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.

Blended and Digital Innovations in the Academic Writing Program

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!

An Apology and a Modest Defense

I have an apology to make to all English teachers and English majors out there:

I did not mean to imply that there's something intrinsically wrong with being an English major, or that there's something wrong with the discipline. English majors and scholars are vital both in and out of the academy.

When I tweeted "Encouraging Ss to become ENGL majors is arguably more unethical than encouraging them to stay in college" the other night, I was doing two things: 

1. contributing to the "ethical" theme that was dominant in this week's chat and
2. making a larger argument about our role as writing teachers.

For context, the theme of this week's chat was FYC and retention. The initial question at the top of the hour was:

"So why does FYC have such a big impact on students' retention?" followed shortly by 
"Is it your responsibility as a professor to try to keep students in college?"

Here are some of the responses:

I had this amazing student one year who told me he hated college, it wasn't challenging, and he wanted to leave... I didn't know what to tell him about staying in school 

It's certainly not my job to keep them in college no matter what. That's a question that can stray into ethical areas. 

He was so smart and engaged. I thought he would do well in school. But yeah, ethically, I didn't know what to say 

Did you tell him there's nothing wrong with leaving? Do we have to sell education? 

 I tried to just listen and offer my best advice 

Pushing is one thing. Helping Ss think through their options and consequences is valuable, though. 

I agree. I am very uncomfortable with selling the university. I'd rather spend my time helping them analyze it! 

Absolutely, it is not our job to keep students from leaving, but there are ways we can help. 

At my cc, I sometimes encounter Ss who aren't confident about being in college or have been told outright they won't succeed...so they may benefit from retention-focused FYC in multiple ways.... 

because "college isn't for everyone" still implies failure on the student's part. 

 yes, exactly! not the message I want to send 

Do you talk about conversion of FYC students to English majors are part of your retention conversation? 

We do. It is now in the syllabus and orientation to encourage good writers to become ENGL majors 

Encourage students to become ENGL majors? Why?

Encouraging Ss to become ENGL majors is arguably more unethical than encouraging them to stay in college 

My point here is that ethically, encouraging students to stay in college is one thing. Encouraging them to become English majors (or any major, for that matter) is a completely different story. 

We FYC teachers find ourselves in the position of advising students all the time--or, rather, students come to us far more than they do most other professors, because they usually know us better. The ethics of this are discussed regularly--as they should be. We're not academic advisors. We're not counselors. We're writing teachers. Still, students come to us for advice, and we all make our own decisions about what is and is not appropriate.

I've had the "should I stay in school" conversation several times. I listen. I nod sympathetically. I try to shift the focus to completing my course successfully.  Last year, I had a student who had no interest in being in school at all and was here because her mother wanted her to have at least a year of college under her belt. "You're almost halfway there," I offered. "My advice to you is to do the best you can so that if you choose to return at some point down the road, you'll at least have a couple of classes on your transcript that you won't have to repeat."

I think this is sound advice. But converting FYC students to English majors? No. Here's why:

The majority of my students have declared, even as first-semester freshmen. I do not think it is appropriate to impose my discipline on my biochem or aerospace engineering or finance or dance majors. As for the undeclared: I tell them to take everything. I encourage them to think in terms of courses, not majors. A course is a semester-long decision. A major is a multi-year decision with direct consequences on their graduate and/ or professional careers. Again, I'm not an advisor.

Moreover, I don't endorse the idea that good writers should be English majors. Just because you're a good writer doesn't mean that you should be an English major. Rather, it means that you are well-positioned to go further in your chosen field because you know how to think critically and communicate your ideas effectively. That's what we need. We need good writers in all disciplines, and we need to help students understand that this "English" class is not an "English" class at all--it's a life skills class. We focus on critical thinking, rhetorical analysis, information literacy, efficient research skills, and effective argumentation. These skills are not the sole purview of English departments. We teach these skills so that our students can succeed in all of their other courses.

I don't want to keep all of the good writers. I want to send them out to all of the other departments on campus. I want the engineering and environmental studies majors to write as well as the English majors. I want our students to research what they're passionate about and be able to contribute to their fields without having a panic attack when faced with a ten-page writing assignment and running down the hall to find an "English major" to help them write their papers.

That's where I'm coming from.

I hope that this helps. I'm sorry if my words stung; I didn't mean to offend. As always, I welcome your comments.

Going Public

As we're in the final stretch of Argument as Inquiry, I'm looking ahead to the rest of the semester. It's all new.

This semester, my students are going public. I've moved the "final paper," the academic position paper, from the last week to week 11. I'm now calling it the "academic argument" to distinguish it from the new project: "the public argument."

My students are conducting quality academic research that doesn't go anywhere. Their "academic audience" is a false construct (they're not *really* going to publish in the Journal of Social Psychology as freshman college students), and most of what they write in my class is "just for English."

I hate that, as do many in my field. So, I'm handling this by having them publish their research findings online. Their last "paper" will be targeted to the public, to the blogosphere and twitterverse. I've made a class twitter (@LyraBL101) and asked all of my students to make new Twitter accounts for themselves and follow us at #Lyra101. They're to follow any author or source that they use in their research and later, will tweet at those authors, telling them that they're using their work in their papers. When they publish their work online--on Blogger, Weebly, or Wix--they're going to tweet about it, tell people on Facebook and Tumblr (neither of which I go near--that's their world, not mine), and, I hope, get people to comment on their work. 

Students will repurpose their papers and small assignments from earlier in the semester for a public audience. They might turn some of their earlier work into a series of blog posts, or keep the larger papers as stand-alone arguments but cut them in half, from 1500 to 750 words. 

I theme my class around media, technology, and education, so students research something that nominally is related to one of those fields. I try to group students together by topic for peer review groups. Those groups will stick together for this last project.  I want them to build these websites in groups, and then each of them will have a portal or something to their individual research. 

I don't think it's reasonable to have each student build his or her own website. A simple blogger, fine. But I want more than that. I want them to have a website that can house a Twitter feed, a blog, a full paper, an annotated bibliography with hyperlinks, etc. I think that this needs to be a group effort. Some students will do it easily; others will be completely intimidated. So, building this website as a group seems like the way to go.

The sticky area is privacy. I've asked students to make new Twitter accounts specifically for this class so that they keep their private and professional worlds separate. I know that several other professors require students to use Twitter, so this won't be the last time they're asked to make a "professional student" account. I've asked students to use a name that I will recognize, but it doesn't need to be their full name--they can just use "Stan ENGL" as their full name for this assignment. While part of my objectives are to teach them digital literacy skills and how to conduct oneself online in a professional manner, I still want to protect them. They may not want their employer in five years (or five months) to read their college papers.

I'm walking an interesting line between encouraging my students to publish their work online so that their research actually matters to someone other than me and wanting to protect them from their "future" selves. I'm asking them to follow people on Twitter and tweet about their research. My students need to be "real people," but they don't need to be identifiable to the point where their Twitter and Weebly for this class is easily linked to their personal Twitter or Facebook. It's a Brave New World in higher ed and literacy studies...