WH@MCPHS

Writer's Help at MCPHS

After the first visit to discuss teaching with the handbook, I compiled a list of resources that came up during the conversation. Those are collected here to have in one place.

Teaching with Hacker Handbooks:  https://community.macmillan.com/docs/DOC-1475

  This will have ideas for sequencing the handbook use into writing assignments and/or activities to address writing issues. 

Syllabus 5: Writer’s Help, in Critical Reading and Writing, fall semester   https://community.macmillan.com/docs/DOC-1575   

  This syllabus is from Stephen Bernhardt, who with Nancy Sommers co-authored Writer's Help. His cool idea: he underlines key terms in his syllabus and then has students look those up using the search tool in Writer's Help.

Stuff I've Written Up

How to use Word to turn essay into list of sentences  

https://cbwshare.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/how-to-use-word-to-turn-essay-into-list-of-sentences.docx

With inspiration from Klonoski, Edward, “Using the Eyes of the PC to Teach Revision.,” Computers and Composition, v11 n1 p71-78. 1994.

Since handbooks and exercises use single sentence examples to illustrate incorrect and then corrected sentences, a proofing stage activity, students use the steps in this handout to transfer what they read and exercise to their own writing.  They do this by turning their essay into a list of sentences to match the kind of approach the handbook/exercises use.   See also, for a related activity inspired by Ed’s piece, “One Way to Use Grammar and Spellcheckers Carefully” at http://bedfordstmartins.com/catalog/static/bsm/technotes/forandrea/.

See also, "Schooling Grammar Checkers" for 8 things teachers can do to address the strengths and weaknesses of that tool:

https://community.macmillan.com/people/nick.carbone/blog/2016/05/23/writerkey-versus-the-writing-feedback-machine

James Lang's stuff from the CHE:
Small Changes in Teaching -- http://www.chronicle.com/specialreport/Small-Changes-in-Teaching/44?cid=RCPACKAGE

On Transfer

Why Don't They Apply What They Learned, Part 1

http://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-Dont-They-Apply-What/136753/

Why Don't They Apply What They Learned, Part 2

http://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-They-Dont-Apply-What/137389/

Why Don't They Apply What They Learned, Part 3

http://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-They-Dont-Apply-What-They/137963/

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Three core ideas

1. Be explicit with students about the role of Writer's Help in their MCPHS writing career. It's not just a course text, it's a text for all the writing they do. Strategies include letting them know their other professors will know they have the book (and those professors might have access). Stressing for each time you teach them how to use the book on their own that you are teaching them this so that can and will use it on their own in other courses, other writing situations. This kind of explicit teaching of goals and purpose will help students see that what is taught in a writing course -- strategies for drafting, researching, citing, reviewing, revising, proofing, and consulting Writer's Help in all those activities, is what they should bring to writing across the curriculum.

2. Move from Writer's Help to student writing; from student writing to Writer's Help. Teach students how to go from the advice in Writer's Help to their own writing and classmates' writings; and to know how to look at writing and then go to Writer's Help for advice. So space the use of Writer's Help throughout the semester (see Lang on spacing and interleaving), structured so that they move as quickly as possible from Writer's Help to writing. For example, if you're going to ask them to focus on thesis statements for a workshop, they might be told to look up thesis statements in Writer's Help, maybe do some LearningCurve questions, or standard quiz activities, to reinforce what they read. Then in class the next day, have them bring copies of their own writing and work in groups on finding and improving their owns and classmates' thesis statements. The key is make it the next day, so they can apply what they read and exercised to actual writing. Because you are just focusing on thesis statements, they can be in groups of four, and each writer can get three reviews.  Ask them to do this:  Describe to the writer what the thesis statement is (or could be if the reviewer thinks one is not there), and based on Writer's Help -- by citing or quoting from it -- talk about the statement's quality.  If it helps, use this prompt or template for them to complete:
According to Writer's Help, a good thesis statement ____________________________. 
Your thesis statement is __________________________________________________.

And then use either:

Your thesis statement is good because ______________________________________.
Your thesis statement is on the way to good, and will get there if you _________________________________.

3. Never work  harder than your students. 

First, do as much to grow student to student feedback as you can. Micro reviews such as the thesis statement can work wonders, both to help writers learn to see how to improve things on their own and to give them the time, focus, and practice at working those improvements.  No writing instructor should ever take on the burden of being the only person who gives writers feedback they will use. Teach them to give and receive feedback from one another; they will learn more and more deeply.

Second, on sentence level issues,  address only one or two a week, using steps something like above -- students read Writer's Help, do exercises, do the best they can applying to their own writing; in workshops set aside to teach just proofreading and copyediting,  they look at writing and go back to Writer's Help for explaining their feedback. When you address sentence level issue in your written feedback, do two things: one, only address an issue you've taught; and two, don't circle the error in the sentence nor label it. Use minimal marking -- put a check at the end of the sentence. The writer needs to look at the sentence, decide what the error is, and figure a good revision. He or she can ask a classmate for help.  

