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...

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!

Instructor Presence

I love teaching synchronous classes online.

Yes, AdobeConnect isn't perfect. Yes, my wireless can go on the fritz. Yes, a student or two may have a hard time getting into Googledocs.

But I love it all the same. I wouldn't have predicted this two years ago, when I started teaching blended courses, but I really can do things in my synchronous online days that I cannot do face-to-face.

I always give my students ten minutes to get settled on synchronous online days. Most students come in by 9:30, but I don't start the live class until 9:40. This gives students time to run to the library, if they have class just before mine, or time to ask pre-class questions in the chat box. Meanwhile, everyone completes an opening activity:

At 9:40, I start my webcam and come on line. I'm not showing the full screen because doing so will reveal my students' names, which I will not do. But here's me, in my home office, smiling as students type in their warrants to these enthymemes.

I call on three or four students to write their answer in; this prevents students from dozing (or walking away from the computer entirely). "Adam, Beatrice, Connie, David: what's the warrant for the Starbucks enthymeme?...Good...Ernest, Frank, Gertrude, Henrietta, you're on deck for Fox News..." and so forth.

All three classes nailed this, so we quickly moved on to the next piece: finding "Viable" sources. This part was new. The day before, one of my TAs, K, and I were were trying to figure out how to come back to stasis theory in a way that would be most useful to students.

"Maybe..." I suddenly thought, "maybe I should make some sort of presentation that walks students through the research process, like Narrowing Topic --> Finding better sources --> evaluating sources --> choosing the most useful sources, as in the ones with actual arguments--> adding those sources to your stasis grid. Maybe?"

"YES!" K responded. "Students will definitely find that useful, 'cause most of them are like "what is this stasis thing and why am I doing it. This will totally be helpful."

"Okay. I'm on it."

I made a rough map, popped it into Google Presentations, and asked my TAs to help by finding images and making the presentation pretty. K added a lot, and I worked on it until 1 am (of course). It worked out. After walking through the presentation and taking a sudden detour into Academic Search Premier, I explained exactly what to do with their "top" sources: enter them on the grid, like this:

After students identified the two categories with the most claims and questions, they went into their group Googledocs from a couple of weeks ago to find a two-source stasis grid for them to fill out with two of their sources:

2/19 - Stasis Grid

	author/publication/date	categorical	definitional	causal	value	action	jurisdiction
Source 1
Source 2

They had about twelve minutes to do this (my second two classes did, anyway; we were short on time in the first class), and my TAs and I watched them in their Googledocs while I kept an eye on the AdobeConnect chat box in case students had questions. I put myself on mute for this activity, unmuting myself halfway through for "You guys are all doing great! About five more minutes" and then "okay, we're about two minutes away..."

And then, when everyone came back into AdobeConnect, I explained that they would copy this activity into their own stasis grids that was part of their homework this weekend. Six sources in the stasis grid by Monday.

And voila. Toulmin + Finding and Evaluating Viable Sources + Stasis Grid Lesson Accomplished.

Why do I love days like this? Because it was a research-focused day. Student had to be on their laptops to search in Google and Academic Search Premier and then work on their stasis grids. Why would I do that in a face-to-face class? I want students to be talking with each other when we're face to face, not staring at their laptops. This is a perfect synchronous online day lesson plan. They need me, a live instructor with a face and a voice, to walk them through Google and especially Academic Search Premier, to show them Diigo and Storify and Pocket, to reinforce why stasis theory is useful. If this had been an asynchronous day, many students would have either been confused, completely lost, or wouldn't have done it at all.

This is what blended learning and teaching looks like with Team Lyra. I love it.

How to Blog Like a Social Media Intern

Clarification: Social Media Intern for the Smithsonian. 

Courtney is back with me on an independent study this semester. She is researching all things blended learning, boosting our online presence, and teaching me how to conduct myself online.

Observe:

My strategy for "conducting myself online" thus far has to be private. I've been blogging for three years now, but haven't published anything. I have been waiting until I know that I can blog on a regular basis. More importantly, I have been waiting until I've had content I truly wanted to share. I've read hundreds of blogs over the last decade, and too many of them haven't been updated in months, or even years. Many of them seem to have been created as a requirement for grad students or first-year teachers. "Why blog?" "Because I have to." "Oh. So...what are you going to write about?"

"I dunno. The view from my window?"

That's pretty much how I started. I had to experiment with it in order to figure out what I was doing. I was blogging for myself. Now, however, I do have content I want to share: lesson plans, discussion board prompts, advice for teachers transitioning to blended/ hybrid courses, enthusiasm for my classes and my students who are creating better and better writing every semester.

Courtney sat down with me yesterday and assumed the most diplomatic voice she could muster: 

"A good rule of thumb for blogs is to keep them short: 600-800 words."

I cringed. "I know, I know. I can't believe how long my posts are!"

"And pictures. You need pictures. College Tourist requires that I write 1,000 word posts, but I fill them with pictures. Here, let me show you."

She hopped on my laptop and led me here: Ten Ways to Find and Land the Perfect Internship

Yes, that's right: my "web content and social media" research assistant also happens to be the social media intern for the Smithsonian. She's a rock star. And I am the luckiest educator on the planet.

"Pictures? I don't have any pictures! I don't even have a decent profile picture!" (True words).

"Right. Well, work on that. You need them."

Here you go, Courtney: 

That's my class schedule for the next two weeks. Speaking of which, I need to prepare tomorrow's synchronous class on research skills and stasis theory. 

How's this? Better?