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.

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?

Google vs. Blackboard

I use a lot of collaboration and interaction in my online writing classrooms with assignments including reflection journals, class discussion, and writing workshop. My institution’s course management system is Blackboard (I know, right) and like many I have not been particularly satisfied with the way Blackboard supports my pedagogy. The discussion forum in Blackboard does not allow the conversation to flow and develop organically but instead imposes a formal structure and makes it impossible to easily connect entries due to the need to click in and out of posts. The journal tool does not allow students to comment on the journals of their classmates. Writing workshop in Blackboard tends to be a one-way street with little collaboration. Blackboard does not offer any fun social media options or alternatives to support community development. Navigation in blackboard is just clunky and counterintuitive. None of my reasons for disliking Blackboard are unique to me and probably are not news to any experienced user.

This summer I abandoned Blackboard and taught an online graduate class entirely using Google tools and Twitter. We built collaborative docs for our discussion, posted journals that encouraged the free exchange of ideas, and, best of all, created a robust and lively online writing workshop. While no relationship is entirely free from challenges, I was in love with Google docs and wanted everyone to know about it (read more in “Teaching With Google Docs”).

Still caught up in the heady rush of a young love affair, I leapt into using Google for my online writing classes in the fall semester and abandoned my long-time practice of using Twitter for Google+. I knew there would be challenges. I was now teaching much larger sections and working with undergraduate rather than graduate students as well as all the baggage that accompanies students who are taking a required class rather than an option or elective. However, I was sure that the good would outweigh the bad and that we could work through whatever ugliness Murphy’s Law threw in our path. Now in the final days of the semester I can look back at such naiveté and laugh. It wasn’t a complete disaster and certainly some good things happened this semester, but in the spring semester I will move the bulk of my class activities back to Blackboard.

Better Communication

Using Google opened up an additional channel of communication that Blackboard just can’t match and for that reason alone I will continue to use Google in some way. The chat option cannot be matched for an online class because I have my Gmail window open most of the day so students can usually catch me for some quick help. I wanted to use Hangout as well but it seemed most were just as comfortable using Chat and perhaps using the other features in Google docs made Hangout extraneous for them. I do love having that as an option though. I also like Google+. I love Twitter and continue to use it outside the classroom but I like the ability to separate groups in Google+ and I like the posting/commenting features better for the purposes of classroom communication and community building. Right now I plan to continue requiring students create a Google account (if they don’t already have one) and we will use Google+ as our social media and community building tool.

Messy and Distracted

I still love the idea of creating discussion documents and journals in Google rather than Blackboard as they are much more collaborative and organic than any options available in Blackboard but they are also messy and because they are removed from Blackboard I think for many students it seemed to be a case of out-of-sight then out-of-mind. I suspect part of the problem is that it was just one more place to check in and so students would simply forgot about it or put it off. It seemed to me that discussion participation was down (which did solve one of my initial worries about the number of people who could collaborate on a document without it spinning out of control) as the semester progressed. Journal posts also seemed to drop off. We can never know all the reasons why students don’t do their work for a class, but I suspect that in this case another channel created more problems and interference. Of course, it did not help that in the middle of the semester we were all forced to switch to Drive and I really don’t like Drive as much as I liked Docs (but that is another post). We had a number of problems with disappearing posts and folders. I expected some of that but it certainly contributed to student dissatisfaction and lack of engagement (understandably). Logistics was also an issue for me. With a full undergraduate class (rather than a small graduate seminar) it was often difficult to keep track of participation in discussion and while it was easier with journals I still had to do a lot of clicking. This was made even more complicated by the fact that some students did not follow naming conventions and did not always properly use folders. Of course these things happen in Blackboard too.

My New Plan

While I will continue to use Google for the chat and social media features, I plan to move journals and discussion back to Blackboard. However, this time around I am going to experiment with using the Blog tool for our weekly topic discussions and reflections. While it may not be as organic as a Google doc I think it will be more so than the discussion board and it will be less messy (and therefore better for logistics) than Google. I also hope that by keeping discussion and reflection in Blackboard so that students are not switching back and forth between tools will remove one obstacle to student participation.

I have not yet decided what to do about writing workshop. I still love the options that Google offers for this and as students will have Google accounts I can reserve that option. Traditionally, we don’t start off with workshop so I will have some weeks to ponder our options and perhaps by the time it becomes an issue students will be ready to make the leap with me or I will know that this specific group of students is not ready to use a new tool.

Once again I am reinventing my online classroom. Is all this innovation a good thing? Some days I wonder. Which Blackboard and Google tools do you recommend for fostering class discussion, reflection, interaction, and workshop?

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.

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!

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.