"We all use myspace"

Yesterday, I introduced my students to the wiki we're going to use this semester. After talking them through logging in, I sent them to "doodle pages." These pages were meant to give them a chance to learn how to use the wiki interface by using it. I planned to give them 25-30 minutes to play on those pages.

After about 10, a few of the students started looking bored. I tried to encourage them to experiment, to find out what they could make the site do. One of them said something like, "Mr. Sutton, we know how to use this. We all use myspace."

The more I think about that response, the more it interests me. I'm not that familiar with myspace, though I've read about how it affects students. Maybe the wiki interface and myspace's interface are similar. Their rhetorical spaces, however, have very different purposes. The wiki is an extension of our classroom, a place for them to put their work. Some things people put on myspace would be inappropriate there, and we discussed that. I told them that they couldn't post things like cursing for the sake of cursing, unwanted romantic advances, or discriminatory language. Some of the doodle pages, however, come close to those barriers, though at the level of innuendo.

I wonder if the similar feel of the spaces could have thrown my students. Like I said, I don't use myspace, but the student who I quoted above seems to be saying that the wiki looks a lot like it, just like papers for different classes can look the same on the surface. Turning in a history paper in biology, however, will earn a person a failing grade. Writing requires more than getting the surface stuff right; it also requires knowing your purpose and audience. Given that they had only just seen the wiki, maybe they hadn't had a chance to figure out its purpose and audience.

I'm not trying to criticize the student I quoted, or any of my students. They caught onto using the wiki quickly, and they're doing good work in the other activities we've done. This experience just highlighted the importance of figuring out the purpose behind a writing act, which is one of the major concepts we've discussed (and will discuss all semester). In an earlier entry, I said I wanted to use blogs and wikis to teach students how to write for a larger audience. It seems like they can also help us learn about purpose.

One week in the books. . .

I didn't have a chance to reflect after last Wednesday's class. The week was chaotic, and the class felt the same way. I left being concerned that I was going too fast, leaving the students behind. Today's class left me feeling better. We finished up talking about audience, then shifted to invention work on the literarcy narrative assignment. While I'm not sure, I feel somewhat confident the students were able to come up with an idea they can start working on. We ended by looking at critical reading, particularly summarizing.

One thing that really stuck in my mind was the feel of the class, particularly when the students were working in groups. I heard a lot of conversation and careful thinking about the assignments. I also heard them having fun (or at least as much fun as one can have in an English class). That's what I want. I don't see the point of classes where everyone sits there really serious, only talking when the teacher identifies them. Writing is supposed to be fun, and as long as the students get the work done, I don't mind if things are a little loose.

On Wednesday, I'm going to introduce them to the wiki. I've got it set up enough for us to use, at least initially. There's more refinements to be done, but I can't do those until we set up the groups (another project for Wednesday). Still, we'll be able to play on the wiki next time.

Basically, I think the class is gelling. If we can keep this attitude going, I think we'll have a good semester.

The first day of class

Towards the end of the summer, I got swamped for time and didn't blog as much as I wanted. Now that the semester has started, I'm going to use this as an online reflective teaching journal.

My 1031/1032 class, the one whose assignments I have been working through in this blog, met for the first time yesterday. Most of the class was preparing for and completing the diagnostic, which is based on a set of newspaper articles on the same subject. The students did a good job discussing the pieces, catching a lot of the specific details that they would need for their essays. I'm glad some of them feel comfortable talking in class. Except for some printer problems, the writing part of the diagnostic seemed to go well. I haven't had a chance to look at the diagnostics yet, but I'm feeling confident about the class.

Inbetween discussing the diagnostic pieces and writing the diagnostic, I talked through some of the high points of the syllabus. No one seemed worried about the wiki component, or most of the other assignments. Of course, the students didn't have a long time to reflect on what I was talking about, so some may have questions or concerns when we meet tomorrow.

Overall, I think the class started well. Next time, we'll look at some of the fundamental concepts of the course: purpose, audience, and the writing process. I'd hoped to give them time on the wiki, but it isn't ready yet. That'll have to wait until next week.

