Final Project Proposal

The ideal composition course would encourage critical thinking about rhetorical strategies and prepare students for work environments for which they need to be adequately prepared to be successful. Unfortunately, most composition courses at both the secondary and college level continue to place value in traditional essays almost exclusively. Educators might be feeding into this for many reasons, including lack of familiarity with digital tools, limited resources for students to use, nostalgia for the traditional transfer of knowledge via paper texts. The institutions themselves are slow to change and reluctant to embrace multimodal texts as valuable in their own right and reliable in content.

This reluctance to engage students with the rhetorical strategies necessary to create and read multimodal texts results in graduates who are woefully underprepared for the work force. Work environments in the 21^st century require the ability to create not only alphabetic texts, but the complex "texts" used by everyone from the average person uploading videos on YouTube to the marketing director who determines the blurb and thumbnail in a sidebar. The traditional composition course does not teach the rhetorical possibilities of multimodal texts simply because it does not recognize that the definition of literacy has changed.

My project will examine the existing pedagogical research on digital tools and suggest immediately applicable strategies for secondary and college composition teachers to begin preparing their students for the work place. Rather than encouraging a complete abandonment of what has been done before in composition instruction, my suggestions will interact with existing assignments to enhance student mastery of the skills necessary to write effectively in any medium.

I am particularly interested in the use of wikis to construct knowledge for the school as a whole. As I mentioned in class when I presented the poetry assignment I had created for use with a wiki, I would like to create an environment like a mini-Wikipedia on academic topics that all students could feed into, use, and revise collectively to share knowledge and to build upon what others have learned, rather than to retread the same information year after year as we seem to do now.

Working collaboratively is a difficult skill to teach, but the more practice students have in a low-stakes setting like a wiki in which content can quickly be revised, the more students (and faculty) will see how valuable collective knowledge can be to the academy. I hope to demonstrate with my research that not only is the inclusion of multimodal texts necessary and relatively simple to do, but that they teach skills that we currently are not able to give students and that are vital for a successful negotiation of career. These networking and collaboration skills can be developed most easily with digital tools. Furthermore, the product of the students' work will continue to influence future students at the school and students around the world who stumble upon the wiki.

Fan Fiction, Affinity Spaces, and Appropriation

In his article on fan fiction sites and the way students are writing despite school, Henry Jenkins writes, "Through online discussions of fan writing, the teen writers develop a vocabulary

for talking about writing and they learn strategies for rewriting and improving their

own work."  Some teachers may feel threatened that students are developing these skills without their guidance or to create something the institution doesn't feel is valuable.  I am grateful that these outlets for creativity and connection exist.  These affinity spaces are much more meaningful learning experiences than any that we can manufacture in school simply because school is an institution and not real life. 

I would enthusiastically encourage students to participate in any of the activities we read about because it would give me as the teacher an authentic context to teach how to interact with others, evaluate what they read for themselves, and determine the rules of the affinity space in which they choose to spend their time.  Jenkins explains that "Certainly, teens may receive harsh critical responses to their more controversial stories when they publish them online, but the teens themselves are deciding what risks they want to take and facing the consequences of those decisions."  In school, teachers cannot force students to publish or even to produce, but if we teach them how to handle the types of criticism from "trolls" and genuine critics we can equip them for the types of responses they can expect in the work environment.

"Misinformation abounds online, but so do mechanisms for self-correction;" this is a truth often overlooked by educators whose contempt for Wikipedia and other sites stems from a lack of knowledge with how such information is constructed and who is constructing it (44).  Instead of being intimidated by the potential for misinformation, teachers should be equipping students to sort through the mixed bag that is the results of a Google search to find the worthwhile pieces of information.  As Jenkins points out, the best sources are not only the ones contributed by the gate-keepers.

