As I write this post, scientists around the world are marching in reaction to the political climate and in support of science.  One of the emerging issues around the march is the intersection of science and politics, with many scientists wondering just how political such a march should be.  Emerging offers a number of essays at the intersections of science and other issues, which can then serve as an entry point for thinking about the role of science in the world, which in many ways is at the heart of the march.   Sandra Allen’s “A World without Wine” looks at the cultural and economic impact of global climate change by examining threats to the world’s major wine producing regions caused by shifts in weather.  Wine grapes are enormously sensitive to climate; recent shifts in weather patterns in these regions risks a sea change in the wine industry as we know it, with serious economic and cultural repercussions.  Allen’s piece is a great way to think about climate change in practical terms and around a topic that might have some relevance to students.   “Ethics and the New Genetics,” by the Dalai Lama, instead examines the relation between science and ethics, specifically considering the rapid evolution of biotechnologies and the relative lack of a concomitant evolution in ethics.  It’s a useful essay for thinking about the ethical implications of technology.  The Dalai Lama issues a broad call for the development of an ethical framework, a call that students can begin to answer in their own work.   Richard Restak’s “Attention Deficit: The Brain Syndrome of Our Era” uses brain science to consider the impact of media on our attention and quite literally on our brains.  Restak believes that our propensity to multitask is actually breeding Attention Deficit Disorder.  His essay offers students a way of critiquing media and social media from the standpoint of science or, alternatively, an avenue for challenging science based on the lived millennial experiences.   Tomas van Houtryve’s “From the Eyes of a Drone” considers the intersection of science and imaging technology and the military by exploring the use of drones in military operations.  Given the long and complex relationship between science and the military, van Houtryve offers a useful primer for students.   Perhaps the most powerful essay for looking at these issues, particularly in the context of the Science March, is “Being WEIRD: How Culture Shapes the Mind” by Ethan Watters, which documents the work of Joe Henrich and his colleagues which has called into the question the universality of social sciences ranging from anthropology to economics to psychology.  Henrich and his co-researchers demonstrated that much of what is considered universal in these disciplines is in fact “WEIRD”: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.  Culture and environment thus, they show, deeply shape the mind and the science that attempts to account for it, calling into question the Truth-with-a-capital-T of science.  Given that the march was all about the sheer power of science in relation to fact, Watters’ essay can help students complicate that understanding. ... View more

Now that the semester is over for me, I can put more energy into my work to improve discussions in my online classes. As I have discussed in earlier posts, I plan to spend more time preparing students for discussion, and I intend to increase low-stakes discussions in an effort to encourage more conversation. This week, I want to consider what I need to do myself to improve students’ discussion.   Each week, I asked students to discuss various topics. Sometimes, they responded to webpages or infographics. Other times, they shared drafts and gave one another feedback. Just as I would do in the face-to-face classroom, I checked on all of the groups. Since the class was 100% online, I skimmed through their discussions, paying attention to who contributed and noting any questions that came up. Occasionally, I answered a specific question or left some emoji thumbs-up feedback.   At the end of the week, students reported on their work by completing a weekly checklist that provided links to their Slack posts and replies. I used my spot checks of the discussions and the weekly checklists to gauge the success of the discussions. I hoped that feedback on the previous week’s contributions would improve the conversations during the next week. Unfortunately, discussion stayed rather flat, with students completing only the bare minimum to meet the requirements.   During the last weeks of the course, students were working on a large group project. There should have been a lot of discussion in Slack to coordinate drafting, feedback, and revision. I decided to ask them directly, using a version of this question in each team’s channel: How are things going with your project? I see several of you have posted recently, but I know there are 11 people in the group. I'd like to hear from all of you so I can tell that you’re on track! Students began responding almost immediately, telling me what they had accomplished, asking questions about their work, and sharing plans for finishing their project. The Slack channels were alive with conversation for a few days that week, and I suddenly realized my own failure in making our online discussions successful.   In the face-to-face classroom, students know you are there watching them. Although I was constantly reviewing what students were posting in my online classes, they had no idea that I was there. While I answered questions and added some happy-face feedback, I wasn’t doing enough. I needed to engage students with questions, feedback, and encouragement more frequently. In retrospect, it seems completely obvious. I wasn’t talking to students. Why would they talk to each other?   