Remembering what it's like to be a learner

I've spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks figuring out computer-related stuff. In order to completely redo a clearinghouse of links I maintain for Kean's College Composition program, I've been increasing my knowledge of HTML coding. I've also been trying to set up an RSS reader and learn how to work a wiki. All of these things are making me feel like a student again, mostly because of repeated experiences in them.

Early on with each of these projects, I encountered frustration. I couldn't remember how to set up RSS feeds, even though a colleague had talked me through them five times. At least half of a page on the clearinghouse site wasn't showing up, even though the code looked right. I created a new wiki page with a link, then forgot a day later how I did it. In all three cases, the help files for the programs I used didn't seem that helpful. For a couple of days, I used portions of my vocabulary one might not expect a professor to be so fluent in.

After I finished getting annoyed, I looked for alternative sources of information. I showed my colleague Charles Nelson the code for the webpage. I read Will Richardson's chapter on RSS readers. I kept puttering around with the wiki. All of these searches were guided by goals: there was something I wanted to do, and I felt the sources of information would tell me how to do it in an efficient, simple way.

The first two sources were extremely useful. Charles noticed where I had left out a bracket in my HTML code, which put everything on the page in a link instead of the URL address I wanted to include. Richardson's clear descriptions showed me exactly what to do. I was also able to find information I wasn't expecting. Charles knew some code I didn't that helped make the divisions of my webpage easier to see. Essentially, the extra help not only met my goals but extended my knowledge.

There were also eureka moments. While puttering around with the RSS reader and Richardson's book and looking at an older version of a friend's blog, I finally remembered how to set up a feed for blogs. The eureka was even stronger with the wiki. After a few days of batting my head against the wall, I read the help files a little more carefully and found out several ways to create new pages on the site, as well as how to add them to the menu bar. While external sources helped in these cases, I don't know if I'd consider these experiences the same type as the ones I discussed in the previous paragraph. Consulting the book and my colleague were both more direct; I knew they could help me and I knew what to ask. The experiences in this paragraph were less focused. I knew what I wanted to learn, but I didn't know how to ask it.

Regardless of how I met the goal, I felt satisfied because I had met it. I've said earlier that I'm not the most techno-savvy person in the world, and I have been concerned that I won't know these programs well enough to teach them to my students. I'm not as worried any more. There's still more I need to know about the wiki, but the basics are clearer.

It would be great if I could figure out a way to have my students go through this same set of feelings when they learn in the classroom. It's hard to do, though. My learning was motivated by intrinsic needs; for many students, the primary motivation in the classroom is grades, which are extrinsic. Satisfaction in learning can also be hard to create when students don't have a personal connection to their work (and I don't consider grades a personal connection). The frustration can also be hard to work through unless someone has experience getting through similar issues, and age makes getting those experiences easier. If the frustration seems insurmountable, people give up. Essentially, giving students the same set of feelings and experiences I had over the last couple of weeks can be hard.

That doesn't mean I don't try, just like all the other good teachers I know. After all, learning to teach is just another form of learning. There's always something else to figure out with it, just as now I need to figure out how to add another source to my RSS reader.

Am I blogging?

Over the weekend, I read Will Richardson's Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. If you're an educator interested in the possibilities of blogging and other web-based software for your classroom, this is a great read. Richardson includes a lot of ideas about how blogs, wikis, and other programs can be used. He definitely feels passionate about his subject, giving the sense that even techno-semiliterates like me can use these programs effectively. Because of my plans to use a wiki, I focused most of my reading on that section of the book, though I did read the rest of it.

In the chapter on blogs, Richardson says he sees them creating a new writing genre, which he called connective writing. He states connective writing is "a form that forces those who do it to read carefully and critically, that demands clarity and congency in its construction, that is done for a wide audience, and that links to the sources of the ideas expressed" (29). All of these characteristics are also important for academic writing. They are also not things people do naturally. If blogging can help students develop these skills, then it serves a valuable purpose.

I was a little troubled, though, when Richardson makes a list of blog uses, only some of which he considers "blogging as an academic exercise" (32). Number two on the list is "journaling, i.e 'This is what I did today'"(32). So far, my blog has almost all been "this is what I plan to do next fall," which probably counts as a variation on "This is what I did today." Does that mean I haven't been blogging, even though these messages are appearing on a site connected to Blogger.com?

