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...

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.

Lofty Ambitions: How Much Theory Can I Introduce in One Week?

Well, that depends.

What's my objective? To stick to my syllabus? To frontload the theory before students tackle the first major paper? Or to ensure that students are learning the material in a manageable way?

Hm, I don't know. The last one seems like a laudable goal. Some might say it's the only important goal up there. In fact, I'm one of them.

Look: the stuff I teach is harder than students expect. It's harder than most people imagine when I tell them what I teach. First-year college writing: two parts process writing and one part research skills blended with peer review and served with a slice of grammar and punctuation?

Sure, I do all that. I also teach argument theory, digital literacy, and rhetorical awareness and analysis. That doesn't happen quickly, as I am grudgingly remembering this week.

The first two weeks were devoted to rhetorical context and summary. As I stand here at the end of Week 3, I'm rethinking that unit--I'm asking them to summarize an argument before they even know how an argument works. Whatever--I'll revisit that at some point. I need them writing within the first week, and the articles I choose at the top of the semester are easy enough to digest:

We start with two sample summaries of Gabriel's 2010 Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age. Then, groups of students summarized either Steve Kolowich's 2011 What Students Don't Know, Peg Tyre's 2012 The Writing Revolution, or Josh Keller's 2009 Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers. 

This past Monday, they submitted an individual summary on either Carr's Is Google Making us Stupid, Shaahin Cheyene's 2012 How the Internet is Changing our Brain or Clive Thompson's 2012 Is Google Wrecking Our Memory, which they'd already discussed in a Lyra Classic: an overcomplicated discussion board prompt that asked them to put their article in conversation with Eli Pariser's Ted Talk on Internet Filters (everyone needs to watch this--everyone--and assign it in class. Do it because we all need to know this, and do it because the discussion that this generates is brilliant).

I asked them to submit these summaries as an ungraded assignment. I've never done this before--it's usually associated with maybe ten lousy points--but I like it. I told them that this was their chance to receive feedback from me before handing something in for a grade. Makes sense, right?

Back to my dilemma: I introduced stasis theory last Monday, which is easy enough to do in fifteen minutes. The trick is to follow up with it well in the next class. This went okay yesterday, but I was more distracted by the fact that students clearly didn't grasp rhetorical context--that thing I've been pounding every day for three weeks now--and had to. I spent more time on that by tying it in with the other big piece of yesterday: simple online research skills. It was an online synchronous day in AdobeConnect, so we all hit Google and searched for a few things. We got to reinforce Pariser--"Who has a different results page than I do?" and then go over simple things like using quotation marks and filtering for dates (2011..2014). And then we got to the good stuff, which I hadn't even planned on:

"Okay, before I even click on this link--what do I know about this article? Here's my results page, and I've taken three nanoseconds to decide I want to click on this one. Why? What am I looking for?"

The most important clue: "Where is it published? What can we detect from the website? That's the first step. What else? Date. Okay. Let's click on it. Here's the link in the AdobeConnect chat box so that you can go to this article on your own computer. Alright, let's check this out. I've never read this article before. Let's pretend that we've all been assigned a short, 750-word assignment about blended learning in college. A basic expository piece to be published in The Diamondback next week. Take a few seconds to scan this. Would you use this source?"

This was not in my lesson plan. But this was the perfect way to introduce (introduce?!! Then why didn't I do this on Day 2?) rhetorical context. Now they get it (I hope. I should still reinforce it Monday so that it totally sticks...). But in essence, they've got it. Great. So then the trick was to bounce from there to stasis theory, picking up from Monday, which I thought they could nail as preparation for...

...Toulmin theory this Monday?

I must be Out. Of. My. Mind.

Stay tuned for Major Syllabus Adjustment #1 in Spring 2014.