Tools of the Trade: Rubrics

image by artzsamui

At this point, most instructors are in the throes of evaluating student work, whether these are final exams, major projects, or simply the last assignment of the semester.  Many teachers across MCC-Longview use a rubric or some kind of scoring guide to facilitate the grading process.

Rubrics are wonderful tools when they are custom-made to fit an assignment because they can help ensure consistency and objectivity.  They are also an excellent way to communicate explicitly the most important aspects of an assignment and let students see exactly how their work is judged.

But a rubric loses value as an evaluation and communication device if it is generic and not designed to reflect the specific nature of the project or writing task at hand.  It also loses its luster if it's too packed with attributes.  Designing one is a really good exercise in prioritizing.

Chapter 14 in John Bean's newly revised Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom (2011) is a great primer on the theory behind analytic and holistic rubrics and the rationale for using them: "Using Rubrics to Develop and Apply Grading Criteria."

For even more comprehensive info on how to create a rubric, you can't do better than Walvoord and Johnson's Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment in College (2010).  This 2nd edition is chock-full of sample rubric formats from across disciplines and offers up their savvy take on time management when it comes to teaching and grading. 

If you are not feeling too creative at this point of the semester and need a jump start to develop a rubric for a project, consult the free RubiStar website for an array of templates that permit you to input the assignment criteria and select a rubric format and specific features: http://rubistar.4teachers.org/

RubiStar was one of the first online tools of this sort and was developed at the University of Kansas School of Education in the mid-1990s.  Such teaching tools have since proliferated on the web and some are pretty pricey.

Just resist the temptation to grab a generic one and go.  You'll likely end up losing precious grading time to the frustration you'll feel at its crudeness and inability to capture the nuances of your well-designed assignment.

But if this semester has already pulled away from you entirely in its final moments, don't hesitate to contact me over break or at the beginning of next semester for assistance and support in tailor-making rubrics to match your assignments, great and small.  As always, I'd be more than happy to help, especially if you are looking to get a head start on next semester.

Wishing all a relaxing break,

Mary

WAC Teachers Talk: Melissa Eaton on her Cultural Anthropology Assignment

Today's post features an interview with Melissa Eaton, Anthropology instructor at MCC-Longview, about her interesting ethnography assignment in her Cultural Anthropology class.  The assignment is based on two scenes from Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World. 

Melissa originally conceived of the project when this book was selected as MCC-Longview's common reading last year.  She found it so effective in advancing student understanding of key anthropology concepts that she continues to use the book as the foundation of a semester-long project she describes in detail in this interview. 

To see her assignment, click here.  To find out how she designed it, click here.  To find out more about Melissa, read her WAC profile.

Next Stop: The Intersection of Plagiarism and Social Media

image by Master Isolated Images

There are signs all around us that things are changing: gas prices dropping, leaves falling from trees, new technologic accoutrements being released daily, and celebrities disappearing from reality TV shows as quickly as you can say, "Dancing With the Stars." 

Actually, we need look no further than our own use of language and ideas to see evidence of a few seismic and probably even more momentous shifts now underway.

Intersections of cultural phenomena have tugged on our academic universe in some fascinating ways.  Last week a group of WAC faculty gathered to discuss a few such intersections, including concepts of plagiarism and concepts of social media, both of which seem markedly in flux.

To wit:  memes have surfaced as the new backbone of popular culture, especially for those under 20 years of age.  What's a meme?  Well, if you are one of the 19 million people who have viewed or made reference to "keyboard cat" over the past several years, you have been privy to a meme.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, watch here:

This New York Times article offers a brief explanation of memes for those like me who hadn't a clue that the obsession with cats playing the piano belied far more than a collective eccentricity of folks who favor felines: "Internet Memes 101: A Guide to Online Wackiness" by David Pogue. He includes links to other memes, like "Dramatic Prairie Dog," the video for the song "Friday," and the real-world participatory practice called "planking."

But the most instructive information I found in regard to defining memes came from a PBS Arts video (Offbook: PBS video online), aptly titled, "How to Explain Memes to Your Parents."  The handful of people interviewed in this brief film offer some insight into how memes are constructed and, importantly, why.

