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April 7th 2008

4Cs NOLA Friday — F Session

Somehow, I started fresh Friday morning after blogging late and trying to adjust to New Orleans time. A session on Fully On-Line Instruction began at 8:00, which is 6am CA time, and I was starting to feel it.

This particular session focused on a pilot project from UCSB comparing a series of face-to-face FYC courses with totally on-line instruction. The courses were taught by three different teachers, each taking one of the on-line and one of the face-to-face courses so that assessment of pros and cons could be relatively evaluated across pedagogies. One speaker identified herself as a “not-so-tech-savvy” person who engaged the project with more skepticism than her colleagues. The others were rather more knowledgeable, but in the end, I didn’t learn anything I didn’t already know.

The problem is that, if an instructor has read the latest research or spoken in depth with anyone working on-line, the problems and benefits are consistently in the same areas:

The positives are that

  • The responsibility for collaboration and group work is on the students
  • The technology allows more useful (timely?) feedback and more efficient distribution of course materials
  • The quantity and quality of communication increases
  • Asynchronous activities allow students to proceed with work on their own schedules
  • There are opportunities for multi-modal presentations that a classroom setting does not facilitate

The negatives include

  • Limited immediate follow-up and spontaneity in conversation and it can be difficult to provide individualized instruction
  • If you use portfolios, collecting and assessing such is difficult
  • There are inevitable technology glitches and access considerations (dial-up, etc.) that complicate things
  • Prep time is dramatically increased
  • Because the primary medium of communication is written text (rather than spoken words as in a classroom), students who read slowly and/or write slowly (or poorly) fair less well than in a regular classroom environment

So, the consensus was that on-line instruction was a mixed bag–a different mode with different advantages and weaknesses that we just need to be aware of. The panel had some recommendations on creating better on-line learning courses based on their experiences as well as their assessments of student learning outcomes.

  1. Maintain clarity of purpose in the course–be slow to introduce “new” features and instead try to maintain a stable environment around an “institutional” context, rather than a “technology” context
  2. Keep the basics of good practice in mind–peer review, drafts, etc.
  3. Be prepared to do more prep work (nearly 3 times as much at first) than in a conventional classroom

It was, in the end, an interesting enough presentation–they’d brought slides of the research and bibliographical information that situated them in the field, but I had been hoping for more practical tips for esubmissions, responding to students, maintaining real-time discussions and the like.

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April 2nd 2008

4Cs NOLA Wednesday — Ethnography in Composition

Today I attended a half-day workshop, “Out of the Classroom/Into the Streets: Ethnographic Research in Composition and Basic Skills Courses.” There was some presentation, but we also talked a lot about our experiences with Comp and Ethnography and broke into groups to analyze some classroom strategies.

The presenters, Jan Ramjerdi, Nancy-Laurel Pettersen, Belle Gironda, Peter Gray, and Todd Craig, were all from Queensborough Community College, an extension of CUNY, Bayside, NY. They presented a rationale for, sample syllabi from, and student writing examples of ethnographic work in composition and basic skills classrooms.

As it turned out, the rationale was largely unnecessary, since everyone there was there because they’d already bought into the idea. Still, it was nice to get a bibliography of research and history of ethnography in its composition framework, which is pedagogically different from its anthropological framework (although there are overlaps). In a nutshell, Shirley Brice Heath’s Ways With Words is the seminal text for comp-ethnographies but the pedagogy develops through Mina Shaunessey’s developmental lens and James Berlin’s political perspectives, among other influences, to modern works by Wendy Bishop and others. The essential difference between composition ethnographic works and anthropological works, one of the presenters posited, was that ethnography of communication (describing/understanding how people communicate) characterized our discipline’s approach. In my mind, I expanded the word “communicate” to encompass “human interaction,” although there may be arguments with such a broad interpretation.

One immediate question was posed by a member of the audience–isn’t comp about learning writing? The presenter did a good job of staying focused: Comp can be about both, of course, and the particular tack one takes in teaching depends on the context of the course. A basic skills ethnographic course will not be the same as a Transfer-level comp ethnography class which will in turn not be anything like a graduate-level ethnographic study. We were given examples of different approaches.

The workshop went well beyond its noon cut-off and I have a stack of handouts related to it. The conversations we had ranged from the practical–how some of us (including me) are using ethnographic work as part of our classes–to more esoteric questions of theory.

I was particularly interested in its application at the basic skills level–Nancy-Laurel uses it in her reading courses–and we exchanged email addresses so we could collaborate on strategies. I was thinking how it helps comp classes linked to social science courses as well as the additional reading emphasis we need to add into our 251 courses. One presenter complained that her experience was that basic skills focused too much on the personal and the students don’t write enough length at the end of the course. Ethnography allows the personal, but also factors in a kind of research that students can easily accomplish with little “book knowledge.” Interview essays work well in this sort of research and it is not hard to build longer essays using this approach.

One presenter was using the approach to develop literacy narratives, such as “How did you learn ‘hip-hop’ cultural literacy?” to get student buy-in and have them write about relevant issues.

I was also interested in improving my course, and I got a lot of ideas from the presentation. Some people’s approaches seemed too prescriptive, others too loose. However, not only can I look through their syllabi and rubrics, but they included student writing samples as well. Fabulous!

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