The difference between me and Richardson here might be one of definition. For him, blogging seems to be a genre, a form of writing. For me, blogs a medium, like writing with ink or using a typewriter. The medium can be used for a lot of different reasons. One academic ideal can be connective writing, and it is definitely an ideal that should be aimed towards. However, some students have trouble getting words out or getting past their fear of audience. For them, connective writing would be really scary or difficult. Knowing that the person whose ideas you're writing about could write back would be enough to induce a heart attack. (I put off writing this entry for a couple of days just because I was afraid Richardson might come across it. Then, I decided it'd be nice to have proof someone besides my friends are reading this thing). A student writing about their own life, without adding in other sources, might be easier. Once they reach a high enough level of comfort, then they can start using blogs "for extended study and reflection on a topic," which Richardson considers something older students should do (33). Even some older students, however, may need time to reach that level.

Let me give an example to clarify. When I tell my students about my dissertation, they're almost universally shocked that anyone could write something 150-odd pages long. They swear they could never do that. I didn't either, when I was a college freshman. It took me nine years of learning at the college level to be able to pull it off, starting with three page papers in freshman-level classes. I wouldn't expect my students to write a dissertation the second they enter my classroom, nor do I expect them to write a perfect college paper. They, like any writer, need time and support and practice. Part of practice is just getting words down. If writing about their day in a blog helps a student write more fluently and gives them the feeling they can write, I consider that use an academic exercise. It isn't the only use for blogs, but it's an important one.

Just to clarify, Richardson's book is great. I agree with a lot of his ideas. The levels of blogging, however, just got me the wrong way, just like discussions about making students read only the canon sometimes do. I just want mine to read and write and not mind doing either.

Refining the for further reading assignment

I've done some more thinking about the for further reading assignment (described here). We'll start it as a class by developing a set of topics that are of interest to first-semester college students. We'll develop them as part of a lesson on invention strategies, though I'm not sure exactly which strategies I'll teach with this assignments. Once we come up with a list as a class, students will need to find one source (that doesn't repeat a classmates) every week, and the topics will vary. I haven't decided if students will be able to choose a topic, or if everyone will be looking about the same topic on the same week. Maybe the class will decide; I can see benefits to both approaches.

In order to help them find sources, we'll spend some time talking about how to locate sources on the Internet and on library databases, as well as how to evaluate the sources students find. We'll also talk about summarizing and responding at this stage, since they'll need both strategies in order to complete the assignment.

With this structure, students will create at least 10 bibliographies of sources, building them one entry at a time. They'll also improve their skills at researching, summarizing, and responding, all important skills for college and professional life. Work-wise, I don't think it'll be too bad, though the word counts will need to be short (probably no more than 250 words for both summary and response). I can also limit or cut assignments that I used to give daily, so that the students don't get too overwhelmed.

This assignment definitely makes more sense to me now. I'll continue to refine it, but I think it's close to where I want it to be. If anyone has ideas or notices something I've missed, please let me know.

Possible assignment: Preface

The decision to switch to a wiki interface for my students' online readers gave me an idea for a new assignment. Most anthologies have a preface that explains the focus of the collection and prepares readers for it. Each student group could write the preface for their anthology.

This assignment would be collaborative; all of the members of a particular group would need to work together to create the preface. They'd also have most of the semester to prepare it, to give a chance for a theme to develop naturally from the topics they choose instead of a theme being forced on them early on, as will as give us the chance to study some sample prefaces and determine genre characteristics. The wiki interface will allow them to revise and edit the preface throughout the semester. It will also allow me to see the changes they make, giving me some insight into how the students' understanding of revision might be changing.

The only problematic part of the assignment I can think of comes in grading it. Students tend to be grade-conscious, and someone will worry that they aren't getting a fair grade because of having to depend on others. That idea showed up throughout my research into assessing collaborative writing. That research, however, also gave me some ideas of how to set up assessment mechanisms that will respond to their concerns. I can include a peer evaluation score in the grade. Also, the ability to trace revisions in a wiki will help determine who has done what, if the interface lets me see what made which changes. If it can, I have a useful double-check to make sure the grade is fair.

