At 2:00am, YouTube is your Friend

Many of my colleagues who have dismissed YouTube as a dumping ground for "look at what funny stuff my dog can do" have missed out on a fabulous resource. Don't get me wrong, there are some amusing videos featuring different animals doing lots of unlikely things; however, there also are tons of "how-to" videos. You need to learn how to do a certain crochet stitch, ask YouTube. You need to know how to check a certain car part, ask YouTube. You want your students to properly format their documents with headers, footers, page breaks, and hanging indents...yes, you guessed it, ask YouTube!

So this is just a short reminder to stop wasting time getting frustrated with your students and/or spending time in your class showing students how to do these things, just start assigning these videos to your students before papers are due! And what if you can't find a YouTube video for what you need to show them, contribute to the resources by making your own video. It's quick, it's easy, just use Jing (a free screen capture software) and you'll be making your own "how-to" video in no time.

Using Turnitin.com or other Plagiarism Detection Software (Shelley's Philosophy)

Yes, I admit it, I generally use Turnitin.com with my online students! I know, some of my rhet/comp colleagues are not happy with this fact. I too did not believe that using plagiarism detection software was a good thing; however, one of our part-time faculty at Mesa Community College helped change my mind. I figure it was worth taking a few minutes to describe how and why I useTurnitin.

Politics
First, I have to admit that there is a pressure to use tools like Turnitin. I have colleagues both within and outside of English who scream about how many students plagiarize work. Obviously I try to have the "have you structured your assignment in a way so that it is more difficult to plagiarize?" discussion. However, as someone who also works in our Center for Teaching and Learning, I feel it is kind of necessary to use and understand various technologies to which many faculty are committed. Ultimately, I wondered if there is a way to use tools likeTurnitin in a pedagogically sound manner instead of as a big stick to punish students after the face.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by photoeditorvision

Learning vs Punishing
One of the complaints rhet/comp colleagues have about plagiarism softwares is that they are "dumb." These technologies do not take context into consideration when marking up sections of a document as plagiarized. I have found this conversation is a great learning moment for students. I basically have my student submit both rough drafts and final versions of their documents to Turnitin. And when I have student reflect on their peer reviews, I ask that they read their Turnitin Originality Report as another peer review. By marking sections that students have either quoted (I'm optimistic) or copied the "dumb" technology gives students an opportunity to think about

• the distinction between their ideas and other individual's ideas,as well as
  
• introducing and properly citing quotations.

As experienced writers we know that to really focus on any one aspect of a paper, we have to reread the paper only focusing on that aspect. Having students use plagiarism detection software as another "review" helps give them a new lens to (re)analyze their drafts.

And then if a student was too lazy to revise accordingly, it can be helpful to have two copies of a plagiarized paper within the Turnitin system.

I will concede the fact I still worry about the legal ramifications of plagiarism softwares like Turnitin keeping copies of student work; however, that is a discussion for another time. For now, I just wanted to reflect upon how and why using something like Turnitin can be useful and used as a learning tool instead of a big stick.

Rousseau-The Process Writer (Guest Blog)

A colleague and friend just posted this "translation" of Rousseau's Confessions as a Facebook note. My being behind on blogging this week made this an obvious sign that I should ask Matt to guest blog this week. He agreed to having me post here!

Here is an excerpt from Jean-Jaques Rousseau's Confessions in which he talks about his writing process. The text is from the 1945 translation, so I've used brackets to update it for the 21st C freshman.

"Hence comes the extreme difficulty which I find in writing. [Writing is hard work] My manuscripts, scratched, smeared, muddled and almost illegible, bear witness to the trouble they have cost me. There is not one of them which I have not been obliged to copy four or five times before I could give it to the printer. [I revise] I have never been able to produce anything, pen in hand, in front of my table and paper; it is during a walk, in the midst of rocks and forests, at night in my bed while lying awake, that I write in my brain; [oh yeah, I brainstorm first- it's handy for invention] one may judge how slowly, especially in the case of a man utterly without verbal memory and who has never been able to learn six lines by heart in his life [I can hardly ever remember what it was I thought I wanted to write].
Many of my periods have been turned and turned again five or six nights in my head before they were fit to be set down on paper [Punctuation is the worst, but I gotta edit & proofread my work]. This, also, is the reason why I succeed better in work which require labor than those which require to be written with a certain lightness of style, such as letters- a style of which I have never been able to properly catch the tone, so that such occupation is a perfect torture to me [I gotta be true to my voice]. I cannot write a letter on the most trifling subject, which does not cost me hours of fatigue; or, if I try to write down immediately what occurs to me, I know neither how to begin nor how to end [first thought not always the best thought]; my letter is a long and confused mass of verbosity, and, when it is read, my meaning is difficult to make out. [I get wordy and convoluted if I don't follow my process-- see revision comment above]."

Using Blogs for Student Work

I was ecstatic the first time I asked my online writing students to complete all of their work in a blog; I've never gone back! For years now I've had students start blogs and then post most of their course work within their own blog. I have to admit, for various reasons I've had to make fo-blogs in learning management systems the past year or so and they haven't worked quite as well; however, let's go back to square one, why I love students submitting work in individual blogs.

Invention Focused
Composition theory shifted from a focus on product to a focus on process. With that focus on process it is important to have students doing lots of invention work and, more importantly, realize the significance of that invention work. By having students post all of their invention homework in a blog, students can see how all of the work builds into their bigger projects. Even in face-to-face classes, blogs make sure that all student work is located in one area and that they don't lose any of their work during the long semester.

