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!