Keeping Up While Winding Down

image by Idea go

As another semester comes to a close, instructors necessarily turn much of their attention to evaluating and grading student work. Preliminary drafts of projects have been completed and revised by students---or not, the coaching offered and counsel issued by instructors has been heeded---or not, and the final versions of projects students turn in to instructors as evidence of their best work may successfully reflect just that—or not.

At this point, it’s possible for teachers to feel relieved, tired, frustrated, exhilarated, exhausted, ecstatic, or disappointed. In fact, it’s entirely possible for them to cycle through all of these emotions in the space of a single afternoon, especially if the afternoon was spent grading.

To combat grading fatigue, consider these tips:

• Pace yourself so you are not overwhelmed by an entire set of papers or exams at one sitting.  Get up and move around or take a walk after a set number of papers, especially if you realize that you are struggling to focus.  For those who can tolerate it, caffeine may offer some modest health benefits in addition to stimulating your brain temporarily and helping you maintain focus (The Mayo Clinic). 
• Harder to do at this late date, but schedule more time than you think you need for your grading sessions.
• Remember that the grade you assign to a final project is an evaluation of a single performance.  You needn't assume a defensive posture as you respond, just provide the necessary assessment and offer brief remarks that highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the project.
• Though you won't be seeing another draft of this piece, it is still legitimate to pose questions to the student. Students can always benefit from your specific questions about their intended meaning or writing choices.
• Recall that less is more; studies have shown that a few salient comments (or questions) have greater impact on future student performance than a page of detailed instructor comments.
• Devise and use a scoring guide of some kind (holistic or primary trait) to help communicate your evaluation clearly and efficiently.
• Conduct research: note and record consistent patterns of problems that students exhibit as a group.  It might be harder to remember these when you want to revise your instructions next semester or next fall if you don't jot them down now. 
• Talk to colleagues; share your utter joy and bitter disappointment as they happen.
• Call me if you need assistance with any of these tips!

Connections Unbound

Connecting people to ideas related to writing and through writing have been critical dimensions of the WAC Program from the start.  In fact, one of the first across-the-curriculum events sponsored by WAC and some other new initiatives in the late 1980s was a large-scale reading of Kurt Vonnegut's futuristic novel, Galapagos.

Common reading projects are a great way to engage students in a larger consideration of ideas than a single classroom experience can typically provide and, of course, are a great way to integrate relevant writing opportunities into courses to any degree an instructor desires. 

Faculty who've participated in recent common reading projects at Longview, such as The Plague and Affluenza, can attest to the value of having students read a book and connect it to what they are studying.  Many are already planning to incorporate Huxley's Brave New World into their courses next semester.

With Here Comes Everybody, we took a slightly different approach by informally inviting everybody at LV to check out some of Shirky's ideas and just play with them. Reactions to the book have been varied: some are struck by Shirky's analysis of social patterns, some feel they already had a grasp of the ideas he explores, others regard his ideas as ground-breaking and transformative, and a few don't agree fully with the way Shirky accounts for some of the social changes we've seen in the last two decades.

What matters is that people were considering these ideas about social media, social networks, and human behavior, probing the relationships between them, talking about them with others, and trying to put them into a broader phenomenological context.  Getting these important perspectives into circulation was really the point since not everyone's schedule could accommodate participation in the meet-ups.

Something else interesting happened with the read-along: Honors students discovered it and joined in the discussions.  As it turns out, the major theme for Phi Theta Kappa (PTK) this year is the "Democratization of Information," coincidentally a rather perfect fit with the book we chose to feature in this new way of engaging our Longview community.  (Although after reading Shirky's take on the six degrees of separation and social networking, I'm reluctantly beginning to doubt the existence of coincidence since he makes such a good case for how principles of probability rule.  And can I just say I think the notion of coincidence, while considerably less scientific, is way more fun?)

Keet Kopecky, LV Honors Program director and LV WAC Cadre member, explains how PTK and the Honors Program are connected: "MCC-Longview's Honors Program and the national honor society Phi Theta Kappa both require students to achieve and maintain a 3.5 GPA in order to join. Participants in both programs benefit from enhanced engagement in the classroom and through campus and community involvement."