For example, if you've addressed fragments and subject-verb agreement only, put check marks in margins at lines where one of those two errors occurs. Don't say which it is or where it is. The following week the check mark might also include run-ons if that was taught next. Each week the mark can potentially include a wider array of errors, but only errors that have been taught and workshopped. Let your students use the marks as hints for going back to Writer's Help for advice on figuring out what the error is and how to fix it. You're working hard to mark margins; they're working harder to learn more deeply and permanently what the marks hint at and how to fix those things. 

WTL @ NCAT

Writing to Learn Aids Learning to Write

One of the challenges for students when they take any course in any discipline, and it is one of the joys too, is learning how to see and make sense of the world through the lenses -- ways of thinking and sharing ideas -- a discipline provides.

To do this, we know from insights in gleaned from the science of teaching and learning, students need to learn content and processes. Learners also need to grapple with those ideas -- not just cram them before a test, not just remember enough to pass a course -- to learn them deeply. Writing remains one of the best tools for idea grappling, for learning.

And through writing about what is being learned, students build more fluidity writing about the things they will write about as emerging thinkers and researchers in that discipline. It's kind of cool when you think about.

And here are some sources to help you think about it.

• Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel 

Page includes links to reviews of the book or articles inspired by the book. Key insights in the text as captured by the publisher's description:

Many common study habits and practice routines turn out to be counterproductive. Underlining and highlighting, rereading, cramming, and single-minded repetition of new skills create the illusion of mastery, but gains fade quickly. More complex and durable learning come from self-testing, introducing certain difficulties in practice, waiting to re-study new material until a little forgetting has set in, and interleaving the practice of one skill or topic with another.

• Small Teaching by James Lang
  
  
  This delightful book combines insights from the science of teaching and learning (SOTL) with small changes that can make a difference. A lot of the ideas dovetail well with writing because they use writing to learn strategies. For more on small changes, see also Lang's collection of articles on the topic at the Chronicle of Higher Ed:
  
  http://chronicle.com/specialreport/Small-Changes-in-Teaching/44
  
  
• Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty by James Lang
  
  From publisher: Drawing on an array of findings from cognitive theory, Lang analyzes the specific, often hidden features of course design and daily classroom practice that create opportunities for cheating.
  
  What you find when you look at the case studies of classroom practices, is how often the use of writing to learn activities help with deeper learning and help to mitigate against the need to cheat.

Aside: Plagiarism happens for two broad, complicated and often overlapping reasons: fear and loathing. Students are afraid they cannot do the work and will fail. If the stakes are high, the grade is needed, cheating becomes an option out of fear of failure. Loathing describes an almost opposite situation: students don't care about the course, don't like the subject, maybe resent having to take it. For them the stakes are so low, then, that out of disdain or animosity or boredom or indifference, they cheat as short cut to finishing.

Writing to learn mitigates against plagiarism because it gives students the time and practice to write about ideas that will be used later in their more formal writing assignments. That's very powerful learning and very powerful mitigation against plagiarism practice: getting ideas in words before setting words to an essay, lab report, or major assignment.

The works above all help illustrate how writing can help foster that power. So can this resource:

• Plagiarism 101 by Nick Carbone -- http://plagy101.blogspot.com/
  This site collects resources used in plagiarism workshops, including links to handouts, language you can add to your syllabus about plagiarism, readings and a video you can assign students to view and read as part of discussing the issue.

A collection of teaching ideas

Ideas for Writing to Learn with Discussion Boards

•     When you place a reading on reserve at the library, have students use a discussion board to post their responses or notes on the reading. Since most all libraries have computers, students can do this in the library as they read.
•     Use the discussion board during class as way for students to write and post responses to writing prompts (which you can post in the board in advance). 
•     Put text you want students to read in a message; ask students to use the reply key and to quote the original message--the text you posted. They can insert comments and annotations in the text.
•     Have students copy and paste drafts of their writing in a board. Create separate strands for peer review groups or study groups. They can reply and comment on one another's paper.
•    Create a discussion board devoted to sharing research sources. Require students to post full citations for a source they discovered an annotation or abstract to go with it. 

 Writing to Learn, Writing to Write and Managing the Workload

You don’t have to comment or grade every piece of writing--you can do a lot by simply reading. Here are some ways to think about workload:

•    Read and comment on posts in aggregate. "I notice a lot of comments are saying ..." or "Three of you -- student, student, student -- have pointed out X, what do others of you think?"
•     Make sure to reply to every student's writings at some point, however.
•     Use your discussion leading skills to get students to respond to each other--point out when they have ideas in common, or opposed, and invite responses. (Good for face to face as well as discussion boards.)
•     Don't get caught up doing tech. support. Urge students to help one another whenever possible--if you introduce online tools in face-to-face settings, you can move this along by having students who complete a step or task move around the room to help those who are still working at it.
•     Peer review. Teach it, and help students find the value in it. Treat peer review comments as what they really are -- micro essays -- that, like any essay, can be improved by rewriting, feedback, and discussion. Spending more time on teaching students to do peer review in the early weeks -- even if that leaves less time to work on essays -- can pay off in the end. The skills they learn writing comments -- being a close reader, writing full, descriptive comments, offering a writing choices, learning to read writing like a writer -- all transfer and support what writing is about. There's no loss to spend more time on peer review and a little less on actual essays early on.
•     Conference with students--read writing cold, on the spot, in conference. Conference online in chat spaces and have students describe what they're doing. Talk about the writing. As the semester goes on, make more of your comments orally, in mini-conferences, and let peer reviews be the comments of written record.
•     Don't try to grade everything. Have students periodically write reflections and self-analysis (have them quote from class transcripts, discussion, peer review comments to make points); remember you're reading and skimming and keeping track that works getting done, but you don't have to grade every jit and jot.
•     Set office hours and keep them.
•     Set times for your own work and don't let students intrude.
•     Set rules for when and how frequently you'll answer student email.
•     Keep students on schedule--nothing like extensions to stretch your work out.
•     Don't be afraid to cut down on work you assign from time to time.
•     Teach computer skills as writing skills. For example, how to save a file in rich text format might seem computer skill, but it's an essential writing skill if writing's to be shared among platforms. Realizing this helps put that necessary teaching in perspective--it's work worth doing, and saves time down the road.

