My blogging persona

I am writing my 100th blog post at the same time that many elementary school students are marking their 100^th day of school. For many of those students the 100^th day brings with it an assignment to collect/display/share 100 items of some sort (buttons, paper clips, etc). I can still remember my son agonizing over what he should collect. He wanted it to be something unique, but it also needed to be readily available and portable. Now I can’t even remember what he chose, but I suspect it was something we found in the kitchen. However, my recent consternation about what to do with my 100^th blog post combined with recent Facebook posts by parents and teachers of primary students celebrating the 100^th day of school reminded me of that dilemma and helped me put my own struggle into perspective. Yes, this is an exciting milestone, but there will be many more blog posts to come.

But what can I, or should I, use this occasion to discuss? I started two different posts (about alternate academic career tracks and my annual review) and considered a host of teaching-related posts (my recent experiments with badges and Google+ communities, for example) but in the end decided that these posts can wait for a less momentous occasion.

Then I contemplated whether this might be the best time to wrap up this blog – as a Blogger blog that is. I have a professional web site and have been considering for months the advantages and disadvantages of maintaining a separate blog and web site as well as the issue of Blogger vs. Wordpress. But I’m pretty sure I’m making the switch to a Wordpress blog on my own web site (the control and aesthetic issues I’m having with Blogger are simply beginning to outweigh the advantages of Blogger) so there goes that topic which many others have ably discussed such as this post on The Painted Hive and Build Your Own Blog.

Then I mulled over the idea of discussing my history and development as a blogger. This blog is three years old so I have been able to maintain a fairly consistent presence, but the fact that it took that long to arrive at the magical “100” is a clear indication of my inability to post weekly and doesn’t tell us much about me as a blogger. My tags are a little more telling, but also somewhat problematic as I haven’t always been consistent (or smart) about their use. I’m kind of interested in my Top 5 Posts (as indicated by readership) but that also says more about my readers than about me. In the end, I concluded that a picture was worth more than words and simply plugged my blog into a Wordle. This simple graphic summarizes what my blog is all about.

My description of my blog is:

This blog reflects my interest in writing pedagogy, agency and efficacy, and teaching with technology -- as a rhetorician and researcher as well as writer, teacher of writers, and teacher of writing teachers.

The Wordle clearly highlights the topics that I write about although some trends were a little surprise to me. Obviously as a teacher and National Writing Project site director issues surrounding students, classes, and education are of keen interest and I clearly write about them a lot. However, I tend to write from a more personal place about my own experiences and experiments in my classroom. As a social media proponent and online teacher/learner it is also not surprising to see that idea highlighted.  Similarly, as I am interested in the idea of community as a teacher, administrator, and researcher I was not surprised to see that featured prominently. But I was rather surprised to see that writing was not among the most prominent topics I write about. Perhaps I need to consider that as I plan future blog posts. I think using Wordle as a reflective and analytical tool can help a blogger consider the past and plan for the future. It was certainly a worthwhile exercise for me.

Finally, after reading Pat Thomson’s post about blogging identity I decided that this might be the perfect time to explore my own blogging identity. Like Thomson (and most other humans), I have multiple private and professional identities and have written about this identity problem before. However, I tend to keep this blog focused on my various professional identities (although I have upon occasion discussed more personal topics that connected with these professional interests). I do not do a good job separating the personal from the private when it comes to social media, but that is another post for another day. Unlike Thomson, I did not delete my rant about education, but then as someone who works (and writes and researches about that work) with teachers I think my concerns about my son’s education touch on (at least peripherally) what I write about in the normal course of blogging.

I really like two ideas that Thomson shares in her post. I, too, blog in an effort to “de-privatize” my own thoughts and struggles with teaching, learning, and researching. Yes, I sometimes worry that I overshare, but as someone who advocates reflection for her own students how can I not practice what I preach? I truly believe in the importance of reflection to learning and growth and this blog plays a tremendous role in my own growth and learning. Interconnected with this is the simple fact that I am a teacher and a National Writing Project site director. As such it is my job, my duty, my calling to make visible my struggles, failures, and successes in hopes that these experiences will provide lessons for others as well as my entrée into conversations about these issues. That is the power of blogging and social media – that I can connect/communicate and learn/share with someone like PatThomson who is not even on my continent.

Also, blogging is a powerful tool for creating that sense of “there” that Thomson discusses in her post. Face-to-face and real-time connections can be powerful and have a long-term impact, but they are also transitory. I have a terrible memory, especially when it comes to verbal interactions, but blogging can live on and remains accessible. It can provide a “just in time” spark or response -- at least I hope mine does.

NOT The Trouble With Online Education

My Ph.D program recently shared a link to a New York Time’s Op-Ed piece about online education that still has my blood boiling. “The Trouble With Online Education” certainly does not present any new ideas or arguments about (against?) online education (nor did it when the piece came out in July), but I suppose the timing of reading the piece during the first week of our semester – a semester when I am teaching two online classes – sparked a need to respond. Whatever the reason, there are several points the author makes that are really bothering me as an educator in general and online teacher (as well as former/ongoing online student) in specific.

As an educator it really bothers me that Mark Edmundson is offended by the notion that professors might learn from their students. Yes, I am the content specialist in my classroom and as such usually know a lot more about my subject than my students, but I would argue that if you are not learning from your students then you are doing it wrong. Education is not just about transferring chunks of information from one head (yours) to another (your students). That is an outmoded and ineffective model and one of the things wrong with education today. Education is about exploring ideas and if you are not giving students the opportunity to explore, understand, apply, and share in your class then you are missing out and, worse, you are cheating your students.