I'm really getting excited about this course design. It'll definitely be a new approach for me, and I think it'll also engage my students. In addition, the wiki interface may provide some interesting data on how students learn to revise, data I can use to improve my teaching.

Technology as part of learning to write, or keeping the horse in front of the cart

My colleague, Charles Nelson, is probably the major proponents of classroom blogging in my department. He's also a good friend and frequent sounding board. Almost every week, he tells me about some new site or freeware he's found that might be useful for the classroom. If you're interested in seeing some of his recommendations, look at this page or some of the posts in his blog, Explorations in Learning.

I usually leave these talks both energized and nervous. The energy comes from having some new ideas I can use suggested by someone I trust and who thinks through the issues surrounding technology in the classroom carefully. The nervousness comes from wondering how I can figure out these new technologies. While I do have some technological literacy, I'm not at the high end of the scale. Any program I adopt for my classes, I have to learn how to use well enough so that I can help my students. Otherwise, they get frustrated, and I get embarrassed.

I also wonder sometimes how my students respond to my use of technology. The focus of a writing class should be helping students learn how to communicate better, usually with words, though some other symbol systems are just as useful. The Internet is definitely a form and forum for communication, one that is becoming more and more important. Students, especially those who come from backgrounds with little access to technology, need to learn how to use the Internet well enough to survive. That's part of the reason I use WebCT. However, how can I keep that form of literacy balanced with the other forms students need to learn, like the traditional academic forms their other professors expect? If I spend too much time teaching them to use computers, will they see my class as a computer class instead of a writing class that uses computers?

I feel like I'm rambling a bit, so maybe an example will help focus my thoughts. I've nearly decided that a wiki interface would better represent an anthology than a blog would. There are a lot of free (or cheap) wiki sites, and it probably wouldn't be hard to create four or five wikis for my students to post their work on. However, which service would be best? Does "best" mean the easiest to use, the most cutting edge, a combination of those, or something else entirely? How much programming language will I need to teach students so that they can post their work in the way they want it to appear? Is taking that time appropriate for a writing classroom? If I don't take time, will they learn it on their own, or am I setting them up for frustration that can interfere with learning?

Ideally, I feel technology should be a tool in the classroom, just like paper, chalk, scrolls, or clay tablets. Any of those tools can be useful for helping people learn to write. All require some degree of training in order to use them effectively, to the point where writers can use them to convey meaning effectively. The trick comes in how much time it takes to reach that level of proficiency, and how much time that leaves for working on other subjects.

Major essay two: two possibilities

I've been thinking about two possible tacks to take with the second major assignment my students will do. As I've done in earlier posts, I want to spend some time thinking in writing about them. If any reader wants to give me feedback, feel free.

Possibility one: Defining a Problem on Campus. This assignment is essentially the first half of a problem-solution paper. Students will identify a problem on campus and explain why it is significant. Parking will be excluded (it's a problem on every campus), but anything else goes. The students need to conduct some basic research to learn about the problem, which could include observation, interviewing, or checking school records.

While I know this assignment works, it doesn't really excite me. It's a really common assignment, and I'm not sure how much variation I'll see. I'm also a little nervous about having students write about problems at my school in a public forum. While I don't tell my students what to say, I would be responsible for their comments, which could have effects on my job security. Admittedly, this is a failure of nerve on my part, but I like my job and would like to keep it. Outside of the campus community, I'm not sure who would want to read about the problems my students select. Since I want to have a larger audience than my classroom, the assignments may need to be ready to engage that audience.

The one positive for this assignment is that I know it works. It helps students learn the basics of argumentation (i.e. claim, reasons, evidence) that the third essay will develop. There's something to be said for sticking with what works. However, my goal is to reinvent the class. That could make the safe choice a wrong one.

Possibility two: Analyzing Presentations of School. With this assignment, students would pick some representation of school in popular culture, such as a movie, television show, or book. They would analyze how that representation presents education, backing up their assertions with evidence from the source.