Another difficulty that Jenkins points out that has plagued me and my students is the difficulty that the students have in maintaining boundaries between what they have written and what others have contributed.  They also have trouble processing the information that they find in their research and often copy and paste the text from a source into a Word document without ever even reading the material carefully or trying to consider how it fits in the text they are constructing (51).  At the beginning of the semester, I felt that my students were in the wrong and needed to value copyright much more highly than they do currently. Through the readings and discussions we've experienced, I now wonder how useful those ideas about idea ownership are.  It seems that we need new definitions of what it means to create and to "own" something.  The mash-ups our students make are their own creative effort that is a completely new thing that is separate from the original products with which they started.  Documentation, the value of the individual, the results of collaboration: all these concepts have been changed by the rapid development of Web 2.0 and the proliferation of media through which anyone can express him/herself.

As we noted in last week's discussion, no one really knows what we're doing or where it's all going.  Acknowledging that there are changes and that there should be new ways of considering institutions is a valuable place to start, I think.

Assessments, Journals, and Plagiarism

In chapter eight of Multimodal Composition, Selfe describes the use of progress journals for formative assessment. I have often performed formative assessments and conferenced with students mid-project, but it never occurred to me before reading this suggestion to write down what we discuss each time. Doing so would eliminate the preliminary discussion in which the students have to remind me about their topics or the challenges they knew they would have.

I also see great value in having students keep progress journals. This is where they can express frustrations or triumphs, contributions to the group, and questions they have for me when I come to speak with the group. These journals would facilitate the writing of reflective pieces, or "heads up" as Shipka calls it. Students would have notes to pull from and to remember the process they went through and to document their growth.

Another inspiration I took from chapter eight was the example assignment, starting on page 107. Selfe writes that, "The class then uses their understanding of this rhetorical situation to develop a rhetorically informed rubric for the assignment." Students are often tougher on themselves than their instructors would be, so it would be interesting to see what they would prefer to be graded on and why. This is also an excellent way to introduce a discussion of affordances and the differences between different types of text.

The sample assignment itself is a wonderful example of what the traditional research essay should move toward, in my opinion. I would take it one step further, however, and look for an actual contest or grant that students could apply for via video. Many such opportunities exist, including the Project for Awesome on YouTube.com. Can you imagine the work students would put into their projects if there were a realistic possibility that they could change the world in which they live?

Moving on to Teaching Writing, I do have experience using Word's comment features in peer editing. Being able to interact with the text electronically seems to appeal to my students more than trying to revise with pencil and paper in the classroom. They typically write much, much more and the feedback is more useful ("This sentence doesn't make sense" instead of "Good job"). This doesn't happen automatically, though. Modeling and instruction has to happen before peer review does more than draw smiley faces on papers.

David Nunuz' suggestion to have students practice via blog comments is a great way to encourage thoughtful responses. By looking for "interesting, constructive comments," Nunez avoids the bare minimum approach to which students will default if left to their own devices. Since blogs are great reading response tools, these blogs and comments will serve multiple purposes.

Kathleen West's suggestions on methods of grading blogs answered some of the questions I had about blog evaluations. I do believe that at first grading on completion only is important to help students create confidence in the modality. As time goes on, grading of blogs needs to be somehow based on the content of the blog rather than the minimal requirements of timeliness and length. I am intrigued by West's suggestion that a better blog is one that generates more worthwhile discussion.

Regarding the discussion of plagiarism, I agree that although sites like turnitin.com are useful in eliminating hours on Google checking suspicious papers, they do also assume students will plagiarize. I have seen this create a negative environment in my classroom before. As soon as the students find out they must submit their papers, they balk and worry that I, like the university in the example Beach gives, will take the computer's word for it rather than examining papers on a case-by-case basis. My policy is to look for significant finds on turnitin.com, and then to evaluate the offending passages myself. Almost every time it is the computer's misreading of the text and not a student's plagiarism that has been highlighted. Turnitin.com is very useful for situations in which students modify another student's work with their names on it.

Beach makes a vital point, one that is more important than whether or not such services should be used: "teachers need to do their part to provide a context in which it is difficult to plagiarize and in which students are not motivated to do so—for instance, by creating unique, interesting, engaging assignments instead of dull, canned assignments" (203). Who cares really whether students have correctly cited boring, useless information that students have been regurgitating for decades? Critical thinking, collaboration, and meaningful communication are the skills that we are looking for so we may as well eliminate situations in which a reliance on others' work exclusively are available.