Edmundson then goes on to ask the question: Can online education ever be education of the very best sort? This is a valid question and one we should continue to ask, but what irks me is the assumption that a lecture class is the gold standard by which education should be measured. Just this week Cathy Davidson argued that “If we profs can be replaced by a computer screen, we should be.” She makes many excellent points about the need for education reform and how/why online education will be a major player in that reform but she also points out that lectures are an economic expedient but not good pedagogy. Davidson points out lectures may (if done well by the expert performers Edmundson lauds) be entertaining, but research shows students do not retain information presented in this format or understand how to apply it. Just yesterday Matt Reed agreed with Davidson and noted that lecture has never been “a particularly effective way to teach.” Online classes can be and are designed and taught in similarly ineffective ways all around the world, but as Davidson and Reed point out there is also great potential for innovation in both the traditional classroom and the online classroom if we adapt to new circumstances and knowledge and employ new strategies and new tools. Whether we like it or not, times are changing and we profs need to reform and “turn into the skid” or the university will indeed be torn apart as Edmundson so fears. The fault will not be with online education but will instead be with profs (and institutions) that refuse to evolve and grow.

The idea that Edmundson presented which really made my blood boil is that an online class cannot be a genuine intellectual community because it is a monologue rather than a dialogue (ironic much?). He goes on to describe online education as anonymous, sterile, abstract, and lonely. I thought my head my spin off my shoulders after reading this opinion which was apparently formed after watching a pre-filmed online class. Well, of course that model of online education is not as rich as the live lecture (which is already pretty ineffective) but apparently Edmundson is not aware of the tremendously rich and varied pedagogy taking place around the world that harnesses the power of technology to make online and blended classes exciting and challenging places to learn. It makes me wonder how Edmundson would respond if his students present such a poorly supported argument.

I would urge anyone who questions the exciting class design possible in online and blended classes to visit such collectives as HASTAC and Hybrid Pedagogy to find overwhelming support to counter the idea that online education is anonymous, sterile, abstract, and lonely. I strive to make my classes an interactive community with dynamic, collaborative projects and my class activities and assignments are constantly evolving inspired by the amazing work being done by my friends, peers, and colleagues around the world. This is an exciting time to be an educator and I believe our students are enriched by the experience. Sometimes my class activities and assignments don’t work out as planned (or hoped) but then that was true when I taught face-to-face. Often my online space is messy but then so was my traditional class space – we were often loud too. But this week, our first week of classes at my institution, we have begun building a community. I shared personal tidbits about my hobbies, family, and dog and invited students to share as well. As we interact as a group, we have talked about favorite books, movies, TV shows, and video games as well as tattoos, crafts, and pets. We are finding out who is creative, who is nervous about technology, and who is incredibly busy. After only three days, 22 students have posted more than 150 messages to each other in our Community forum. Sure I have included some prerecorded videos to explain assignments but there are no lectures. Instead we will continue to share, discuss, challenge, and question – and I know that I will learn from my students just as they learn from me and from each other. I don’t know how Edmundson defines a “genuine intellectual community” but I’m pretty sure we’ve got one going on and I know we are not alone.

Community Building With Badges

I've been thinking about community a lot lately - specifically class community or rather creating a learning community in my online classes. I know from both my experience and research that learning communities have many benefits for students (my recent reading includes Dawson, Kearns and Frey, Sadera et al). They foster learning and lead to high-impact educational experiences. Just a quick review of my blog shows that I have written about community a lot (too much? you be the judge) so I won’t get into all the reasons why I consider it important in this post and will instead focus on my current pedagogical thinking regarding community building.

While I consider community important, I also know from personal experience that creating a learning community in your class - especially an online required general education class - is no easy task. I've created successful online learning communities at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, but those successes have been in classes of willing, motivated students. So the real question is: how do you create a successful learning community with students who aren't so much?

I have been thinking about this question for weeks - before the fall semester was even over. I knew that the community in my online general education class was not as strong as I wanted and it seemed to weaken as the semester progressed. I've been struggling to find a way to do better this semester.

My solution is to put my money where my mouth is - or rather to give class credit for community building. I usually give credit for participation activities such as class discussion (in the form of blogs and journals etc), but now I am going to try breaking these out so it is clear that I value community building and participating on the blog posts of others.

I am only adding one new class activity to my usual introductory activities. I traditionally open the class with ice breaker activities such as six-word memoirs and me museums (oops, is that my writing project showing?) and I expect to do the same this semester. I have also used social media to give us a more informal space to connect and share. This spring I will again use Google+ for that purpose. However, I hope that by making “community building” an actual assignment with points assigned that students will get the message that this is important (I tell them but I think the fact that the points will underscore the idea). 

I am also going to steal/borrow/adapt Cathy Davidson’s draft badging system to support the community building assignment. This is a new activity that I’m adding to the first few class sessions. My idea is to have students create badges for their community building work (frequent flier, cheerleader, class clown, social butterfly etc.) and then strive to earn as many badges as possible. I think it could be fun and spark a lot more activity and involvement. If it works I’ve already got plans to use a similar system for discussion feedback and writing workshop. Stay tuned!

How do you use badges in your classes? What community building activities do you use? Do you think my idea of community-building badges is a good idea or a disaster-in-the-making?

