Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Plagiarism Workshop for the Greenville Technical College English Department

Dealing with Plagiarism
Let's begin with some good advice:

. . . offering the students an off-line alternative makes their consent absolutely clear. For instance, as an alternative, the student could be required to turn in a photocopy of the first page of all reference sources used, an annotated bibliography, and a one page paper reflecting on their research methodology. Such an option would be unlikely to be chosen by any students, but if they did choose it, the chances of plagiarism would also be vanishingly thin.

Source of this quote.


What is Plagiarism?

One of those terms whose definition seems, ironically enough, to be plagiarized from time to time. Or is it plagiarized? Why isn't it?

Cheating is Easy
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=free+term+papers, but let us look and see how it can be made both harder to do, and not worth doing, all in the context of helping students use the Internet and WWW better for the writing and learning they need to do.

Try Googling your assignment. Go to Google or another search engine, and put in keywords from your writing assignment. See what comes up. Do you need to revise the assignment to make it less plagiarable?

Turn Papermills to Your Advantage
Since these sites exist, let students know that you know about them. Use them in your teaching. For example, you can go to Schoolsucks.com
(http://schoolsucks.com/portal/modules.php?name=searchmain) and find student papers and use them in class for all sorts of reasons: to teach peer review, for editing practice, as imperfect models.



How Student Papers Sometimes Get Written

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail64.htmlThe site's a hoot, and it's funny. And it's also a useful teaching tool, worth showing in class if you can do it, or sending students to look at and write about it for a class discussion on doing one's own
work.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2059540/leads to "Adventures in Cheating," by Seth Stevenson, a piece that samples term paper mills, and finds --no surprise-- that you get what you pay for (and even that ain't much). I wrote a response to this piece, which again, I find useful for teaching, that began, "Essentially, the free papers stink, and they're recycled. That is, free papermill sites often carry copies of the same papers." Rest of the note is here: http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=2538524&.

Teach Students How to Make a Bibliography
The Bedford Bibliographer at http://bedfordstmartins.com/bibliographer

Or, show students what research is really about: http://bedfordstmartins.com/icite


Remember That Writing is Social
http://ncarbone.blogspot.com/TeachingWriting/2005/10/no-writer-is-island-tyca-sw.html



Teaching Source Evaluation and Research Skills


Before the Internet and World Wide Web information explosion, most teachers did not spend time teaching students to evaluate sources. Research projects sent students to the library, where it was assumed that sources would be valid. So an essential skill was never taught. But now it needs to be taught.

Fortunately, there are several good WWW sites to help teach those skills. All these sites apply criteria drawn from the types of questions librarians ask when deciding whether a book or other print source will be a good resource to have in the library.


The Bedford Research Room: http://bedfordstmartins.com/researchroom by Mike Palmquist offers tips and advice on evaluating sources, an avoiding plagiarism tutorial and more.
Evaluating Web Resources : http://www2.widener.edu/Wolfgram-Memorial-Library/webevaluation/webeval.htm by Janet Alexander and Marcia Tate. This site organizes questions to ask about sites by site type -- informational, advertising, and so on.


Evaluating a Site: http://www.2learn.ca/evaluating/evaluating.htmloffers interactive forms students can complete and then print out and bring in as part of their homework.

Yahooligans' Teaching Internet Literacy: http://www.yahooligans.com/tg/litintro.html offers both a tutorial for teachers and activities for students.

Teaching Research, Teaching Writing, Teaching Academic Honesty
Naturally, these are all intertwined, especially now, with the Internet and WWW providing a place where teaching, writing, and research all actually converge. But how to talk about it and work it all into the classroom? My own inclination is to work make the issue discussable. Here's how I do that: http://bedfordstmartins.com/technotes/workshops/talkingplagy.htm.

Or, try what Mike Edwards at UMass tried:

Let's Plagiarize
http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/archives/2005/11/01/lets-plagiarize/

And Plagiarize We Did
http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/archives/2005/11/03/and-plagiarize-we-did/


Reliable Sources
These are examples of reliable WWW sites -- good starting places for students and instructors to use. The main difference between starting here and finding something on Google? -- human editors made careful choices.


  • Research and Documentation Online at http://dianahacker.com/resdoc offers a comprehensive collection of research resources, including an overview of research starting places organized by subject matter and sorted by source type: book, WWW sites, and databases.

  • The Internet Public Library at http://www.ipl.org/ provides an excellent, librarian and library science student collection of resources chosen with the same care and attention librarians bring to the sources they put on their shelves.

  • Links Library at http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/rewriting/rc5.html collects "several databases of annotated links for a variety of disciplines. These links lead to resources that Bedford/St. Martin's authors and editors and readers have found to be useful in their own teaching and research. "

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Bradley University: Teaching Visual Rhetoric


Welcome to the workshop resource page. I'll place links and other items here.

If you have questions after the workshop, feel free t drop me an email at ncarbone at bedfordstmartins dot com. Sorry that's not an active link, but I'm trying to cut down my spam intake.

I should begin by confessing. I'm not really all that good with image technology. I can figure out Photoshop when I have to, but I don't use it a lot. I've done some movie editing, but don't make it a habit. Ok, I did it once. I've built ebooks that used mulitmedia --images, audio, video, linking-- but not recently. Why am I pointing this out? Because it's important to understand that you don't have to be an expert in the latest technology in order to teach visual rhetoric. You don't have to know Photoshop in order to have your students do something along the lines this Salon article describes, where people are using Photoshop to do homemade political satire and commentary. Here's the URL for the story:
http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2004/07/01/photoshop/index.html

You need to sit through a short slide show ad to see it, but it's worth a look if you're thinking about using the elections or civic literacy, or pop culture or multimedia composing or technology in your courses this summer or fall. Here's a link to one of the most famous Photoshop satires: http://www2.warnerbros.com/madmagazine/files/onthestands/ots_424/gulfwars.html (It's from Mad Magazine.). For something less professional, follow this link to Google Image that uses the search words photoshop and satire.

See also Freakingnews.com, which runs regular Photoshop contests for more examples, such as this one that takes off on Renoir: http://www.freakingnews.com/view.asp?entry=27629&display=photoshop

But still, what's a teacher to do?