Keet added that generous scholarships are available for active members of the Honors Program during their time at MCC-Longview and that there are significant scholarship opportunities for active members of PTK upon graduation and transfer to a 4-year university. Keet says that there is a large overlap between the membership of the Honors Program and PTK at Longview, so many of his honors seminar students are also members of PTK.

Keet is facilitating two honors seminar this semester, both entitled "Democratization of Information," since that is the 2010-2011 national PTK theme.  Keet said, "I always involve the students in designing my seminars, and when I mentioned Shirky's book, they enthusiastically embraced discussing it as part of the seminars."

He notes that students brought "generational and life-experience perspectives different from those of most Longview employees, making our monthly book meet-ups involving honors students, faculty, and staff quite rich and insightful."

At last week's seminars, Keet said his students "offered unsolicited comments in strong support of the faculty/staff/student book discussions and hoped that the college understood how much they liked the engagement with employees and hoped it would be repeated in the future."

I certainly can't speak for everyone at LV, but the WAC Program is definitely up for another read-along after our last meet-up for Here Comes Everybody this Friday, Nov. 12, at 2:00, at Next Door Pizza.  As always, you are more than welcome to join us!

In Their Own Words

Clips of Selected Interviews from WAC Digital Archives

(video compiled by Clay Bussey)

From its inception, the WAC Program at MCC-Longview was carefully researched and thoughtfully designed, which has unquestionably contributed to its longevity.  But the only way a program like this can thrive for 25 years is because people have taken its ideas to heart in their teaching and support of learning. 

WAC comes to life in classroom after classroom, semester after semester, year after year, because people like those featured in this selection of clips from interviews (conducted five years ago on our 20th anniversary) strongly believe writing is a unique and powerful mode of learning.  You see much evidence of it in the way they teach their courses.  But don't take my word for it; click on the video link and hear what those involved in WAC have to say. 

Why WI?

Over the past 12 years that Writing Intensive (WI) courses have been offered at MCC-Longview, people have occasionally wondered why we named it Writing Intensive.  Isn't the term "intensive" somewhat daunting and doesn't it suggest that students will do more work than they would otherwise?

Perhaps surprisingly, the answers are "no" and "no."  The running joke in the WAC Program is that we could have named the experience "Writing Euphoria" and students would still shy away because the word striking fear in their hearts is actually "writing" rather than "intensive."

We know this because during the earliest years of General Education writing assessment, we discovered that students were waiting until their last semester at MCC-Longview to take a composition course.  We also found that the more composition courses students had taken, the better they performed on the writing assessment.  Needless to say, this finding speaks well of the composition experiences orchestrated by English faculty. 

However, we all agreed that the kind of knowledge and writing experience recieved through composition courses would serve students much better if the courses were taken sooner rather than later. So the Writing Intensive requirement works, in part, as a powerful lever, steering students into the prerequisite, English 101, much earlier in their academic careers than they would elect to take it if left to their own devices.

What happens next is that faculty in other disciplines can build on that English 101 knowledge and experience by their embrace of the writing process and carefully designed assignments marked by thoughtful use of drafts and feedback meant to develop further the critical thinking abilities of their students.

The irony is that a Writing Intensive course is not more work for the students who take it, but, rather, for the faculty member who teaches it.  For students, such courses offer interesting and unique writing projects just as many MCC-Longview courses do. 

In Jim Pratt's Intro to Microcomputer Applications, for instance, students create a business plan for a hypothetical business they invent.  In the Math-English learning community, Bridget Gold and Becky Foster have students do an array of writing projects, including letters explaining math concepts, similar to the kind featured in the book they read, Letters to a Young Mathmetician. 

Matthew Westra encourages his Adolescent Psychology students to develop their own assignment by investigating an aspect of the field which particularly interests them. Those going into teaching can devise a curriculum pertinent to adolescent development while others choose to examine the historical, social, or medical dimensions of this stage.

Anne Nienhueser's WI project in her online course invites students to design a green home by researching ecological and economical sources and applying the concepts they've learned in Foundations of Physics.

For instructors, these courses reflect an emphasis on revision and an obligation to provide considered feedback to each student on a project draft so that the student can re-think some of the writing choices he or she has made.  Students then have the opportunity to fully consider the impact and effectiveness of their writing and make changes to strengthen the project by revising it before turning it in for final evaluation by the instructor.

