellow fellows have discovered and and plan on continuing to use. In my College Writing courses at Franklin Pierce Keene, I know I'll keep using a blog as a place to post announcements and links to resources, and have one or two in-class writing sessions in which students respond to each other's work in the computer lab. I also found it quite handy when I had to do a make-up class after a snow day. The Meebo instant message feature seems to be quite valuable to my students as well. (My College Writing blog is http://biggerclassroom.blogspot.com/. I haven't updated since December, though, since I teach hybrid courses on eCollege in the spring semester.) At my Keene State classes where there are more functional computer labs on campus and I have a bit more academic freedom, I have been experimenting with all kinds of online writing. I had students create blogs on Blogger in the fall semester, and then in spring was able to move to WordPress when KSC installed it. (My Blogger blog was Tracy's Office at http://itw101.blogspot.com/, and my WordPress blog is T Blog at http://keeneweb.org/tmendham/ . There are links to all the student blogs in the sidebars.) I've created an online social network using a service called Ning, which I recommend for discussion board work if you're feeling adventurous. Students are facile with online networks and enjoy them, and it gives you a more protected space than a blog, but a more personal and less limiting one than Blackboard. (My Ning network is Keene-Ning at http://keenening.ning.com/. There's also a community blog, not specifically related to academia, for residents of the Monadnock area. People who live up this way might be interested in it: Citizen Keene at http://citizenkeene.ning.com/ )
For my own amusement and to keep track of some scholars I admire, I've started using the microblogging tool Twitter. (You can follow me at http://twitter.com/mendhamt.) I plan Finally, I'm using del.icio.us to store bookmarks, explore the bookmarks of colleagues, and point students to resources online. (If you want to swipe my bookmarks, you're welcome: see http://del.icio.us/mendhamt. The best ones are tagged "cool": http://del.icio.us/mendhamt/cool) The Gabcast audio podcasts worked really well in my Keene State class; reactions were a bit more lukewarm in my Franklin Pierce class. You can see and listen to student audio podcasts if you look at either of my blogs. Allowing students to take out their cell phones in class and create audio recordings on Gabcast was quite popular among the students, as you can imagine. Some educators are using Twitter (which you can post to via text message from cell phones) in the classroom, and I'm considering it--perhaps having them post thesis statements so they can be viewed and critiqued/edited? As far as I can tell this would require having all the students set up Twitter accounts though. If anyone has ideas for a simpler way to gather text messages to project on a screen, let me know. There's a great new term bouncing around the higher ed blogosphere: EDUPUNK. My esteemed colleague Mike Caulfield wrote a good blog post about it at http://mikecaulfield.com/2008/05/26/edupunk/ I'm going to the TEACH! conference on emerging technologies in education in July and quite looking forward to it.
So, what about you?

Instant Message Widget

For those of you using a blog (or some other kind of frequently-visited website) in your teaching, you might find this instant message service called Meebo useful. If you sign up for a Meebo account, you can create a little window to place on your blog that students can click on to see if you're online and chat. I'm going to try adding a Meebo widget to this post, and if you see "mendhamt is online" you can talk to me.

The system isn't perfect--some have had difficulty contacting me on it, but I've had quite a few students use it so far with quick questions and been very pleased that they were able to do so (I tell them it is for quick, simple questions only).
At the Meebo page you can also log into multiple instant message accounts with various providers at once. So if I have some people I want to communicate with who use AOL Instant Messenger, and some who use Google Talk, and some Yahoo, I add those to my Meebo account and use all of them from one place and without downloading their software. (I used to use AIM a lot, but it developed a bad reputation for adware and spyware, as have many other instant message providers). There's a chatroom feature as well, but it didn't work in the Franklin Pierce-Keene computer lab the day I tried it.

Ron's "It's Been So Long, I Don't Remember Anything" post

Finally!! I did my WAC online thing! Actually I did my project quite some time ago, and am just getting around to writing about it. To be continued because my home desktop computer is going so slow, I can't stand it. Wednesday, October 24, 2007: First, here is a testament to the usefulness of first writing a "thought letter" on an assigned short story, then responding to other students posted essays on WebCT. For this purpose, I had assigned students to do an active reading and two page TL on Donna Tartt's "The Ambush," from 2007 Best American Short Stories. This is one of the most positive posts, but there really weren't any negatives. Message no. 62Posted by Jared Lowell (lowellj) on Tuesday, September 25, 2007 3:43pmSubject: Jared Lowell's Reflection Doing this assignment was an easy task for the most part. The only trouble I had was putting some of my thoughts together to write the essay. The essay was a good piece of literature to read and write about. Posting my essay online for all my to read and comment on was a great experience. Once reading their responses to my essay gave me ideas of how I could improve my writing skills. I also enjoyed reading their essays and giving feedback to help them out as well. This is going to help me build my writing skills to help me be successful throughout college and the rest of my life :) Now, here is a typical thought letter analyzing and interpreting Tartt's "The Ambush," as practice leading to my student's more formal critiques of self-selected short stories from the BASS collection.

