Blended Interactions

The second week in BlendKit14 focuses "Blended Interactions" and essentially addresses two different things: student-student interaction and student-instructor interaction. These are two of the three components in Garrison, Anderson, and Archer's (2000) Community of Inquiry Model. It makes sense to leave the third one--student-content interaction--out for now, as this week seems to be more about Social Presence and Instructor Presence. The people. 

Anyone who knows me knows that this conversation is at the core of my pedagogy and, increasingly, my research. To me, Blended Learning makes it possible to facilitate the most effective and engaging interactions between students and between student and teacher. This is critical for writing courses. Plenty of research suggests that it's critical for any discipline, but I'll only speak to what I know. As a writing instructor, my first job is to facilitate a healthy, safe, supportive learning environment. Only then will students be able to share their work, accept and give constructive feedback, and feel compelled to revise and revise some more. Writing is a process. Learning is a process. Both writing and learning are social acts.

Since I started teaching blended courses two years ago, I have taken advantage of the discussion forums much more than I could in the past. In a 100% face-to-face class, discussion boards are always homework in a class that already has an obscene amount of homework. In a blended class, discussion boards can be both classwork and homework. It's taken me a couple of semesters, but I've finally arrived at a model that makes discussion boards 20% of the course grade. We have one every week, and most of them have structured responses, e.g., go back and find two people to respond to. 150-200 word responses (on top of their 250-300 word posts). That's 2-3 pages of informal writing every week on topics that range from personal expression (like the introductions in Week 1) to reflections to analysis. They work, when designed well. 

As for my face-to-face classes: I do very little lecturing. I could, in fact, do more (I'll come back to this later. I'm realizing now at the end of the semester how much I haven't adequately addressed, content-wise, which I need to figure out over the summer). What I do instead is a lot of group work in response to maybe a ten-minute presentation. In order to create a close community of writers in a format that only has 75 minutes of face-to-face contact, the group work is critical. I also set up the desks in a horseshoe (at least, I usually do) so that we're all looking at each other. When possible, I sit down, too, so that I'm part of the circle like everybody else.

Going forward, I know that I want to have more hands-on time with student writing before they submit their formal assignments for a grade. I think that I can do more of this in the f2f classes, though it's tough; we have so much to do in all three classroom environments (f2f, AdobeConnect, and asynchronous OL days) that it's hard for me to see how exactly I could provide direct feedback live. But I know I need to get my hands on students' drafts earlier. I can, too--their drafts are uploaded electronically for peer review, so my TAs and I have access to them. We need to do more than skim these--we need to provide more written feedback on them. It's time-consuming, but vital. 

That's my takeaway from Spring 14. I feel good about the sense of community in my classes, but I need to provide more direct instruction and direct feedback. More instructor presence, both in the classroom and one on one with students. 

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.

Redemption: Voicethread to the Rescue

Opening up Voicethread the morning after an asynchronous day and finding scores of new comments is like running downstairs on Christmas morning and finding a pile of presents.

Here's my view of all of my Voicethreads:

The yellow comment boxes alert me that there are new comments on those three Voicethreads. Yesterday's classwork. Unlike the Voicethread from three weeks ago, yesterday's was simple and straightforward: comment on the quote sandwich in two of the following paragraphs.

Reason #1 that Voicethread rocks: students can see me as I'm going over the prompt. I've listened to myself on Voicethreads in which I've only given audio prompts; those are fine, but I believe that being able to see me, as dorky as I may look, helps to humanize this activity. It boosts instructor presence, obviously, but it also makes it so that adding an audio comment is less intimidating. If I can add a video comment, students can an audio comment.

Reason #2 that Voicethread rocks: We can hear each other! We're only in a brick and mortar classroom once a week. While many of my online days are synchronous, students can only hear me and my TA, not each other. They type in the chat box or in Googledocs, but it's not the same. Hearing each other's voices helps build "social presence." I ask them to introduce themselves when they start to speak so that subsequent students can reference them by name.

Reason #3 that Voicethread rocks: when recording, we can draw on the slide. 

I'm asking students to point out specific things in paragraphs, so being able to point to the area they're talking about is super helpful. The drawings fade after seven seconds, so the slide doesn't get too cluttered.

Reason #4 that Voicethread rocks: I know immediately if they've understood the lesson. This lesson focuses on the "quote sandwich": how to integrate sources properly in a text. Full rhetorical context, including the main aim of the overall text, the quote (or paraphrase), restate the quote in your own words, analyze the quote, and "forward" it, to use Joseph Harris's term. This lesson was presented in a video lecture I made with Camtasia. I don't use the bells and whistles in Camtasia--the quizzes or polls--so until I started using Voicethread, there was no way for me to know if they truly "got it" (let alone watched it) until I looked over their drafts.

Okay, this could happen through a discussion board, but that wouldn't be nearly as good. They just watched me, in the video, go over several paragraphs, pointing out what is or is not working in the samples. Then, they do the same exact thing in this Voicethread. They didn't read the lesson--they watched me. Practicing in a Voicethread is the most logical way to reinforce what they just learned.

Reason #5 that Voicethread rocks: Students can see the text, listen to each other, and add their audio comments all in the same place. You can't do this with a discussion board.

 Here is a Voicethread from last semester. I've gone back to this one because it doesn't include student work (visually)--they are commenting on political cartoons from October, 2013.

The thumbnails on the left and right of the slide represent seven different students. I'm playing this slide now; you can see that I'm listening to the first student's comment.

How cool is this? I mean, seriously? I'm about to write a proposal for this semester's ITL Conference. I want the entire campus to know about this and to adopt this--I think this is an extraordinarily powerful tool for writing teachers like me, for art/ art history teachers, for architecture, media studies, math--the applications are endless.

Thank you, Voicethread, and thank you, students, for bringing me back to my properly enthusiastic state!