Maria's Reflective Introduction for Community Writing

Welcome everyone to my online course, Community Writing. After a summer spent thinking about this course, then thinking about it in terms of technology and online spaces, I have finally reached the point of feeling as if I have made more progress on this course. Specifically, I think transferring this course to an online space enhances the goals of this course as it better allows students to engage in critical thinking practices and write with the understanding of that writing can impact other’s thoughts, ideas and understandings. 

Upon reflecting on this course, I kept battling over this being a hybrid or strictly an online course. Finally, I settled with the course being only online. This understanding centers on the theories and thoughts of Gold, Gaver & Rogers. These theorists strongly impacted my understanding of teaching with technology and how technology can impact the space and then the community that is formed by a course. Specifically, Gold, Rogers and Gaver focus upon what the classroom becomes when one moves it from a traditional classroom with desks, chairs, and walls to a classroom with non-physical attributes, online attributes. These authors then theorize about the new space, the new "community" that is formed when moving outside a F2F classroom. Thinking about these points, it became clearer to me how an online space may better provide a more global understanding of thoughts, perspectives as well as give a space for an actual “outsider” audience to reside. This “outsider” audience I am referring to is an audience beyond the teacher and student’s peers in the classroom. Writing in an online space in a way then creates higher stakes and allows the possibility for students to begin connecting writing with a rhetorical understanding (writing for a real audience, writing for a purpose, writing for a situation, etc.). In fact, Gold builds on this understanding stating that by using blogs like BuddyPress the classroom as a network becomes “more open, more porous, and more varied” where the “classroom as a social network can help create engaging spaces for learning in which students are connected to one another, to their professors and to the wider world” (p. 76).

Therefore, when presented with the option of making this either a hybrid or an online course, I leaned much more heavily towards the online course. As an online course, I want to witness these anticipated transitions in student awareness and student writing. Additionally, I want to experience issues that may have not been issues in a F2F course and confront these with real solutions. All in all, I want to test my understanding of what this course could be and my understanding of how these theories can impact my course. Therefore, I anticipate that in the future, this course could potentially be created as a hybrid course. However, I first wanted to understand the strengths and limitations that an online space provides especially when talking about community. For instance, while I think an online space may provide excellent opportunities to understand rhetoric in practice as it pertains to writing, I do have my concerns that it may be limited in transferring the concept of “community” over. Often times in my F2F classes, the largest challenge has been getting students to identify a community that they belong to. As such, you will see in my schedule of activities and project descriptions that I spend the longest amount of time on unit one. Here students not only need to get familiar with working in an online space but need to get adjusted to understanding “community” and identifying one they want to work with. As such, we spend almost twice as long on that unit than the other units. Further, all the units have been slightly adjusted to be in alignment with MSU’s FYW program. I did this intentionally as one day I would like to actually propose and use this course at a similar university. Therefore, I had certain constraints placed upon me such as number of units and types of units. Nonetheless, I did slightly re-arrange the scaffolding of assignments. Particularly, I asked students to create a multimedia project for unit 2 instead of typically waiting until unit 4. I felt this was an important task to introduce early into the course because of the course being online and a place for multimedia to be engaged. Additionally, the task for unit 2 I think builds nicely upon unit 1 and begins to solidify student’s understanding of community.

All in all, I must say that I am pleased with this course overall but am well aware that there will be limitations to it. As such, I really do invite all of you to take a look at the website (course assignments and syllabus will be posted there) and let me know what you think. As you all can probably tell, I really do hold this course concept of “community” close to me and think it has a lot of potential. But before it being what it could be, I could use your feedback. Feel free to email me anything you may see at novotn10@msu.edu. Thanks much!

Reflection on F2F Session: A brief reflection on the Graduate-Level Summer Camp Experience

I know this blog doesn’t necessarily align with the suggested blog topics listed on the syllabus. But I wanted to post a few reflections about the experience of the F2F sessions, not only for my own synthesis practice but to generate some larger class understanding about how we all experienced the F2F and where that leaves us now.  As a teacher and as a student, I find reflection very generative and helps situates the next steps/process to undergo. Often times in graduate school, I feel so rushed to move from one experience to the other without the opportunity to critically reflect and understand how the experience has influenced new understandings. So as always, feel free to comment and share what you took away from the experience.

What I Took Away From the F2F Experience:

1. Graduate “Summer Camp” Rocks – now, last week I probably would have not said that. I think it is fair to say that most of us struggled sitting in a classroom for 6 hours each day. However, now that I survived that experience, looking back I must say that the time spent together was very generative. Plus, as this course occurs in the summer it really is perfect timing. I now feel that I am in a great position to really work on my syllabus and course design plans well in advance from the start of the fall semester. And I must say that a summer course has a much different vibe than a fall or spring course. A summer course, especially a summer online course, feels less rushed and creates space for reflection and generating new course ideas. For me, I really see a benefit being away from the classroom – having physical space away from the classroom to really think about what the classroom space offers as well as what an online classroom space offers. With time for reflection, I plan on incorporating this then in my final project.