I'm actually leaning more towards this assignment. It should engage students by targeting their interests. It will also build on the thesis-support pattern we looked at in the first assignment (the literacy narrative), as well as the kind of argument I was talking about earlier. If their blogs have a larger audience than mine seems to, readers will be more interested in this kind of analysis than possibility one.

I am a little concerned about students finding an artifact to analyze. I can think of a lot of movies or TV shows set in a school. Accessing them creates a problem. I don't want my students to feel pressured to buy a movie so they can watch it several times to pick apart. For some of my students, I think a Blockbuster rental would be an extra expense. While I could pull from my personal sources, that would limit the choices available to students. Even after the students find an artifact, they'll still need to take time to analyze it, time I'll need to factor into the schedule with checkpoints that will allow me to keep an eye on the students' progress.

I still need to think about it, but the second option seems like the better one. It might be difficult to set up, but I've got several months. If anyone feels I've overlooked something, please let me know. My students will thank you.

Are blogs the best option?

Students in my classes do a lot of group work, everything from analyzing a model essay to workshopping to writing a single essay as a group. I want to continue that pattern in their blogs. Each group of students (which will be about 4-5 people) will have their own blog, and they will all post their work to the same blog. I'm hoping this approach will mirror the experience of a print anthology. Each section will present work on the same genre (like the literacy narratives), each taking different perspectives. Combined, all of the pieces will give a more developed view of the issues raised by the genre and in our larger theme of the first semester experience. Students may also decide to develop a themed anthology, where they agree to look at one aspect of the course theme. With the right technology, there's a lot they can do to make this topic their own.

I've started having second thoughts, however, about using blogs as that environment. Blogger.com offers collaborative blogs, but I haven't investigated them enough to see if they'd work the way I want them to (or if I can figure out how to make them do what I want). The blog interface may not have the flexibility I want, by which I mean the ability to group the genres and the for further reading sections together. Of course, I still need to investigate the different options, so it's too early to say I'm abandoning blogs. I'm not prepared to give up the real audience aspects of cyberspace environments; I just want to make sure I find the one that best meets my goals and my students' needs. If anyone has some recommendations, I'd be interested in hearing them.

NJWA 2006

On Monday, I presented at the seventh annual New Jersey Writing Alliance (NJWA) Spring Conference. NJWA aims to build bridges between secondary schools and colleges in New Jersey, and the conference theme this year--"We're All in It Together: solving Writing Problems Across the High School-College Divide"--emphasized that aspect. I want to comment on a couple of parts of the conference I found interesting.

In the keynote address, Ann Jurecic identified three characteristics of college writing:

1. Writing occurs in all disciplines, and the writing will be a significant part of their course grades.
2. The assignments will require students to work with lengthy and challenging texts, requiring them to read those texts carefully. Most of the texts will be nonfiction.
3. Most of the writing students will do is argumentative, will they have to make a point and support it with specific evidence and reasoning.

Based on my experience, all of these points are definitely true. Most academic writing requires the writer to work with some sort of text in some way: respond to it, argue against it, integrate it into the writer's point, and numerous other approaches. That text isn't usually literary (outside of English classes anyway). Essentially, students need to learn how to read nonfiction, using the same close reading skills English teachers normally apply to literature. While English teachers can help students learn those skills, the skills need reinforcement in other classes, where students read something besides textbooks.

The third point is also one that students need a lot of reinforcement on. Arguments, however, can be hard to teach. In addition, high school students aren't developmentally at the place where supporting an argument comes easily. My colleague Sally Chandler made this point in our panel, and most of the audience seemed to agree with it. Yet the more practice students receive making a point and backing it up, the easier it will come to them.

Jurecic ended the keynote by stating there needs to be more systematic connections between high schools and colleges. Those connections are essential, but not many of them exist. More often, it seems like college professors spend more time complaining about what our students can't do. Her talk, and NJWA, provides one kind of connection, but there need to be many others.

--

On a different note, I also attended a presentation by Laura M. Nicosia on online study guides. After a classroom experience where a student was covertly looking at a study guide, she gave her class an assignment to evaluate each guide, seeing which ones were the most useful for understanding the text. I like this idea. Students have a definite interest in these kind of sources, and having them evaluate them would be a good way to teach evaluating sources in general. Also, it may help them realize the purpose of study guides: to reinforce a person's understanding of a text they have already read, not as a substitute for reading the text.