You can assign students to do a photoshop assignment using the tools you have, including something as humble as Microsoft's Paint. I used Paint to make the Bradley University graphic you see at the top of this entry.

But more importantly, I think there are two broad approaches you can take in the classroom when teaching visual rhetoric: reading and writing.

Reading visual rhetoric is simply the process of treating images and video the way we treat essays and literature. You look at them with a critical eye. The trick is, that most of us grew up as literary scholars. We were taught how to discern such formal elements as an introduction, a thesis statement, a paragraph. We know about plot, character development, dramatic triangles, prosody, rhyme, stanzas, and so much more. We have handbooks on writing, a language to talk about language, and vocabularies for discussing poetry, fiction, drama, and other literary forms.

Remarkably, a lot of that language can be adapted to the reading of images. One of my first forays into reading an image took place from a writing textbook that was first written, I believe, in the early sixties--P.J. Corbett's Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. The introduction of this book began with a rhetorical analysis of an advertisement. When I first used the book, it was an ad, I think, for an IBM Selectric typewriter. That tradition of reading visuals is carried on today in all kinds of textbooks from all publishers. Here are two sets of visual analysis activities from Bedford/St. Martin's books, Seeing and Writing and Writing in a Visual Age: http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/rewriting/wr2.html

As you can see if you peruse these activities, the McQuades (in Seeing and Writing) ask students to begin with observations, and then use guided questions to call out qualities and features of the images that will help students view it both critically and constructively.

In Writing in a Visual Age activities (free registration required), Odell and Katz ask students to focus on visuals in context and at the play of images mixed with words. Their book is meant to guide students toward smartly using images in their own essays; the book began as a response the authors had to students who were handing in papers with images in them. The found that students would just plunk images down without much thought as to what role they played in a larger argument.

In both books, the authors carry on the work of Corbett in others in giving students heuristics by which to read visuals.

But you'll notice that those heuristics are more or less adopted from the rhetorical tradition (Odell and Katz) or from the literary tradition (some of the McQuade's questions are inspired by this approach).

So what about teaching the elements of visual composition? How do we begin to do that? afterall, if you're going to ask students to read an image, shouldn't they be able to read it on the formal terms of visual composition? And couldn't those terms provide a good basis for assessing and responding to the visuals students might use (whether you assign them to use visuals or they choose to use them on their own)?

Of course, the answer is yes, there is a way to begin, and there are useful guides. Here are some that Bedford/St. Martin's offers:

Getting the Picture, by Marcia Muth and Karla Saari Kitalong
IX Visual Tutorials, by Cheryl Ball and Kristin Arola
I*Claim, Visual Arguments, by Patrick Clauss
Designing Writing, by Mike Palmquist

We'll look at IX in the onsite workshop today.

I really find these kinds of tools invaluable for providing a groundwork for myself as an instructor to get a purchase on the kinds of vocabularies and understandings I'm used to availing myself of when I teach fiction, poetry, or essay writing. I also find these resources useful as well:

Anne Wysocki's visual resources list (best place to start)

David Blakesley's List (another best place)

A Glossary of Art from Nancy Doyle Fine Art

Beyond Words in Powerpoint by Ellen Finkelstein How (and when) to present using just images and graphs, not bulleted lists


You can assign students to read visuals and then to write about them. Seeing and Writing and other visual readers do this. It's what we do when we assign students to see a play performed or to watch a movie of Shakespeare's Henry V. Those are visual experiences. We can assign students to go to art shows on campus, or at local museums. We can have students deconstruct ads, analyze pop cultural symbolies and images, and so on.

But what about using visuals? I guess the real question now-a-days is how can you deal with the fact that more and more students are simply using visuals in their academic work. At its heart, even simple essay assignments rely on visual rhetoric -- rules about headers, title pages, line spacing, the use of italics, margins, and so on, create a visual look. We tell students to use a reasonably sized font. For example, take a look at this Strongbad cartoon on writing an English Paper to see what I mean: http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail64.html

The paper's a good resource for introducing academic honesty as a discussion topic, but also for talking about the use of visuals, about layout and design. Everytime you give an assignment and give parameters on spacing, margins, and other visual elements of the page, you're giving visual rhetoric requirements.

Taking a simple next step, and giving students guidance on the use of images in that paper is easy to do.

Asking students to create an effective Powerpoint (or other presentation) using images effectively is easy to do. Students have these tools at hand. They know how to paste an image into their word processors and their presentation software. You won't have teach them that. You will want to teach them how to choose the right images for the rhetorical situation. And as writing instructors you're experts in understanding rhetorical situations. Does the image support the argument? Will your audience understand it? Where is the image from? Have you cited it? You know how to teach that.

Yes, but what about asking students to do something where the image is primary? What about asking them to make a photoshop satire or a video mashup like this: http://youtube.com/watch?v=cUUeAAHmwR8? Or, what would be an appropriate video mashup for your course? Students playing Archie and Edith (or how about archy and mehitabel) only changing the lyrics to fit current events or culture?

Maybe that seems silly, but take a look at some of the things, for example, that Todd Taylor's students have done using visual composing: http://www.unc.edu/~twtaylor/teaching/06/nuevo.html

The joy of it all is that there are more possibilities. More ways to communicate what we're thinking and learning. The tools are at hand for writers to use words and images, both still and moving images, and sound, together. Now maybe, in a first year writing course where the primary requirement is helping students to be better wordsmiths, there won't be time to do all that is possible, but you do have options.

And oddly enough, the more complex the use of visuals and multimedia, the more writing plays a role in making sure things work. Story outlining, scripting, written analysis of choices before commiting to their making, descriptions of what's planned, storyboarding --all become more important the more complex the visual elements in hand. If students make a photoshop satire, they can also be assigned to write about the satire. Why did they make? Who is its audience? What effect is meant to have? How does it achieve its goals?

In other words, assigning students to use visuals in conjunction with writing so that they can learn how to do that is one step. A next is to assign students to creating visuals that stand on their own, but then to use writing to describe how they composed those pieces, what their thinking was. In either case, writing and thinking play key roles.

The big issue, as always, however, is time and comfort. What do you feel comfortable doing? If you add something new to your course, what do you shift or drop to make room for it?