So memes are now a main staple of social media and pop culture: at their best, irreverent commentaries on society, and at their worst, the social media version of chain letter emails.

What has this got to do with plagiarism?  Well, the social and cultural values promoted in the development and distribution of memes include levels of collaboration as well as the fundamental notion of imbuing images with a unique twist or spin.  Such twists or spins are essentially the embellishment of an existing image without any acknowledgment of the image's origins and without expectation of any attribution for the newly conceived image launched into a viral spiral via social media.

If such experiences are part and parcel of the experience of younger users of technology, then it follows that boundaries around what constitutes intellectual property and how to appropriately cull and cite information from sources could appear somewhat blurred for them.  It's highly likely that his blurring of boundaries could and does create some measure of confusion for students when it comes to documenting academic sources.

Susan Blum, Professor of Anthropology at Notre Dame and author of My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture, explains in one chapter of her book "how the practice of citation---the antidote to plagiarism---arose and how the norms ...on which it is based are being challenged.  It seems that rather than being entirely ignorant of the principles of citation, students are often aware of them but do not entirely accept them (29)."

Some instructors present at our discussion last week decided that memes and other examples from social media might serve as useful points of class discussion in helping students better distinguish the expectations of creditable and credible academic work and the importance of fully developing one's own ideas within a larger realm of thought.  Our students, after all, are just entering the conversations that have gone on in some discipline contexts for centuries.  We must imagine new ways to throw them the ropes. 

And however creative, innovative, irreverent, or just plain wacky popular culture ever is, the behaviors attached to using the latest, greatest techno tools might need adjusting when transferred to other complex environments, both professional and educational.  Such environments typically demand thoughtful deliberation and careful consideration of multiple perspectives in order to achieve the intellectual maturation that instant gratification, fleeting Internet notoriety, or sheer glibness rarely yields.

YOUR thoughts on these matters?

For more reading on these topics, see the Further Reading section of the blog.

Timing is Everything or The Readiness is All

image by winond

Welcome back to The Lake Effect!  Though the blog blog has been on hiatus for the past two months, MCC-Longview's WAC Program has certainly kept busy, offering the first WAC Institute for Community Colleges in June, visiting with new students at the Resource Fair last week, preparing for the upcoming Introductory WAC Workshop and subsequent mini-workshop on issues related to plagiarism and social media, and helping instructors launch their assignments this semester through individual consultations and classroom visits.



WAC table at Resource Fair
photo by Liz Harmon, courtesy of the Longview Current


The WAC Institute went off without a hitch, thanks to the support of nearly every area of this campus.  All of the feedback from participants, who were community college WAC program directors from across the country, indicated that the experience was extremely beneficial and valuable, which was quite heartening given the time and energy that had been devoted to planning it.  Participants departed with new ideas and practical strategies for how to create or sustain a WAC Program at their own college.  As this was precisely the aim, the facilitators deemed the event a success.

Cultural Arts Center-MCC Longview
image courtesy of MCC

I would assert, however, that something else happened almost instantaneously: From the moment the participants and facilitators took their seats in the Cultural Arts Center, a community formed.  The speed and ease with which participants jumped into activities and discussions led by the facilitators and presenters who guided them suggested that the time was ripe for these conversations to occur. 

That is, participants came hungry for the very information facilitators and presenters by their experience and expertise were poised to offer.  Or, as Shakespeare's Hamlet has occasion to say in Act V, scene ii, "The readiness is all."

photo by Matt Banks

There was palpable synergy evident throughout the three days despite the acute fatigue noted by all at the end of the final session.  Working in such ways is exhausting, but, importantly, also exhilirating and rewarding.  When people meet face to face over mutual concerns and accord each other a healthy respect, great things are bound to happen. 

We've already heard some terrific reports of participants incorporating ideas from the WAC Institute into their home programs: Some are diligently working on developing programs based on design principles and best practices learned here.  Others are recasting existing programs by shifting emphases and adding features to strengthen their impact.

