Inventing the Digital Remediation, Part 1

It's Saturday morning. Saturday is my day off, not only from work, but from the Internet.

That's funny.

It's Saturday morning on the cusp of Week 12 in a 15-week semester. My students are (ostensibly) revising and polishing their Classical Argument Papers, due Monday. I am (still) inventing the final Digital Project assignment, the prompt for which I should probably give my students, oh, Monday.

I don't want this to be hard. I want it to be awesome.

The concept is straightforward enough: I want my students to take their academic research public. I want them to remediate their CAPs into a (born) digital text for a public audience. I want my students to write for a really real audience. I want their work to be seen.

It's been pretty easy to figure out what I want them to do. I want them to build a website. My original idea for a group project, which I had come up with under the auspices that I am asking them to do something challenging, so working in a group would be easier, is gone. JL is right--it has to be an individual project. Having a website that's part body image and the media, part women in STEM, and part same-sex education is too messy. Each student needs their own space so that the project is devoted to one argument.

I want them to build a website (instead of a blog) because I want lots of things on there. I want them to have a robust reference area that includes their working bibliographies (hyperlinked, when possible) and stasis grids. It would also be cool to link other related sites--even each other's--devoted to their topic. And I want audience interaction--there needs to be some way for the audience to engage with the site, even beyond comments. I'm thinking polls and surveys.

Okay, so I have a pretty good idea of what I want. The question is: what do they need to get there? This is where it gets tricky. In order to build a visual argument, my students need some basics in visual analysis. Fine. Writing Arguments has an okay chapter on that, part of which they're (theoretically) reading this weekend. Last week's one-post discussion board asked them to find three images that have something to do with their topic and write about why they're strong. I did that even before assigning the readings, as I wanted them to come up with their own criteria for what makes a visual argument work.

I just looked at one of them, and it's great! The student pulled a pie chart, a political cartoon, and an advocacy ad, all of which make strong arguments about his topic (which I won't even include here, as I'm still hyper-cautious about identifying students on here. Which will likely shift dramatically over the next couple of weeks as my students, um, publish their work online). See, this is the kind of stuff I want them to add to their websites.

Maybe I should have them go back in this week and add to their analysis, once they have some formal understanding of fonts, colors, and C.R.A.P. (contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity)? Here's Mike Rundle's blog on C.R.A.P., which I may use instead of the excerpt from Robin Williams's book, The Non-Designers Design Guide*. Or I could use this, from LifeHack.

*Wait, the second edition is available full text for free?

*blink*

What. 

Okay, now I have an idea. Stay tuned (in theory. This is my second post this month, and it's the 19th). But seriously: I do want to post on this, if for no other reason than to post the links that I've found the most useful for creating this project.

I'm basically modeling the inquiry process for my students...next semester, of course.

Le sigh.

Designer Blends

I have spent two years designing, redesigning, and improving my blend. I have spent an inordinate amount of time making and editing lecture videos, rewriting lessons for asynchronous online days, modifying them for synchronous AdobeConnect days, and scrapping both lessons at the last minute to teach the lesson face-to-face. I have surveyed my students extensively, exhausted my TAs, and pushed myself to the breaking point in getting this blend right--all while simultaneously rewriting my syllabus each semester to incorporate more lessons on information and digital literacy and transform many traditional assignments into digital ones.

From day one, my mission has been not just to maintain but to strengthen the productive, interactive community of learners that is paramount to my teaching. I believe that deep learning is rooted in Dewey's collaborative constructivism: we learn through doing, with each other. Critical inquiry and deep learning is predicated on a safe, supportive learning environment. As such, "going blended" has meant taking advantage of synchronous activities to foster exploration and experimentation in Googledocs and face-to-face classes and asynchronous activities to foster reflection in discussion boards and Voicethreads. My students are free writing, experimenting, drafting, revising, editing, and polishing work that is significantly better at the end of the semester than it is at the beginning. They are collaborating with each other more comfortably. They are writing more on the discussion boards than they ever could speak in class. We know each other better than we did even in my highly participatory, horseshoed-desked, discussion-based traditional classrooms.

The rewards can be seen through my students' writing and self-awareness. If writing is thinking on the page, and my job is to help students think critically about themselves as learners and writers, then my students need to be writing more. They are: My students produce an average of 70 pages of writing every semester, 30 of which are revised and polished. Even in my early semesters teaching blended, my students were making greater improvements in their writing than my students had in my traditional classes. They are reflecting on their digital literacy and media addictions, their research skills, and how well (or not) their high school teachers prepared them for college writing and research. They are providing more and better feedback to each other because they have more time to write careful feedback online. Plus, the online feedback is written, so students can't forget what their peers have said. They just need to go back and look.

If blended learning is seen as a method to save time and resources and increase convenience, then it's never going to gain acceptance among educators, especially compositionists. This does not bode well, for more and more college courses are being offered as blended/ hybrid every year. Resistance from compositionists is warranted if the format is pedagogically unsound, but done well, the format is not simply pedagogically sound: it's pedagogically obvious. Students are writing more, interacting more, and reflecting more. They are doing this by writing more. The net result is that my blended students are making incredible progress in fifteen short weeks, progress that I never would have thought possible three years ago. As a writing teacher, I will take nearly any risk if there's a possibility that it will help my students become better writers. The risks are high. The rewards are real.