Use Portfolios to Transition Writing to Learn (WTL) to Writing in the Disciplines (WID) 

For writers, careful record keeping, reflective essays, research logs, copies of sources used, annotated bibliographies, and so on-- are essential skills and practices that scholars and researchers follow. Writing to Learn activities are part of the thinking record your young scholars should learn to save and use. If you require WTL activities and especially, but not only, if they are precursors to WID projects, requires your students to save all their work in an e-portfolio. An e-portfolio can be as simple as folder where all work is kept or as rich as full on e-portfolio tools. 

But to make these work, set for students incremental deadlines (collecting items as the weeks progress) and help students to keep their portfolio organized, accurate, and useful for these reasons:

• It helps you teach students how to manage time and set a series of smaller goals and deadlines. Setting deadlines helps students stay on course, and if you make it explicit that you're setting deadlines to model the kind of planning they need to learn to do when they engage larger writing projects on their own, it helps them to see the value of planning the project that way.
      
• It lets you tie the use of the portfolio to the issue of plagiarism and honesty. Make it clear and explicit that such a portfolio benefits students should there ever be any question about the origins of their work. Portfolios help students show the work that goes into their writing, and that helps them should there ever be a question about their honesty. And of course, by collecting the work incrementally and seeing how students are doing as they go, it helps you to teach source management (avoiding inadvertent, technical plagiarism), and makes it harder for students to cheat (avoiding intentional plagiarism).
     
• One of the best ways to start any project is to use this WTL idea: have student to create a knowledge of inventory, a list of everything they know or think about  their given topic, as well as tracing where they learned what they know or how they derived the opinions they have. From this, students can generate two very useful things: one, some early essays that help them structure their own initial thinking, and two, research leads. 

1.  Essay Drafting Benefit: Using WTL before research helps students get their voice on paper. It gives them a document that they can weave their sources and research results into. This helps avoid the get-a-stack-of-sources-cobble-quote-cite-and-then-patch-a-paper-together-thing that often results in voiceless, bland, unengaged research writing. By writing first, you can help students move back and forth between research and writing. They write to get started; research to explore their thinking, answer questions, solve a problem or learn more. They work what they've learned from research into the evolving draft, as research helps them revise their thinking 


2. Research Leads Benefit: If students remember having read an article in the dentist's office six months ago, or recall hearing something on the news, had a textbook a few years back which addressed the issue, or took another course where a teacher discussed the topic, and so on, then they have leads, places to begin their research.  They can look up those articles and call or e-mail those teachers.

• An incrementally collected portfolio lets you see how students research, and how their research and writing strategies are unfolding. These views into their process let you intercede and find more teachable moments than can arise when you only get a paper on a due date
     
• You do not need to comment on everything you collect. Just the act of collecting work in increments still helps students because it gives them deadlines. Just skim if you've a need to, looking for broader issues that might be addressed to the class as a whole or in consultation with a research librarian This is also a good way to find class-wide issues that might be addressed by consulting your writing center and arranging a workshop on some particular research writing skill. That is, collecting portfolios does not necessarily have to entail a lot of extra work reading and responding.  But still the benefits are immeasurable and merely skimming opens up opportunities for working with your local writing center and library.
•  Seeing work from the start -- brainstorming, searching for topics, finding a thesis, and so on -- makes the chances of plagiarism "vanishingly thin."
      
• By collecting work in increments, from WTL activities to WID processes --and regularly checking portfolios and research logs to see that work accumulate, teachers can sooner find struggling students. If a student's not doing the work, is falling behind, you know that student is in some trouble. Students who get behind and in trouble are often the ones tempted to cheat. The chance to intercede and help them sooner is much more useful  -- and less agonizing -- than trying to catch them at cheating later.
• Failure to do the portfolio and/or to meet its incremental deadlines, can be a reason to refuse a student's final paper or to consider the research project incomplete. Thus, if you feel students have plagiarized, but can't find the source materials they may have used, and they don't confess to plagiarizing, despite all the circumstantial evidence you present before them, you can still give them a low, perhaps failing, grade because they don't have a research portfolio. To do this, however, you have to make it clear in your syllabus and research assignment that a complete, and incrementally developed portfolio is part of the project. And it needs to be part of of the assignment's articulation that missing --or incomplete -- portfolios will result in no credit for the project. 