From the perspective of the facilitators and presenters, the institute offered a chance to give back to WAC.  As noted throughout the 25th anniversary celebrated last year, MCC-Longview's WAC Program has certainly enjoyed tremendous support from all corners of our campus---faculty, staff, administrators, students. 

But we have also benefited greatly though far less obviously from collegial sharing by WAC mentors, colleagues, and programs at other colleges via postings on listservs, phone conversations, college visits, conference sessions, websites, etc.  Scholarship on college writing and WAC produced by scholars and researchers in the fields of rhetoric and composition as well as other disciplines has also powerfully influenced the trajectory of this program.

Frankly, very recent reports produced by by two and four-year college researchers identifying some of the difficulties inherent in sustaining WAC in the community college setting were part of the impetus for us to create the WAC Institute.

And so 25 years' worth of growing a program serendipitously crystallized into a moment of academic philanthropy.

The upshot of all of this?  Keep learning and be ever at the ready for just the right time.  For the readiness, indeed, is all.

Just a few of the folks responsible for MCC-Longview's WAC Program over the years:
from Chancellors to Writing Fellows and everyone inbetween.



Imagination Longview 2011: What Really Happens When You Write to Learn

This year's Imagination Longview was by far the best one yet: high attendance, committed WAC faculty sponsors, keen interest of attendees, and a room full of fascinating and inspiring student projects which fueled enough conversations to keep the Education Center abuzz with voices for two solid hours.  To say students were passionate about their ideas seems like a gross understatement.

To wit, here's some of what I learned:

• about the place of comic books in World War II among troops and at home and the depiction of Hitler as the obvious villain
• why physician-assisted suicide may not not be compatible with an American vision of democracy and health care

• how a service learning project to collect purses for abused women served by an agency called Veronica's Voice led to an ongoing connection with Longview students who intend to continue their project beyond this semester

• how Longview students created an onsite vegetable garden with kindergarteners at a local to have a direct impact on promoting a healthy diet for children

• about what happens when you read between the lines of Hemingway's short story "The Hills are Like Elephants"  
• about how a student discovered the lives and stories of her family members, long ago separated by slavery, through a chance introduction to a local artist when she was completing an assignment

• how much Aldous Huxley's Brave New World has to say about issues like privacy and choice
  
• that a popular video game directly reflects the influence of the character James Bond and includes numerous visual allusions to Alfred Hitchcock
• the powerfeul connections between an Intercultural Communications class and an ESL class

• how you can accurately estimate costs of a complicated construction project by graphing the salient variables
• why a student chose to spend the semester analyzing Ella Fitzgerald's version of the Cole Porter song I Concentrate on You

• what happened when a whole new world was created in the collaborative novel written by students in an Anthropology-Creative Writing learning community
• what it feels like to set a goal of running a marathon and then reflect on achieving that goal

There were even serendipitous moments like the one where a student who'd just won an impressive $30,000 scholarship to the school of his choice disclosed to me that he'd presented at Imagination Longview a few years back and here met the woman who became instrumental in his academic success as his teacher and mentor. She happened to visit his table and they struck up a conversation about his project.

And that is perhaps what Imagination Longview is really all about: learning through writing and, in the telling of the learning, connecting people to ideas as well as to other people.  I don't know of a better reason to write!

Old School, New School, No School

In my time working with students, I have always found it interesting to note what to them constitutes writing.  They often equate writing with school writing exclusively, and, even at that, believe that only formal research papers rise to the level of real writing.  It often never occurs to them to consider the plethora of activity that goes on throughout a course or via texting and Facebook outside of school as, well, writing.  And yet it is. 

Collapsing those arbitrary perceptual boundaries can open up a broader understanding of writing for students.  Let me explain how.

Email did not exist when I attended college nor did it exist at Longview when I began working here.  I received no formal instruction in how to write an email and yet I spend hours each day producing them since emails are currently the salient communication tool of the workplace.  How did I learn to write in this new genre? In part, by applying what I had learned in graduate school about analyzing rhetorical situations. 