Community building with Google+ and Twitter

I have always worked to build community in my writing classes. I believe that community helps improve learning in general, but it is essential when working with writers (see Writing Networks or Creating a Community of Writers).  However, as I teach online, building community in my writing classes is often fraught with challenges. As we are not physically together we do not gain all the typical visual clues that help us get to know each other. As we do not gather on a specific schedule there is not the usual casual chatter during breaks about weekend activities or physical well-being. I try to combat these problems with a two-pronged approach.

I begin the semester with activities designed to help us get to know each other. Specifically, I use six-word memoirs and Me Museums. These activities help us get to know each a little better as well as help me provide more targeted support and direction for future assignments and projects as I now know something about my students’ program of study and interests. In addition, I have tried to provide a channel for the sort of informal conversation you have in a typical class where conversations take place before and after class as well as during breaks or group activities. For several semesters, that back channel was Twitter (see Tweeting the Semester Away). However, this semester I decided to teach using Google docs as my primary content management system and I didn’t want to overwhelm my students by using too many new tools, so I opted to use Google+ instead of Twitter.

I have grown to love using Twitter personally and as a teaching tool. I have my Twitter feed running in the background much of the day so I can drop in on conversations whenever I need a break or get a little lonely (teaching online is sometimes lonely, my dog Max is an awesome listener but not much of a conversationalist). In addition, Twitter allows me to connect my conversations with those of others around the world through the use of hashtags. Much of my daily professional reading comes to me via Twitter. As a teaching tool, I also find Twitter useful. Not just for creating community but I believe the limited character count also makes students think more about their word choice and the open channel requires them to think more about their message than they might in a closed forum. I also think connecting their writing to a larger community gives them an authentic audience for their writing.

Of course, there are disadvantages to Twitter as a teaching tool. Some students are resistant and only go through the motions to meet the assignment criteria and never really engage. I have tried any number of combinations (hashtags, separate accounts, lists, etc.) to separate my personal/professional Twitter account from my student account but there always tends to be a messy overlap. Of course, it has made me be much more deliberate about the things I Tweet which is not a bad thing but still a bit messy personally. Of course, an advantage of this is that I have stayed connected with some students long after a class is over. It is also a challenge to monitor participation and some students like to set privacy settings which hinder the collaboration and communication I intend. However, I still believe the advantages of using Twitter in the classroom outweigh the disadvantages and I continue to be an advocate.

The switch to Google+ was not as easy as I expected it to be. I was experienced with using social media in the classroom and they already had Google accounts so how hard could it be? I was so naïve… Well, for those new users (and that was the majority) it was confusing to use both Google docs and Google+ and they didn’t always understand the difference between the two. And of course, using Google chat for individual conversations with me (while handy) sometimes added another layer of complications (just how many channels are there?). Simply navigating between Gmail to Docs to Google+ was just confusing to some students. In the future I will need to break this into separate steps – introducing each tool separately with more scaffolding and clear separation about the ways we will use each. Of course, there was always a learning curve with Twitter as well and I do not think learning Google+ was any more of challenge just perhaps a tad more complicated.

I like the use of Circles to clearly group my classes and I prefer that to the Twitter options of lists or separate accounts. It is easy to send a message directly to one or two groups rather than my entire audience and I have not had a problem with interlopers or hijackers like I have had with Twitter. It is also nice to have the ability to easily share photos and links. You can do this with Twitter but the limited character count often restricts the message you want to send with the link and it requires an extra step to view the photo. Personally, because I have always tended to use Google+ for professional purposes rather than personal (plus the use of Circles), it seems as if there is less messy overlap between my personal and teaching lives on Google+. Of course, it could also be that I’ve learned from my Twitter experiences and am more comfortable with it now.

However, I am still not entirely happy about the switch from Twitter to Google+. It does not appear that students are as active on Google+ as they were on Twitter. This might be my fault as I am not as active on Google+ as I am on Twitter so I am not modeling/prompting enough. I post much more frequently to Twitter than I do on Google+ so that could be the simple answer. Maybe it is not too late to jumpstart more Google+ activity now that I have identified one problem area. I also think I need to be more deliberate about how I use Google+ in supporting our coursework as well as our community. I think there are more opportunities to engage in discussion and the exchange of ideas using Google+ than on Twitter. There is a definite learning curve for me as well as my students. I have to remind myself that my use of Twitter as a teaching tool evolved over several semesters and this is only my first attempt with Google+. As I remind my students, I am learning too and that is clear as I struggle with using a new tool (for teaching).

I know many others who teach with Twitter but would love to learn more about the ways folks are using Google+ as a teaching tool! I plan to continue using Google+ in the Spring semester and hope I can learn from both my mistakes this semester and others in order to make it a better experience.

What does our writing studio program look like?

Last week I wrote about why the Morehead Writing Project is creating a writing studio and this week I want to explain how our studio looks during its pilot. Of course, we do not know what will come of this pilot so the final version could look very different. The Morehead Writing Project Studio is affiliated with the English Department at Morehead State University, but it is a separate program offered by the Morehead Writing Project which makes it different from most other writing studios. Our pilot program focuses on MSU students, but we hope the final version will grow to include K-12 students as well. While most studio programs grow out of a need to serve a student population, ours came from our mission to provide support to teachers of writing. We wanted to create a vehicle that demonstrated the best methods for teaching writing – methods in keeping with the beliefs of the National Writing Project. Ultimately, we end up in the same place as other studio programs – helping student writers; however, I believe this difference in orientation sets us apart.