UNR, MLA, & OFS (Other Fun Stuff)

Resources We May Reference

An MLA Update FAQ from Bedford/St. Martin's via Macmillan Community:

https://community.macmillan.com/docs/DOC-2105-mla-2016-faq

Citation Management Software Guides, University of Nevada Reno Library
http://guides.library.unr.edu/citationmanagers

How to Cite a Cereal Box using MLA by Martine Courant Rife*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPyB3bl7GY0

*Note, this is for an older version of MLA, but still worth showing. Students can apply its lessons/method to the current version.

The Citation Project -- Rebecca Moore Howard and Sandra Jamieson

http://citationproject.net

Plagiarism 101: Resources for Faculty

http://plagy101.blogspot.com/

 “Inventing the University” by David Bartholomae (Journal of Basic Writing)

http://wac.colostate.edu/jbw/v5n1/bartholomae.pdf

"Next Time, Fail Better" by Paul M. Krebs (Chronicle of Higher Education)

http://chronicle.com/article/Next-Time-Fail-Better/131790/

“Conquering the Freshman Fear of Failure by David L. Kirp (NY Times)

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/opinion/sunday/conquering-the-freshman-fear-of-failure.html

Carol Dweck -- The power of believing that you can improve, a Ted Talk.

James Lang on teaching transfer:

"Why Don't They Apply What They Learned,  Part I" and Part II

See also by Lang, Small Teaching:Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118944496,miniSiteCd-JBHIGHERED.html

Daniel Willingham on understanding transfer:

"Why Transfer is Hard." -- from his collection of online articles on how students learn at http://www.danielwillingham.com/articles.html

Robyn R. Jackson on the first two steps on not working harder than your students:
"Start Where Your Students Are." and "Know Where Your Students are Going," chapters 1 and 2 from her book, Never Work Harder than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching.

Barbara Fister 
Her IHE Blog, Library Babel Fish

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish

"Teaching the Rhetorical Dimensions of Research," Research Strategies 11.4 (Fall 1993): 211-219.
http://homepages.gac.edu/~fister/rs.html

Two Handouts from the BYU Writing Center:

http://writingcenter.byu.edu/sites/default/files/handouts/mla_style_citations.pdf

http://writingcenter.byu.edu/sites/default/files/handouts/mla_formatting_0.pdf

WVU & Teaching w/ Technology

Stuff on Teaching

Position Statements - National Council of Teachers of English - Two Year College Association

http://www.ncte.org/tyca/positions

Guidelines for the Academic Preparation of English Faculty at Two Year Colleges

http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Groups/TYCA/TYCAGuidelines.pdf

 Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, James Lang

Robynn K. Shannon, Ph.D., of Fairmont State University, wrote this recommendation: 

[James Lang has a series of posts] in The Chronicle of Higher Education on small changes that faculty can make to their teaching to improve learning in their courses, you will be pleased to know that the series has now been compiled on a single page of the Chronicle web site:  http://chronicle.com/specialreport/Small-Changes-in-Teaching/44.   

If you are not familiar with Lang’s writings on teaching and learning, these pieces for The Chronicle are a great place to start. 

Earlier this year, Lang’s most recent book, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, was published by Jossey-Bass: 

 http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118944496,miniSiteCd-JBHIGHERED.html.  

_____

Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom
by Daniel T. Willingham
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-047059196X.html 

Willingham also has a collection of articles on cognition and learning at http://www.danielwillingham.com/articles.html.

If you visit that page, these might be helpful in your planning:

• Why practice is important
• Why people love and remember stories
• How to teach critical thinking
• Why reading comprehension strategies are less useful than most people think
• Can Reading Comprehension Be Taught? 

__

“Inventing the University” by David Bartholomae

http://wac.colostate.edu/jbw/v5n1/bartholomae.pdf

"Next Time, Fail Better" by Paul M. Krebs

http://chronicle.com/article/Next-Time-Fail-Better/131790/

Stuff on Technology

 Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository
from The University of Central Florida's (UCF) Center for Distributed Learning (CDL)

https://topr.online.ucf.edu/index.php/Main_Page

Teaching Resources for Writing @ Colostate's Writing Studio
http://writing.colostate.edu/teaching.cfm

Student Permission and Public Writing

What Role Does Student Permission Play in Making Their Own Work Public? 

A presentation for UConn First-Year Writing's 11th Annual Conference on the Teaching of Writing

Some sources:

Agre, Phil, & Rotenber, Marc, eds. Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape. MIT Press, 1997.

From Phil Agre:
". . . control over personal information is control over an aspect of the identity one projects to the world, and the right to privacy is the freedom from unreasonable constraints on the construction of one's own identity" (7).  

Watters, Audry, "Student Data, Privacy, Ideology, and Context-less-ness," Hack Education. 31 July 2014. http://hackeducation.com/2014/07/31/privacy-data-ideology-identity-context

In her book Privacy in Context, Nissenbaum offers a different frame: 

“What people care most about is not simply restricting the flow of information but ensuring that it flows appropriately, and an account of appropriate flow is given here through the framework of contextual integrity.” 