Dan Melville
College Writing 1
Professor Drogy
19 September 2007
The Ambush
When some unfortunate even happens, there are often negative effects on people who were involved. This could range from someone missing class and not passing in their homework to a message between naval submarines being misinterpreted and starting a nuclear war that destroys the world as we know it. When people witness an unfortunate event and come into contact with the “victim” of the situation, feelings of sorrow and sympathy are often felt. When this happens, it is not uncommon for people to try to help by providing support in any way they think will be effective. This is understandable considering how much better the world would be if everyone was compassionate and sensitive to others needs, but if this gets out of hand, it could make the situation worse than it already is. This is demonstrated exceptionally well in the short story “The Ambush” by Donna Tratt when a boy that lost his father in the Vietnam War is given no parental boundaries by his mother or grandmother; this is illustrated by his bad behavior and his automatic innocence in any situation.
Tim is the poster boy for brats. He bosses his mother and grandmother around like he owns them and never does what they say. He appears angry when they talk to him as if they are speaking out of line. If he is told to do something that he doesn’t want to do he screams at the parent or simply ignores the command. This is not entirely his fault, it’s mostly his grandmothers fault because she always let him do whatever he wanted. Instead of reprimanding the young child when his conduct was poor, she gave in and let him do as he wished. He never had any boundaries; he thought because his father died, he will be given special treatment for the rest of his life. The one time his mother calmly asked him about all the noise he was making in the yard, she was shut up by his grandmother.
Another way Tartt established the negative effects of this type of extra attention was the fact that he was never guilty of anything, even if that meant someone else had to shoulder all of the blame. When Tim and Evie were sneaking around out in the yard trying to scare whoever came down the steps, they succeeded and caused Tim’s grandmother to slip and fall. She cut her arm badly and Tim bend down beside her to treat her, like he did to Evie when they replayed his father’s death and she got shot, while she went to go call 9-1-1. On her way, she was stopped by Tim’s mother who grabbed her, screamed at her, smacked her in the face, and then blamed the whole situation her, also saying “This boy was never bad a day in his life.” All of the blame that could have been put on Tim was transferred to her, along with the responsibility for his actions since the first time they met.
Tim’s mother and grandmother brought Tim up with special privileges because they felt bad for him because he lost his father. These feelings are acceptable but they way they helped him, trying to compensate for the loss of a father with a lack of rules, is not. This did not help Tim at all as he used his father’s death to his advantage to get whatever he wanted from his mother or grandmother. This gave him a false sense of reality, in which he is free to do as he pleases, which will later become a disadvantage for him as he tries to adapt to reality and find his way in the world by himself. He is going to be lost without his lifelines and will need real help.

After reading and writing a thoughtful analysis/interpretation of the Tartt story, each student chose a short story from the collection on reserve, read it actively (margin noting, highlighting, note-taking in journal) and then wrote a three page analysis/interpretation of the story. Then I had students work in small groups to write "advice-centered" reviews, based on the directions in John Bean's Engaging Ideas. Next, each student revised his or her critique and then conferenced with me. Based on our discussion, each student then did a second revision of his or her critique, and turned it in to me about two weeks ago. I am about to return the thought letters on "The Ambush" for students to do an optional revision, which will be followed by a final draft of the formal short literary analysis. I have found this project to be very challenging and intense for most, if not all, of the students in my two College Writing I classes. I believe they have been well immersed in reading and criticizing short stories, a genre that may have escaped their attention altogether. I think they have found there is great value to reading short stories, especially when they are too busy to take on full-length novels.

The next FAWP in our fall curriculum, FAWP being a formal academic writing project, is personal narrative. My intent in taking on short literary analysis first was to immerse students in excellent narrative writing strategies and techniques, in the fictional mode, which they can then apply to writing their own true life narratives. We are in the middle of that process now, as nonfiction narratives (short ones by Angelou, Tan, Dillard, and Alexie) have been read and analyzed, again through the writing of Thought Letters, and first drafts have been written and critiqued. I will soon be reading the first drafts and revisions of those essays, which are posted on WebCT. Students are now working on revisions, with editing to follow. Next week students will share their tentative, finish products, reading aloud in class, and "final drafts" willl be posted on WebCT accompanied by cover letters, and open to additional online peer response.