Going forward, I realize that I need to get much more involved. The best option is to add comments frequently that respond to students. Those comments will depend upon the context of the discussions, so it is hard to guess the exact comments to add in advance. To prepare, I have gathered some potential discussion starters that I can customize when the time comes:   Ask students to check in and tell me how their work is going Respond to a specific student (e.g., What do the rest of you think of Pat’s analysis?) Request details on current projects (e.g., What questions do you have about the assignment? Anyone need help?) Ask for clarification and explanation (e.g., Can you explain this idea more?) Call for examples (e.g., What are some examples from the document? Can you show me what you’re talking about?) Request synthesis after students share ideas (e.g., Okay, how can we tie all these ideas together? What’s the take-away?)   There are more discussion starters in the article “50 Questions To Help Students Think About What They Thinkhttp://www.teachthought.com/critical-thinking/questioning/metacognition-50-questions-help-students-think-think/.” While the article focuses on younger students, the questions can work for any level. To prepare even further, I want to take all these discussion starters and organize them into potential scenarios (like questions for peer feedback or questions for responding to an infographic). That project is on tap for another week. For now, I feel like I’m making good progress. I would love to know what you think. Please leave me a comment on how you engage students or what you use as discussion starters.     Credit: Preparing for presentation by Bill So, on Flickr, used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license ... View more

If you check the International Writing Center Association (IWCA) website, you’ll find a section on K-12 writing centers that includes a map noting writing centers in the United States. The northeast has the largest cluster of centers, though there aren’t many states that don’t have at least a couple of schools with writing centers. This is all good news—and the result of very hard work on the part of the IWCA as an organization, as well as individual teachers across the country. In my years of teaching at the Bread Loaf Graduate School of English, I have helped many teachers found writing centers in their middle- or high-schools (and even one in an elementary school!).   Last summer I met another such teacher, and one fairly close to me here in California. She teaches at a public school in Santa Rosa, and we’ve kept in touch this year as she thought about the possibilities of a center at her school. Then just a week ago, this teacher and a colleague drove down to Stanford with six fabulous sophomores to visit Stanford’s Hume Center for Writing and Speaking. After welcomes, our director, Sarah Pittock, led us all in taking a “writing inventory,” answering questions such as:   Do you require particular conditions to start writing or continue writing? How much planning do you do? Do you write in multiple drafts or revise as you go along? Do you seek input from readers as you write? What are the biggest obstacles you face when you write? What do you like about writing?   We all wrote for twenty minutes or so and then shared our findings. As always, I was fascinated by what these students had to say. Some needed utter silence in order to focus on writing; others needed “white noise” or music. Some revised painstakingly as they went along; others blasted out a draft and then began revising. All did some planning, from scratch outlines or notes to more complete blueprints. And all sought response from other readers, though when they did so differed: some liked to have a “pretty good draft” before sharing it with anyone else, while others called in outside readers from the get-go. All had experienced procrastination “issues,” and a couple of them had experienced serious blocks—but they had strategies (everything from running or other physical exercise, to cooking, to talking to parents or friends, to reading what they had been able to draft out loud.) And they all liked to write—I was surprised to find that several of them much preferred to write on paper rather than computer screen. Said one: “I find it engages me more so I do my best work on paper.” And: “When I write for fun, I almost always write on paper because of the easy access. I can always find paper and a writing utensil around me!”   What bothered them were constraints put on them by what they regarded as often rigid prompts or “rules” they must adhere to (they all talked over one another when describing a teacher that insisted they have SIX quotations in every paragraph!). Nevertheless, as they continued reflecting, they could see value in some strictness, saying it gave them confidence that they could produce text under such conditions. Nothing particularly new here, but I was struck by the maturity of these sophomores, by their thoughtfulness, and by their willingness to work hard and their understanding that writing well is hard.   We talked some about the pleasures and challenges of peer tutoring (they loved the idea of not having to be a judge and of having a chance to help others) and explored the logistics of their school—issues of space and time and a little funding—but most of them seemed hopeful that they could pull off a center. I concurred and hope that I can visit their school next year and find it up and running.     If you have stories about a high-school writing center, I would very much like to hear them. In the meantime, here is a photo of our visitors in one of the workshop rooms at the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking. Credit: Photo by Andrea Lunsford ... View more