Overall, whether multimodal or alphabetic, the texts our students write should not be a repackaging of what has happened before, but a reimagining of ideas, the juxtaposition of thoughts that are surprisingly complimentary or contradictory. When we ask students to write about old topics in the old ways, we are not teaching, but reminiscing.

Podcasts and Vlogs: Reader Response

Chapter 7 of Teaching Writing focuses on "sonic literacies" that can be practiced in many different ways and in diverse contexts.  To me, podcasts and vlogs have great potential in encouraging students to share their responses to what they have read with one another. 

In the past (as inspired by my time in the NWI Writing Project), I have asked a class to collaborate on a Daily Log while reading a novel (just one unit a year).  Each student in the class would be assigned a day for which he/she would be responsible for synthesizing what was discussed and learned that day in class.  These entries were written or typed and shared with the class at the beginning of the next class period before being placed in a binder in chronological order.  This assignment has worked well to keep students attuned to class discussions and provided a convenient resource for students who were absent.  Traditionally, I would assign this during May, also known as "Field Trip Month" when I could expect as much as 3/4 of my juniors to be away on any given day.

I would love to do this assignment as a vlog instead.  The time parameters would have to be adjusted, because it's too much to ask students to create a vlog post in the course of a single evening during which they also have many other academic, athletic, and extracurricular obligations.  Creating the vlog would have several benefits over the old daily log:  1)  students would be much more interested in the videos than in the reading of the log 2) authors of the vlog would have to think carefully about how best to present the previous day's information 3) students would be more invested in making a good vlog and might even compete with one another to be creative and funny 4)  these vlogs could be available online so that absent students could access them 24 hours a day.

It might also be interesting and a good class project for students (in a different unit, of course) record 30-60 second responses to the reading assignment with Audacity prior to coming to class.  The teacher can find "highlights" to share as a warm-up activity for the discussion for the day.  Ultimately, the class could take that vast collection of audio clips and collaborate on a podcast, video, wiki, blog--anything, really--to summarize and synthesize the class' reactions to a novel, collection of short stories, etc.

I appreciated very much that Beach et. al addressed the concerns we all have for students with learning disabilities.  These students are in our classes at all levels, labeled or not, and the suggestions given could really make a difference for a student.  One possibility suggested in the text was that a student could record themselves in an audio essay instead of composing an alphabetic text.  There are many times when this option would have been useful to me in the past, if only I had thought of it!  Sometimes students have the necessary mastery of the content, but are horribly hindered by the act of writing itself.  When the writing itself is not being graded, but instead the focus and purpose of testing is the content, and audio essay is an excellent work-around for those with disabilities. 

For all students, being able to listen to their alphabetic text read aloud could be greatly beneficial in the study of voice.  We often advise students to read their writing aloud to themselves, but they feel foolish doing it and/or do not allow themselves enough time for proper revision.  Depending on the sophistication of these programs, Text to Speech tools could be invaluable in helping students to hear the rhythms their words and sentences create.

All in all, I am encouraged to see new (to me) ways of integrating digital tools in the classroom that will address the ongoing difficulties that traditional approaches have not been able to solve. 

Do me a favor?

Hey, everybody!  Further to my plot to take over the Internet with my juniors next year, it would be very helpful to me to see what Edmodo looks like with actual people interactions.  If you're willing to just join my "class" and tell me what you think, it would help me a lot! 

Edmodo.com
Sign in as a student
umf4q3 is the group code.

it's fast and easy.

Thanks very much!

The Changing Look of Composition

Before I start reacting to the readings for this week, I would like to share two links with everyone.  The first is Edmodo, which looks suspiciously like Facebook, yet alleges that it is completely private and to have access, students must login with a randomly generated code provided to the teacher (much like turnitin.com, which my school already uses).  VERY COOL!  It's way prettier than Moodle, and there's only teeniest of learning curves.  I figured it out in about five minutes.

 
 

Link the second!  This is a news article that I ran across which happens to be talking about the need for social networking tools to become a part of the classroom. Here it is.  Thank you, MaryAnn, for teaching me how to hyperlink in Blogger.

