Welcome to WAC Online at Franklin Pierce University!

Why WAC? Why Online? Why FP?

This blog will serve the Calderwood Initiative Write-to-Learn Workshop, August 13-17, 2007, at Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, NH. The workshop is co-led by Zan Goncalves and me (Wini Wood), and will focus on developing write-to-learn assignments in online environments for participants teaching in a variety of disciplines.

We'll begin by introducing ourselves in a disciplinary kind of way. Each of you is registered as an "author" of this blog, so you are allowed both to post and to make comments after other people's posts.

Your assignment: Create a post introducing yourself to our workshop group. To make your post, look at the top of this page; you should find a button labeled "New Post" on the blue bar. Click that; you'll be taken to a separate page where you can write and edit your post. Notice that you can give it a title in the title field. For consistency's sake, let's all title our introductions in a similar way: Introducing XXX. When you've finished, simply click "publish post," and voila!

The second part of the assignment is to read other people's posts as they come in, and to write a comment after one or two.

I will post two versions of an introduction to me as models. The first will be plain vanilla; the second will be a bit fancier (with links and a photo). If you want to learn how to insert a photo on the first day of class, you'll need to have a digital image available to you in the computer lab. One way to ensure this is to email a photo to yourself at your Franklin Pierce account. This blog site will accept photos in JPG, GIF, PNG, TIF or BMP formats.

And of course, you can post more than once, too, if you find that you have new things to say, or questions to ask.

Looking forward to meeting you all in person next week...

Wini

Introducing Wini Wood

I'm Wini Wood; I direct the Writing Program at Wellesley College. Ours is a first-year interdisciplinary writing program: our faculty come to us from departments across the college, and develop their introductory writing courses on topics specific to their fields (of interest, of expertise). My own course, for example, doubles as an introduction to cinema and media studies; it is WRIT 125/CAMS 120, Women in Film. I also regularly teach a course on the rhetoric of presidential elections and, recently, a new course that was rather grandly (and erroneously) entitled "A Brief History of Public Speechmaking." In these courses, in addition to assigning several large papers (all written in drafts), I assign about a dozen small write-to-learn assignments, most of them involving some use of our campus electronic system. I'll be sharing some of these assignments with you all this week.

I also do research on electronic discourse; I'm especially interested in the convergence of private and public language in online settings, in how students develop a political presence online, and in the relationship between individuals' online and offline identities and relationships. I've led a research and action project at Wellesley College for seven years, funded by the Mellon Foundation, with the goal of creating campus-wide initiatives to educate our students in how better to engage in online conflict (of which there is much at Wellesley). This summer, we hosted the E-SCAPE symposium, a gathering of faculty, students, information services officials, and deans of students from over 30 colleges to discuss the kinds of problems we all must confront online, and the varying perceptions each group has of a single type of problem. We have learned that each group manages and perceives online conflict quite differently, and that, as individuals working together in a campus setting, we need to be able to work together on common problems.

Wini

This is a Photograph of Me

It's an old photograph, taken when my glasses were big and my hair was long and I wore a braid to tame the curls. It was taken during the early days of my digital teaching, and appears on the first web page I ever constructed. This web page is still my official (though very outdated) personal web page.

Do you know the poem, "This is a Photograph of Me"? I encountered it at my very first workshop on computer-based classroom discussion; it was the powerful discussion of this poem that sold me on the virtues of CMI (computer-mediated instruction, as it used to be called, back in 1991). We were handed a copy of this poem to read but were not given its author. We were then directed to a discussion site, where we were greeted with a single question: Is the author male or female? Why?

The online discussion that ensued spanned pages, grew more intense over time, and led us to full and rich analysis of the poem. As we "talked," we were forced to refer to specific phrases and words from the poem to justify our points. At the end, when class was finished, we were told the author of the poem, a nice bit of closure. Needless to say, we were quite surprised to learn that the poet was Margaret Atwood. I have since used this very exercise in multiple ways--with students in class; with faculty in workshops; and as part of a study on the impact of computer-based discussion on students' writing. It never ceases to amaze me for its simple power.

The power lies in finding the right question to ask.