One thing I find students often struggle with is locating a voice in their writing.  Because the FYC courses at our school focus on academic discourse, students have trouble stepping into a voice of authority, a challenge well explored by David Bartholomae in “Inventing the University.”  Their attempts to craft that voice often lead to writing that is stilted, choppy, and awkward.  I’ve tried approaching the problem by moving the register to the oral, explaining how their writing voice can sound just like their voice in class discussions.  But, I don’t know that it’s an approach that works as well as I would hope.   I’ve been thinking about what creative writing might offer, as well.  In our program, we have a number of GTAs who are pursuing their MFAs in creative writing and I know that a number of them have deployed small creative writing exercises in the classroom, such as open free writing, just to get the juices flowing (so to speak).  Surely, bringing elements of craft into the classroom could be a boon, but to do so would require a grounding in what is a contiguous but not continuous discipline.  To do so would also be to try and squeeze one more thing into a very crowded course.   It so often feels like a race to help students achieve proficiency in critical reading and writing in a scant 16 weeks that paying more attention to writing feels nigh impossible.  Ironic, of course, that I should be so troubled about teaching writing in a writing course.  But I wonder how others approach issues of style in the context of the FYC course.  Do you find ways to teach not just academic writing, not just correct, writing, but also good writing? ... View more

As I revised Elements of Argument recently, for the first time I had to take a close look at the new MLA documentation guidelines. I found the use of the new term container a bit clunky, if perhaps useful. I can imagine a group of bibliographical scholars sitting around a conference table saying, "There has to be a better word for the . . . CONTAINER the documented information comes from." Apparently their conclusion was that there isn't.  I can remember back in the old days holding a book or journal and telling my students, "Give credit to the source that you held in your hands." That seems like an old-fashioned idea these days, indeed. For those of you who have avoided looking too closely at the new MLA,  the container is the book, journal, or magazine that ideas or wording comes from, but it also has its electronic forms. The container can be a web site or an online newspaper or a television series. The MLA was attempting to set up guidelines based on core elements that could be used for bibliographical entries, no matter what the source, rather than depending on numerous examples of any form that source might take. The generic term container makes it easier to provide a consistent format, even though the container varies widely from one citation to the next.   I can understand my students' confusion with the old MLA guidelines regarding how to cite some types of sources. An article, for example, appears in the New York Times, but the student reads it on nytimes.com. The article is the same (usually), but the container is different. The availability online  of so many sources is making parenthetical documentation less useful than it used to be because seldom are there page numbers. The line is even less clear, though, when there are, because then we may have a journal article that appeared in hard copy merely reproduced on the screen, page numbers and all. The new MLA doesn't solve that problem. It may help, though, for students to think about which container they accessed.    Hyperlinks to the sources they used would perhaps make more sense in our digital world. However, sites come and go and change, so a link that works today may not work tomorrow. In preparing essays for inclusion in my textbook, I ironically find myself more and more having to replace hyperlinks with old-fashioned parenthetical citations.    The changes in the 2016 MLA are an acknowledgment of the complexity of dealing with documentation in a cyber world and a step in the right direction.   ... View more

In the early years of the Internet, one of the most commonly heard slogans of the time was, "information wants to be free."  This ringing affirmation of the uninhibited flow of speech, knowledge, and news was one of the grounding values of that heady era when the Net was known as the "electronic frontier," and was regarded as an unfenced "information superhighway."  Those were the days when the web log (better known in its shorthand form as the "blog") was born, and the opportunities for virtually unfettered communication opened up in ways that the world had never experienced before.   That was twenty and more years ago now, and while a superficial glance at things would seem to indicate that nothing has really changed, a closer look reveals quite something else; deep down, the Internet has been fenced, and the superhighway is becoming a toll road.    To see how, we can consider the history of the blog itself.  Yes, blogs still exist, but they have often morphed into what were in the past called "editorials," as online newspapers slap the label onto the writings of pundits and even those of news feature writers.  What you are reading right now is called a "blog," though it is really a semi-formal essay devoted to professional musings and advice, rather than being some sort of online diary or journal.  The blogs that still hew to the original line of being personal and unrestricted communiques to the world still exist, of course, on easy-to-use platforms like WordPress, but most have been abandoned, with their last posts being dated years ago.    Where has everybody gone?  Well, to places like Facebook, of course, or Instagram, or Reddit, or whatever's hot at the moment.  But this is not a mere migration from one lane of the information superhighway to another; it is an exit to a toll booth, beyond which some of us cannot go, not because we cannot afford the cost (the toll is not paid in dollars), but because we are unwilling to make ourselves the commodity that "monetizes" what now should be called the "electronic data mine."   