Re: Thinking, Teaching, Writing

Beyond the red pen

Notes for a presentation about using blogs to respond to student writing

My history as a blogger. I started blogging in 2004, with only the faintest idea what a blog was, in order to play around with  some technology new to me and hoping to be able to use my blog to collect up reflections about my teaching and notes on some things I'd been reading. (Here's a post from earlier this year, for example, where I play around a bit.) Before long I was starting to appreciate the power of blogs to connect to other people interested in teaching writing. As I started posting comments on other people's blogs and adding the blogs I liked to my blogroll, I started to get a few people reading my blog; I was astonished by how excited this made me and how much it motivated me to keep writing. I started contributing to the group blog Community College English, which I now run, and I started wondering if I could use blogs in my classes to give my students the same excitement, motivation, and connection.

My history as a teacher. When I started teaching (several decades ago), each semester my students would read four novels, write eight essays, and work their way through a 200-odd page grammar book that had them diagram and then write their own compound-complex sentences featuring various combinations of gerund, infinitive, and participial phrases. My job was to mark and count Major Usage Errors (we called them MUE's), which included fragments or run-on sentences, homonym errors, wrong verb forms, or pronoun or verb agreement problems. 3 MUE's meant an F on an essay. That was department policy, and essay sets were collected from us graduate assistants to make sure we adhered to this rule.

It bothers me that my students now have so many problems writing error-free paragraphs (let alone essays), but I have more important things to teach them. Out of habit, sometimes, my pen still moves to circle misspellings and check-mark sentence boundary issues, but I groan when my students say they have "corrected" a rough draft by "fixing the mistakes" I marked. I wonder if blogs could help to break both me and my students out of this misplaced emphasis on error.

How it works. 

• I set up a course blog, where I post the course syllabus, essay and reading assignments, links to online resources.
• I arrange to bring students into a computer lab on campus where I show them how to set up their own blogs. (This semester I'm using blogger; I've also used wordpress and edublogs.)
• Students give me their blogs' URL's, which I then post onto sidebar of course blog, separated by classes. Students are encouraged to browse and read others' essays.
• I give instructions for peer review (see here and here) and group students into pairs or trios (assigned after they have posted their drafts).
• I comment on rough drafts, moving back and forth between two open windows set up like this: Download Twowindows. 

Sample peer and instructor response. See Kristen and Lauren's blogs.

Other suggestions/options.

The commentpress template available in edublogs allows a reviewer to attach comments to specific paragraphs (for example, here). Students found this blogging software a little more difficult to use than blogger, and I found myself tempted, as you can see from the linked example, perhaps to "overmark" essays, esp. for style issues. (Maybe more appropriate for higher level courses?) 

In addition to asking students to post drafts, I've also used blogs for prewriting "trial run" of subjects, allowing me to give feedback on topic selection, an issue whose importance is significantly under-appreciated by many students, and for post-writing reflection on revision process (other reflective topics possible as well).

Potential advantages (especially) for portfolio students.

• deepening their sense of audience
• allowing time for more thoughtful responses to the work of their peers
• prompting them to consider criteria for evaluation as they measure their work against the work of others
•  fostering more frequent and more substantive revision
• helping to develop awareness of their own writing processes
• on a practical level, helping to keep work organized and accessible (and backed-up)

Difficulties and complaints (cited by approx. 20% of students in survey last week)

• student resistance to technology and, more significantly, problems with Internet access
• student reluctance to make work public
• student sense that this is more time-consuming

For additional resources, click here.

Waffling on technology

My students this semester are again using technology to read and write about technology and its impacts on commerce and the creative arts, communication and warfare, education and the environment. Pretty wide swath of subject matter, designed to appeal to all comers and delivered via the mode these Gen Ex, Why, Zee-ers—whatever they’re being called these days--eat, sleep, and breathe. Only it’s not working out so well. My community college students have problems setting file formats and attaching files to emails, remembering the passwords needed to get into their blogs, adjusting browser settings. Their printers don’t work. They don’t know how to save files to portable storage devices. A few don’t know how to find the word processor on their desktop and open a blank file. One fresh-from-high-school student snorts that I should be a science teacher. Another older student says that when she was in high school only the girls who wanted to be secretaries learned how to type, she thought this was an English course, they told her she wouldn’t need to know anything about computers, why does she have to learn how to use a computer when she would so much rather sink into a good book.