Once students take a WI course, they typically are quite sold on its value.  In fact, it is not at all unusual for students who have transferred to 4-year colleges to report back on how valuable these WI courses were in preparing them for their coursework at the next level and even for employment beyond that. 

The LV WAC Cadre ultimately settled on the name "Writing Intensive" because they knew that most of the 4-year schools to which our students transfer use this identifier. For better or worse, it seemed logical and appropriate to call the experience by its most recognizable name.

Check out MCC-Longview's Spring 2012 WI offerings and please direct your students to them!  The instructors you'll find listed there are quite willing to discuss the nature of the projects and course work with interested students.

Power Tools

When I first came to Longview, you could open up a volume of Encyclopedia Britannica on the reference shelves in the front room of the library to the term "technology" and find a lengthy entry written by one of my former professors and mentor at the University of Missouri-Columbia.  Dr. Robert F.G. Spier, Anthropology professor emeritus, is a premier authority on technology of an ancient kind: tools of other times by which people hunted and gathered and generally made their lives and survival easier.

It's startling to think how swiftly the word "technology" has been sharpened into a far more narrow meaning and one that is mostly computer-related.

Looking at an online encyclopedia today is a far different and more complex experience than flipping through a printed volume.  Search terms lead you to more search terms and and you quickly realize that a single screen is rife with research possibilities: lists of related articles, names of contributors, and sample APA and MLA citations.  It can be daunting even when you know where you are headed.

Which may help explain the popular appeal of Wikipedia. It seems like only yesterday that the mere term invoked incredulousness and cynicism in the minds of college professors and, well, me.  An encyclopedia that was instantly revisable and composed of collaboratively written entries and without the veracity of a refereed publication or peer-reviewed journal? Who would buy such an idea?  Almost everyone, it turns out, albeit ten years later.

In late 2010, we find ourselves teaching a generation of students for whom Wikipedia is the "go-to" source. Is that a bad thing?  Not necessarily.  I now use it as a starting point for looking up things or people I know absolutely nothing about, like a band I recently heard on the radio called the Magnetic Zeroes or a term that I'd like a bit more explanation of than a dictionary will offer.  It would be an unlikely starting point for my own professional research, however.

For students who are novice researchers, especially on topics new to them as so many of those they will study in the Gen Ed curriculum are, Wikipedia might, for now, appear slightly less frenetic than an online traditional encyclopedia.  It can provide an informal way to get a general sense of a topic before pursuing more comprehensive coverage of it in academic or other sources located through databases.

Whether you love or hate Wikipedia, providing some context for it and counsel on how to approach it in regard to your assignment is probably time well spent. Chances are good that when it comes to investigating a topic, Wikipedia is the research power tool of choice for many students.

FYI: Clay Shirky discusses extensively the evolution of Wikipedia and its emergent features in Chapter 5 ( p.108-142) of Here Comes Everybody.

Do you encourage students to use Wikipedia?  If so, what are your expectations of it?  Do you establish parameters for its use?  Do you overtly discourage it?  Tell all.

Poetry in Motion

When explaining that writing is a performance-based activity, I often use a sports analogy to illustrate that point. Writing is like playing a sport: you have to engage in it to improve.

Although we tend to think of it as strictly a cerebral process, writing is also very much a kinesthetic one, whether fingers are clicking against a keyboard or wrapped around a pen moving across paper.

Reading about writing or grammar does little to change the actual performance, just as reading about basketball wouldn't have much impact on one's ability to shoot hoops, though such reading could have value for myriad other reasons. 

What improves writing is, well, writing, which gives us yet another good reason for striving to incorporate many writing opportunities for our students throughout their time at Longview.

Watching the Longview volleyball coach give counsel to some young volleyball players recently reminded me of other dimensions of the writing-athletics analogy. The coach masterfully instructed the players on discrete parts of the game and patiently illustrated moves to make subsequent game play more effective.

This session wasn’t a game, so the stakes were lower, allowing much instruction and practice to be accomplished without game-time pressure. Understated sessions like these, which encourage concentrated focus, are arguably the building blocks of high-intensity play.

Not a minute was wasted and players were absorbed into the moment, without distractions, guided to more advantageous spatial orientation by the elegant movement and succinct communication of an expert.