The pilot studio groups are embedded within three developmental writing classes taught by two MWP teacher-consultants. The class instructors divided their classes (which cap at 17) into three small groups which meet once each week for an hour. These teachers have coordinated their syllabi and assignments as well as class preparation so the classes (which total 45+ students) are very similar in content and approach. Of course, we are able to do this for our pilot project, but may not be able to do so as the program grows. The studio work is considered part of the required work and attendance for the class so there is no separate or extra credit awarded as a result. Many other models offer Studio as an elective or required 1-credit class as an adjunct to freshman composition.

Our pilot studio groups are led by Peer Writers who are junior/senior English Education majors at MSU. The five Peer Writers involved with the pilot project have all worked with MWP before as well as had a number of education classes and/or tutoring experiences. Typically, studio groups are led by faculty members and graduate students although there are some programs which also use advanced undergraduates. We know there is a larger pool of English Ed majors we could use at MSU as well as a number of Middle Ed majors. We are cautiously considering how many Ed students we can work with at a time to maintain the same level of quality. At our pilot stage, all of our Peer Writers were carefully selected and we can easily stay in contact to provide the support and guidance they need to lead studio sessions. Of course, experienced Peer Writers won’t need that level of support but how many novice Peer Writers can we work with at a time?

The first assignment for the classes we are working with is a literacy narrative. The instructors have provided writing prompts to guide the initial development of this narrative and the Peer Writers are familiar with both the assignment and the prompt so they can support their studio groups as they continue the work they began in class by writing, sharing, and talking through their challenges. We are finding this assignment to be an useful vehicle for the conversations we want to take place in both the studio groups as well as our learning community.

We have created a learning community which includes the five Peer Writers and the two writing instructors as well as two representatives of the Morehead Writing Project. During weekly meetings, our learning community shares stories about working with students, brainstorms solutions to challenges, and coordinates plans for the next round of studio meetings. We are finding this learning community to be a tremendous resource for supporting our pilot project, but as the program grows it will be increasingly challenging to gather all the instructors and Peer Writers together every week. Our task as we grow will be to find ways to provide the necessary support for our Peer Writers.

Although our pilot is still in its early stages, we are already seeing a number of benefits. Of course, the developing writers benefit from working in a writing group led by a skilled mentor who can model both good writing habits and good writing group participation. In addition, the discussions focused on the students’ previous literacy experiences help students unpack some of the issues blocking their progress and better position them to learn and grow as writers. It is also not surprising that the Peer Writers are finding the studio a great learning experience as both teachers and writers. However, both the faculty members and pre-service teachers have found working within a supportive community both more helpful and invigorating than expected. We are all energized and engaged by this collaborative teaching experience. Our excitement for this project continues to grow as we wrap up our third week and we cannot wait to see what happens next.

Creating a Writing Studio Program

This year the Morehead Writing Project has started a new program. The Morehead Writing Project Writing Studio Program provides peer writers to lead groups of student writers in developmental writing classes (now) and early college writing classes (coming). Why? The mission of the National Writing Project is to improve the teaching of writing and we believe this project can do so on three fronts.

First, we believe our program can help the students of our host institution. We know there is a need to support our developmental writing students. More than 50% of incoming college students must take one or more remedial courses (in writing, math, and reading). First-year attrition among all college students is high (25% nationally) and the three main reasons that students struggle (and often leave) is that they are underprepared academically, lack the necessary student and life skills, and possess low confidence in their academic skills. We believe a studio approach is more compatible with the approaches to teaching writing endorsed by the National Writing Project than a writing center or lab. We believe working within a supportive community of writers will help our developmental writing students learn and grow as writers as well as students. We hope providing peer writers to serve as mentors and advisers will help our developmental writing students attain the knowledge and skills they need to not only stay in school but succeed.

In addition, a writing studio program supports the growth and development of the writing instructors and the peer writers (English Education majors who will be writing teachers in a few years). We have created a learning community to support our studio program. The learning community includes me (as MWP Site Director and the peer writer mentor), the two developmental writing instructors (also MWP site leaders) whose classes are piloting the studio program, and five peer writers (upper level English Ed majors who have worked with MWP in the past). We are meeting weekly to discuss practical issues ranging from current assignments and discussion topics to cover the theoretical and pedagogical challenges the peer writers encounter in their studio group sessions. In addition, we all regularly reflect about our experiences with the studio project to help us document the process. I look forward to these meetings and love the give-and-take of our discussions. We are all learning and growing as teachers as a result and I know my enthusiasm about the project and teaching has only grown since we began meeting.

Finally, as a result of both the hands-on experience teaching writing and working with writers as well as participation in our learning community, we believe our peer writers will be better prepared to teach writing when they graduate and enter their own high school classrooms as teachers. Our five peer writers are learning strategies they can employ in their own classrooms in the future and developing their own teaching style, but perhaps most important of all they are learning how to shape and direct their own professional development through a network of peers. I am so proud and excited to watch these pre-service teachers work through the challenges they face and can’t wait to see what happens next.

Stay tuned as I share the progress of our new program in the months to come! Soon I hope to share a description of what our writing studio program looks like and how it works.

Social Capital as Core Competency

I came to my interest in organizational communication by studying the idea of community as a teacher and writing groups as both a writer and teacher of writers. I have always believed very strongly in using writing groups to support the growth and development of writers and my work with the National Writing Project has only intensified that belief. However, my NWP work has also taught me the importance of community to the growth and development of all learners. And since I also believe that all successful organizations are learning organizations it seemed a natural progression to look at how organizations function as a community and learn.