Not easy questions, but also not questions you have to figure out in one semester. Start small, do something as a first step that you think will succeed (nothing like success to buck up the nerve). Choose something low stakes to start. Enlist students to help you pull it off --let them teach each other the technology if needs be; you focus on teaching rhetoric.

And oh, yeah, when you have some spare time, play. Try out somethings by tweaking an image. Plug a microphone into your laptop and record a note to your students. Grab your cellphone or digital camera and record a few seconds of movie magic. Then edit it. Just for fun. Nothing serious. Don't think about teaching it. Just play and see where that gets you. Ideas will come in their own time if you're having fun.















Saturday, April 08, 2006

If Not Books, Then What?

span style="font-weight: bold;">Preamble.
Feel Free to Skip it While I talk it,and Jump to the Links and to Play in Them.

A long time ago, in a teaching job far, far, away, I worked with a colleague who was deaf, having lost her hearing late in life. She didn't sign, but could read lips reasonably well. In many meetings, we'd do ok if the conversation wasn't quick, by which I don't mean short, but fast-paced. When you're on to a topic that excites you, upsets you, is urgent in someway, you tend to talk faster, or with different degrees of emphasis.

So when conversations were quick, and lip reading wasn't going to sustain communication, I'd move to a keyboard and write what I wanted to say, and my colleague would read and respond.

Speech at normal speed worked. Writing a quick speed work. They were cognitively analagous. Made sense. Could-keep-my-thoughts-in-the-moment kinds of acts.

However. Sometimes. I. had. to. talk. to. my. colleague. over. the. phone. And. then. my. speaking. slowed. down. Each. word. was. uttered. then. a. full. stop. while. the. TTY. operator. typed. what. I. said. and. sent. it. to. my. colleague. for. her. to. read. When. I. was. done. speaking. and. it. was. her. turn. to. talk., I'd. say. "OVER." to. the. operator. who. would. signal. my. colleague. to. reply.

What I found when using the phone with TTY operator was that I would lose thoughts. My thinking-in-conversation habits were based in part on a certain space, on visualizing what I wanted to say as I was saying it. So I often start to speak and have in mind a sense of where I'll go with a sentence or thought or burst of discourse, even though I don't always get there or change my mind mid speech. But in talking to TTY operator at a slower pace, I couldn't keep that thought outline in my head. So the conversation was less rich. Sentences were shorter.

The point: The technology changed how I thought and communicated. It shifted cognition, communication, and understanding. It changed how wrote (if we take spontaneous speech as a kind of writing, and after Tara Shankar's presentation on Spriter, here yesterday, I think we can).

Aside: Yesterday, Kathleen Yancey cited Charlie Moran who had noticed that when students word process, they're often working in a screen space for a document meant to live a print life. There's two levels of cognition going on their. It's also worth noting, by the way, how many of Kathi's screen shots were of storyboards, diagrams, notes of different kinds done with pen, crayon or colored markers, on paper and as a way to plan digital spaces. So we saw maps of eportfolios, sketches for a power point slide. Students thinking in dual spaces at once: print-->digital::digital-->print = digital<-->print, with distinctions blurring.

See for example, my daughter's Quizilla story. She intersperses the story with quiz questions because she's writing in a free quiz making site that's become a social networking site. She often writes these stories by hand, on paper, when we're on long car trips or when she's in room and can't use our one computer (which is in the kitchen) because someone else is on it. The stories blend her interest in anime/fantasy genres with her love of horses and riding. The layout doesn't allow for traditional dialogue (she presents dialogue in script format because she does some acting on occasion in the community theater) and her writing pulls in online chat shorthand.

Others who take the quizes or read the stories might rate them, so she's getting instant feedback. She logs in and chats with other writers, using one discussion board as way to role play, and other on occasion where they'll do a story chain, each post advancing the story.

The site offers social networking, journaling and other features. So she's immersed in writing. Finding feedback and review. And become more fluid and fluent in both the technologies and in working with words.

She's reading quizes, taking quizes, and making quizes, which means she's really reading stories, engaging stories, and writing stories. And forging an unique online identity in that community.

So she's found a discourse community of sorts. Not academic, but it has all the elements: shared literature, vocabulary, interaction, peer review, conferences (online via discussions), presentation.

What else though? Technology changes how you think, habits of mind and ways of seeing. Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies is premised on loss, what technology is costing us in habits of minds and ways of seeing and making knowledge. The old, slower, more deliberative (he argues) pace of print, with writing by long hand, holding books is giving way to the quick IM and browse. Synthesis gives way to Remixing.

So what does remixing mean for teaching research?

From I Found It on the Internet: Coming of Age Online by Frances Jacobson Harris, some key observations:

1. Libraries are formal information systems/places.
2. Students' habits are informal.
3. Things do not have to be either formal or informal because the Internet, to which libraries are linked, is an example of an . . .

. . .Information and Communication Technology
Barbara Fister's (See from her vita this reference "Teaching Research as a Social Act" and Teaching the Rhetorical Dimensions of Research.) research shows that successful student researchers, those who get A's, often begin their research communicatively, by which she means they don't just choose a topic and then a thesis and then sources, but they engage in discussion on ideas with others, sometimes faculty and other experts, and begin writing prior to and during research. She also argues that it's possible to create assignments that help foster this communicative role.

Fifth Canon: Delivery. I'll play a snippet of my other daughter's William Carlos Williams presentation at some point in the discussion. You'll hear an academic assignment turned into a kind of Bud Abbot and Lou Costello routine. You'll hear deliberate remixing, and a tweaking of plagiarism. You'll hear a performance, her research and writing not just delivered, but (en)acted.

Everyday, sitting there on your laptop technologies now make sophisticated delivery simple and easy to do. So naturally people are going to use these tools. Our students will use them whether we ask them to or not.

Is it a loss? I don't know. But we do know that changes in the technologies we use to think and communicate and make sense of the world, change how we see, understand it, live it, think it and, of course, write it (Isn't writing an articulation of what we see, understand, think and live?).

What does this mean for teachers, students, and publishers?