At his urging and after watching him effortlessly model specific moves, the players stretched their arms above their heads and with their open hands formed triangle shapes in the air, their fingertips repeatedly lifting the ball and pressing it into flight.

The take-away message here? When it comes to student writing, teachers are very much operating as coaches, offering critical and timely feedback and pinpointing the areas of performance that need improvement or that could benefit from another approach.

The mix of low-stakes and high-stakes assignments found in various courses throughout our General Education curriculum, the foundational writing instruction provided in composition courses, and the required Writing Intensive experience all serve to ensure that our students get plenty of writing time and performance-enhancing counsel while at Longview.

If you’re searching for fresh ideas for your own classroom coaching or just want to see pure poetry in motion, think about catching a Longview Lakers volleyball game before season's end.

Other sports analogies?  Share them in the comments section.

If Programs Could Talk

ON TURNING 25:

AN INTERVIEW WITH LONGVIEW'S WAC PROGRAM


How are you celebrating your 25th anniversary?

Instead of hosting one giant event, we decided to integrate our celebrating into all that we normally do. For instance, when we distributed “How to Write in College” tip sheets and blue highlighters emblazoned with “Write to Learn!” to students at the Student Resource Fair, we talked with them about how Longview instructors have been committed to using writing to help students learn for the past 25 years. They were impressed; the program is now older than most of them.

We also definitely plan to make the 25th anniversary part of our main student event on May 4, 2011, Imagination Longview: An Interactive Gallery of Student Work, which features students sharing their course projects with the larger Longview community and talking with attendees about what they learned.

We designed some ongoing activities for the entire Longview community, such as the read-along of Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody, as a way of instigating broad discussion of ideas about our communication behaviors in professional and personal arenas.

It seemed logical to launch our WAC blog, The Lake Effect, in conjunction with the anniversary since it represents a new way for instructors to engage with the program beyond the workshops. The blog will allow us to highlight hallmark aspects of the program as well as some of the great people who have been involved through the years.

In faculty workshops this year, we’ll be talking about the dramatic shifts in writing contexts and practices that have occurred in the past 25 years.

How has WAC changed?

Since it began pre-Internet, WAC was more event-driven when it was first taking off 25 years ago. They were trying to create an overall awareness about writing as a learning tool. The original group who designed the WAC Program thoroughly researched the WAC literature of the time and laid a rock-solid foundation.

The primary focus, though, has always been on professional development for faculty, whether through individual consultations with the WAC Coordinator or interdisciplinary workshops and forums.

What is the impact, value of having many disciplines involved?

From the beginning, the teaching of writing was framed as a responsibility of all instructors regardless of discipline, so the WAC Program was created expressly to support all full and part-time faculty at Longview. It was deliberately structured so that it belonged to all departments.

Sharing the writing conventions and values of their own subject area with colleagues from other disciplines gives instructors a much broader perspective on writing. They also realize why certain writing strategies and genres are more effective in some fields than in others. It can be stimulating and invigorating for instructors to share assignment ideas and evaluation techniques.

The WAC Program also provides information to instructors to help them understand the theories and practices that inform college-level writing instruction.

How has the program grown?

WAC at Longview has always been about creating and sustaining a culture of writing. It started with a handful of instructors from different disciplines interested in a new pedagogy and grew to include instructors in every division, full and part-time, engaged in practices that are now ubiquitous here at Longview. And now students are very much a part of the conversation. Instructors help them see the value of writing within the course as well as beyond the classroom in their future professional lives.

In the mid 1990s, the WAC Program interfaced with General Education writing assessment efforts and then developed the Writing Intensive model adopted by MCC over 10 years ago. Writing Intensive courses offer students powerful writing experiences beyond their composition courses so they are ready for the next level, whether it’s a 4-year school or employment.

Honestly, the program thrives because it was well-designed and supported and the whole college contributes to it: instructors get involved and avail themselves of the WAC Program resources; library staff assist students in the projects instructors create, guiding students to credible sources and with the research process; the Writing Center helps students with the entire writing process from creating drafts of projects to revising them; the Campus Life and Leadership Office coaches us on our student events; division chairs and division assistants help get WI courses scheduled; advisors and counselors help students understand why and when to take a WI course; administrators offer tremendous moral support and the necessary budget.

Where do you see WAC in the future?