An aspect of organizational communication that particularly fascinates me is the idea of social capital. Social capital is essentially the investment of your time, energy, and knowledge in a specific community and the benefits you derive from that investment. The organization’s purpose binds the community and focuses its energy, but it is social capital that fuels it. Social capital provides advantages to the individuals who possess it, but it also provides advantages to the organizations comprised of members with social capital.

I see social capital as a multiplier. If an organization is a sum of its component parts – or members – then an organization including members possessing social capital is so much more. Social capital gives leverage to do more than a single person could do alone. It is efficiently harnessing the power (time, energy, knowledge, skills) of others for a common purpose. People are willing to give of themselves, to either pay it forward or pay it back, because they can trust they will receive just as they give.

The human capital of an organization is the knowledge and skills that individual members possess, but it is the social capital that connects the human capital and amplifies it. In our information society it no longer holds true that knowledge is power as everyone has access to knowledge – in fact so much access and so much knowledge it is overwhelming, paralyzing. The organization with the most power knows how to manage the constant flow of information and leverage it to the organization’s best advantage. That leverage takes human capital and social capital. And that is why I believe social capital is a core competency for today’s professional in any field.

Teaching with Google Docs: The Good, Bad, and Ugly

I have never been a fan of Blackboard for teaching online. I find it clunky and cumbersome. Worse, it seems to control the flow of the course in ways that directly interfere with what I want to do (such as build community). Specifically, there are two class activities that I have never been wild about running in Blackboard – discussion and writing workshop. I have experimented with using wikis, Edmodo, and blogs -- both stand-alone and with Blackboard -- but none of these options have come as close to satisfying my needs as Google Docs.

Google Docs, if you do not know, is a free suite of tools (word processing, spreadsheet, presentation) combined with a data storage system. Users can create, upload, and store files as well as share and collaborate with others in real-time or asynchronously. Learn more by watching “Google Docs in Plain English.”

This summer I experimented with using Google Docs instead of Blackboard for a small online grad class. While it was not perfect, we (my students and I) all agreed that Google Docs was an improvement over Blackboard – and especially for discussion and writing workshop. Here are some things I learned from that experiment/experience:

The Good

One aspect that I didn’t think about early on was how easy it was to share everything for the class with my students by creating a folder for the class and then sharing it. No need to share new documents as I created them – simply upload or move into the already shared folder. Very handy!

Students also commented after the class that they could easily copy the folder (or a specific folder, such as a collection of course readings) to preserve for their own records. This is of greater value for graduate and upper level undergraduate classes than say freshmen comp but certainly handy.

For the type of collaborative class that I wanted to run I loved how easily I could give my students the ability to create, change, and generally collaborate not just on the documents but the organization of the course itself. I believe this sense of ownership contributed greatly to the overall satisfaction with the class.

Students commented that they liked how everything was in one place – as opposed to Blackboard. I admit I did as well. It was really easy to switch back-and-forth between assignments, discussion, and course documents.

Students also liked the ability to discuss in one document – rather than a discussion board thread – and to create thate discussion collaboratively. When we were done with each discussion we had a document that could easily be saved and read again in the future.

In addition, students liked being able to comment right on the work of their peers – in a comment thread that was very conversation-like. They noted that this seemed to remove barriers between writers and made writing workshop much more effective. Creating a sense of class community is important to me and students agreed that the Google Docs helped foster this through the easy-to-use collaboration and comment tools.

I must admit that I really like being able to talk with a student right on a document in real-time. This feature was a prime draw from the start to Google Docs and I was not disappointed. It also helped create some of those lovely side conversations that you get in a traditional class and can so easily miss in an online class.

The Bad

Of course that level of collaboration also created problems. Sometimes documents and whole folders got moved by accident and caused panic in the ranks until we figured out what happened and learned how to correct such mistakes. Next time I will try to prevent this problem by limiting the sharing (you can have editors, viewers, commenters).

Obviously not every document or folder needs to be highly collaborative so I will need to sort that out in the future. I admit that while it caused problems to give everyone the highest level of control (lost folders etc.), it was also really nice to share that responsibility. Often times the problems were solved while I was away from my computer.

The Ugly

Unlike most other course management systems, Google Docs does not come with a built-in structure. I worked around that by creating a Course Overview page with links to important documents (such as the Powerpoint assignment sheets) as well as descriptions of the activities and deadlines for each week. Even so, some students had some difficulty getting started and understanding how Google Docs works and even where to find it. For some students navigation was a constant problem.

And of course, you can’t really grade in Google Docs because it is an unsecure environment, but I actually like being able to clearly separate the workshop from the grading so this was not an issue for me – maybe even a benefit.

Some tips:

·         My first mistake was not to simply start with everyone creating a Gmail account. Sharing with other accounts was possible but it caused problems and cut down on communication possibilities. My advice, which I will follow next time, is to just start out with everyone creating a Gmail account if they do not already have one. This could be a drawback for some students.

·         Use folders to help you organize and practice careful naming protocols for your files as well as enforce those for your students. We quickly saw that inattention to either can cause problems and that was with just nine people – I shudder to think about a class of 20+.

·         Finally, carefully think through the levels of sharing – what roles do you want your students to have for specific documents and folders? When should your students be editors, viewers, or commenters?

My students (all teachers) talked about how we could use Google Docs in larger classes as well as younger students and most were eager to try it out (in middle and high school as well as college). We think for both discussion and writing workshop that it would be a good idea to use groups and other protocols and tools to organize larger classes. We were OK with an instructor and eight students interacting all the time in everything but the consensus was that going much above 10 would make this unwieldy – especially for discussion.