Textbook publishers know that we're not in the book business. We're in the pedagogical tools business. Books, for last several hundred years, just happened to be the most useful way to provide pedagogical tools, mainly materials and structures for teachers to use to help students learn.

In a post titled, "The developerWorks Power Architecture challenge: Man's best friend (outside of a dog)" Joshua Fruhlinger writes:

But when it comes to the books that make up the bulk of our reading lives, the vast majority of us are still reading words printed with ink on paper bound with glue and string.The reasons for this are numerous and pretty easy to rattle off:

* E-books can be physically uncomfortable to read (whether you're sitting at a desk looking at a monitor or squinting at a tiny PDA screen).
* They're not portable if you have to read them on a desktop computer; if you read them on a laptop or PDA, you can't read if you run out of power.
* There's a number of often incompatible formats that the files come in.
* And the user's ability to access the book's content is often restricted by various digital rights management technologies. (It's notable that the Baen Free Library, one of the more successful e-book outfits, gives away books that are DRM-free -- and, for that matter, free as in beer. I guess it's easy to be successful when you don't expect anyone to pay you!).


On the other hand, old-school paper books are generally easily portable, use reflected light and are thus easy on the eyes, don't need batteries, and can be read as often as the reader wants and even lent to others. And they're still readable after the sort of abuse that would send any piece of electronics to the scrap heap.


Fruhlinger's words ring true. Thus, textbooks that try to do online what they do in print will not succeed as ebooks for all the reasons above. The questions to ask are these --what are students being asked to learn? how can they best be taught? A book is good for supporting a lot of ways to learn, but that codex book meant to be used/read in codex ways won't work nearly as well on screen as it does in print. So what does work online? In what context? How will it be taught and within what virtual educational context? How will assignments be made, learning measured? And and will teachers and students engage and build upon the concepts, ideas, and information delivered in this new book? Figure out that, and you've figured out ebooks in education. And you can figure those books won't look anything like books. Wonder what we'll call them?


Links
Social spaces -- if these are habits and ways students network and share information, do they belong in the classroom?

MySpace

No, really, MySpace

Flickr

H2O


The TLT Group's Exploration Guide for Educational Uses of Blogs and Wikis offers a really good resource for help guides, articles, and other resources.

Here's another use of Wiki's.


Matt Barton's students began writing Rhetoric and Composition: A Guide for the College Writer in a wiki. Follow the link and see how it easy it is to contribute, join, compose in that space.

Books Won't All be Read: Some will be Played:
In each class, students will play a "chapter" of the overall story, one that contains a beginning, middle, and an end, and last about 30 to 40 minutes. From: Revolution, one of the game prototypes at MIT's Education Arcade.

Or will books become tutorials/visual theaters that merge text, animation, graphics, and activity?:




Clear Your Throats: Podcasting Is Easier than Ever

iTunesU: Apple's resource for educational podcasting.

Fern Shen, writing in the Washington Post, "IPods Fast Becoming New Teacher's Pet," describes how some schools have gone from banning students from bringing IPods into the classroom to using the technology for teaching.
Kids are podcasting -- reading poems, doing book reports, and coming up with other ideas -- and idea casting for new podcast ideas: "We could read parts of books, to show why we like them. We could do interviews. If there's a field trip, we could make a recording of it and post it," said Mohamed El-Sayed, 10. "Kids anywhere will like to hear about us."Kids are motivated in part because the technology is new and cool, but also because the work is, published, or cast. Kids are making podcasts that they hope other teachers will use. Their learning is becoming a tool for others to learn. Also, teachers are finding that by not making everything automatically cast, students work harder to get good stuff in. Students do research in books and on the Internet, write scripts, perform roles --a town crier during the Revolutionary War, for example. "Kindergartners are taking loaner iPods home to practice their vocabulary words, and English as a Second Language students are using them to practice English."


. . .an Anthropology professor at Brandeis got a grant to buy iPods for students. The initiative is expanded now and is called "The iPod Experience" You can read about it here: http://lts.brandeis.edu/teachlearn/ipod/about.html
Students developed two-minute audio texts for each of the paintings in an exhibition at the university museum. They posted them on a university site for everyone in the school to download. This semester students are developing oral history materials to use in a walking tour of a neighborhood in Medford.

eLearning Utopia: iPods Meet Course Management in theClassroom
http://www.campus-technology.com/article.asp?id=11666 By Robert ViauProfessor of English & Interdisciplinary Studies
Questions: What type of pedagogical content could be delivered through audio files? When and how would students and instructors be likely to use audio files with pedagogical content?


Farther south, technologists at the University of Iowa are honing their own homegrown ePortfolio systems. Via an overarching electronic portfolio project, students in the school’s College of Education are treated to four different flavors of ePortfolios. The flagship initiative at Iowa—Digital BackPack—is a system that, much like UMD’s, provides a series of individual repositories into which every student can store files. On the surface, each portfolio is nothing more than a glorified Web page to organize presentations, documents, and images for others to peruse. Behind the scenes, however, the Digital BackPack is an elaborate, homegrown content management system, a place for students to store all the evidence of their education and curriculum-driven conceptualizing.

--quoted from Matt Villano: ePortfolios >> Hi-Octane Assessment

What role will publishers play in supporting these e-portfolios? What's more telling about the passage is the linking of portoflio to content management (and digital repository). As publishers, of course, we're learning how to think about a learning objects repositories. But the degree to which students and professors are creating (ePortfolio is one example; a lesson plan site such as Merlot is another) learning repositories and managing them and turning them to mulitple uses (Multiple use examples: ePortfolio can be used for course assessment of a student; department assessment of a course or of a program; college assessment of a department; student can reuse the same portfolio to get a job or apply to graduate school; or a professor in a department can use the same content to do research on how students learn.). The story of databases and eportfolios is really about how students and instructors are using learning content and artifacts in new ways. To the extent publishers are in the content business, they need to understand ePortfolios, content management systems, and learning object repositories (all variation of the same thing) and what instructors and students require from these tools.