2.  Workshops/Tools Are Awesome – In a way this relates to #1, however, because of the impact the workshops had on my project descriptions and teachnology statements I felt this could be it’s own category. Like any peer review, the workshops for the course provided the opportunity not only to receive feedback but also to read others and “sneak a peak” into their understandings and their ideas. For me, that “sneak a peak” moment was most generative. And as I stated in class, it would be wonderful for Eli to have a tool that allowed reviewers to take notes as they are reviewing other’s in order to track and mark ideas that they want to incorporate in their drafts. 

Similar to Workshops, the tool review sessions were invaluable. It was wonderful to learn about multiple tools that support and afford an online learning space. Further, since we all come from a variety of backgounds, the tools that were presented offered a variety of insight and generated multiple ideas. I know that I plan on incorporating more mapping tools and plan on playing with the avatar site. 

3. Talking About Theories – Thinking about the F2F session in particular, the time spent in class talking about learning theories was also very interesting and something that I think we have been attempting to do in campfire yet not totally successful. I think campfire is a great tool to spend an hour of time with students and check in on progress and questions but it really doesn’t easily afford the opportunity to lecture and then discuss theory. The F2F time when Bill spoke about communities of learning and other learning theories then enhanced my own comprehension of such theories but it also provided a place to attempt to apply theories. This ability and skill of knowing how and when to apply theory in the classroom is something I believe vital for good teachers to know how to do and be successful at doing so. Thus, I think discussing those theories and then pushing us to incorporate some of those theories into our course descriptions and plans will serve all of us well once (and if) we determine to incorporate these practices into our future courses.

Critical Ideas:

Overall, the F2F sessions made me question my own future in the field of writing and rhetoric but in a much larger way.  While I am interested in the power of technology in writing and rhetoric, the F2F session asked me to expand my thoughts on technology into the field of education and higher education in general. I think this was because of the various fields we represented in the class. And so, leaving the F2F session I couldn’t help but think about:

·      What is next (technologically speaking),

·      What my role (as a teacher and graduate student) is in this,

·      And finally, how to best evaluate and support good technological options.

As someone who wants to make change in our field, specifically with applying more decolonial theory into our writing classrooms in order to make space for all of our students to represent their thoughts and writing, I can’t help but think about technology may be a tool to assist in creating such space. These ideas are fresh and still need development. Yet, overall, this class and the specifically the F2F session has really allowed me to begin pondering such questions and has pushed me to attempt to formulate some sort of an answer to them.

What I Would Like To Do More Of:

So here we are at our “independent” work time and after ending our F2F session, I was thinking where should I go from here? Yes, I will start going over Eli comments and start polishing up my teachnology and project descriptions. But what about the other drafts? With that, I was thinking that it might be helpful to conduct a few more workshop sessions. I know for some they may think, well that is just more work which it is, but I found the workshops on Eli quiet generative and I don’t think they took much time. So I am boldly proposing that we conduct one more Eli review session before the symposium. I know campfire will provide ample time and space to discuss issues and questions we have about the projects, but the opportunity to actually see the drafts in progress is something that I value and learn a great deal from. I am curious what others think and I’m not trying to give more work, just trying to best improve my drafts and incorporate these learning and technology theories into my course design.

On Teaching & Learning "Out Loud"

Well, today I had the pleasure of reviewing the work of the six people who participated in this Summer 2011 edition of Teaching with Technology. I've sent final evaluation messages with my thoughts and my thanks to each of them. And now it seems appropriate to reflect a bit on the way we conducted the course, and to speculate a bit about the future of this space.

Way back when the course started I posted some thoughts about what I had hoped the course blog would do in my overall plan for the course. Drawing on Krause's article "When Course Blogging Goes Bad," I put some optimism out there into the uni(blogo)versisphere. Now that we are on the other side of July (boo!), 120+ posts later, I can call it: success! We've not only used this space to share ideas, share responses to readings, offer statements of teaching philosophy, show sketches of what students' interactions might look like in online courses and other things. We've also created a resource that others out there may find useful.

If we have done this, do feel free to let us know. I hope that as we head into the Fall and some of us, at least, move on to our next teaching assignment, we will return here occasionally to post about our experiences. We might also share thoughts about a new tool or a new reading we come across.

I know I have a lot of cool new stuff to read that I've been gathering up all Summer. One on my list is a new book by a colleague of mine Brad Melenbacher called Instruction & Technology: Designs for Everyday Learning.

I'm also eager to try out this new drag & drop composing (blogging-esque) platform called WebDoc to see if it might have some legs for classroom use. Looks promising. I know there will be others...

If you are a fellow traveler - a teacher with technology - we hope you'll stop by, leave a comment, or maybe even do a guest post? Drop us a line! And thanks for listening as we learned out loud this semester.