Thus, I have seen personal blogs that I used to follow because I was interested in what I learned about their writers, fall fallow because they had moved on to Facebook.  For a long time, some such pages could be accessed by the likes of me if their authors chose to make them public, but they have now all been privatized by Facebook itself.  When I try to visit even the pages of public organizations, a moving barrier fills my screen, ordering me to open an account.  A free account, of course: all I have to do is sell whatever last shred of privacy I have left in order to sign on.   Yes, I know that Google is following me, even if I am not using its search engine: it gets me when I visit a site.  But signing on to Facebook (Google too, of course) involves an even deeper surrender of privacy.  This is demonstrated by the fact that Facebook feels that it cannot get enough data on me simply by noting that I have visited one of its subscriber's pages.  And I am not willing to let Facebook have whatever that extra information on me it wants.   I realize that I may sound here like someone who is demanding something for free.  I don't mean to sound like that: I realize that the Internet, like commercial television, has to be paid for somehow.  But I'd rather watch an advertisement (indeed, the ads are often better than the programs) to pay for my access than present to corporations like Facebook private information that it will sell to anyone who is willing to pay for it.  And I mean anyone, as one of the new readings in the just-completed 9th edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A. (with a publish date of November 2017) reveals: Ronald J. Deibert's "Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy, and the Dark Side of the Internet."   Not that I am missing much, I think.  The thoughtful blogs that folks used to write have vanished into Facebook personal news bulletins—more like tweets and Instagrams than developed conversations.  It is not unlike what has happened to email, which I gather, is very uncool these days.  Much better to text—a non-discursive form of shorthand which, paradoxically, one does have to pay for in hard cash. ... View more

Since Oxford Dictionaries chose “post-truth” as its word of the year for 2016, I’ve been checking on what other new words have entered the dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) updates its entries four times a year, in March, June, September, and December. In the latest update (March 2017), they report adding 500 words, phrases, or “senses of words” to the dictionary—which could add up to as many as 2000 a year, or more! How many of these words will I know or recognize—or want to learn?   As the OED’s Katherine Connor Martin explains: In keeping with the OED’s broad scope, the list of new entries include such disparate items as hate-watch, a 21st-century verb meaning ‘to watch (a television programme, etc.) in a spirit of mockery, as a form of entertainment’; pogonophobia, a jocular term for a strong dislike of beards that was coined in 1857 but may be more relevant than ever given the current proliferation of barbigerous hipsters; and heliopause, the astronomical term for the very outer edge of the solar system beyond which the solar wind is undetectable, a boundary traversed by the touch of humanity for the first time in 2012, when the Voyager 1 spacecraft crossed it to enter interstellar space. Who knew “barbigerous”? I certainly didn’t, though I intend to use the word as often as I can now, as in referring to the Houston Rockets’ James Harden as “both a barbigerous and a dangerous player.” One of my favorite additions this time around is “sticky-outy,” about which the OED says: The charmingly colloquial adjective sticky-outy means ‘that protrudes or sticks out’, elaborating upon the form of the synonymous earlier word sticky-out by adding an additional –y. The OED’s first citation comes from a letter written by the Australian composer and pianist Percy Grainger to his mother in 1921, lamenting ‘My hair has taken a wild fit, all sticky-outy in ends.’ Indeed, Grainger’s hair was notable for its sticky-outiness, as photographs of him from this period attest. (Check out Grainger’s music here!) Other new terms include “genericide,” which indicates a trademark term that becomes generic for its product, as “Kleenex” to refer to any tissue, and “skitch,” which refers to “holding on to the back of a moving vehicle so as to be pulled along while riding on a wheeled device like a skateboard or bicycle.” If you want to read about the other 490+ additions, you can find the whole list at “New words list March 2017.”   Or you can check out Dennis Baron’s most recent post on his Web of Language blog, “Dictionaries are Trending.” I look forward to Baron’s postings and always learn from them (and often get a good laugh as well). In this post, Baron tells us that “Dictionaries are kicking a** and taking names” and citing this tweet from editors of Merrriam-Webster. For a long time, I’ve thought of librarians as heroes, given their support of fair use, their refusal to disclose the names of people who check out books, and their willingness to tell truth to power. Now I plan to add dictionary editors: Who would have thought?   Credit: Public Domain ... View more