Writing is now and always has been a central academic process. People probably write more today outside of school than they do in school. How writing is configured in teaching and learning environments will shift, of course, as new technologies emerge and trends in education develop. But the idea that writing is the key to deep understanding and long-term retention isn’t going away.

Instructors already incorporate more digital and multi-media options for students as a way of expanding the possibilities for projects. Expectations in regard to visual literacy will continue to evolve.

WAC will continue to support teaching and learning practices and innovations of all kinds---from distributed learning to service learning and everything in between, even as it adapts to new writing contexts.

Longview’s WAC Program will always hinge on what has sustained it all along: keen faculty interest in student learning and the collegial relationships across the campus that naturally follow in support of that.

A Communications Revolution?

When presenting information about writing to students in classes, I used to frame the significant shifts in technology and their corresponding impacts on the frequency and nature of our communications as a "technology explosion."  I  would describe how technology had permitted a world of 24/7 contact with other human beings and then delineate the ways in which it increased frequency of contact and entirely reframed the accessibility and expectations of those we do contact. 

Because current technology is ubiquitous to traditional-aged students, they are often surprised by what these changes have wrought in terms of job-related writing: for one, that they will do far more of it than they ever imagined.
 
At some point, "technology explosion" seemed too narrow a concept for the changes afoot, so I began identifying them as a "communications revolution."  I'm not meaning to be hyperbolic; I am simply trying to depict for students the sheer magnitude and scope of what our culture is experiencing as we continually alter our patterns of connecting with ideas, information, and people. 

Some have brilliantly captured the nuances of these changes using visual media:  Michael Wesch at K-State has had his finger on the pulse of this from an anthropological perspective and has produced several powerful videos.  You have probably viewed his most popular one, The Machine is (Changing) Us.  

Common Craft Media has a set of 3-minute videos for educators offering simple illustrations of how social media works and available for previewing on their website, including ones on  Social Networking and Social Media.

All of which brings me to the focus of this post: the first book meet-up yielded an interesting though far too brief discussion of the initial 100 or so pages of Here Comes Everybody. The group talking about the book last week at Next Door Pizza was composed of instructors and students and the mix of ages represented seemed to figure in some of our responses as we considered Shirky’s discussion of shifting power structures within industries like the news media.

We compared notes on the shifts we observed in our own lives instigated by pivotal changes in technology and the way our culture has adapted to these changes.

Facilitator Casey Reid invited us to reflect on passages she culled from this portion of the book and respond to questions she developed for our use (Click here and scroll down to view the entire set of questions.)

We touched on the topic of how higher education might be affected in ways other industries have, but time constraints precluded our full response to these questions:

2. On page 22, Shirky writes, “"Now that there is competition to traditional institutional forms for getting things done, those institutions will continue to exist, but their purchase on modern life will weaken as novel alternatives for group action arise.”
How does the weakening of traditional institutional forms affect us at the CC? In what ways might this shift alter how our students view the world and how we teach?


3. On page 47, Shirkey writes, “"Social tools provide a third alternative: action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive."
In what ways might we take advantage of social tools in our classrooms to harness student energy? In what ways could/can social tools/media work against us?


6. On page 69, Shirkey writes, “A professional often becomes a gatekeeper, by providing a necessary or desirable social function but also by controlling that function.”
In what ways do we serve as gatekeepers in our roles in higher education? In what ways are our gatekeeper roles being challenged, impacted, and altered? In what ways might social media and the Internet in general be stripping higher education of its privileged status as a gatekeeper for access to, use of, interpretation of, and construction of information and ideas?

7. "Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society; they are a challenge to it. A culture with printing presses is a different kind of culture from one that doesn't have them. New technology makes new things possible: put another way, when new technology appears, previously impossible things start occurring. If enough of those impossible things are important and happen in a bundle, quickly, the change becomes a revolution.

The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the existing society. As a result, either the revolutionaries are put down, or some of those institutions are altered, replaced, or destroyed." (Shirkey 107)
a. In what ways are social tools a challenge to our work?
b. What previously impossible things are happening in your work as a result of social media?
c. Is the institution of higher education being altered, replaced, or destroyed because of new technology? How is it being altered, replaced, or destroyed? How is our work being altered, replaced, or destroyed?

