Results?

The results are coming in! I’ve got the “first draft” of my FYC students’ Research Paper coming in tomorrow. I’ve set it up this semester as an exercise, (read: a culminating of the semester exercise), in which they will, in effect, relive almost everything we’ve done all semester in three weeks in an “identify-your -writing process” type of session.  Online, they identify the parts of their process and comment on them: which ones they used, how they used them, I’m looking to see what the “repeating” of the exercises we’ve gone through (at least twice) will produce in the writing and revising of their papers.

Thinking aloud

I learned years ago from teachers repeating the same thing over and over again as they grilled me, “if you can’t define a word (off the top of your head), you don’t really know what it means.” I don’t buy all of that. We can know what something means in context but to be able to blurt out a dictionary definition is another thing. It makes me think of the learning a word example I mentioned before. Somewhere along the line, I’ve heard someone say that to have a word become a part of your working vocabulary, you must repeat it three times a day for 3-5 weeks. I wish I could find the original source and I mentioned that earlier in this very blog but springing off that idea, I feel you can know a process but without using it, the understanding you’ve gained to that point of using said process goes away. Use it or lose it. I’ve evolved my original P3 idea. Use it or lose it.  I asked them to list the exercises we’d done in just the last three classes and they came up with three of 11, only. Where’d the others go?  The “evolved” version of my “application” is to utilize and practice the parts of a writing process… a generalized writing process, using a generalized college research paper as the form we strive to create. I think I can construct a format for them to follow, in which I repeat some steps following the age-old writing process of pre-writing, drafting, revision, proof reading, and publishing and I can build in exercises to put these steps on the path to the 3 times a day for 3-5 weeks concept- that it will take to make these exercises part of their regular writing process (and vocabulary) before it goes away.

Essay heuristic

In my research to define essay, I found that originally it was a method of thinking about a subject and if I connect to this great word, heuristic, I can see a method of using this blog to think about my research into essay, viewed through the lenses of “multi-literacies” and “online literacy” as a heuristic and comment upon that investigational journey. I would be really tweaking my work on the P3, so far – as I’m investigating how an online exercise would help my FYC students’ transformation of knowledge and transference of skills learned in my classroom, onto the pages of their research paper. How do I think about how whatever I discover might be interpreted towards my thinking about essay? Well, first I must document and interpret the information I get from my students’ work online. The idea is to use this stream as a thinking aloud tool from which I hope to learn.

I’m working with the discovery that my students’ process information from my showing them how to do things and then assigning them activities that exercise these things I’ve shown them - into their papers. Another discovery is in how they don’t process this same information when only told how to do the same things (they’ve already done at least once )- into their papers. I don’t know why they haven’t processed it. Is it that they don’t understand it? Or is it that they’ve chosen not to process the information into their papers? This exercise online will document what they have actually processed and then I can compare that to their papers and see if they’ve done the work. I have to find a better way to explain what I mean in this phrase: “process into their papers.”

Engaged Thursday

Engaged my Thursday classes in active discussion about their papers, set the stage to enable similar discussion on an online medium in Google Docs to begin this weekend. Took their temperatures on the upcoming experience. They are anxious and insecure about what they “have to do.”  I presented it as a read and respond activity. I’m aiming to see what they retain from classroom discussions. Can they express it? Will they express it on Google Docs? I’m going to start with a simple call and response regimen. Mostly, I aim to ask what they thought of various things and slowly work into how they understood other things/concepts I’ve talked about and activities they’ve done in class. I’m hoping to engage them in that and work them up to discussing things among themselves on the online forum. I hope to use the semi-anonymous status of the web commenting to have this online experience serve them. I wonder if I should hide their identification from one another.  

new stream: P1 stream as a writing tool for thinking (about P3)

As I’m working with the Google Docs assignment (P3) for my students, I have to balance my expectations, anticipations and what I hope they’ll do with the natural human tendencies to avoid work and to do only the minimum amount of work so as not to affect the grade they want. I am curious to see if I can engage them enough to do all the (best practices) things they need to do to produce this last research paper. I’m working on the basic steps in class and assigning them homework to do and the Google Docs is designed to monitor with what they are engaging, if any thing… and a reiteration of the work, if you will. I read somewhere that in order to make a word part of your regular working vocabulary you must use it three times a day (in some way) for 3-5 weeks. I can’t find the exact numbers or the source but, I’m going to presume the concept is basically true. So, I’m adding in another use of these types of “writing process” composing practices exercises I put them through in class through the Google Docs assignment… while I add to their digital literacy through working time online with annotating, commentating, commenting and reflection.

This past week, we’ve worked on brainstorming techniques on lists of: topics, supporting and opposing points, and personal connections to their topics. Also we worked on various pre-writing brainstorming exercises to begin to discover and to think about ideas for the paper, and ways to organize the ideas, specifically mapping and outlining. We worked on collaboration in teams to brainstorm together to add to these lists. We worked on a class participation brainstorm session, modeling a brainstorming session of a general topic (free bottles of Dasani water on campus) and created lists together, writing them on the chalk board.

sAy what?

Peterson’s piece opens the conversation about distance learning. I’m with her on the issue of bundling, especially when combined with the issue that students and teachers are not meeting in the same space. The effectiveness of a teacher to meet the needs of a specific student in a specific coursework would seem to depend upon the familiarity of the teacher to the material and if she hadn’t written the course, then there would be a level of inefficiency in connecting the material to the student. In other words, how could the teacher adjust? Could she adjust the teaching/ the technique to meet the prescribed outcome? A great familiarity of the material, no matter the author would render this issue moot, I suppose. Another part of this conversation might be rendered moot by making the online teaching done synchronously via a medium like Skype. 
A big issue, beyond the content in the Peterson piece (touched on but not too much) is that all the communication between the teacher and student is all written. Their communication depends upon precision of the intercourse. One try gets one answer. It’s like it is all carved in stone. Let me try again. If I write one thing and the student understands it as something other than what I meant, we’re lost. And verse vice-a.  

Order up! one online research with everything, please

How do we evaluate sources through the internet noise? It has everything on there! The “Web Literacy: Challenges…” piece identifies that “…web sites advocate, sell, entertain, opine, and present research and some sites try to do it all" (333). So how do we teach our charges to wade through this noise?

My use of internet research comes with years and years of filtering through the noise from the information highway originating from before even the online web experience was invented. My thinking always comes with a “where do you get that information” evaluation. I rarely thought (consciously) of myself making that evaluation until after I entered university study and found I had to make that determination daily in my reading, researching and writing. I suspect most of us in post-graduate work have always done this type of inquiry on some level whether we knew it or not and I bet a lesser number of those with no college background probably make the same kind of evaluation as a matter of habit. It would be interesting to track that habit. But, how do we teach our charges to wade through this noise? “Assessing the value of information…leads naturally to a critical approach to the Web… (348)” and seems to be a good place to start to address this need.