As I wrote last week, I want to improve online discussion in my courses and increase students’ acceptance of the online discussion tool Slack. The first thing I want to do is rethink how I prepare students to use the technology, as well as how I prepare them for discussion and collaboration. What I Did At the beginning of this term, I provided students with some documentation that outlined the basic commands and features that I thought they would need. My Help with Slack page included all of the following: instructions on signing up information on choosing a username tutorials on the Slack site and on Lynda.com (free for students at our university) links on how to format posts and use emoji details on how to link to posts directions for sharing documents in Slack channels I focused on making the instructions short and simple, relying on existing resources on the Slack site rather than writing my own documentation. I assigned the help page during the first week and asked students to complete activities that would rely on those instructions (like creating a username and writing some posts). Assuming that these materials would adequately prepare students to use the technology, I moved on to preparing them for discussion and collaboration. My strategy was one I have used for years: I asked them to jump right in and post on a number of topics. Specifically, I asked students to participate in an AMA discussion, post a professional bio, propose how to arrange groups, and discuss four infographics. My plan was to get them chatting immediately so that they would learn how Slack worked before we moved on to doing group work. We ran into trouble almost immediately. The usernames that students chose didn’t match the guidelines that I had set. Posts ended up in the wrong channels. Students emailed in confusion when they were asked to turn in links to their work. There was little interaction, but lots of single posts that worked to meet the requirements. Looking back, it isn’t surprising that things went wrong. I had 90 people attempting to have conversations in five different channels, and only two or three had ever used Slack before. Things could have gone more smoothly if students had read all the technical documentation, but even with that, I asked them to do too much too fast. My dual-pronged preparation plan didn’t work. What I’ll Change and Why The first, and possibly most important, thing is to arrange students into small groups on the very first day of the course. Discussion is bound to be smoother with ten students, rather than 90. I delayed setting up small groups to give students input on how the groups were arranged. Based on their input, I let them arrange their own groups. Some from the same major wanted to work together; others wanted to have eclectic groups. The groups ended up wildly uneven, ranging from four members to twelve. In the future, I will create groups randomly in Canvas (our CMS), and use those random groups to set up channels in Slack. Working in these smaller groups from the first week will better prepare students for the collaborative peer review and feedback that they will begin a couple of weeks later. Next, I need to explicitly introduce students to the ways that they can connect to Slack. After all, you have to have the tool in order to use it. My Help with Slack page told students, “You can access Slack in your browser. If you like, you can also download a desktop or mobile app.” I thought that would be enough for students to embrace the mobile apps and access Slack notifications in real time, all the time. I need to include the link to the apps in the resources list on the course syllabus and tell them that it’s required. I hope that requirement and frequent references to the apps during the first week will keep students from defecting from Slack and moving to GroupMe text messages. Finally, I need to prepare them to use the features of the technology. There’s no way to force them to read the documentation, so I need to devise a system where they want to find the information. In ways, the commands in software are a lot like grammar rules. You only learn them when you need them; and they only make sense to you in context. With that notion in mind, I am going to try to think of situations where they need the features. I imagine I need to create a game-like series of challenges that will lead them to finding and learning to use the different commands. It will take some research and work to figure out this last part of the preparation, so I will leave the gaming-inspired idea there for now and come back to it later this summer. Meanwhile, if you have any suggestions for teaching students the commands in the online tools that they use or anything else to help me with the preparing students, please leave me a comment below. I would love to hear some of your ideas!   Credit: DiscussionImageFinal by Rabin Pamela on Flickr, used under a CC-0 license (Public Domain) ... View more

Many times, students come to office hours wanting to know the answer to one question: is my paper good enough? There are many ways to answer that question, but this is sometimes harder for students to see than we think. Students tend to see their grades and their writing as black or white, as good or bad. They tend to judge their work in this binary and often fail to ask questions that could lead them to new thoughts and ideas, opening their writing up further. That’s where the professor, and the Socratic Method, come in. Introduced in Plato’s Theaetetus, the Socratic Method works to engage participants in a dialogue, drawing out thoughts, and prompting students to consider why they’ve made the choices they have or what possible changes they could make. Using it de-emphasizes this “good” or “bad” binary, reframing student work and grounding the revision process in questions.   When frazzled students arrive at my office with a stack of papers near the end of the semester, I start by just talking to them, slowing down and giving them a few minutes of intake: How are you doing? How has the semester been going for you so far? What brings you in? Giving students the space and time to de-compress is the first part of the process, and it allows them to relax and to reflect on their journey through the course thus far, where they are currently, or what they are struggling with at the moment. When it comes to the stack of papers, we don’t start reading right away. Instead, I ask the student specific questions about their work: Where do you think the tension is slacking? As a reader, where are you bored? What do you think the paper is struggling to achieve right now? Is there a reason why you’ve organized it the way you have? Asking these questions allows students to critically but honestly reflect on their own work by stepping back and explaining it to someone else. Suddenly, they may realize that they hadn’t organized their work in any particular way at all, or that they know they’ve been bothered by the thesis the whole time, that it’s just not quite clear enough. Students know more than they give themselves credit for, and employing the Socratic Method offers them a chance to reach these realizations, and to make decisions about their writing on their own. This method empowers students by giving them the questions they may already know the answers to, and giving them an audience as they make their way toward new discoveries in their writing. ... View more