Go ahead, dive in to this discussion by posting a comment. The only thing that might be at stake here is life at MCC-Longview as we know it!

Talking to Students About Writing

Staffing the WAC table at the Student Resource Fair last week gave me an opportunity to chat with some students about the writing they are doing in their courses here at Longview. We distributed tip sheets on college writing (Writing in College and Writing Tips) created by some Longview WAC instructors, which prompted a number of students to comment about how much they needed these since they were presently in the throes of working on projects.

That reinforced what I already knew, having visited a number of classes since the semester began August 24 where the instructors had gotten students writing immediately—in response to readings, in lab reports, in brief paragraphs. At the resource fair, students were eager to tell stories of their own writing situations from their concerns about the projects they have ahead of them this semester to their anticipated career plans.

When I have the opportunity to help present an assignment or run a peer workshop in a class, I jump on the chance to get students talking about their majors and career aspirations.

In any given Gen Ed course there is usually a pretty wide array of majors. In the Anatomy and Physiology class I worked with last week, most students intend to become heath professionals. Student ownership of writing and learning in a course ramps up when students realize that this course and the writing therein is leading them directly to the next level, whether that is a 4-year college or employment.

In A&P, we discussed the nature of the writing they will likely do: care plans, charting, patient education documents, as well as the current communication staple of most workplaces, email.

I usually use a brief survey to capture their perceptions of writing in order to launch a discussion of writing in school and the kinds of writing they will likely do in their professional lives. There are often discrepancies between their perceptions and the data I have to share with them. The instructor and I team up to mitigate those gaps and bring the discussion back around to the project at hand as we coach them on strategies for fulfilling it successfully.

Today I presented information on professional writing to an introductory Engineering class.  This group is often surprised by the sheer volume of writing even entry level engineers are required to produce. The writing in this course is a mix of different kinds and genres of writing---descriptive, technical, research-driven---and includes small-stakes (brief reports and discussion posts) as well as a semester project (career exploration).  All of the writing students do in this class is in service of the course outcomes and the instructor's goals to have students experience firsthand the kind of thinking and writing that is paramount in the field of engineering.

Students are willing to make that connection between the writing and learning in the course and their ultimate educational and career goals if we encourage it. Such a connection makes the course project relevant on another level besides just the immediate one—to get a grade and to complete the course successfully. This is perhaps especially true in the introductory courses students take to complete General Education requirements.

Visiting with students about writing is enlightening and gives you a perfect opening to tout the myriad values you see reflected in the writing projects and experiences you have designed for them.

How do you get students talking about writing?

Read-Along Reviews and Interviews

This post is devoted to mention of some resources that might be useful as you begin to read Here Comes Everybody. Worthwhile reviews of the book are readily available through numerous magazines, journals, and websites. These two seemed to capture the essence of the book.
This review appeared in Ars Technica, a technology news and information website:
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/04/book-review-2008-04-1.ars/1
It is immediately followed by an interview with Clay Shirky by the book reviewer, Timothy B. Lee:
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/04/book-review-2008-04-1.ars/4

This brief review appeared on the Paper Cuts Blog of the New York Times when the book came out in paperback:
http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/gutenberg-is-dead-long-live-gutenberg/

You can really get to know Clay Shirky in a more in-depth, two-part interview by Russ Juskalian which appeared in Columbia Journalism Review:
PART I: http://www.cjr.org/overload/interview_with_clay_shirky_par.php?page=all

PART II: http://www.cjr.org/overload/interview_with_clay_shirky_par_1.php

Finally, here are some preliminary questions to ponder in advance of the book meet-up at Next Door Pizza next Wednesday, September 15, 2:00 PM:
What do Shirky’s stories like that of the lost cell phone illustrate for you? What examples of technology use have you seen driving other changes in the social environment?

 What distinctions does Shirky make between these concepts: sharing, cooperation, collaborative production, collective action? Have you seen evidence of these in play when you use social or other media?

If you would like to share initial impressions of the book based on your reading so far, please post a comment!

Starting Small: Low Stakes, High Yield

Interested in WAC, but wondering how to integrate writing into your already crowded semester? Some instructors begin the semester by easing students into writing with small-scale, low-stakes writing activities. These range from formulaic bio-poems and creative icebreakers through which students introduce themselves or each other to the class to informal paragraphs directly related to assigned reading or class discussion.

