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.  

assessment me

I've got dozens of my email correspondance with my students, in which I'm building toward this concept of an online interaction - the email is working but without permission yet, can't post but 

As I’m reading and thinking about assessment, I reflect upon my own efforts teaching writing: In assessing my own efforts and the subsequent outcomes. Specifically one such cause and effect: my students’ resistance to my teaching them to think and write analytically.  

I tell them each of my lessons leads to the next and we will leave nothing behind as we go through the semester but that seems to fall on deaf ears as we go from one paper to the next. One such example, I conducted an in-class writing on two days in a row, in which I got them to pick a topic they knew and cared a lot about and to write on it. It produced 300-750 words from each of them. I told them to use the results in their next paper. Almost to a person, they disregarded the in-class results and chose another topic to write about for the next paper- the persuasive essay, in which they were to argue for something they believed in. At the end of the persuasive essay lessons, I connected that paper to the next one, the big college paper- the research paper. I demonstrated how to build from their (already written) persuasive essay into the processes of research and told them that both of the assignments: persuasive essay and research paper are connected. The first is a practice run and that they would learn much about how to construct the other from it. What they learned on the first helps (and saves time) on the second.  I reminded them that all of my assignments are connected, one to the next. They were told to finish revising the persuasive paper using steps I’d specifically constructed in revision of the persuasive essay into a research paper and in class, I had them write in many different ways – passages and outlines and pre-writing exercises to set up and revise the persuasive into research paper. Most ignored the content and ideas they’d created even on the persuasive revision and none evolved their persuasive into their research with the content that’d been created through exercises- for them. It occurs to me through assessing my results from my efforts that the connection between these two papers’ construction, must not be clear to them – they cannot see how to transform any knowledge from one to the other. Are they aware of gaining any knowledge? Can I help them to connect it through some kind of online reflection medium?

I’ve been thinking about this since I’ve been teaching FYC, jockeying around with a paper on it, missing so far is the assessment literature review and this week’s readings help me put it into words. The Learning Record writes, “Teachers and students work together to document and interpret evidence of student learning, based on criteria and standards established by the teacher and reflecting the collective understanding of what disciplines, fields of study, and departments believe students should know and know how to do.” Hawisher and Selfe suggest I “assess ways in which computer technology could affect my strategies for working with students.”  I’m liking the idea I have to use Google Docs' online document sharing in which my students can work together in some kind of evaluation format of the day-to-day note-taking.  I can start them off and they can build from there.

sEaRch

It is interesting how the activity of search engines that are built into other applications seem to be more than simply intrusive. Facebook “suggests” friends, and matches ads to my profile content and to my friends’ content and to my friends’ friends content and to my searches within the entire Facebook platform. You actually have to “opt out” to stop that cookie from connecting. LinkIn matches members to me, suggesting, suggesting. Classmates continually asks their users to view who “signed” their guestbook, using “signed” to signify a mere “visit” to their profile (unless opted-out), sending emailed reminders of search results, the reminders progressing  exponentially month by month to non-premium-services’ subscribers. Any user can be a member but must upgrade to “see” who “viewed” their profile listing as reported by their search. AOL’s search engine saves and shares their users' searches (for cash money). And then there’s Google leading the way with all these intrusive techniques. Would you be surprised to discover that a special “clean” building was built in San Diego to house the servers and computers that Homeland Security uses to track ALL cell phone calls and ALL emails sent from and received in the USA? It is rumored that the Google algorithm was adapted to track certain combinations of keywords within each email and cell phone call in order to identify whomever they wanted to identify. This week’s key words are Charlie Sheen and Winning, last week’s were White+House, and bomb. I have no verification of this urban myth (other than to reference the Executive Order that Bush signed authorizing a type of this surveillance designed to ferret out terrorists –see text, below). It would require just such a search engine to search a database such as would be produced from this type of massive surveillance- and admit it- you can believe it is possible just from the knowledge gained from merely reading Halavais’ book.

President Bush issued an Executive Order shortly

after the terrorist attacks of September

11, 2001, authorizing Keith Alexander,

head of the NSA to engage in the

warrantless wiretapping of international

telephone, cell phone, email, and

internet based conversations with at

least one of the participant’s side of

the conversation originating outside of

the USA. But, whoops! a glitch caused

the system to record an undisclosed

number (shhh it’s classified!) of such

conversations of United States citizens,

in which all participants’ participation

originated on US soil. We have the 
requisite tools, why not just listen in?