Privacy, she argues, is the right to the appropriate flow of information, and we should debate the appropriateness of the creation, collection, and consumption of data based on the context of each. We can debate this, ideally, through transparent, democratic processes, recognizing that we have to work through the knotty challenges of protecting public and individual needs. That is, with integrity.

Nissenbaum, Helen. Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life.  Stanford University Press, 2009.

A central tenet of  contextual  integrity  is  that  there  are  no arenas of life not governed  by  norms  of  information  flow ,  no  information  or  spheres  of life  for  which  “anything  goes.”  Almost  everything—things  that  we  do, events  that  occur,  transactions  that  take  place—happens  in  a  context  not only  of  place  but  of  politics,  convention,  and  cultural  expectation.  These contexts  can  be  as  sweepingly  defined  as,  say,  spheres  of  life  such  as education,  politics,  and  the  marketplace  or  as  finely  drawn  as  the conventional  routines  of  visiting  the  dentist,  attending  a  family  wedding, or  interviewing  for  a  job.  For  some  purposes,  broad  sweeps  are sufficient.  As  mentioned  before,  public  and  private  define  a  dichotomy of  spheres  that  have  proven  useful  in  legal  and  political  inquiry.  Robust intuitions  about  privacy  norms,  however,  seem  to  be  rooted  in  the  details of rather more limited contexts, spheres, or stereotypic situations. 

Observing  the  texture  of  people’s  lives,  we  find  them  not  only crossing  dichotomies,  but  moving  about,  into,  and  out  of  a  plurality  of distinct  realms.  They  are  at  home  with  families,  they  go  to  work,  they seek  medical  care,  visit  friends,  consult  with  psychiatrists,  talk  with lawyers,  go  to  the  bank,  attend  religious  services,  vote,  shop,  and  more. Each  of  these  spheres,  realms,  or  contexts  involves,  indeed  may  even  be defined  by,  a  distinct  set  of  norms,  which  governs  its  various  aspects such  as  roles,  expectations,  actions,  and  practices.  For  certain  contexts, such  as  the  highly  ritualized  settings  of  many  church  services,  these norms  are  explicit  and  quite  specific.  For  others,  the  norms  may  be implicit,  variable,  and  incomplete  (or  partial).  There  is  no  need  here  to construct  a  theory  of  these  contexts.  It  is  enough  for  our  purposes  that the  social  phenomenon  of  distinct  types  of  contexts,  domains,  spheres, institutions,  or  fields  is  firmly  rooted  in  common  experience . . .

Carbone, Nick; Lowe, Charlie; Jerz, Dennis; and Williams, Terra.  Review Discussion for "Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom." Into the Blogosphere. 2004. http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/172819/Comments14.pdf

Nick, I'm curious about your reasons for thinking that required public writing should be an elective only? Is is an ethcial issue? After all, there are other course tracks in many universities where students are required as part of their degree work to do things outside of the safety of the classroom. K-12 student teaching and engineering internships are two that come to mind. Posted by: charlie at July 3, 2004 11:22 PM 3 

I can't speak for Nick, but the cases that come to my mind revolve around the confessional, personal stories that one often finds in a freshman comp course. I can also imagine problems from some students who have restraining orders against individuals to whom they'd rather not publicize their whereabouts. I personally try to address this by showing students multiple examples of times somebody blogged (or uploaded e-mailed or IMed) something they later regretted. Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz at July 4, 2004 04:45 PM

Isaacs, Emily & Jackson, Phoebe, eds. Public Works: Student Writing as Public Text. Heinemann. 2001

 "[t]here has not been enough attention to the ethics of assuming that students will necessarily benefit from such practice; there has been little discussion about the problems teachers face trying to institute such a practice; and finally, sometimes these practices have unintended, even negative, effects on students and their writing or the audience for whom they are writing." (Introduction)

For a useful review of Public Works, see http://digitalcommons.tacoma.uw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1026&context=ias_pub

Links for #NCTE15 #G18

Writing to Read; Reading to Write Workshop -- online and social annotation tools are here:  http://dutchessworkshop.blogspot.com/

The Citation Project:   http://site.citationproject.net/

Reading with writing is better than reading with just a highlighter (This also shows social annotation in use.): http://bit.ly/1MbZYwN

Visualize Sources by Doug Downs & Bedford/St. Martin's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqR4XC6_wKQ

How to Cite a Cereal Box by Martine Courant Rife: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPyB3bl7GY0

"Believing Game" by Peter Elbow: http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=eng_faculty_pubs  (See also http://works.bepress.com/peter_elbow/doctype.html for more of his work.)