I've attended NJWA for the last three years, and I definitely find it a useful conference. If any of my readers (and if I have any readers) who are New Jersey teachers, I strongly recommend joining the organization. You can find more information on it at their website.

Too many changes?

As I said in an earlier entry, I'm planning to do some major changes to the way I teach composition. One of them is having my students keep a blog. The other is using Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's new book They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. This text introduces students to some of the basic rhetorical moves that make up academic writing.

While some people probably don't like the templates given in the book, I think they're necessary for beginning writers. Academic discourse is everyone's second language; none of us (including long-time professors) were born speaking or writing it. If someone doesn't have a background in a language, they have no clue how to start using it. Graff and Birkenstein present the moves clearly, in language that should make sense to the average college freshman. It is a basic introduction, but, as they say, once someone knows what to do, they'll make the moves automatically, without the need for a template.

The complication, however, comes in They Say, I Say's focus on responding to other people's ideas. The first major essay for my students will probably be a literacy narrative. In it, they're not really responding to anyone's ideas (at least as far as I can figure out for now). This means we may not need the book for a month or so. Of course, I could talk about summarizing texts separately; they're going to be part of the "For Further Reading" assignment, and I don't want to wait on them. Also, I'll return to the idea of critical reading and responding to texts throughout the semester. Giving a basic introduction to it early on, via the Graff book, will set the ground work that we complicate later. But will the students see it that way?

I guess my concern here comes down to trying to create a unified course, one where students can tell how everything fits together and they don't feel like we're covering useless information. We will spend a lot of time writing in response to texts, but we won't start there. Does that mean I should wait until we do start responding to texts before we use the new book?

This entry is messier than my earlier ones. However, most of what I'm doing in this blog is thinking in prose. Thinking should be messy, so I guess I'll live with the way this one looks. After all, the more ideas I work through now, the more cohesive the class will be.

Major essay one: literacy narrative

The first major essay my fall students will complete is in a genre that's becoming pretty common: the literacy narrative. This genre asks writers to describe their experiences with literacy, focusing on a few that are particularly significant. In my case, I use a pretty open definition of literacy: any symbol system used for communication. I also don't want students to limit themselves to only classroom events. Reading with parents or designing a web page can be just as powerful literacy events. Those events can also affect how students view the academic literacies we examine and practice in my class.

In addition to describing their experiences, students will need to say how that event contributed to their approach to writing now. This wrinkle will hopefully allow students to begin doing the kind of thesis-driven writing expected in the university. Thesis-driven genres require the rhetor (one who uses rhetoric) to support their statements with specific evidence. In my experience, students have trouble doing that, mostly because they write about topics that seem impersonal or distanced from their experience. Supporting a point in a literacy narrative should be easier because it draws on their experience. Once the assignment helps students understand the rhetorical moves involved, they should be better able to transfer those experiences to less familiar contexts.

As we work on this paper, I also hope to introduce some of the basic concepts of rhetoric to the students: purpose, audience, genre. We'll also talk about writing as a process and start looking at revision. All of these ideas are fundamental concepts. This unit will just introduce them; we'll spend the rest of the semester complicating them.

(Special thanks to Sally Chandler and Charles Nelson, colleagues and friends, who helped me think through the ideas in this assignment).

Possible assignment: For further reading

The main content of my students' online anthologies will be their own writing. There will probably be other assignments in there as well, though I haven't thought of many yet.

One I have decided to use is based on the for further reading section that appears in a lot of anthologies. This section is usually a bibliography (sometimes annotated) of other sources that discuss the same concept or issue as the readings in the anthology. The for further reading section in the blogs will be similar. In it, students will list web-based sources. Each entry will include a link to the source, a brief summary, and an evaluation/reaction to it. This will be a standing assignment that students will have to update throughout the semester.