 
 

I would like to start with Shipka's article, "A Multimodal Task-Based Framework for Composing."  If I were only able to give one article to my department head and principal about multimodal composing, this one would probably be it (selectively highlighted of course!).  Shipka is able to articulate in this article that while multimodal composition appears to be an entirely different process from alphabetic text composition, it accomplishes the same goals as traditional writing with better results.  Shipka asserts, "that what students come to understand about potentials for processes, processing, and revision is far richer and more complex when practiced within this kind of goal-directed multimodal task-based framework" (302).  Students generally abhor the concept of revision.  They want to quickly tap out something in a Word document, hit print, and never look at it again.  Students do not typically feel this way about revising multimodal texts, particularly when they are allowed to choose the media for their presentations.  I have had students in the past who have loved making videos so much, that they did asked for permission to create a video instead of the more traditional text requested.  I was more than happy to let them try it and we hashed out what would have to be accomplished in their video.  These students spent hours and hours working on, revising, editing, re-taping, and layering their video and it was amazing.  Now these students had access to these resources and technical knowledge on their own and were able to achieve this. 

 
 

There is a caveat to multimodal success.  Shipka writes, Increasing the range of semiotic resources with which students are allowed to work will not, in and of itself, lead to a greater awareness of the ways systems of delivery, reception, and circulation shape (and take shape from) the means and modes of production. Instead, I argue, composition courses present students with the opportunity to begin structuring the occasions for, as well as the reception and delivery of, the work they produce" (279-80). Just having video, audio, or other resources available does not ensure the types of higher level thinking that could potentially be associated with these types of composition.  Instead, metacognition seems to be the key to Shipka's success with her students' projects.  By requiring students to give her "head's up" about their ideas regarding the choices, execution, and revision of their projects, Shipka creates a learning environment in which it is not enough to simply turn in a finished product, but one in which the process--the minutiae of individual decisions leading to that finished product--are as valuable or more valuable to the instructor in evaluating that student's growth in the understanding of rhetoric. As Shipka puts it, "students must always account for the specific goals they aimed to achieve with their work and then specifically address how the rhetorical, material, methodological, and technological choices they made contributed to the realization of their goals"(287).

 

As I read Selfe's chapter, "Experimenting with Multimodality," I repeatedly starred various techniques to try next year when I am back in the classroom full-time. All the strategies about helping students take ownership of the technology they will use and teaching their peers to use the equipment are excellent suggestions. Students learn faster when they are teachers, and they rarely listen to any adult explaining how to use equipment. I also believe in the importance of "reading" texts of the type one is planning to compose before diving into the project. Asking students to find multimodal compositions could be an interesting assignment and might—gasp!—result in extra learning, as they will probably need to watch more than one video to find a good one and will want to wow their classmates with the wackiest/funniest video. Again, pre-screening is important for a high school classroom.

 

One interesting thought that Selfe shares is that "the less a teacher confesses to knowing about multimodal composing and digital composing tools, the more completely students feel able to invest their own time" (97). Students enjoy being the experts, and this takes quite a bit of pressure off the teacher. Selfe explained before that it was not necessary for the instructor to know everything about technology to undertake these types of compositions, but the concept that appearing to be an expert can actually be a detriment to student performance diffuses the anxiety a teacher might feel when beginning an experiment with multimodal composition.v

 

Finally, Selfe mentions at the end of chapter five that students benefit from "informal opportunities in which they analyze their own projects" (62). It is very important for students to have this practice time without the pressure of being graded and with time to make changes and adjustments based on peer feedback. Furthermore, peer feedback is more likely to be helpful with these types of assignments. If the fast-paced college schedule allowed time for peer feedback in our first project before presenting, we might have been able to solve problems that individual groups had due to knowledge gaps. My group had trouble with timing our slides and layering sound, which I'm sure others would have been able to assist us with (as they demonstrated competence with these issues in their own videos). Additionally, working on a complex project that requires revision after revision, it can become difficult to see what impression the project leaves on the first-time viewer. Feedback can put the author(s) back in touch with what they have created.