Look for future posts offering more details about my experience with class discussion and writing workshop in Google Docs.

You can read more about teaching with Google Docs with “Revisiting Google Docs for Classroom Use” and “Google for Educators.” 

Writing Networks or Creating a Community of Writers

I have spent a lot of this month thinking about community. Of course, as those who read my blog know, I have written a lot about community over the past year, but I’m teaching summer classes and preparing my discussion notes prompted me to think about what I have learned about community this summer.

Writing within a community of writers has always been important to me as a writer and so I have always worked to provide that same sense of community for my writing students, but recently I have become very interested in what makes a community and how a community is formed. I know that communities don’t form by accident and simply assembling a group of people does not a community make. Last summer I wrote “What is a community?” and “Creating a Classroom Community;” however it is when I began learning more about social capital theory that I was able better understand how community works. Social capital is essentially the investment of your time, energy, and knowledge in a specific community and the benefits you derive from that investment. A sense of community is important to your willingness to invest and your level of involvement and commitment plays an important role in what and how much you will give to the community.

So what makes someone more likely to invest in a community? Community members have to want to join. Possessing both power and agency are also important for the members of a community to develop the trust essential to social capital. This trust must encompass social controls as well as reciprocity. Building a community requires willing members, trust, social norms, and reciprocity. This summer as a National Writing Project Site Director I’ve had the privilege to observe the formation of four communities of writers (read more in “Transformations, Magic, and the Power of Writing and Writing Teachers”). While I agree that those qualities are essential to creating social capital in a community, I also believe there is an essential ingredient missing from that list. I believe the group members must share a common goal in order for a true community to form from a group of individuals and for social capital to develop within that community.

It seems as if I’m stating the obvious. Clearly the group formed for a particular reason. What I mean is an actionable goal that they are ready, willing, and able to do something about. It is more than believing or caring about the same thing – it is working on something together. I think this is the reason why some classroom communities thrive and others wither on the vine. I’ve long known that we can make community work in an National Writing Project Summer Institute – especially if we take care with recruitment and selection – but this summer the Morehead Writing Project tried an online Summer Institute for the first time and we were more than a bit worried about our ability to create community without the opportunity to bond over parking woes, shared meals, and all the side jokes that come with sharing space for an extended period of time.

What we have found is that we can create an online writing and learning community. Our online group is working together, supporting each other, and bonding. I feel it and see it but more important so do they – and most important of all (to me anyway) is that they see the importance of this sense of community to the growth and development of their own students. In their own words, they have noted that what has made the difference for them in their sense of community is the level of trust and sense of equality in the group as well as the open and available communication streams. We use Twitter (#ENG608) as well as sharing documents that we create together and comment upon those individually written. Trust has been established because we have shared extensively and increasingly openly our fears and failures. We also know that we can trust that help, encouragement, and interest are there from the other members of the group. My less-successful classroom communities did not have this level of trust and reciprocity so this is something I will need to work on. However, a key part, according to the online group, is the sense of equality. The students are taking on leadership roles and with the use of contract grading I am really able to steer clear of center stage and dominating the conversation. Of course, this is easier to achieve at the graduate level so I remain uncertain about how to make it work in an undergraduate class. All this is supported by social capital theory, but I remain intrigued by my idea of a common cause in terms of its impact on community.

Teachers come to a National Writing Project Summer Institute because they want to become better teachers of writing. NWP believes that teachers who write are better teachers of writing and so a great deal of time and energy at an SI is focused on transforming teachers into writers. Once they have experienced the magical transformation and begin to grow in confidence, teachers then embrace this foundational idea. I believe it is at this point that the true community forms. They now have a common purpose and understand how the other teachers in the room can help them learn and grow as writers as well as teachers, but perhaps most important they understand how community can help other groups learn and grow as well.

Similarly, I visited two different writing camps offered by the Morehead Writing Project this summer. Both developed writing communities and the kids had a lot of fun writing, but the second camp focused very closely on “writing for change” and even though the kids involved in that second camp had fewer previous relationships I think they bonded more tightly as a group because they had the mission in common. The first group grew as writers, but I think the second group grew as writers and as people and as a community.

Ronfeldt writes “In Search of How Societies Work” that there are four major forms of organization: Tribes, Institutions, Markets, and Networks. He posits that all other forms are hybrids of these. His theory is that these forms have existed since ancient times, but each “embodies a distinctive set of structures, believes, and dynamics (with bright and dark sides) about how a society should be organized” and each “involves different standards about how people should treat each other.” I really want to think a lot more about his idea of networks and their development as I think those ideas work in interesting ways with my own ideas of community and social capital. I’ve taken a step forward in my understanding of community and network formation as both a teacher and a leader as a result of my teaching experience this summer and it has given me a lot to ponder (and I expect write about) in the future. I'm already starting to ponder these lessons and ideas in terms of my professional writing students and my work as a technical communicator.

Transformations, Magic, and the Power of Writing and Writing Teachers

This week has been a rough week. My first week back on campus and truly on the job since my health crisis and every day I have left campus exhausted and every night I am beyond done. However, as much as I can’t be everywhere and do everything that I would like, I have remembered why I love my job and why I have the most magical job on earth!

I am a National Writing Project site director and if that isn’t a magical job I don’t know what is!

This week I had the privilege to work with and get to know teachers who work with students from kindergarten through college. We read, wrote, talked, teased, cried, laughed, reflected, and grew – oh my, did we grow -- as writers, teachers, and people. Pure magic! And if you don’t believe it then you can follow us on Twitter (#MWPSI & #ENG608). Add to that the pleasure of watching the young writers at our writing camp find the joy and magic in writing without the fetters of school/curriculum constraints and become published writers in the process.