I use this same basic process for each new formal writing project. I particularly enjoy the early phases of immersion into a new genre and and then the collaborative analysis of what really makes a narrative a narrative, or an argument an argument Thought letter are great to use as a low to medium stakes form of intellectualizing and communicating what is being discovered. Posting on WebCT makes the writing very accessible and easy for me to check on, especially by compiling shorter discussion postings like thought letters and reader responses.

Minghua's Sep Update

Hi, everyone:

My assignment is for my Money and Banking class and it has three phases. The first phase is to ask them to make choices based on their instinct or previous knowledge 1) choose between stock and bonds as an investment option, 2) pick up three favorite stocks 3) pick up favorite bonds. The first phase of my assignment is due the second week of the semester. They posted their answers on WebCT at designed individual cubbie. I did not ask them to comment on each other's posts. Instead I read each of their post and wrote one commment for each of their posts. Fortunately there is only 9 students in this class and I had to write only 27 comments maximim (I could not do this for my ET101 class with 24 students). One student did not post his answers on time and another student only answers one of the three questions. The rest of the students all did a very good job.

By and large I think it works fine for me. For the second and third phases I will introduce more interaction by requiring them to write peer reviews: respond to two of their peers's posts.

Here is another reason I love blog: you can post the link. However I cannot with WebCt discussion board. But you can visit my class discussion board as viewstudent. It is a public user account used by a lof of instructors. The user name is viewstudent and the password is webct. After signing in you can scroll down the list of all courses and my course is Money and Banking ET223. The discussion board is named as Investment Guru Forum.

Minghua's respond to August Check in: My plans

Hi, everyone:

Sorry for coming so late. As I mentioned in my presenation back in August, I use WebCT as the platform for my online assignments. I love blog but I rely on WebCT to assign homework, release notes to the students, let them monitor their grades, etc. And my impresssion is that students might have a hard time to keep track of both WebCT and a separate blog site. Keith and I had the coverstation the other day and we agreed that it would be wonderful if there is a blog site that will also provide the other features that blackboard/webct offer. In that case I will definitely switch to blog.

Anyway, I still use WebCT discussion board to assign the Investment Learn Curve projet I proposed. Each student is assigned one cubbie and post their comments there. It is easier for me to keep track and give them credit accordingly. For the first post, I do not require them to respond to each other but I will post my comments for each of them. For the second and third post I will require them to write comments for their peers.

Bigger Classroom/Gabcast Assignment

Hi everyone:
I had my College Writing I students call in their essay topics to my Gabcast channel last week as prewriting for their first essay on "Received Ideas." I think it worked okay. It's a small sample: there are only 9 students enrolled in the class, and 8 completed the task by the due date. Later on, maybe after the students have written the first two essays, I'll do a survey and get their feedback on whether they found the phone-in useful.
I found collecting the messages and burning them to a CD to play in class pretty easy. One of my concerns had been sound quality, but only two messages were two messages sounded a little wonky, and even with those, I could understand what was being said on a second listen. With a small number of students, and it being early in the semester without a lot of papers to grade, it wasn't too difficult to transfer the phone messages from my Gabcast channel to the Bigger Classroom blog, but I can anticipate that this might not always be the case.
So the technology worked fine, and I'm still evaluating the pedagogical value.
This is a link to the post on my Bigger Classroom blog with student phone messages:
http://biggerclassroom.blogspot.com/2007/09/received-ideas-phone-messages.html
Tracy

Into The Wild Blog Update

I really don't have much to update you all on. My first assignment is not due until the beginning of October so once the students submit that I will have an update as to how it went. I explained to them the assignment on the first day of class and could tell from some of their reactions that creating a blog and using it as an online journal written as a character in a book is an assignment that is different for them, which for me is good. One update I can share with you is that I took what we learned at Calderwood and designed an academic blog. One of the things I struggle with is students taking proper notes and making sure they understand and go back and review the important aspects of class discussions/lectures. So I took what we learned at Calderwood and I started an academic blog that chronicles what went on in class, the discussion topics, things to focus on for next class, main points to study for quizzes/exams, homework assignments, etc. This blog stemmed from my own struggle to keep my semesters straight when I am teaching 4 classes or multiple sections and things can get hectic. Immediately after class I would write a paragraph to myself that summed up class and reminded me what to focus on next class. I realized that if I am struggling to keep things straight, maybe the students are too. I chose to do this in blog format because you can be more creative and more informal which seems to be more inviting to students, unlike how they perceive platforms like WebCT, Blackboard, etc. Here is the link. http://profdetjen.blogspot.com