That is, I considered the audience to whom I was writing and what they needed to know and crafted the message from there.  Emails follow a pretty distinct pattern, so much so that the template was eventually built into the software.  The writer, of course, controls what gets plugged into that template, so reading emails was a good way to see which features were promoted and tolerated in an academic workplace.  Another important part of my learning was observing others and imitating their rhetorical moves.

Our students will similarly learn some of the writing nuances of their particular work setting while on the job.  At a four-year school, most will have opportunities to rehearse the kinds of professional writing they will be called to do post graduation.  For future health professionals, that means care plans and charting.  For would-be engineers, it means technical reports and proposals.  For those going into business, it means memos and reports that reflect brevity and clarity.  In that world, after all, time is money, so no one wants to waste it reading unnecessarily lengthy or arcane communiques.

Will email still be the communication tool of choice by the time current students graduate and enter the workforce?  Quite possibly.  Or email could be supplanted by a later, greater technological advance that sends it the way of the telegram.  What's important is not that we teach students to write emails or texts, but that we give them ample opportunity to learn through writing and, in doing so, help them develop enormous depth and breadth as communicators so they can accurately decipher any writing situation they find themselves in.

Our students are navigating different writing arenas throughout each day.  They slip between these much the way all of us do when we adjust our manner of speaking when with friends as opposed to a room full of strangers.  Linguists refer to this phenomenon as "shifting registers."

We typically dress and speak differently in the context of a job interview than we would in the context of talking to neighbors while doing yardwork. We recognize that these two situations make strikingly different demands of us as communicators.  Our ability to see these differences hinges on our understanding of the expectations of job interviews and our understanding of the expectations of informal chatting. The more you know about those expectations, the more likely you are to get your message across efficiently and effectively.

Helping students understand that academic writing requires a clarity and explicitness they are not necessarily obligated to when texting or posting on Facebook is a first step in helping them understand the expectations of the academic audience.
 
Art Young, a WAC pioneer who hailed from a disciplinary background of Engineering and English literature, distinguishes in Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum between personal writing for learning which privileges the language and values of the writer and public writing for communicating which privileges the language and values of a broader discourse community (Prentice Hall Resources for Writing, third edition).

Dr. Art Young, Clemson Professor, holding his book Teaching and Learning Creatively, which is used by a number of WAC faculty at MCC-Longview and available for borrowing through the WAC Program.

Whether in school or out of school, whether for close associates or for publication, it all qualifies as writing. So the question becomes: How effective is any message?  Clearly, that depends a lot on who is reading it.  The sooner students grasp the concept of audience, the sooner they will become discerning writers. 

And since technologies associated with reading and writing are bound to change more than a few times in their lifetimes, our best bet is to prepare students to analyze every writing situation they encounter, including the ones we create.

So when and where did you learn to write an email?

Putting the Social in Social Media




Image by Salvatore Vuono


I recently read a set of student responses to an article on social media, part of a Computer Science assignment designed by instructor Cindy Herbert requiring students to read a relevant article, develop a thoughtful response using one of the instructor-posed questions as a guide, and then post an insightful response to another student's post.

I was struck that several students in their article responses registered shock at having witnessed instructors overtly tell classes NOT to write in textspeak: no "u" for "you," etc. They simply couldn't imagine their peers producing written coursework that would include such seemingly inappropriate language choices.

In WAC workshops in recent years, instructors have reported texting terms creeping into student papers and emails with increasing frequency and a few teachers have described entire papers rendered as a text message. 

Is technology impairing our ability to write?  Probably not, even though communication boundaries have clearly shifted.  Language, after all, is a socially constructed and continually negotiated aspect of culture.

People have long wanted to believe that computers have had a significant impact on writing skills, almost since the first pc came online, although there has been no evidence to support such a claim.


Scholars at the forefront of computer instruction in composition, like Gail Hawisher and Cindy Selfe, suggested early on that perhaps we were asking the wrong questions. After all, no one assumed that the typewriter had altered the process of composing written text. The pc did allow the production of perhaps more readable prose---literally-- in a technical sense, but it did not instigate more intelligent or well-written prose.