I love watching a group of writers become a community. I have really loved that Twitter has made it possible to watch the magic for our traditional SI even when I’m not in the room and made it possible to happen at all for our online SI.

I love watching people become writers. The transformation is nothing short of breath-taking and awe-inspiring and I do not think I will ever tire of watching it happen. Writing teachers are masters of magic!

I love watching writers discover the power and magic of words and I further love watching those words transport others to new places and new ideas as well as to raise us to great heights of inspiration and joy or plunge us to the depths of despair and sadness. This week has been filled with laughter and tears and we have reveled in this. It brings tears to my eyes just thinking and writing about it. Magic.

I love watching teachers explore ways that they can become better teachers especially how they can use their own transformation to writer to enable their students’ transformations. Teachers are the masters of magic!

 As a writing teacher as well as teacher of writing teachers, I struggle to combat the sort of magical thinking that writing is something easily taught and writing problems have easy solutions, but this week has reminded me once again that the opposite of easy does not necessarily mean difficult. We have all worked hard this week but our growth and development has not been difficult. While perhaps not as easy a waving a magic wand (or magic pen), it is also a lot fun. Being a writer is hard work but it is also magical work and what price can we put on magic?

And so, despite the constant and ongoing aggravation of administrivia, I know I have the most magical of jobs and if you want to argue that your job is better you better slap on your wizard hat and grab your magic wand!

Reflection on Reflection

As I blogged about reflection in September:

“I believe strongly in the power of reflection to help writers learn and grow, but there is one problem with reflection as a tool for change – humans are lazy and thinking is hard.”

However, I persevere with the uphill struggle to make my students reflective writers. This semester I modified my approach to reflection. In the past I have required journals and used Twitter but this semester I expanded the process.

It begins with a Prompt that I post on the class blog. This is more than the quick one- or two-sentence prompt which I used in the past and actually approaches more of a mini-lecture of sorts. My intent is to provide a lot of fodder for reflection. For my Writing I students that has meant exploring topics such as writing, literacy, and education. My Professional Writing students have explored professional writing and rhetoric, their professional and personal goals, grant writing, and grant reporting.

I then ask students to journal about the prompt topic. These are not graded and I’m looking for nothing more than a brain dump of sorts. Students are then asked to discuss the prompt topic and the questions it raises in a Blackboard forum. Finally, I ask them to share their thoughts via Twitter. I have been collecting their Tweets on these topics using Storify and I find that I really like having those snapshots of their discussions.

For example, that first week my Writing 1 students reflected on what it means to be a writer. I know I can’t convince all my freshmen writers that they are indeed writers, but every semester hope springs anew. They then moved on to discuss literacy and education as well as their importance.

My Professional Writing students really enjoyed learning more about and discussing rhetoric and professional writing during that first week. I think it was a great place to begin our semester’s work. In preparation for choosing their topics for their semester projects and helping me create a meaningful course, they then discussed their life goals.

While I am sure that many of my students are not enjoying this process as much as I am, I hope that ultimately they take away some important lessons from this reflection.

Tweeting the Semester Away

We are just starting our fourth week of classes at Morehead State University and despite a respiratory virus which severely upset my work schedule, I am fairly pleased with the way the semester is going. While I have used Twitter in the past, this semester I stepped up its use and I think things are going well. Of course, not all of my students agree but my dog doesn’t like taking his medicine either, so I am taking their complaints under advisement, but keeping the assignments at least until I hear some compelling arguments against them.

I teach online a lot. In fact, for recent years my primary teaching load has been online. This is in part because I am the one who pitched and piloted the online versions of our general education writing classes, but also because I like it. I think teaching writing online allows us to focus on the writing in ways that face-to-face classes do not. There is a tendency to fill traditional class time with talk, either mine or students. In an online class that talk must come in the form of writing which means the emphasis remains on writing. I also like the transparency offered by online writing workshop. Of course, I must also admit there are practical reasons as well. Half of my job is administering a National Writing Project site and I find it a lot easier to juggle the two roles (as well as my personal roles of mother, wife, dog owner) and my research with a more flexible schedule. However, while I prefer to teach online I also know there are drawbacks to it. A big one for someone who actually likes her students is that Blackboard (the CMS we use at MSU) does not do much to encourage personal interaction. Little things like the lag time in student name updates (so the newly married or newly divorced women’s names don’t match the roster) or the fact that student names do not match their personal preferences are a problem. Plus, the dry and rigid structure with no pictures or other personalization really makes it difficult to get to know students.

In recent semesters I have tried to combat this problem by using Twitter. We start out creating 6-word-memoirs to introduce ourselves and I ask that they post those 6-word-memoirs in their bios. This means that whenever I’m reading our class Twitter stream I can toggle to my list of followers or just click on an individual student to not only see their name and photo but also jog my memory about this person. You can see the results for my Professional Writing and Writing I classes. Perhaps more importantly, I also ask my students to post about their daily life. It can, but does not need to be anything too personal. They can keep it rather superficial such as notes about classes, friends, food, and their health – in other words the little conversations that we would likely have in a traditional classroom before, in between, or after our lessons. Of course, this system isn’t perfect either. Some students are reluctant and resistant while others leap into it with a frenzy (or are already active on Twitter) and overwhelm the class stream with the trivia of their lives, but I appreciate the fact that Twitter allows me to get to know my students on a more personal level than Blackboard and that it opens another channel of communication which is always a good thing, in my opinion.

