Yesterday, I met with a few of my fellow blended instructors to see what everyone's been up to this semester, report on the OWI Committee and other highlights from the 4Cs, and look forward to the upcoming academic year. Even with just four of us, our discussion was so lively that we didn't get to the last item at all. Here are some highlights:
New this Semester:
DB started us off by explaining how he's incorporated the digital project into the syllabus. He's having his students create websites on Weebly and "got their feet wet" with the Rhetorical Analysis. This is a good move: his students have at least two months to play with their websites instead of having to build them in just a few weeks, as mine will this semester. DB is using the digital project as the Revision assignment; students will revise their EoE and Position Paper and add them to their websites. His students will also add their annotated bibliographies and have a separate section for "other voices." His students have responded enthusiastically to this addition, which gives me confidence about introducing this in a couple of weeks.
JE was impressed but wondered if building websites was a little advanced for English 101. DB replied that it was easy for students--they know how to do this. Even if they hadn't built a website before, they know what one looks like and what makes a good one. He's going to collaborate with his students on how these should be assessed, which is a recommended strategy that many have written about, including our new hire, Chanon Adsanatham. A link to his 2012 Computers and Composition article, “Integrating Assessment and Instruction: Using Student-Generated Grading Criteria to Evaluate Multimodal Digital Projects,” is on his website.
On this note, I offered that students possess an internal grammar for visual rhetoric. They may not have the terminology, but they have the grammar, a point that DK picked up on. He's been doing a lot of work recently on students' right to their own language and opened this semester with Vershawn A. Young's 2010 Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies article, "Should Writers Use They Own English," which immediately gets students talking about writing from Day One. I think DK needs to give a workshop or a presentation on this for the AWP, as I don't think that this principle, as old as it is (1974), is familiar to most people in the program. Here's a link to the CCCC Position on Students' Right to Their Own Language, with a link to an annotated bibliography.
JE talked about her experience working with a TA this semester and couldn't be happier! Her TA is phenomenal, and her only regret is that she only has a TA for one of her sections instead of two. DK and I were both thrilled, of course, and we all looked at DB: when is he going to start working with TAs? DB replied that he already had one in mind, and we pointed him to the application for 388V on the AWP website: 388V Internship Application
I then talked about how I've redesigned my course to focus on students' digital literacy, much of which can be found elsewhere on this blog. The two texts I highly recommend are the ones I discussed at length with several people I met at the 4Cs: Eli Pariser's 2011 Ted Talk on Internet Filter Bubbles and Fogleman, Niedbala, and Bedell's 2013 Behavioral and Social Sciences Librarian article, "Writing and Publishing in a Blended Learning Environment to Develop Students' Scholarly Digital Ethos." That link is to ERIC, which can be accessed for free through our library.
I also touched briefly on my class Twitter @LyraBL101 and how my students are using Twitter to enter the "public" conversation. My students have made a new Twitter for class (some of them have kept their own, which is fine), tweeted their research question with #Lyra101, and followed at least ten people or organizations who are tweeting about their topic. I emphasized that they need to be following at least three people who they disagree with, which I hope will help at least a few of them with the upcoming Rogerian Letter. I held conferences this week, and several students mentioned that they had found useful articles and links for their projects on Twitter, which is exactly what I'd been hoping for.
Neither JE, DK, or DB are on Twitter, so it was a little hard to explain all of this in the short amount of time that we had. I showed them my hootsuite and my TweetDeck to show them all of the conversations I follow: #fycchat, #4C14, #ncte, #engchat, #digcit, #digped, #blendchat, #blendedlearning, #highered, etc. Many key people and organizations can be found through our BL Twitter account, @BLWritingUMD, currently being managed by the impeccable @Courtney_Guth.
Sharing our Work
With only ten minutes left in our meeting, I quickly showed everyone the CCCC page for the Committee on Effective Practices for OWI and explained the new Open Resource (OR) site that the Committee has just launched. I want all of us to contribute our work--the BL and OWI community will benefit from a robust set of resources to draw from. This works both ways: these will be peer-reviewed publications, which will help individuals. On a broader note, I'd like to see a strong UMD presence on this site, which will help all of us here. So please, submit your work! The Call for Submissions can be found on this page.
I also mentioned that I'll be presenting on Voicethread at the ITL Conference at the end of April. This is a great, one-day conference; some of my recent work has come directly from presentations at this conference. Registration is quick and free: Innovations in Teaching and Learning 2014
As always, I'm inspired by everyone's work in and out of the classroom, and look forward to catching up again towards the end of the semester!
Thanks for reading, everyone!
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