Digital Writing Across the Curriculum: http://www.tltgroup.org/resources/gx/Digital-WAC.htm

Elgg: Learning Network as Social Space: http://elgg.net/

Multimedia as composition from Todd Taylor: http://www.unc.edu/~twtaylor/teaching/06/
Work from Todd's students: http://www.unc.edu/~twtaylor/teaching/06/nuevo.html

Friday, April 07, 2006

UMass WTT Conference Notes

Assigning and Judging Writing in the Digital Age
Mike Garcia: Accumulating, Connecting and Using: Sorting Out Judgment in the Digital Age.

Robbin Zeff: Time for a Makeover: Rethinking the Design and Delivery of Writing


Mike: U. context but ideas carry over to other contexts.

Remembers being ta in 2002 and taught tech. writing for first time and had to emphasize technology, including the WWW. Teachers had to learn WWW design to teach it (students required to make a WWW page). Mike had WWW experience but many other instructors didn't. Teachers were impressed with him, but his students were not.

Made webfolio as assignment w/ main page and links to work on WWW. Used dreamweaver. Mike find the folios disappointing. All students were doing he realized was putting offline/print based documents online. Work wasn't transformative. Just used to delivery print.

Found that they didn't take advantage of transformative power of Web.

Meanwhile, Mike had been weblogging since 2001 and was aware of power: browsing, linking, responding. What he liked was blog roles, trackbacks, tags, links to posts.

Web 2.0: Works in particular way. Goal for site, sets up tools, and users design as they go. Create space for design to emerge (emergent design). 100's might contribute to Wiki article but it's overall movement/work of the 100 not the role of anyone that matters (though w/out that role, nothing would happen, right?). Isn't it both things that matter, then?

Web composing primary mode of composition in U.S.? Good question. Might be the case for our students who likely write more "words on the web and for the web than anywhere else." Web2.0 is remarkably textual, an endless stream of words.

What's this have to do with judgment of writing. Cites Elbow's "Ranking, Liking, Evaluating" from '93. Readers reading for ranking don't read the way people naturally read.

Mike thinks about Peter's categories for writing for the WWW.

Public writing moves words beyond two party system of instructor and student only. Student classroom blogs become read by broad audience and find success that is different than what Mike is used to measuring.

His usual criteria don't matter for genre of blog. Or he can force them to force the genre closer to the classroom. If they do that, put just academic forms up, is it really a blog?

Mike: service learning and other writing in world assignments faced same assessment challenges.

Closer to world, harder it is to apply usual measures.

Ranking is academic concept w/ less relevance to outside world. Evaluating and liking mean different things in terms of WWW texts.

Surfing is accumulating and using texts, quickly and what Sirc called "throw away texts: dynamic, functional, situated and often forgetable; emphemeral text."

Class is doing an online journal and organizing it in a tag. What Mike realized that in making it a closed system, it wasn't really working, so he issued open call to journal and now outside contributors coming and project is looking like the WWW actually works.

Mike: talk about emergent behavior and how underlife transfers to WWW. Validity and Reliability in W2.0 context. TOPIC/ICON program. TTU goes in wrong direction, says, Mike because it further abstracts.

Dynamic criteria mapping process (via Bob Broad's What We Value, Beyond Rubrics).

Position statement/outcome statement on assessing blogs.

Statement will need to be dynamic and in flux, always in process in reaction to ongoing change.

PE: Life is long, and college is short. Mike says Peter referring to tendency of assignments to only serve classroom function, but that's a blip in terms of person's life and need to write beyond the class.


Mike: Never a big fan of standardization (thus rejection of TTU approach?).



Robbin up now: Time for a Makeover: Rethinking the Design and Delivery of Writing Assignment Directions by Applying UD for Learning Principles.


Robbin w/ North Virginia WProject.

DeWitt Clinton Steam engine image: shows train pulling stage coaches on train wheels. So you see old technology imprinted on old. Why did trains not adapt to new technologies -- cars, planes. Because they were in the train business, not the transportation business.

In writing, when we first put technology in classroom, first step is to do what DeWitt did (and what Mike just admitted); graphing print practices to teaching.

UD started with disabilities (wheel chair ramps were added to buildings after the fact). Shift was to design in accessibility in universally. Curb cuts made for wheel chairs originally be benefit everyone: moms w/ strollers, people pulling wheeled luggage, bikers.

Same principle of design matters for instructional design. Design assignments to be universally accessible from the get go.

Robbin describes how she learned universal design from working with a great editor. Tells of revising an article for professional magazine where the magazine didn't know what they wanted.

Colleagues did assignment and didn't know what they were looking for until got paper back and it wasn't it. Instructions didn't do it.

Need multiple representations, engagement, means of expression.

Give assignment in audio, print, online, downloadable.

Add images to directions: cog psych shows that people think in images often and words and pictures work best. Use images in instructions -- show layout you want for directions on where name and date and title of paper go --make it visual.

Examples are key. More examples you give, better it is.

Make assignment intuitive to use and understand:
* headers
* whitespace
* short passages
* use of concrete words and concrete descriptions
* graphics to accompany text.

Image to show what writing looks like to people w/ Dyslexia: Washout effect; River effect (words break where aren't meant to break), Swirl effect.

Ideas: Treat Instructions like writer's guidelines.
Provide multiple means of expression. Base assignment and course on what you want them to learn; the learning behind the task, not the task itself. Multiple ways to finished product. Not in the paper business, in the writing business.

Brain and Mind Research from UD:

Hearing words uses different parts of brain than reading words. Argument for audio assignment.

Multiple engagement:
Pop ups/mouseovers
Formatting
Links to additional reading.

10 percent of read; 20 hear, 30 see, 50 see and hear; 70 say; 80 do.

work in class, work online, work with peers, comments.

Typical assignment:

compile an annotated bibliography on topic. Include 6 sources.

To make this prompt a full UDL assignment:

1. Move beyond prompt only instructions. One step was narrative, more words, more information, but won't work for dyslexic.

2. More design, assignments, overview, task more detailed, headers, white space, bullets, longer document w/ grade and assessment criteria. Additional resources via URL. Sheet of paper.

3. Did hypertext version of the same thing. Dates appear in calendar for visual learner via popups. Popup blockers doomed that. Mouseover, internal navigation.

We don't know our audience in highschool and their learning needs. Hard to differentiate instruction because we have no access to their records/learning history. Still, though on WWW, looked like sheet of paper. Through that out the window and used CSS. CSS removes design from text so text readers don't read code. Read text more cleanly.