A summary of Peter Elbow's Believing and Doubting Game: https://www.d.umn.edu/~cstroupe/ideas/believing.html

"Theft, Fraud, and Loss of Voice" from Transition to College Writing by Keith Hjortshoj:
https://writing.caltech.edu/documents/1-plagiarism_hjortshoj.pdf

Bedford Research Room by Mike Palmquist (bewhiskered and will move soon, grab the downloads asap): http://bedfordstmartins.com/researchroom/

Teaching Arguments from Dartmouth Writing and Rhetoric Program:
https://writing-speech.dartmouth.edu/teaching/first-year-writing-pedagogies-methods-design/teaching-argument

Chapter 1, "Language and Experience" from Language and Learning by James Britton: http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/languageandlearning.pdf

"Writing and Reading in the Classroom" by James Britton, 1987 report, NWP Site:
http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/download/nwp_file/151/TR08.pdf?x-r=pcfile_d

Threshold Concepts and Information Literacy: http://www.ilthresholdconcepts.com/

Five Things You Should Read About Threshold Concepts, from ACRL: http://acrl.ala.org/IS/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/5Things2014.pdf

Making and Sharing Knowledge: Textbooks' Roles in Academic Disciplines

Textbooks Convert Scholarship to Pedagogy. 

 

A crude rendering of Kandisky's metaphor from Concering the Spiritual in Art http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/06/02/kandinsky-concerning-the-spiritual-in-art/

Here're some of our recent and popular titles informed by the scholarship of their authors:

 

 

Writer/Designer by Arola, Ball and Sheppard

 

 

Understanding Rhetoric

 

Joining the Conversation by Palmquist and Wallraff

 

Writing About Writing by Downs and Wardle

 

Stuff to read:

http://ncarbone.blogspot.com/2014/11/editing-love-story-in-four-subheads.html

Valdosta State Workshop: Small Steps Lead to Big Strides

Welcome to the resource page for today's (March, 16, 2015) conversations and workshops. 

Here are ten premises for today's work:

1. Every professor already teaches with technology.
2. Every professor already teaches a hybrid course.
3. Different technologies offer different gifts for teaching and learning, opening new doors and giving professors more options when designing an assignment or a course.
4. No professor has to be an expert at any given technology to use it.
5. Students may be digital natives when it comes to using technology socially, but they are decidedly digital strangers to using technology academically. 
6. Teachers should never work harder than their students.
7. Students really do want to learn, and will work hard in a course if they understand the value and purpose of the course work.
8. Both teaching and learning can and should be hard fun.
9. Failure and mistakes are not only o.k. in a course, they're necessary and sometimes even cause for celebration.
10. Students can transfer skills learned in writing courses to other course and writing down outside of courses -- if they are taught how to transfer those skills. 

Readings I Always Recommend:

  James Lang on teaching transfer:
"Why Don't They Apply What They Learned,  Part I" and Part II

Daniel Willingham on understanding transfer:

"Why Transfer is Hard." -- from his collection of online articles on how students learn at http://www.danielwillingham.com/articles.html

Paul Krebs on learning from mistakes in the humanities:

"Next Time, Fail Better."

Robyn R. Jackson on the first two steps on not working harder than your students:
"Start Where Your Students Are." and "Know Where Your Students are Going," chapters 1 and 2 from her book, Never Work Harder than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching.

Other good stuff:

"The Processing Demands of Writing" by Mark Torrance and David Galbraith in The Handbook of Writing Research ed. by Charles A. MacArthur, Steve Graham, and Jill Fitzgerald via Google books at http://bit.ly/1GLyr0R.  You can purchase the full book directly from Guilford Press.

Addressing plagiarism by Nick Carbone: http://plagy101.blogspot.com/

Seeing the Field from the Field, Nick Carbone -- http://teachnet.blogspot.com/2011/05/c-and-w-2011-seeing-field-from-field.html

The Writing Classroom as Functioning Ecology and Economy, http://watson12carbone.blogspot.com/?view=magazine

Charles Moran, "From High-Tech to a Low-Tech Writing Classroom: You Can't Go Home Again." http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/782

Stuff we happened upon during discussion:

The Citation Project by Rebecca Moore Howard and Sandra Jameison: http://site.citationproject.net/

Nick Carbone's experiment analyzing grammar checkers (scroll down to posts on the grammar checker analysis): http://nccei12carbone.blogspot.com/

Handout on turning essay into list of sentences: http://cbwshare.wordpress.com/2014/02/ Scroll down to entry by Nick Carbone

San Jose State University and Writer's Help for Lunsford

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Writer's Help Handouts, Guides, and Instructor Manual

- - -

Handouts and Guides 
This Google Drive Folder for SJSU will evolve and update as needed with materials written especially for SJSU professors and students.  Current contents:

1. Student Access Handout for WH2LH San Jose State
2. Annotated for Instructors -- Student Access Handout for WH2LH San Jose State
3. Slide Show for Classroom - WH2LH and SJSU
4. Tech Support and WH2LH
5. Email for SJSU Fall 2014 First Year and Transfer Students

Instructors Manual, the platform Writer's Help is on is called LaunchPad. Key refresher pages:

• How do I create a copy of a course?
• How do I create assignments?  -- note, not all the assignment types illustrated on this page are available in Writer's Help.
• How do I activate my course? -- use this to open the course so students can join and to get the Course URL they can use to register directly into your course.

Sign in URL for Writer's Help 2.0 for Lunsford Handbooks: http://www.macmillanhighered.com/writershelp/lunsford/

 

Guides to Teaching with a Handbook, Articles on Teaching

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The table of contents for Teaching with Lunsford Handbooks -- for an overview of teaching ideas the book covers.

Crib ideas too from Teaching with Hacker Handbooks -- some will be similar, some will differ, but the principles are the same as Teaching with Lunsford Handbooks.