Course Portfolio
Because most of the student work is posted in the blog, it then makes it very easy for the student to wrap up the course with a course portfolio. The blog IS the portfolio. By having the student make his or her portfolio cover letter the last entry of the portfolio, it becomes the first entry when someone visits the blog. This is both a great way to wrap up the blog (so that if anyone visits it after the class they need only read the first entry to know what/why/how the blog existed). Students can also link to specific blog entries within their cover letter as citation for the evidence of the learning in the course.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Howdy, I'm H. Michael Karshis

Beware
Many of my colleagues ask about how to keep students on topic when blogging (they don't like reading the "blah, blah, blah" of unfocused posts). The common mistake is to just ask students to "reflect" about what they are learning. Students need specific assignment prompts. Again, I have students post responses to specific homework assignments so they know exactly what they are posting and hopefully (eventually) why!

Shelley's Philosophy on Grading Homework

I just finished the first week of classes, and I've got my first batch of homework to grade. It feels, I haven't done a study or anything, that I assign a lot more homework when compared to a bunch of my colleagues. Now, I also teach online; so all those face-to-face activities have to be converted into online activities (which makes it all homework). Anyhoo...

Many of my colleagues see my list of homework assignments and have the nightmare image like what I found in Flickr below. I don't think they realize though that the vast majority of this homework is invention work. As invention work, it is just those activities that will help students develop materials that they might use in the future writing projects. Basically, students get out of the homework what they put into the homework. And as such, I generally grade it on a pass/fail (done/not done) basis.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by ninniane

Instead of spending lots of time analyzing at what level they engaged the homework (aka, figuring out whether or not their homework is an A, B, C, etc.), I spend time responding to the homework. Again, I don't respond to ALL the homework. Instead, I respond to the invention work that I have found has the greatest impact on their successful completion of a major writing project. For example, I always, always, always spend lots of time on the homework assignments where students are trying to select and/or narrow a writing/research topic. I also tend to spend more time on homework where they are analyzing their audience (because it is an activity they are not used to doing and generally do not engage well).

All this to say that although I assign a lot of homework (honestly, most of the activities that you see listed in The WGtR), grading does not take as long as you would think.

Personal Portal Handbooks

In all of the years I've taught college writing courses, I've never settled on an appropriate reason, philosophy, and/or method for teaching "grammar." Although I was one of the people who saved my college writing handbook, I'm also a college writing professor. I hate the idea of students purchasing an expensive book, barely using it, and then selling it back for pennies on the dollar. And I hate even more, requiring that students buy a handbook, teaching them how to use it, and then they still sell it back.

Since so many students sell back their handbooks, I've decided it is a worthwhile endeavor to have them make their own "handbook" using Personal Portal web applications like iGoogle, Netvibes and/or Pageflakes. This way, I help them identify web resources, like the Purdue OWL, that will help them with their researching and writing, instead of them just googling something when they need help. In the Personal Portal (or "Keeping Fresh") assignment I also ask that student subscribe to a couple of blogs that provide regular writing tips and tricks. Finally, students can add different writing related gadgets/widgets to personalize the page.


cc licensed flickr photo shared by puptoes74

If you would like to see a sample of the assignment, check out my most recent version of the assignment prompt.

Required Meeting with a Librarian

Although I love the theory of the Library 2.0 concept model visualized below, it is not happening in my online courses (and for a lot of my community college commuter students who only come to campus for classes). The model below is definitely what Susan's library at North Carolina State University is trying to provide for the students. They've got video game systems in the library; I was so jealous when I visited! However, I do need to get my online community college students to the library and I want them to have a positive visit.


cc licensed flickr photo shared by habibmi

This past summer, while teaching ENG102 (research project focused first-year composition course), I assigned a one-on-one meeting with a librarian. Specifically, I waited until after the students complete writing project #1 (research project proposal) and were starting to work on writing project #2 (annotated bibliography). Now, I had already assigned work getting the students digging into the library databases; however, we all know that doesn't mean students actually talked to a librarian. By already having a focused research question, and having some experience researching (so knowing what already found, what want to find, etc.), the students had productive meetings with the librarian.

Since this was an online course, students met the librarian in an online meeting environment (we used Elluminate; however, Adobe Connect, DimDim, etc. would work as well). This allowed the librarian to share her screen and demo how she was using the library's webpages, especially the databases. Many academic libraries are now offering some type of online chat option, some of which have screen sharing capabilities. Check out the video my community college district libraries made.

This "meet with the librarian" requirement paid off! Although I did not explicitly compare papers from prior semester, I can tell you that it "felt" like the students were using many more resource from library databases. This is actually saying a lot for a five week summer session course! Many of the students also mentioned that their sessions with the librarian were helpful. I believe that because they were prepared, they were better equipped to take advantage of the resource.

I do not require that students go to the writing center; I know there are not enough hours on the writing center roster to support that requirement; however, I'm hopeful that the library can support this requirement. Either way, the librarians want students to use the library; therefore, I do not feel too guilty in assigning a "talk to the librarian" visit...especially if the student is prepared. At minimum, before sending students off to bug the librarian, consider making sure they have:

• detailed research question,
• list of search terms, and
• experience trying to use the databases.