Possible objections to this detailed assignment:

too much information could stifle creativity.
does work for students
takes too much time to write assignment
requires too much technical skill


Findings: People actually read instructions research says when they think they have something to say. When instructions look different, they pay attention. Delivery changes expectations?

Students read only to point where they think they know what you want and don't read all of it. Illusion of knowing. So if you change look, you break that illusion and they read more carefully.

Idea: Had students use insert comment feature on word to supply feedback on assignment.

* Writing process begins w/ instructions
* instruction become learning tool
* meet needs of all students in class.

benefits to instructors:
* better assignments
* is just good teaching -- clarity for students.

Two things I can use from UDL: honor past student work by making it a model; figure out what I think I want by putting down goals and criteria.

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

NIU: Trends in Composition

Social spaces -- if these are habits and ways students network and share information, do they belong in the classroom?

MySpace

No, really, MySpace

Flickr

H2O


The TLT Group's Exploration Guide for Educational Uses of Blogs and Wikis offers a really good resource for help guides, articles, and other resources.

Here's another use of Wiki's.
This is in fact a Wiki used on composition (quoted from: Penn State's Wiki-Based Pilot Program NEXT\TEXT ):
Penn State's wiki farm pilot program is one example. It allows teachers of freshman composition to propose and teach interdisciplinary wiki-based courses. Instructors Richard Doyle, Jeff Pruchnic, and Trey Conner argue that students in the pilot program produce better work than students enrolled in traditional versions of the course. The peer-reviewed wiki environment contextualizes grammar and mechanics, and motivates students to proof their work carefully in order to impress their audience. Critical thinking skills are also honed, as students compete to post the best, most original argument.
To visit Wiki Farm: http://calper.la.psu.edu/cmc/wikis/englishcomp/Homepage

Books Won't All be Read: Some will be Played:
In each class, students will play a "chapter" of the overall story, one that contains a beginning, middle, and an end, and last about 30 to 40 minutes. From: Revolution, one of the game prototypes at MIT's Education Arcade.

And what of reading books online?
In a post titled, "The developerWorks Power Architecture challenge: Man's best friend (outside of a dog)" Joshua Fruhlinger writes:

But when it comes to the books that make up the bulk of our reading lives, the vast majority of us are still reading words printed with ink on paper bound with glue and string.The reasons for this are numerous and pretty easy to rattle off:
  • E-books can be physically uncomfortable to read (whether you're sitting at a desk looking at a monitor or squinting at a tiny PDA screen).
  • They're not portable if you have to read them on a desktop computer; if you read them on a laptop or PDA, you can't read if you run out of power.
  • There's a number of often incompatible formats that the files come in.
  • And the user's ability to access the book's content is often restricted by various digital rights management technologies. (It's notable that the Baen Free Library, one of the more successful e-book outfits, gives away books that are DRM-free -- and, for that matter, free as in beer. I guess it's easy to be successful when you don't expect anyone to pay you!).
On the other hand, old-school paper books are generally easily portable, use reflected light and are thus easy on the eyes, don't need batteries, and can be read as often as the reader wants and even lent to others. And they're still readable after the sort of abuse that would send any piece of electronics to the scrap heap.
Fruhlinger's words ring true. Thus, textbooks that try to do online what they do in print will not succeed as ebooks for all the reasons above. The questions to ask are these --what are students being asked to learn? how can they best be taught? A book is good for supporting a lot of ways to learn, but that codex book meant to be used/read in codex ways won't work nearly as well on screen as it does in print. So what does work online? In what context? How will it be taught and within what virtual educational context? How will assignments be made, learning measured? And and will teachers and students engage and build upon the concepts, ideas, and information delivered in this new book? Figure out that, and you've figured out ebooks in education. And you can figure those books won't look anything like books. Wonder what we'll call them?

Clear Your Throats: Podcasting Is Easier than Ever

iTunesU: Apple's resource for educational podcasting.

Fern Shen, writing in the Washington Post, "IPods Fast Becoming New Teacher's Pet," describes how some schools have gone from banning students from bringing IPods into the classroom to using the technology for teaching.
Kids are podcasting -- reading poems, doing book reports, and coming up with other ideas -- and idea casting for new podcast ideas: "We could read parts of books, to show why we like them. We could do interviews. If there's a field trip, we could make a recording of it and post it," said Mohamed El-Sayed, 10. "Kids anywhere will like to hear about us."Kids are motivated in part because the technology is new and cool, but also because the work is, published, or cast. Kids are making podcasts that they hope other teachers will use. Their learning is becoming a tool for others to learn. Also, teachers are finding that by not making everything automatically cast, students work harder to get good stuff in. Students do research in books and on the Internet, write scripts, perform roles --a town crier during the Revolutionary War, for example. "Kindergartners are taking loaner iPods home to practice their vocabulary words, and English as a Second Language students are using them to practice English."
. . .an Anthropology professor at Brandeis got a grant to buy iPods for students. The initiative is expanded now and is called "The iPod Experience" You can read about it here: http://lts.brandeis.edu/teachlearn/ipod/about.html
Students developed two-minute audio texts for each of the paintings in an exhibition at the university museum. They posted them on a university site for everyone in the school to download. This semester students are developing oral history materials to use in a walking tour of a neighborhood in Medford.

eLearning Utopia: iPods Meet Course Management in theClassroom
http://www.campus-technology.com/article.asp?id=11666 By Robert ViauProfessor of English & Interdisciplinary Studies
Questions: What type of pedagogical content could be delivered through audio files? When and how would students and instructors be likely to use audio files with pedagogical content?