Bits Blog Handbook teaching tips -- most from Barclay Barrios -- short, sweet, fun, and eclectic are his contributions. Worth the visit just to read a few

Andrea A. Lunsford's Multimodal Mondays in BITs.

All of Andrea's BITs posts.

Everyday Writer 5e Student Center

Oral and Mutlimedia Presentations from Andrea's Students

 James Lang on Transfer
"Why Don't They Apply What They Learned,  Part I" and Part II

Paul Krebs "Next Time, Fail Better."

Daniel Willingham, "Why Transfer is Hard." -- from his collection of online articles on how students learn at http://www.danielwillingham.com/articles.html

"Start Where Your Students Are." and "Know Where Your Students are Going," chapters 1 and 2 from Never Work Harder than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching by Robyn R. Jackson.

Handout on turning essay into list of sentences: http://cbwshare.wordpress.com/2014/02/ Scroll down to entry by Nick Carbone

Side bar: plagiarism resources -- http://plagy101.blogspot.com/

Inventing the University, David Barthlomae : http://wac.colostate.edu/jbw/v5n1/bartholomae.pdf

Trends in Teaching Writing Online: What Things May Come

Up Goes the Triangle, Slowly

At a Computers and Writing conference held in Ann Arbor some years back, I touched on some data Bedford/St. Martin's, as the company I work for was known by at the time, learned from faculty surveys. That's here: http://teachnet.blogspot.com/2011/05/c-and-w-2011-seeing-field-from-field.html. We saw a distinction among research universities and two year colleges in what technology was reported used, and we saw that overall, across the board, technologies that folks who attend computers and writing have known about and used for years were making just small in roads in most courses. 

And yet, the trend from 2006 to 2010, the two years spanning the surveys, was up, more technology was being used. We are seeing now, though I don't have the data, that trend continue, with multimodal composition being something programs and professors request support on (scroll down from this post to see an example). 

That said, trends come and move slowly. Wassily Kandinsky, describes in his monograph Concerning the Spiritual in Art, a triangle that moves up a slope, and at the tip, a lone innovator, and the base, folks doing what came before. But as the triangle moves up slowly, at some point the base will be where the innovator once was. I picture it something like this:

Nick's bad art. The red line is slope the triangle moves up. When the bottom line gets to where the top point is, that's when most of the field catches up to where innovators are now. Sometimes progress is so slow, you cannot tell it's a trend.

So What are Some Trends and Changes?

Multimodal composition was a featured topic at Computers and Writing in Pullman again this year, but hitting a kind of perfect storm moment in terms of resources available to support it's growth.

CWPA had a lot of discussion on foreign student enrollment growth and the kinds of support those students need and thus faculty need.

• http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/most-international/spp+50/src+stats
• http://www.iie.org/Who-We-Are/News-and-Events/Press-Center/Press-releases/2013/2013-11-11-Open-Doors-Data

Big data has always been part of composition, at least in big programs and around SACS and QEP time, but technology is making the gathering of data easier for those with the tools such as e-portfolios or home-grown writing systems like EMMA at UGA, MyReviewer at USF, Raider Writer at TTU.

But eportfolio systesm are abloom, and increasingly merging presentation eportfolios designed for good looking portfolios but also tool on the back end for using rubrics, counting page views, and other metrics.
Pathbrite
Digication
Chalk and Wire
Pebble Pad

The shift in data, however, is not just harvesting rubric scores, but looking for ways to gather engagement and learning analytics, records of student learning actions and choices. Programs exploring this include:

Eli, from MSU's Drawbridge and WIDE team
Writer Key
SWoRD from Panther Learning
MyCompLab Mastering from Pearson, which uses Knewton's adaptive learning engine
Acrobatiq from CMU
LearningCurve from Macmillan
Competency Based Learning Programs
Automated Writing Evaluation, though controversial, is a trend

What's interesting is how these things might converge in different ways. And what they mean going

University of Miami - MARE: Multimodal Assignments, Responses, and Evaluations

MARE Workshop Overview

Google Image Search results for "assigning multimodal compositions" on August 19, 2014 9:00 AM

In this workshop, you'll learn more from colleagues than you will from me, but that's as it should be. Many of you are already doing multimodal assignments -- digital assignments where students do more than compose in a word processor a document that could just as well have been composed on a typewriter. Some of you, no doubt, have students write in blog; others perhaps have assignments where students create videos that post to YouTube, or audio assignments that post to SoundCloud, or presentations in Prezi or Wix or Google Sites or Creativist or Medium or . . . well, you get the idea.

So the idea isn't to introduce multimodal composing, to but to see first what folks are doing, and then to see if we can do a bit more.

Central Goal

To create a new, or amend an existing, multimodal assignment which does the following:

• Enriches, if possible, the multimodal assignment. Enrichment may come from adding more multimodal elements (audio to something that only uses images, for example), the scope and purpose of the assignment in the course, or some other change that makes the assignment more central.
• Draft the assignment to meet these three criteria:
1. Makes clear to students how the assignment fits in with and meets course goals.
2. Makes clear to students how the assignment is to be done -- its requirements, resources, procedures, and process.
3. Makes clear to students, if you grade individual assignments, how the assignment will be graded. What criteria, rubric, premise for summative evaluation will be used. Or, if you contract grade or portfolio assess and do not grade individual assignments, makes clear to students how you and they will consider the assignment when coming to the final grade for the course.

