Get Your Twitter Out of My Ajax: Web 2.0 and Writing Pedagogy 

There is an excellent wiki available for this workshop.

http://web20-toolkit.wetpaint.com

This both was and wasn’t what I expected. There was a whole lot of discussion and not a whole lot of hands on or experimentation with the tools. I have mixed feelings about that. Perhaps we got more out of the discussion. Since I have the links, I can play with them when I get home. I got the feeling it wasn’t really planned that way, but that’s neither here nor there. I did write several pages of notes during the workshop—a much better indicator of how much I got out of it than my issues with the facilities.

As far as Twitter goes, I only just signed up for an account a week or two ago in anticipation of this workshop. I did get good ideas for how to use it in the classroom. The one that struck me as the most promising was Shelley Rodrigo’s suggestion of using Twitter to message students and/or have them message you by subscribing to the mobile phone connection. I use the announcements feature in Blackboard to contact students, but this depends upon them checking Blackboard and/or e-mail. If they were subscribed to a class Twitter feed by phone, I could send out group text messages to remind them of assignment deadlines and/or alert them to new information available in Blackboard.

I had already considered using Twitter as a kind of time management device by having students log their progress on projects. If anyone in the workshop mentioned this concept, I missed it, but it is one I want to ponder a little more.

Randall Cream asked how we gauge standards for good uses of Twitter, and Karita dos Santos of Bedford St. Martin’s had a wonderful answer. She said Twitter was just a means of pushing assignments out to students; therefore, we should judge the value of the assignment rather than the use of Twitter.  Twitter, after all, might not even be there by the time we finished establishing our assessment standards for it.

Shelly Rodrigo also tossed out the question of whether we were going to a place with multimodal compositions where students will no longer need to write the traditional academic paper. I’m not sure we answered this, though there was a little talk about it. Personally, my answer would be “not yet.” Maybe one day, but as Karita dos Santos pointed out, composition as a discipline is ahead of the pack on incorporating multimedia into the classroom. Other disciplines remain much more traditional, and part of the purpose of FYC is to prepare students to succeed in college.

Shelley did have a great “blogfolio” assignment, however. She has students blog all of their drafts of all of their projects. Their last blog entry of the semester then is a portfolio cover letter explaining the purpose of the blog and the process they’ve gone through to arrive at the final versions of all of their assignments. I like it.

After the breakout session on blogs and microblogs, I chose Douglas Eyman’s session on document sharing. I got ideas out of this one that I’m itching to get home and play around with. The list of tools for document sharing on the workshop wiki is quite useful. I was also impressed with how much more multimedia work people were doing with composition students than I realized. I’m curious about which of the assignments mentioned related to FYC and which were for more advanced courses, but I’m impressed nonetheless.

I’m most interested in some of the suggestions for remixing. The workshop was quite useful in pointing us to free and accessible options. As someone who can afford the latest version of just about nothing right now, I’m excited to think of trying out free online sites in which to compile projects that will export to Flash. (Eyespot, I believe was the suggestion for that.) 

I’m also pleased with the suggestions of file sharing sites that provide easy ways for students to deliver large presentations to the class. This, I admit, has had me stumped. I use Blackboard, but there is a limit to the file size that students can upload to the course site. I didn’t write down all of the suggestions, but they are on the wiki, and I do plan to check them out when I get home.

Other Workshop Notes:

Doug Eyman: “My job is to make it complicated and then to teach my students how to navigate the complications.”

Colleen Reilly: Says she has students post to Wikipedia and then track what happens to their writing after others have edited and/or removed it.

Doug Eyman: Does something similar with Wikipedia. He also has experimented with posting and tracking misinformation.

Dickie Selfe: Said something to the effect that he wants his students to experience a lot of different teamwork activities and then analyze the tools, the process, etc.

Gina Maranto: Evaluates meta-cognitive reflection on the tools and process of multimedia projects. The self-reflective writing is as important as the outcome of the project itself.Gina Maranto: Where are we teaching students the difference in “to collage” and “to compose”?

Doug Eyman: Makes distinctions between collaboration and cooperation. Someone asked how we get students to move beyond simply cooperating on a project (in which each person writes a separate part) and true collaboration. I’m not sure we really arrived at an answer, but we did discuss a variety of analytic exercises to help students understand the differences.

There were also questions about FERPA and how it relates to student writing as public projects. I don’t know that anyone had any hard and fast rules. There was simply the mention that we should all be aware this is a question.

Overall, I’m most excited about going home to play around with the remixing sites. I’m also very interested in experimenting with having students subscribe to class announcements via text message. They might take days to check email, but they have their phones with them at all times. This has real potential.