However, in landmark scholarship, both women studied what computer-mediated instruction did permit: notably, ease of revision as well as thoughtful selection and purposeful integration of rhetorically appropriate images.

That is not to say that technology might not be having some profound neurological effects.  The Blizzard of Oz last month afforded me the chance to view a Frontline program on PBS titled, Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, which explored some new territory in regard to the impact of technology on the brain. Despite the difficulties inherent in testing a phenomenon which changes unpredictably and incessantly, some discernible patterns have emerged as new questions continue to arise.

So far, all of it makes the landscape and future of higher ed at once fascinating and uncertain. This Frontline program (see trailer here) is well worth a view as it probes several distinct dimensions to show how recent technology advances have fundamentally reshaped some human endeavors.   

It features interviews with teachers and students from MIT and Stanford as well as from a middle school and high school who talk about the place of technology in their lives and debunk the myth of multi-tasking but tout the value of multi-player online games like World of Warcraft, and the avatar-driven Second Life which the program shows is now used by corporations and colleges alike.

Most striking to me was a comment by a researcher at Stanford University who directs the lab studying the impact of virtual immersions via online personas or avatars on people's perceptions of reality: "Digital stuff is such a new phenomenon that if it looks real and feels real, the brain tells us it is real," says Dr. Bailenson. "We've done studies with children where they see themselves swimming around with whales in virtual reality. ... About 50 percent of them will believe that in physical space, they actually went to SeaWorld and swam with whales."  Is this a tipping point where perception begins to trump reality?

The show also served to remind me of other current studies researching technology's impact on learning and writing.  Some of these show that shifting gears constantly causes the brain to lose time on task and forces it to refocus, which actually interferes with both learning and writing.

With newer iterations of technology coming to the fore at breakneck speed and picking up larger pools of younger users, scholars are now specifically probing the impact of social media experiences like gaming and Facebook on writing.

Composition scholar and teacher Andrea Lunsford conducted a webinar late last semester through which she shared her most recent research on student writing at Stanford where she has led a large study of 14,000 writing samples over the past decade. She eloquently noted that student texts still exhibit the kinds of issues and concerns they did before the advent of iPods and iPads.

She was also quick to point out that her research has shown a marked jump in frequency of student writing---mainly outside of school.  Unquestionably, such social writing makes different demands of writers, but her research finds an overall adeptness of student writers at shifting between these different writing situations.

Lunsford suggests that in a world of new and emerging literacies, the role and responsibility of college teachers is to determine which features of the old literacies must be maintained in order to produce sustained and coherent writing.

And this is part of what makes the assignment issued by Cindy Herbert even more salient. It emanates from her desire to have students grapple with the implications of technology beyond its basic applications which are the focus of this introductory course. 

As a teacher long committed to WAC, she wants them to do the analytic and reflective writing that makes that level of critical thinking possible.  By configuring it as a blog exercise and by coaching students on how to construct appropriate messages for this purpose, she guides students to the expectations of writing in social contexts within and beyond her class.

Have you seen much evidence of texting behaviors in your students' work? How have you responded?

Inside the Teachers Studio: Brave New World Ethnography Project

One of the best assets of a college with a culture of writing? Instructors in all disciplines are encouraged to spend time creating unique and productive learning experiences for their students.  

The sharing of such assignments has been a staple of Longview's WAC Workshops.  Seeing what other instructors have designed always serves to point up the incredible diversity of writing projects that can be offered and also illustrates the rich array of learning experiences Longview provides for students.

This semester the blog will feature some of these innovative assignments, large and small, which invite students to develop as thinkers and writers through a thoughtfully designed learning experience.

MELISSA EATON, Anthropology

Melissa contributes here a dynamic and provocative assignment based on Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World.  Melissa used the novel as one of the texts in her Cultural Anthropology course in Fall of 2010.  

Read her guest blog post below to learn about her design decisions and how this comprehensive project came to life within her course.  Then look at the assignment itself in the Innovative Assignments section. 