Google Image Search results for "assigning multimodal writing" on August 19, 2014, 9:10 AM

Discussion Questions -- We'll Use the Blog Comments to Record Thoughts/Sketch Assignments

What's your next step? What will it take to layer in more to an assignment? How will your students respond to it, to each other in peer review? How will you respond to their work?  And a different question, how will you evaluate it -- both in the economy of the course grade and as an assignment that needs to fit into the ecology of the course goals and outcomes?

These are fun questions, open ended, and premised on the idea that what is doable is possible, given a first step and the joy of experimenting with teaching and learning.

Multimodal Teaching and Writing Resources

Resources for Teaching Multimodal Writing, 

Followed by Some Good Teaching Advice Links

Some Free Multimodal Composing Tools 

Wix  -- Easy to use site/service for creating visually rich Web sites.

Creativist  -- Multimedia projects for apps, ebooks, and the Web.

Jing  -- Easy to Use Screen Capture Software -- record up to five minutes of video by TechSmith

Audacity -- Sourceforge's fee recording and audio editing software

SoundCloud -- online audio recording and audion annotation of those recordings.

Multimodal Theory and Practice

"Multimodal Instruction: Pedagogy and Practice for Enhancing Multimodal Composition
" by Sherry Rankins-Robertson, Tiffany Bourelle, Andrew Bourelle, and David Fisher at  http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/19.1/praxis/robertson-et-al/index.html

TheJUMP: The Journal for Undergraduate Multimedia Projects, edited by Justin Hodgson

Kairos, A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, edited by Cheryl E. Ball

Arola, Kristin; Sheppard, Jennifer, & Ball, Cheryl E. (2014, Jan. 10). Multimodality as a frame for individual and institutional change. Hybrid Pedagogy. Retrieved from http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/multimodality-frame-individual-institutional-change/

A Pedagogy of Multi-Literacies: Concepts of Design, from The New London Group

Speaking with Students: Profiles in Digital Pedagogy interviews by Virginia Kuhn

Because Digital Writing Matters by Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Troy Hicks

Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives -- OSU English and DMAC

Special Issue: Making the Implicit Explicit in Assessing Multimodal Composition, Technical Communication Quarterly, Volume 21, Issue 1, 2012, edited by Susan M. Katz and Lee Odell

Assessing Multimodal Compositions. Kent State Writing Program

Ed Tech's Assessment Page, includes rubrics and other ideas for assessing all kinds of digital projects

McKee, Heidi A., and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss DeVoss, Eds. Digital Writing Assessment & Evaluation. Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press, 2013. Web. http://ccdigitalpress.org/dwae/

Journet, Debra, Cheryl Ball, and Ryan Trauman, Eds. The New Work of Composing. Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital P/Utah State UP, 2012. Web. http://ccdigitalpress.org/nwc

Borton, Sonya C., Brian Huot. "Responding and Assessing." Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers. Ed. Cynthia L. Selfe. Cresskill: Hampton Press, Inc., 2007. 99-111. (Word Doc)

"Ideological Foundations of Formative and Summative Assessment Processes in English 303: Visual Rhetoric and Document Design," by Kristen Dayle Welch, Longwood University -- a well-done conference paper account of one teacher's assessment choices for multimodal assignments used in her course.

Liz Losh's YouTube Description of her Digital Rhetoric Course

From Bedford/St. Martin's, now an Imprint of Macmillan Education:

Andrea A. Lunsford's Multimodal Mondays in BITs.

All of Andrea's BITs posts.

Everyday Writer 5e Student Center

Oral and Mutlimedia Presentations from Andrea's Students

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ix visualizing composition 2.0, 2e  by Cheryl Ball and Kristin Arola

Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects by Kristin L. Arola, Jennifer Sheppard, and Cheryl E. Ball. (see citation below from authors in Hybrid Pedagogy for theoretical framework that informs this book.)

Integrating Multimodality into Your Teaching by Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Michigan State

Sample Chapter from Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Write by Elizabeth Losh, Jonathan Alexander, Kevin Cannon, and Zander Cannon. (Chapter 4: Argument, Beyond Pro and Con -- not about multimodal composition, but useful as a prelude to the video below, which explores how multimodal projects can radically alter the writing/creative process.)

The Making of Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing  by Bedford/St. Martin's

Not multimodal specifically, but important thoughts on teaching:

Andrea Lunsford on the Myths of Digital Literacy:

Paul Krebs's "Next Time, Fail Better."

"Start Where Your Students Are." and "Know Where Your Students are Going," chapters 1 and 2 from
Never Work Harder than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching by Robyn R. Jackson.

Peter Elbow. "Ranking, Evaluating, Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment." College English 55.2 (1994): 187-206. Available at: http://works.bepress.com/peter_elbow/42  

Peg Syverson, "The Five (or Six) Dimensions of Learning," Learning Record Online at http://www.learningrecord.org/dimensions.html