At this year’s CCCC meeting in Portland, I held a workshop/discussion with a group of about 15 teachers on how best to teach students in a world of fake news and radical distortion of “facts.” We were all concerned with the sheer amount of misinformation—and even outright lies—bombarding students every day, especially from social media sites like YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, sites where any kind of traditional vetting or fact-checking is missing. Participants in the workshop came from across the country and from many different types of institutions, from high schools to research universities and community colleges: all saw a crucial need for increased attention to careful reading, fact-checking, and “crap detection,” and all agreed that our major writing assignments need to engage students in these practices.   In addition, we agreed that we can help students by encouraging them to make a point of listening carefully and openly to those with whom they don’t agree, of practicing what Krista Ratcliffe calls rhetorical listening, rather than staying only in the safe circles with those who hold very similar views. I came away very impressed with the thoughtfulness of colleagues in this workshop and inspired by the writing assignments they shared.   After the conference, several of us posted our assignments at to a public Google Drive folder in order to share them with each other, and with you. Please check them out, and let me know what you think of them!   Credit: Pixaby Image 336378 by Unsplash, used under a CC0 Public Domain License ... View more

In this series of posts, I’m asking all of you to offer your observations on students and teaching today so that I can begin thinking about what the next edition of Emerging needs.   My last question is about you: How are you teaching these days?   I’ve always been really proud of the instructor’s manual for Emerging, which was based on the training materials we use for teachers in our program.  But technology changes, program needs change, pedagogical theories change, and so teaching changes too.  I’m wondering what’s changed for you in your teaching, what you’re trying out, what’s really working for you, what remains a challenge.  I’d love to incorporate materials that support a broad range of teaching styles and approaches, so please feel free to share what’s happening in your practice so that we can think about how to bring it into the next edition.   ... View more

We are entering the last week of class prior to final exams, and once again I sense a growing dread: in two weeks, I must enter one of five letter grades for each student into our data management system. The deliberations and angst which accompany this process have not diminished—in fact, they’ve increased—after over twenty-five years of classroom experience. Granted, it really isn’t appropriate to reconsider how a grade is calculated at this late point in the term. The right time for devising a system for course grades is prior to the start of the semester, during the construction of the syllabus. Our dean has often reminded us (and I have reminded new teachers) that we are bound to follow the guidelines of the syllabus, so we need to compose that document with thought and care. And I do – each term I make adjustments to course policies, assignments, revision procedures, and the overall grade percentage for each assignment. With each tweak, I wonder if I will have landed on just the right balance, just the right approach. And now, as every semester, I am planning for the next set of adjustments. Part of the problem, of course, is that grades mean different things to different stakeholders.  At my community college, those stakeholders include the department and teachers of subsequent courses my students must take, the division, the college as a whole (since part of our funding is determined by successful completion rates in developmental and gatekeeper courses), our transfer institutions (our students generally transfer to one of five or six universities), employers who fund coursework, federal workforce grant programs, parents, and of course, students.  In my particular local context, these stakeholders variously interpret a grade as evidence of mastery of learning outcomes, certification of readiness for the next level, completion of a certain number of required activities, engaged participation in the learning process, evidence of progress (in relation to the student’s starting point), an indication of academic promise, and evidence of effort (or even personal worth—which is often how my students see these marks). Indeed, each stakeholder not only interprets that grade differently, but he or she may use that grade to make decisions with very real consequences for the student. A “C” grade, for example, is generally accepted by a transfer institution, while a D grade is not. But an employer only requiring that a student pass a course would accept the D grade. A grade of D will permit a student to take the next course in the sequence at the college, but if that D was something of a “gift” to keep a student from losing financial aid, the student could be sent forward under-prepared for the next course. The desire to help a hard-working student maintain financial aid often motivates adjustments – adjustments which we tacitly accept but rarely discuss.  