Good news: You will be able to view student projects in response to this assignment at Imagination Longview on May 4!  Learn more about Melissa by reading her WAC Profile.

An introduction to the Brave New World (BNW) Ethnography Project

THE IDEA

I first daydreamed about this assignment during the summer of 2010 as I was reading Aldous Huxley’s classic Brave New World for the first time and contemplating the possibilities of using it in my courses.

Cultural anthropology instructors have long lamented the lack of an introduction to doing ethnography in most introductory level courses, especially since it is recommended that budding anthropologists should first study a culture outside of their own. Huxley’s dystopia seemed the perfect opportunity to practice ethnographic observations and interpreting cultures without having to worry about travel budgets, grant writing, informed consent, and a human subjects review board.

THE DESIGN

Designing the BNW project took some time as I grappled with the complexity of the project. I wanted students to develop skills of observation, cultural relativity, reflexivity, ethnographic note taking, ethnographic writing, peer review, and the outside application of anthropological knowledge. 

Finding ways to split up these tasks into manageable units, learning how to manage (and teach) a wiki to house the information, and writing thorough instructions to communicate what I wanted for the students proved to be the most daunting tasks. Writing the instruction sheets took the most time since I was designing every element of this assignment from scratch. I included several examples in order to make it clear what I wanted students to produce, including several note-taking methods used in anthropology and two examples of ethnographic description by Horace Miner and Clifford Geertz that are classics in cultural anthropology.

I realized quickly that in order to ensure students participated fully, I needed to make the assignment worth a significant portion of the class, which ended up being 25% of the overall course grade. The BNW project also replaced three papers that I usually assign for this particular course.

Of course, I quickly determined that I wanted to give students an opportunity to practice these skills and improve their performance. So, I designed the project to be accomplished twice. The student’s first effort would take place during the first half of the book (before the characters go to the Savage Reservation) and a second effort would observe more complex interactions of culture shock in the second half of the book. 

STUDENT RESPONSE

Overall, students responded well to this assignment. We spent a large amount of time during class discussing the instructions and the examples. However, there was a large learning curve for some. As expected, dealing with ethnocentrism was a major challenge for some students. For others, the barrier was the fact that this was a complex assignment with many parts. I made sure to break the assignment into steps and designed a checklist for students to review to ensure that all steps were completed.

Some students battled with the technology of uploading their documentation to the class wiki. For some students, I provided additional help and even uploaded (or created links) to make sure that the information was available for their peer reviewer. 

For many, however, the largest impediment was creativity. In order to facilitate the necessary skill of reflexivity, I asked students to create an anthropologist’s persona who was following the characters in the book around. The purpose of this part of the exercise is for students to really think about the biases and the impact that their persona is making on the process of note taking and in the interpretation of the BNW culture. 

Additionally, as the last step in the BNW project, I wanted each student to take the ethnographic knowledge produced by another student and apply it in a creative format (like a poster, a synopsis for a film, or a commercial or a product). Both of these elements caused the most pressure and anxiety for the students, perhaps because of the creativity required of the assignment or the lack of familiarity with assignments that permit creativity. After making it through the process of the first BNW ethnography, the students who were anxious the first time seemed much more comfortable the second time around.

CONCLUSIONS

Overall, I was pleased with the products generated by the students for this BNW ethnography. One of the strengths of the assignment design is that students had to read the text in a new way, and that standard reviews and summaries of Huxley’s classic would be useless in completing the assignment. 

As a result, many students became very involved in the project and some thoroughly enjoyed the creativity allowed in its execution. In fact, I recommended two students’ work to be included into the Imagination Longview showcase of student work this spring. 

Although some students chose not to complete the assignment, as happens in every course, I certainly feel that the it not only accomplished the course objectives, but also taught the students valuable skills that can be used in the observation of daily life. I am not certain if I would ever have the opportunity to use this assignment in my cultural anthropology class in the future, I hope that I could modify it for other common reading project novels used at Longview.

 ---Melissa

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!