Handheld Learning

Questions: What kind of content would students or instructors be most likely to look up using their cell phones or PDAs? How would we need to adapt or plan content to work with these devices?
EPortfolios Leave the LAN and Get Webby and Database-based
Farther south, technologists at the University of Iowa are honing their own homegrown ePortfolio systems. Via an overarching electronic portfolio project, students in the school’s College of Education are treated to four different flavors of ePortfolios. The flagship initiative at Iowa—Digital BackPack—is a system that, much like UMD’s, provides a series of individual repositories into which every student can store files. On the surface, each portfolio is nothing more than a glorified Web page to organize presentations, documents, and images for others to peruse. Behind the scenes, however, the Digital BackPack is an elaborate, homegrown content management system, a place for students to store all the evidence of their education and curriculum-driven conceptualizing.
--quoted from Matt Villano: ePortfolios >> Hi-Octane Assessment

What role will publishers play in supporting them e-portfolios? What's more telling about the passage is the linking of portoflio to content management (and digital repository). As publishers, of course, we're learning how to think about a learning objects repositories. But the degree to which students and professors are creating (ePortfolio is one example; a lesson plan site such as Merlot is another) learning repositories and managing them and turning them to mulitple uses (Multiple use examples: ePortfolio can be used for course assessment of a student; department assessment of a course or of a program; college assessment of a department; student can reuse the same portfolio to get a job or apply to graduate school; or a professor in a department can use the same content to do research on how students learn.). The story of databases and eportfolios is really about how students and instructors are using learning content and artifacts in new ways. To the extent publishers are in the content business, they need to understand ePortfolios, content management systems, and learning object repositories (all variation of the same thing) and what instructors and students require from these tools.

Digital Writing Across the Curriculum: http://www.tltgroup.org/resources/gx/Digital-WAC.htm

Elgg: Learning Network as Social Space: http://elgg.net/

Multimedia as composition from Todd Taylor: http://www.unc.edu/~twtaylor/teaching/06/
Work from Todd's students: http://www.unc.edu/~twtaylor/teaching/06/nuevo.html

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

U.Miami: Trends in Composition Workshop

Updated on 1/25:
Quote from a Chronicle of Higher Ed. email:
APPLE COMPUTER will allow colleges to set up customized
portions of the iTunes Music Store to distribute course
content and other audio and video material. The free service,
announced on Monday, will let institutions limit use of some
materials to certain people and make other content available
to all.
--> SEE http://chronicle.com/free/2006/01/2006012501t.htm
____________________________________________

The TLT Group's Exploration Guide for Educational Uses of Blogs and Wikis offers a really good resource for help guides, articles, and other resources.
Here's another use of Wiki's.
This is in fact a Wiki used on composition (quoted from: Penn State's Wiki-Based Pilot Program NEXT\TEXT ):
Penn State's wiki farm pilot program is one example. It allows teachers of freshman composition to propose and teach interdisciplinary wiki-based courses. Instructors Richard Doyle, Jeff Pruchnic, and Trey Conner argue that students in the pilot program produce better work than students enrolled in traditional versions of the course. The peer-reviewed wiki environment contextualizes grammar and mechanics, and motivates students to proof their work carefully in order to impress their audience. Critical thinking skills are also honed, as students compete to post the best, most original argument.
To visit Wiki Farm: http://calper.la.psu.edu/cmc/wikis/englishcomp/Homepage

Books Won't All be Read: Some will be Played:
In each class, students will play a "chapter" of the overall story, one that contains a beginning, middle, and an end, and last about 30 to 40 minutes. From: Revolution, one of the game prototypes at MIT's Education Arcade.

And what of reading books online?
In a post titled, "The developerWorks Power Architecture challenge: Man's best friend (outside of a dog)" Joshua Fruhlinger writes:

But when it comes to the books that make up the bulk of our reading lives, the vast majority of us are still reading words printed with ink on paper bound with glue and string.The reasons for this are numerous and pretty easy to rattle off:
  • E-books can be physically uncomfortable to read (whether you're sitting at a desk looking at a monitor or squinting at a tiny PDA screen).
  • They're not portable if you have to read them on a desktop computer; if you read them on a laptop or PDA, you can't read if you run out of power.
  • There's a number of often incompatible formats that the files come in.
  • And the user's ability to access the book's content is often restricted by various digital rights management technologies. (It's notable that the Baen Free Library, one of the more successful e-book outfits, gives away books that are DRM-free -- and, for that matter, free as in beer. I guess it's easy to be successful when you don't expect anyone to pay you!).
On the other hand, old-school paper books are generally easily portable, use reflected light and are thus easy on the eyes, don't need batteries, and can be read as often as the reader wants and even lent to others. And they're still readable after the sort of abuse that would send any piece of electronics to the scrap heap.
Fruhlinger's words ring true. Thus, textbooks that try to do online what they do in print will not succeed as ebooks for all the reasons above. The questions to ask are these --what are students being asked to learn? how can they best be taught? A book is good for supporting a lot of ways to learn, but that codex book meant to be used/read in codex ways won't work nearly as well on screen as it does in print. So what does work online? In what context? How will it be taught and within what virtual educational context? How will assignments be made, learning measured? And and will teachers and students engage and build upon the concepts, ideas, and information delivered in this new book? Figure out that, and you've figured out ebooks in education. And you can figure those books won't look anything like books. Wonder what we'll call them?

Clear Your Throats: Podcasting Is Easier than Ever
Fern Shen, writing in the Washington Post, "IPods Fast Becoming New Teacher's Pet," describes how some schools have gone from banning students from bringing IPods into the classroom to using the technology for teaching.
Kids are podcasting -- reading poems, doing book reports, and coming up with other ideas -- and idea casting for new podcast ideas: "We could read parts of books, to show why we like them. We could do interviews. If there's a field trip, we could make a recording of it and post it," said Mohamed El-Sayed, 10. "Kids anywhere will like to hear about us."Kids are motivated in part because the technology is new and cool, but also because the work is, published, or cast. Kids are making podcasts that they hope other teachers will use. Their learning is becoming a tool for others to learn. Also, teachers are finding that by not making everything automatically cast, students work harder to get good stuff in. Students do research in books and on the Internet, write scripts, perform roles --a town crier during the Revolutionary War, for example. "Kindergartners are taking loaner iPods home to practice their vocabulary words, and English as a Second Language students are using them to practice English."
. . .an Anthropology professor at Brandeis got a grant to buy iPods for students. The initiative is expanded now and is called "The iPod Experience" You can read about it here: http://lts.brandeis.edu/teachlearn/ipod/about.html
Students developed two-minute audio texts for each of the paintings in an exhibition at the university museum. They posted them on a university site for everyone in the school to download. This semester students are developing oral history materials to use in a walking tour of a neighborhood in Medford.

eLearning Utopia: iPods Meet Course Management in theClassroom
http://www.campus-technology.com/article.asp?id=11666 By Robert ViauProfessor of English & Interdisciplinary Studies
Questions: What type of pedagogical content could be delivered through audio files? When and how would students and instructors be likely to use audio files with pedagogical content?