I'm hoping the for further reading section will help sharpen my students' critical reading and research skills. They'll have to read the source carefully both to make sure it fits the theme of the section and to evaluate it accurately. In order to find the sources, they'll need to use search engines, and the topics will probably be off-kilter enough that they'll have to play with keywords. My colleague Charles Nelson had his students do a similar assignment this year, and it seemed to meet both goals for him.

While I'm basically committed to giving this assignment, it still has some rough edges. First off, I don't want multiple listings of the same source. If everything worked as it should, that wouldn't happen (there's plenty on the Internet, after all). However, I can see someone getting overwhelmed and not getting to the assignment until too late. Copying someone else's work would be a great temptation then. This is the problem that worries me the most.

Also, there may be a problem if we stick too closely to the further reading idea. I usually assign three major essays, plus a final reflective piece. Each essay would be in the same genre, which could limit the number of possible topics. My class may be able to overcome this problem by developing a list of topics that would fit in the general theme; then, each workshop group divides the list amongst themselves. This solution doesn't necessarily solve the no-repeating problem, but it may reduce the pool a student has to copy from within the class.

I'll need to continue to think out the nuances of this assignment. As always, I'd appreciate any feedback.

Blogging as learning about a real audience

Figuring out the audience is one of the most important actions a writer performs. No matter how well written a piece is, if it doesn't meet the audience's expectations and needs, it will lose some of its effectiveness. Literature can be excluded from this rule sometimes, but not always (think about the influence of best seller lists). As a result, learning how to analyze and adapt to an audience is an essential skill for beginning writers to learn.

While it is important, it is a hard thing to for students to apply in an isolated classroom. Instructors can construct assignments that ask students to write to a different audience, and most instructors are pretty good at pretending to be that audience. However, the instructor is the one who reads the work. No matter how good we are at pretending, some of our characteristics always leak through, some of which can affect the grade of an assignment. Logically, students are going to figure out those quirks and do their best to meet them. Pretending also doesn't give instructors full insight into all the needs of that audience. As a result, we may say something is all right that would make a real member of that audience would cringe.

I hope blogging will make my students aware of a real audience. If people comment on their work, they'll see where their arguments aren't clear, where the message isn't organized, and where they've severely ticked off someone else. The fact people can respond to my blog is definitely making me think carefully about what I write. For example, an earlier draft of the previous paragraph used "teacher" instead of "instructor." I like both terms, but I changed to instructor because it's more associated with college teaching. But isn't anyone who gets in front of a classroom and does a job like mine a teacher (including me)? Does my choice of that word risk excluding people who think of themselves as teachers, regardless of level? Will anyone care about that word choice besides me? I don't know the answer to those questions, but any comments on this entry will give me a sense of which is the better choice. I hope my students will have similar debates about their own writing.

Exposing one's writing to the world does come with dangers. While there's a lot of clear, reasoned discussion in cyberspace, there's just as much ranting and personal attacks. If a student receives that kind of feedback, they may not want to write any more, which runs counter to my goals as a teacher. I'm not sure exactly how to handle that yet, though I think the course theme will help. I'm planning to continue to think about this issue throughout the summer, and any suggestions would be appreciated.

Why I'm doing this

I suppose I should start this blog by talking about why I'm keeping it in the first place. Over the last five years, I've tried to incorporate more technology into my writing classes, mostly Blackboard and WebCT. I'm not quite as high-tech as some writing teachers, but I think what I have students do with technology helps them become better writers and thinkers.

Next fall, I plan to have my students use a blog to create an online reader, focusing on the experiences people have in their first semester of college. I hope using blogs will give them a sense of writing for a real audience (i.e. not just a teacher), which will motivate them to work harder on their writing and to learn more about how to write. Of course, I need to know how to use blogs first, so I can help them when they encounter problems. This blog is my efforts towards reaching that goal.

For a while, most of the posts will describe my plans for the course: the assignments I plan for them to do, the kind of topics we might write about, how we'll use the technology, and whatever else comes up. Feedback on my ideas, as long as done tactfully, will be gratefully appreciated (both by me and by my students). I may also talk about first-year writing in general, both the experiences I encounter in class and things I've read about or seen in the news. There won't be a much personal stuff here, but I hope some interesting conversations get started.