These brief writings can serve the instructor in a number of ways: as early evidence of a student’s writing abilities, as a baseline for purposes of observing writing and thinking growth over the semester, as a diagnostic tool through which to determine the need for encouraging some or all students to use additional resources, like the Writing Center.

Instructors rarely grade these types of writings except in a holistic way or to issue some modest credit simply for engaging in the exercise. A check or plus accompanied by a 1-sentence reader-response comment or question is a reasonable response to these brief writings. One way or another, it’s important to let students know you read what they wrote.

For students, such exercises can be a painless introduction to using writing as a way to learn course material. Without the pressure of a grade and without the stress of trying to produce a larger piece of text, students can focus on the question or issue at hand.

Students often get hung up on the end product of a larger high-stakes project before they’ve engaged in a process of developing ideas for it. Low-stakes writing opportunities early in the semester can situate writing for them as a means to the end. 

Instructors who use informal writings in response to readings typically craft open-ended questions that invite a host of legitimate responses which can then serve as springboards for class discussions.  Students who have written even briefly about something usually feel more confident about speaking up in class.  Having students write before they speak reinforces the idea of thoughtful reflection, which can lead to deeper exploration, especially in the case of a controversial issue or difficult topic.

Peter Elbow, a composition theorist whose early work greatly influenced writing pedagogy, describes the goal of low-stakes writing in or out of class as "not so much to produce excellent pieces of writing as to get students to think, learn, and understand more of the course material."  He asserts that the piece of writing itself is not what's of value because what the brain actually retains are the new neural pathways generated by the act of writing.

Low-stakes writings, if used with any frequency, can norm students to instructor expectations in regard to critical thinking and can increase student comfort with writing on demand, making them better poised to tackle a larger semester project.

Do you use any small-scale writing assignments in your classes?  What has worked for you?  What kinds of questions do you pose?  Do you grade these or give credit?  

For more information on the benefits of low-stakes writings, see Peter Elbow's piece, "High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and Responding to Writing," in Writing to Learn: Srategies for Assigning and Responding to Writing Across the Disciplines, Sorcinelli and Elbow, eds., Jossey-Bass, 1997.
 
For a sampling of low-stakes writing assignments (25 different kinds) and a template of the bio-poem and how it can be used to prepare students to write about historical figures, see John Bean's book, Engaging Idea:The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, Jossey-Bass, 1996.

Both of these books are available at MCC-Longview Library.  Additional copies of Bean's book are abundant in every division--see your WAC Cadre rep or me for a copy!

Why a WAC blog?

Well, there are several answers to this question. Perhaps most obvious is that a blog is all about communicating through writing, which seems like a reasonable enterprise for a WAC Program to promote.

Blogs also provide a different kind of space for discussions. Given the frantic rush of our personal and professional lives, due in no small part to the technology that fuels some discernible portion of that frenzy, it is worthwhile to grant ourselves through benefit of this technology some time to read and reflect on topics connected to our work.

Pertinent articles appear before me regularly and many I'd like to share with colleagues. A blog seems a perfect professional development tool in that regard:
• I can link to articles and studies you might not get a chance to see otherwise and you can read them at your leisure.
• I can provide brief commentary on relevant issues and let you know how some of the experts are weighing in on a particular topic, like plagiarism or the impact of social media on writing.
• You can respond to posts if you like and discussions can ensue.
• Posts and comments are archived so you can always get back to them whenever is convenient or desirable.

In short, there is considerable convenience provided by a blog and we'd like to take full advantage of it---a blog seems like the next natural step for our WAC program. For the record and in keeping with our year’s scholarship theme, I've been researching the phenomenon of blogging for the past year and found it to be far more prevalent than I would ever have guessed.

Blogs have also found their way into pedagogy. Many top-notch journalism schools, including the University of Missouri, now offer major coursework in blogging and other emerging media. Through the generosity of a Journalism professor at the University of Kansas, a nationally known journalist on environmental issues, I was able to observe her online service-learning courses over the past year which trained students to blog effectively about environmental concerns in Lawrence.