Setting my class agenda

Unicycling juggler

I am teaching two very different writing classes this semester and I am excited about my plans but a bit worried about juggling the two without dropping balls (combined with the flaming swords and sharp knives I am already juggling as part of my administrative duties for the National Writing Project). I am teaching first-year writing (aka Writing I or Eng 100 at my institution) and professional writing (which is a 300-level class).

I have two primary goals for my first-year writing students. I first and foremost want them to develop as reflective and self-regulating writers but I also hope to increase their understanding community and collaboration. I think focusing on those two aspects of writing development will set a strong foundation for their continued growth and development.

Our first week of classes (which officially begin tomorrow) will include elements of both. I will continue to use Twitter to help us develop classroom community which includes individual and class Twitter feeds, introducing ourselves via Twitter, and socializing via Twitter. In addition, I’m asking students to keep a journal to record their reflections on weekly topics, discuss those topics as a class, and Tweet about those topics as well.

Our first weekly reflection and discussion topic will focus on writers. I posted a prompt on the class blog that included the National Conversation on Writing’s video “Everyone’s a writer” and some interviews with students about how they define themselves as writers.

My goals for my professional writing students are more sophisticated versions of those for Eng 100 (at least I’m consistent). I also want my professional writing students to develop as reflective and self-regulating writers, but our focus in this class will be on discourse community, audience, and genre.

I am also using Twitter for this class and they have the same initial Twitter assignments and, in fact, will engage in similarly-structured reflective assignment that includes a cycle of reflective journal posts, class discussion, and Twitter posts.

Our first weekly reflection and discussion topic for professional writing will explore what we mean when use the term professional writing and what they hope to learn from the class. I share some definitions that others have given and then bring it back to the study of rhetoric sharing with them a personal blog of mine about rhetoric as well as the "In Defense of Rhetoric" video. I then conclude with a selection of Drucker’s “The Age of Social Transformation” about knowledge workers. Hopefully I haven’t set too ambitious of an agenda. I guess I’ll find out this week.

I can’t wait to begin our discussions. Do you think my students are excited, too?

Important Influence: Anne Beaufort

From the moment that I first encountered Anne Beaufort’s work during my doctoral work at Texas Tech I wanted to learn more. Her ethnographic studies of writers moving from academic to workplace writing and theories of writing expertise have strongly influenced my teaching as well as my own research.

Learning more about Beaufort’s professional history only furthered my infatuation and interest. Like me, she began as a classroom teacher and discovered that writing was her first love. She has also written for weekly newspapers and worked in corporate communications as well as been involved with the National Writing Project.

It was her work drawing from cognitive psychology that led me to pursue my own interest and research in writing self-efficacy. In addition, her work on context and discourse communities as well as the development of writers continues to feed my teaching and research. She continues to be a source of inspiration and knowledge for how writers are made.

How well did my semester plan work?

As Robert Burns noted: “The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley” or the more popularly known “The best laid schemes of Mice and Men oft go awry.” While my class plans rarely (I hope) lead to grief and pain or even joy, this quote is apt for my teaching experience. Every teacher knows that the “best laid” lesson plans rarely work out exactly as planned but as WC Fields wisely noted: “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” Perhaps it is the second part of that quote that most applies to my blog post: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it.”

If I want to learn and grow as a teacher then I must evaluate and reflect on the successes and failures of my past classes – and perhaps most important I must learn from them so I can avoid making the same “damn fool” mistakes. I try to keep this in mind every semester as I embark on the 3x3semester evaluation suggested by Profhacker.

First, three things that went well: focus on community, reading groups, and emphasizing reflection. This semester I focused on developing class community and teaching my students about why community is important (as students and as writers). I deliberately used Twitter as a tool to build community in my class as well as to teach students about community. I think this worked well and I’m finally realizing the potential of using Twitter as a teaching tool. I also created reading discussion groups to further support community and to solve some of the problems I’ve been having with my reading assignment. These were a definite improvement over letting students go solo and forming them around student interests solved some of the problems I experienced with past reading groups. Finally, I placed even more emphasis on reflection than before. I continued with literacy narratives as before but I added journals, reflection discussions, and Twitter notes to provide further opportunity for reflection throughout the semester. I had used all these in the past but was much more deliberate about connecting them this semester and I was pleased with how that worked out.

Now, three things that didn’t work so well: reading groups, writing workshop, and rubrics. Organizing the reading groups by interest worked really well and I think helped students connect with each other and the material in more meaningful ways. However, I am still doing too much of the heavy lifting here to organize them. I need to get out of their way and let them do the work. I definitely need to micromanage less next semester. Same is true for writing workshop. I need to orchestrate the process but be careful about stepping in too soon or they will never learn to do it without the training wheels. Finally, I need to redo/rework/reconsider my use of rubrics. I don’t feel they are adequately representing evaluation.

Finally, I plan to restructure both my reading group and writing workshop assignments as well as redo my rubrics. This last will be the most challenging because I’m thinking about making it a collaborative exercise with input from my students. I’m not prepared to totally relinquish my control over this but I think making it a collaborative exercise could be a good learning/teaching tool which will fit in well with my intended focus for the spring semester. I’m teaching Writing I for the first time in a while and I intend to focus on not only how we become (more) literate but why it is important. Our reading and writing will focus on that topic which still falls within my writing-about-writing interest of the past but will allow me to work with my increasing interest in reflection and community as well as the citizenship aspect my program assessment requires.