And regardless of the intersecting realities that led to a grade, the final record is a highly decontextualized transcript.  A student who has made tremendous gains despite an inappropriate incoming placement could legitimately see a D as a mark of success, but the narrative that defines the grade as a success will not appear on the one official document that the student may present as evidence of learning. Many of my students need more time, and repetition of a course might be the best option; unfortunately, the F grade (and even the less stigmatized R or “re-enroll” grade in a developmental class) can mean loss of financial aid, loss of employer support, or problems with visas. There is an ongoing national discussion about community college student success, a discussion that is telling a story of failure, especially for those that begin in developmental classrooms. That story includes data—an incredibly large amount of data that have led to the implementation of “data-driven” policies and reforms.  We certainly need data. But data don’t make sense of themselves; we need theory, experience, and careful thought in order to use data wisely, as emphasized in the Community College Data website. What we do with these data affects not widgets but students, as Adam Bessie and Dan Carino have demonstrated so beautifully. The other community college “story” focuses on the students: students who don’t necessarily fit data patterns or trends, students for whom established courses and time sequences don’t quite work, and students whose needs conflict with well-intentioned and data-driven policies and procedures. The intersection of these competing stories captures the quandaries I face in grading. So in two weeks I will look at my own evidence –my students’ work throughout the term—in the context of my college and my syllabus. And I will think of the students’ stories. And I will enter a grade. But it won’t be easy. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

In the online forums for my writing courses, I ask students to conduct peer review and feedback, collaborate on major writing projects, and discuss the readings and work of the course. Since I am teaching 100% online, online discussion takes the place of the conversations and interactions that would otherwise take place in a physical classroom. I hope it is easy to understand, then, that online discussion is critical in my writing classes. Because online discussion is so important, I have been on a search for the right tool ever since I returned to the classroom. Thought I have tried a number of tools, none of them does quite what I want: The discussion tool in Scholar (our installation of Sakai) typically confused students and felt awkward to me. Our university is sunsetting Scholar in May, so it is no longer an option. I set up my own bulletin board system with phpBB. The site worked well, but I was completely responsible for the technology. I worried frequently about downtime or errors. I decided that I didn’t want the technical responsibility. The discussion tool in Canvas (our new CMS) supports group discussion, but I found its threading capability difficult to manage. The tool always resulted in endless scrolling to find what I wanted. I switched to Piazza, which describes itself as a Q&A platform. I liked the look of the tool, and I loved that it was a company founded by a woman engineer. Unfortunately, I was stuck on its setup for Q&A-style discussions. It is great for students to ask and answer questions, but it was limited for sharing drafts and feedback. Further, I had difficulty managing messages, frequently being unable to tell what I had read and replied to and what I hadn’t. So my unending search brought me to Slack at the beginning of this term. What I like about Slack is its similarity to Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels. Many of the same commands work, since the tool was originally based on IRC. I have used IRC for years, so Slack felt immediately comfortable and easy to manage. Slack met all of my qualifications. It lets me set up groups easily as well as have private conversations with individuals or groups. The tool has built-in support for emoji, threaded discussions, and links to outside documents and images. Best of all, the free version has everything I need, so we can use a popular tool, endorsed by many companies, without any financial investment. I like Slack better than any of the discussion tools I have tried in the past four years. For me, it’s a great choice. My students, on the other hand, are in full revolt against the tool. A vocal majority HATE it. A small group of students have mentioned that they appreciate the chance to use Slack before they enter workplaces that rely on the tool, but their numbers are dwarfed by those who are resisting the site. Students’ biggest complaint is that they cannot tell when others are active in their channels. Since the class is online, they are never in the classroom, using the tool together. Instead, students visit the discussion channels whenever they have time, and they appear rarely to be online simultaneously. It is an understandable frustration: They cannot tell when others post something, so they don’t know when they need to login and respond. Several writing groups are so unhappy with Slack that they have rejected tool completely, setting up group text messaging on their own with GroupMe, even though the assignments and syllabus tell them to use Slack. The students and I have come to an impasse. I want to stick with Slack, but for this term, I have given up on succeeding with student buy-in. Instead, I am taking notes on changes I can make to improve Slack discussions, and I have great hope for the future. During the next few weeks, I will share some of the specific challenges I have encountered and the strategies that I am planning to use to meet them in the future. Most of these issues could apply to any discussion tool, so I hope that you will find something you can use—and if you have suggestions for improving online discussion, I would love to hear from you in the comments below.   Credit: Slack by Giorgio Minguzzi on Flickr, used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license ... View more