 

 

Pedagogy 2.0

I was very excited to read about wikis this week, as I really have no background in these at all except to deplore my students' reliance on Wikipedia as the ultimate authority on all things academic.  The possibilities for wikis as a tool in the classroom at all levels are great, particularly in the light of the constructivist views with which our class texts are certainly enamored.  As an undergraduate student, I felt that allowing students to construct meaning for themselves with guidance from the teacher was by far to be preferred as a method of teaching to the assembly line approach of spouting interpretations from a podium while students frantically take notes (or doodle in the margins).

My most successful pedagogical experiments have always been those in which students created the contexts for learning themselves.  Collaboration is a completely natural way for today's students to approach learning and they are confused about the concepts of original thought and plagiarism.  They feel that if the information is "out there" it is available to be used as a stepping stone to reach a higher level of understanding and that it is in no way "stealing" to do so.  If schools could just overcome the legal and financial obstacles to make wiki construction widely available and understood by educators, these learning tools could be invaluable to the learning process. 

In the state of Indiana, at least, the emphasis is not on specific content knowledge (in English classes), but on skills and critical thinking.  Wikis provide a natural way to achieve both types of objectives.  Students will, by nature of the medium, spend large amounts of time in the upper levels of Bloom's Taxonomy (synthesis and evaluation), rather than being passively dragged as high up the ladder as their teachers can force them via essay questions and class discussions.  Furthermore, the ownership the students have in their writing will ensure that they contribute, edit, and revise. They will see immediate value in their work for the edification of other students and will be excited when outsiders comment or ask questions.  I agree with Beach et al. in Teaching Writing when they say that "knowledge is constructed through a collaborative sharing of ideas (71).  As a teacher, I cannot take knowledge from myself and put it in students; rather, they have to start with prior knowledge of their own and build connections between texts, discussions, and research to build up that knowledge.

Learning to work collaboratively with peers is a difficult skill to teach and to learn, but one that is absolutely vital for today's students who wish to enter the workforce prepared for what they must do there.  The common complaints that are listed in Teaching Writing on page 72 are ones that I am very familiar with and are voiced by students, parents, counselors, and even teachers.  In particular the distrust of their peers' abilities and senses of responsibility to create good work are difficult to resolve.  Although teachers can do what Beach et al. suggest, to create mixed-ability groups, students recognize these groupings for what they are and often resent their role in the group, whether as high-achiever or struggling learner.  This is a difficult hurdle to jump and assignments must be carefully crafted to ensure fairness and reasonable expectations of all students.

Although students may resent collaborative assignments for the reasons in Teaching Writing just as Jody Shipka's students were flabbergasted by her assignments in "This was NOT an easy assignment," these tasks foster critical thinking at every hyperlink and every sidebar.  As student Josh Hibon noted regarding his wiki assignment, "I would have written a similar paper [to the blog], but it would have one with a biased perspective of what I thought about it, but getting their perspectives led to different conclusions" (Beach 88).  Traditional academic thought would perceive the change in Josh's opinion as the result of plagiarism because the new views would have been expressed as his own, but in reality, Josh has done what we all wish our students to do: he has researched the idea and discovered that his previous opinions were no longer valid given the evidence and was able to articulate the how and why of his changed opinion.

As regards McLoughlin and Lee's article, "Future Learning Landscapes, I found that their opinions are in line with the other authors we have read in terms of subscription to the social constructivist ideology.  On one point I did disagree, however.  I do not believe that students feel that educators who use sites like Facebook lose credibility.  Perhaps this was an attitude at the time of the study in 2007, but I have not encountered that feeling from students at all.  Perhaps it was more true of professors at the college level rather than high school teachers.  I do agree that "students may perceive instructors' attempts to co-opt such social technologies for educational purposes as intrusions into their space."  I would prefer to start with multimodal composition, publishing via YouTube and wikis rather than to jump right into Facebook or MySpace.  Although these tools have potential, there are so many tools available that above all, teachers must keep in mind the goals they are trying to achieve and the skills they wish to teach.  The digital tools must be shaped to fit the instructional objectives, not the other way around.

Overall, this week's readings made me want to get started right away with a wiki!  I can see multiple applications and now that I better understand what they are and how they can be used, I am eager to try!