I have felt on the defensive, sputtering my justifications, my tone veering dangerously close to the inappropriate:

• A typed manuscript is a standard expectation even in middle school these days and has been for decades, to save the teacher’s tired eyes and to eliminate the prejudgments that attach to handwriting (you wouldn’t want me to be judging an essay based on those bubble letters of yours, that careless scrawl, those curves careful as a second-grade teacher that scream cliché).
• Let me tell you all about White-Out, those glops that take forever to dry, and the miseries of retyping that last page three times because it’s 3 a.m. and you keep leaving out some vital part of your conclusion. Or suppose you decide that Martin doesn’t really suit yr debonair protagonist; how wonderful to be able to do a global search-and-replace!
• One word: spell-check.
• Won’t it be convenient to be able to access  the course syllabus come week six or seven, when you’re starting to calculate just how many classes you can afford to miss or the grade you’ll get if you really nail those last two essays?
• And don’t forget the emails you can send me explaining yr absence from class and yr avowed intent to turn in that late essay by tomorrow night.
• By using (instead of a textbook) articles available electronically, either online or through the library’s e-reserve system, I’m saving you at least $64.99 plus tax. You’re welcome.
• Finally, wait till you get to the research paper. You wouldn’t believe what we used to have to do (my version of the walk five miles to school in the snow): a special trip to the library to go through shelves full of the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature; guess from the titles which articles seemed relevant to our Quest, in periodicals the library was likely to have; trot upstairs with knotted stomach, hoping the hoped-for bound periodicals were on the shelf (the New York Times we accessed on microfilm, our heads under the hood of the microfilm reader, wincing with each squeal of tape unnaturally loud in the dim room);  take notes on the spot, careful to write down all the information we’d need for our bibliographies. Wait till you see what information you can get now, from the comfort of yr home-(computer), full-text articles to yr heart’s content for printing and annotating.

That said, I have my own doubts, my own concerns about where computing intersects composing.

Observation Day

Inspired by an interesting New Yorker article by Caleb Crain ("Surveillance Society: The Mass Observation movement and the meaning of everyday life"), I have declared yesterday and today Observation Day(s), yet another exercise to encourage students to pay attention to their world. I asked students to pick a spot on campus where they could sit for 15 minutes and take field notes: physical description of the space (what details create its atmosphere?) and the people moving through the space. I am again this semester asking students to consider and write about various aspects of technology, so I doubled-up assignment objective to introduce them to the wiki (the first time I've used one as well), asking them to post their observations here.

The Curiosity Factor

My students' second blog assignment (to brainstorm and post a list of questions related to their topic) prompts many questions for me about the curious absence of curiosity in students raised in a culture of reality shows and endless deconstruction of the melodramas of other people's lives. Students have great difficulty posing questions. I'm just beginning to grasp the extent of that difficulty and how problematic it makes the invention stage (for personal, expository, or research-based writing).

Digression on sequencing in the composition class. It occurs to me that it may be easier to talk about the "curiosity factor" wrt research-based writing rather than personal writing, so that there may be some justification in flip-flopping the often-used ordering of assignments to end rather than start with the personal essay. The "successful" personal essay may demand a degree of self-questioning and self-reflection that is difficult for many beginning writers to muster. To what degree the personal essay is a necessary or desirable part of the FYC experience is, of course, a subject of debate (within my mind as well as the wider community).

Blogging (not slogging) through the research paper

Before the semester gets too far along (and I get overwhelmed with concerns that some students will never quite get the idea of writing in complete sentences), I'd like to record my hypotheses and goals. But first the approach...With the semester's focus on technology, students in my four FYC classes self-selected into one of eight group blogs set up by me:

• the laboratory (on issues such as robotics, AI, and nanotechnology)
• the hospital (on biotech issues such as cloning, stem-cell research, implications of the human genome project),
• the watercooler (on communications and entertainment tech, issues such as myspace, text messaging, videogaming),
• the studio (on the impact of technology on the creative arts),
• the garage (on transportation technology),
• the battlefield (technology of warfare, "pinpoint" bombing capabilities, embedded journalists),
• the marketplace (on the intersection of technology and economics, issues such as e-commerce, cashless society, effects of automation in the factory),
• and, of course, the classroom (the use of technology in education).