Handheld Learning

Questions: What kind of content would students or instructors be most likely to look up using their cell phones or PDAs? How would we need to adapt or plan content to work with these devices?



EPortfolios Leave the LAN and Get Webby and Database-based
Farther south, technologists at the University of Iowa are honing their own homegrown ePortfolio systems. Via an overarching electronic portfolio project, students in the school’s College of Education are treated to four different flavors of ePortfolios. The flagship initiative at Iowa—Digital BackPack—is a system that, much like UMD’s, provides a series of individual repositories into which every student can store files. On the surface, each portfolio is nothing more than a glorified Web page to organize presentations, documents, and images for others to peruse. Behind the scenes, however, the Digital BackPack is an elaborate, homegrown content management system, a place for students to store all the evidence of their education and curriculum-driven conceptualizing.
--quoted from Matt Villano: ePortfolios >> Hi-Octane Assessment

What role will publishers play in supporting them e-portfolios? What's more telling about the passage is the linking of portoflio to content management (and digital repository). As publishers, of course, we're learning how to think about a learning objects repositories. But the degree to which students and professors are creating (ePortfolio is one example; a lesson plan site such as Merlot is another) learning repositories and managing them and turning them to mulitple uses (Multiple use examples: ePortfolio can be used for course assessment of a student; department assessment of a course or of a program; college assessment of a department; student can reuse the same portfolio to get a job or apply to graduate school; or a professor in a department can use the same content to do research on how students learn.). The story of databases and eportfolios is really about how students and instructors are using learning content and artifacts in new ways. To the extent publishers are in the content business, they need to understand ePortfolios, content management systems, and learning object repositories (all variation of the same thing) and what instructors and students require from these tools.



Digital Writing Across the Curriculum: http://www.tltgroup.org/resources/gx/Digital-WAC.htm

Elgg: Learning Network as Social Space: http://elgg.net/

Multimedia as composition from Todd Taylor: http://www.unc.edu/~twtaylor/teaching/06/
Work from Todd's students: http://www.unc.edu/~twtaylor/teaching/06/nuevo.html

Friday, January 06, 2006

Plagiarism Workshop for DCCC

Cheating is Easy
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=free+term+papers, but let us look and see how it can be made both harder to do, and not worth doing, all in the context of helping students use the Internet and WWW better for the writing and learning they need to do.

Turn Papermills to Your Advantage
Since these sites exist, let students know that you know about them. Use them in your teaching.
How Student Papers Sometimes Get Writtenhttp://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail64.htmlThe site's a hoot, and it's funny. And it's also a useful teaching tool, worth showing in class if you can do it, or sending students to look at and write about it for a class discussion on doing one's own
work.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2059540/leads to "Adventures in Cheating," by Seth Stevenson, a piece that samples term paper mills, and finds --no surprise-- that you get what you pay for (and even that ain't much). I wrote a response to this piece, which again, I find useful for teaching, that began, "Essentially, the free papers stink, and they're recycled. That is, free papermill sites often carry copies of the same papers." Rest of the note is here: http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=2538524&.

Teach Students How to Make a Bibliography
The Bedford Bibliographer at http://bedfordstmartins.com/bibliographer
(Available January 11).

Remember That Writing is Social
http://ncarbone.blogspot.com/TeachingWriting/2005/10/no-writer-is-island-tyca-sw.html



Teaching Source Evaluation and Research Skills


Before the Internet and World Wide Web information explosion, most teachers did not spend time teaching students to evaluate sources. Research projects sent students to the library, where it was assumed that sources would be valid. So an essential skill was never taught. But now it needs to be taught.

Fortunately, there are several good WWW sites to help teach those skills. All these sites apply criteria drawn from the types of questions librarians ask when deciding whether a book or other print source will be a good resource to have in the library.


The Bedford Research Room: http://bedfordstmartins.com/researchroom by Mike Palmquist offers tips and advice on evaluating sources, an avoiding plagiarism tutorial and more.
Evaluating Web Resources : http://www2.widener.edu/Wolfgram-Memorial-Library/webevaluation/webeval.htm by Janet Alexander and Marcia Tate. This site organizes questions to ask about sites by site type -- informational, advertising, and so on.


Evaluating a Site: http://www.2learn.ca/evaluating/evaluating.htmloffers interactive forms students can complete and then print out and bring in as part of their homework.

Yahooligans' Teaching Internet Literacy: http://www.yahooligans.com/tg/litintro.html offers both a tutorial for teachers and activities for students.

Teaching Research, Teaching Writing, Teaching Academic Honesty
Naturally, these are all intertwined, especially now, with the Internet and WWW providing a place where teaching, writing, and research all actually converge. But how to talk about it and work it all into the classroom? My own inclination is to work make the issue discussable. Here's how I do that: http://bedfordstmartins.com/technotes/workshops/talkingplagy.htm.

Or, try what Mike Edwards at UMass tried:

Let's Plagiarize
http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/archives/2005/11/01/lets-plagiarize/

And Plagiarize We Did
http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/archives/2005/11/03/and-plagiarize-we-did/


Reliable Sources
These are examples of reliable WWW sites -- good starting places for students and instructors to use. The main difference between starting here and finding something on Google? -- human editors made careful choices.


  • Research and Documentation Online at http://dianahacker.com/resdoc offers a comprehensive collection of research resources, including an overview of research starting places organized by subject matter and sorted by source type: book, WWW sites, and databases.

  • The Internet Public Library at http://www.ipl.org/ provides an excellent, librarian and library science student collection of resources chosen with the same care and attention librarians bring to the sources they put on their shelves.

  • Links Library at http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/rewriting/rc5.html collects "several databases of annotated links for a variety of disciplines. These links lead to resources that Bedford/St. Martin's authors and editors and readers have found to be useful in their own teaching and research. "