Previously, I'd clung to an early stereotyped image of blogging that is woefully inaccurate: nerdy politicos in a darkened room lit by the glow of a monitor and huddled over a keyboard pounding out manifestos that only a handful of like-minded folks would read. While that could well account for some blogs, or perhaps earlier iterations of blogging, it's probably now an infinitesimally small number of the estimated 23 million bloggers because I haven't bumped into many that would fit that mold.

The New York Times (3-12-10) reports that a 2009 study by Blogher and its research partners puts the number of people blogging (those who read, write, or comment on blogs weekly) at 23 million---and that’s just women! Blogs have proliferated wildly, widely, exponentially and at the speed of light. They are written on every imaginable topic, reflect every possible world view, and are open to the entire world to read. They can be remarkably thoughtful windows into the mind of someone who has something powerful and insightful to share about life, the universe, and everything.

Then again, they can be gratuitously self-indulgent and vacuous even as they offer up striking or artistic photographs. They can be hilarious or dead-serious, affirming or provocative, somber or sweet. I’ve seen some blogs use questionable ploys to grab an audience and commercial sponsorship. Interestingly, it's not uncommon for smaller-scale blogs to host contests and giveaways or special events, which surprised me a bit but speaks strikingly to the interactive nature of this beast.

There are many genres of blogs and subgenres of blogs. Food blogs, gardening blogs, health blogs, fashion blogs, spiritual blogs, and pet blogs. You name it, it’s out there. However, I never found the kind of WAC blog I was looking for and soon realized that, well, we are just the right college to host it.

I have also learned how much blogs are about establishing and building community. Bottom line: people want to connect with each other in more complex ways than other technologies afford.

The writer/teacher in me is genuinely amazed and heartened by the fact that so many people write completely voluntarily and regularly outside of school: this could be the writing utopia we’ve been wishing for! OK, maybe I am the only one who has actually gone so far as to wish for it…

The rhetorician in me says this entire subject warrants far more investigation than has been done to date, like articles and dissertations probing the genres and subcultures of blogs. Or some exploration of the metaphoric constructs evidenced in discussions about blogging: blog as house or home, blogosphere as neighborhood, blog as a physical/geographic place in cyberspace, the implications of blog titles, and narrative structures in blogs or the lack thereof.

Should you look, you would also notice that blogs are increasingly about the integration of photos and visual imagery, but we'll save the topic of visual rhetoric and our evolving expectations regarding it for another post.

You will be alerted via email to a new post every Wednesday. You can check it out or disregard it. The blog is permanently housed on the WAC website (also see link at the bottom of the screen) so you can easily find previous posts there.

To get things rolling, we'd welcome comments about your own experiences with blogging.
Do you write a blog? Do you typically read any blogs? Did you have any idea that so many people now do?
Have you used blogs in any of your courses? If so, to what effect? How has it worked?

To post a comment, click on "comments" and enter your comment in the space. You can use an existing id or create one expressly for use on this blog when you hit the "post comment" button.

Welcome to The Lake Effect!

MCC-Longview’s Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Program is about to enter its 25th year. What better way to celebrate than to provide a space for sharing ideas about writing and learning as well as a forum for instructors to identify their own successes and struggles in using writing as a learning tool.

Some history to note: this program began in the mid-1980s as a broad-based WAC approach involving faculty from general education and occupational curriculums at the college. Early efforts focused on infusing writing into courses that had not traditionally relied on writing, like Math and Music, and emphasized incorporating strategies based on writing theory and best practice, like having students produce drafts of projects and encouraging them to revise.

Eventually, large-scale General Education writing assessment efforts in the mid to late 1990s led by WAC faculty, which by now included instructors from all divisions and most disciplines, including Math and Music, culminated in the adoption of a Writing Intensive course requirement as a way to formally extend students’ opportunities to develop as writers during their time at the college.

In 2001, MCC-Longview was honored as a "College of the Year," along with Clemson, Cornell, and Sarah Lawrence College, based on its WAC Program.

Today, the WAC Program at MCC-Longview continues to enjoy broad faculty interest and participation as well as strong administrative support, and, fortunately, our students find themselves writing at every turn during their time here.

The campus of MCC-Longview sits next to Longview Lake and our sports teams are known as the Lakers. Given the strong culture of writing that has prevailed here for so long, it seemed fitting to honor the entire academic community at MCC-Longview for its deliberate and sustained efforts to value writing as a critical tool for learning by calling this WAC blog The Lake Effect.