This week's Technology Tuesday activity comes from Eric Reimer at the University of Montana.  He helps his students master associative thinking by using blogs "create conversations among the disparate writers and texts of the course."  After asking them to write and explore in the digital space, Professor Reimer asks students to use the "digital writing technologies [to] suggest possibilities for new aesthetic and argumentative arrangements in their print essay."  To download Professor Reimer's great assignment, click here: Hetland Chapter 5  To view other ways of applying technology in the literature classroom, see Tim Hetland's full resource, Teaching Literature with Digital Technology.  Have a great week, everyone!  ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Jeanne Law Bohannon (see end of post for bio). This semester has presented numerous reflective opportunities for me, especially when thinking about re/mixing writing for multimodal assignments and applying multimodal composition as DIYs across genres and contexts. This week, I offer a re/mix of a multimodal, public writing assignment from my grammar course, where students re/constructed texts across genres and platforms, culminating in vlogs for public dissemination on YouTube.   YouTube was part of our daily lives in this class, from serving as digital teacher (Ian McCarthy on Social Media), to digital tipster (Bohannon’s Blogging Guidelines).  As we watched to learn, students began to comment about adding their own voices to these video conversations about grammar(s) and creating content in digital spaces.  So, we crowd-sourced an idea: student-produced vlog-casts.   Context This public text construction (or renovation, if you like) comes at the end of an upper-division writing course focusing on digital grammar, after students have drafted three other texts of varying formality, demonstrating their understanding of specific language conventions and associated usages in digital spaces. Throughout the course, students practice applying grammar and syntactic structures in unconventional ways across digital platforms in social and public media.  YouTube is, of course, one of the most popular of these spaces.   My students and I run this writing assignment late in the semester, as a re/mix of a previous one.  Prior to starting the process, the class reads, responds to, and discusses multimodalities of texts and content management across digital discourses. We read  Multimodalities for Students and Popular Media Writing Tips.  We also peer review each other’s original texts and offer ideas for relevant re/construction.   Assignment Students take any analytical study, essay, or other text and re/mix it based on vlogging guidelines to produce a multimodal, public vlog-cast. Measurable Learning Objectives  Apply multimodal composition strategies to video productions Create video blogs (vlogs) as rhetorical, content-delivery devices Synthesize meaning through critical production of digital texts on-screen Digital Deliverables Please feel free to edit, revise, and use these documents for your class. Academic Blogging Guidelines Vlogging Guidelines   In Class and/or Out During the semester, we watch YouTube instructional videos such as English Lesson with Adam and Grammar Girl podcasts.  For this class, we collaboratively searched YouTube for videos that taught us brief histories of English, helped us figure out usage (courtesy of Grammar Girl), and advised us on how to write for popular media.  Searching together as a group was a most rewarding experience; I highly recommend it!   After each viewing, we then analyze key rhetorical components through the Five Elements for Visual Analysis, noting what works and what doesn’t for different audiences and purposes.  We provide feedback in both large and small groups to re/vise our writing for vlog-casting Guidelines.   We then produce our “Grammar Vlogs” using tools such as iMovie, QuickTime, PowerPoint, and PowToon. The average time spent is about four, one-hour class periods, with production happening outside of class.   Student Examples Joseph Video Link : 1990 Caitlin Video Link : 2002 Reflections on the Activity – Students When my students reflected on this writing opportunity, here are the words they used to describe their learning experience:   My Reflection I think this assignment would work well across topics and courses because it doesn’t teach content but rhetorical behaviors.  It draws out rhetorical performances as well, which engenders creativity and scholarly research processes that are relevant throughout the Humanities. Instructors could re/mix their own topics and search for YouTube videos that are specific to their students’ interests and needs.  I would love for folks outside of our field to try it, so please share this post with others; try the assignment and let me know what you think! Jeanne Law Bohannon is an Assistant Professor of English in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Kennesaw State University. She believes in creating democratic learning spaces, where students become stakeholders in their own rhetorical growth though authentic engagement in class communities. Her research interests include evaluating digital literacies and critical engagement pedagogies; performing feminist rhetorical recoveries; and growing informed and empowered student scholars. Reach Jeanne at: jeanne_bohannon@kennesaw.edu and www.rhetoricmatters.org. ... View more