Why These Technological Tools?
Why Weebly?
- Originally going to use Wordpress
- However Wordpress did not have the Facebook compatibility that I wanted
- On Weebly can have "like" button for website & blog - can help my students get blog updates and generate activity to our website
- Can post a Facebook page to direct people to our mission
- Has a mobile app
Why Facebook?
- Functions as a course manager
- Allows students to get to know each other especially in an online course environment
- Invites conversation
- Social media component will hopefully make students think about what they write in terms of audience b/c will posts will be connected to site & will facilitate developing that "critical consciousness" both in terms of audience and student
Why Eli?
- Invaluable resource for peer response in an online setting
- Ability for teacher to manage peer response online
A quick tutorial of the website and it's function in relation to Facebook and Eli Review
http://wra150communitywriting.weebly.com/index.html
Course Assignments
Litearcy Memoir
- The final paper then will be a paper that introduces your community, your past and present relationship with that community, and provides some evidence for why you believe your community to be a community.
Remix
- For this project students will represent their community in a multimedia format. Doing so, students will build upon their own understanding of their community and then "remix" this understanding for a larger audience who may or may not be familiar with the community.
Cultural Artifacts Paper
- For the final paper students will select an object that operates within their community and explore the larger cultural values and practices that the object represents. Specifically, students will analyze an object, determine it’s cultural significance to the community that it belongs to, and then explore how this object operates within and outside the community, debunking any myths in the process.
Disciplinary Literacies Paper
- For this paper students will examine what their community represents and how it operates. As such students will be reflecting upon their own role/involvement in this community. How do you help this community? What do you offer to it? How does your involvement assist your community’s goals?Additionally, students will work with another member from their community in order to add to their research.
Revising Literacies
- For the final paper, students will be writing a reflective essay about their experience with community writing. Students should reference previously papers and critically track their growth and struggles in this process. Additionally, students should indicate moments where they found new ways to think about a concept of a community. This can be related either to the student's own community or one of their peers.
Reflecting on These Connections
These explanations of the online classroom supports my own class redesign. My redesign attempts to break out of the traditional classroom walls and to begin to make steps to connect with the outside world. As someone who attempts to integrate elements of critical pedagogy in her classroom, it thus becomes essential to take steps for my students to engage with a larger world. Doing so I believe allows students to make better connections with such issues rooted in the real world, not just the classroom. As a teacher of critical pedagogy I am always attempting to extend course activities and assignments into real world situations. These assignments attempt to encourage students then to challenge themselves and write for a purpose and an audience beyond the classroom. As such, as I have been developing my course redesign the theoretical reasoning provided by Gaver, Gold, and Rogers have influenced much of my conceptual understanding of the course.
Community Writing Online
- Course structured around our class website, Facebook page/group, and Eli Review
- In finalizing this course, the goal is for the website to be the main page for students to access
- From the website, it is hoped that all other materials and information will be uploaded
- Goal of Facebook page/group two-fold:
- Facebook page is to encourage/build an audience
- Facebook group is a private group only accessible to the teacher and students; the group's page will then be a place to upload academic files that need to be password protected, be a place for students to communicate with each other, and contain "events" where students will be asked to complete certain tasks
- Use of Eli Review will be regular and will serve the purpose of peer response
Matthew Gold, "Beyond Friending: BuddyPress and the Social, Networked, Open-Source Classroom"
For Gold, 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).
Course Development To-Date: Visualizing the Tools in Action
AL871 Course Redesign Rationale
- Will use elements of my previous redesign from the Spring and adjust it by applying teachnology theories and teachnology tools to an online FYW course
- To understand why I believe why this course would work best as an online space, this idea of community must be addressed
"The Communities We Write" Course
http://writingourcommunities.wordpress.com/
- Many reading and writing prompts attempt to develop student's critical consciousness by asking them to think about issues beyond themselves
- While my spring course applied such ideas, I also attempted to encourage critical consciousness in terms of audience
- As such, I created a class blog for my student's to post their final paper assignments
- The goal for the class blog then was two-fold:
- 1)for students to write for an audience beyond themselves, their peers, and the teacher
- 2)for "the outside world" to read these blog posts and learn about community issues students wrote about
Why Online Component of Course Failed
- I failed to have students actively posting on the blog
- The blog was "too clean" and not well incorporated into the daily activities of the course
- I had "student groups" post items to the blog; instead of individuals posting to the blog
- This created management issues and timing issues
- I failed to fully understand how to use a blog in a F2F course
Course Specifics: Community Writing
- Renamed "The Communities We Write" to "Community Writing"
- Wanted this title to be simpler, easier to understand
- "Community Writing" is designed then to be a completely online course
- Believe having the course completely online blends the theories provided by Gold, Rogers & Gaver with Gere, Freire, Herzberg, & Coogan's ideas as previously mentioned
- Online course asks students to perform at the same level as a F2F class but asks them to do this differently
- Online course asks for new levels of student engagement and response
- Online course creates a more globalized community
An Innovative Course?
Adjusted Scaffolding of Course
- A new way to conceptualize what community is
- New concept for a FYW course
- New way to integrate critical pedagogy theories
- New way to incorporate elements of community/service work
- In many ways the digital affords new modes and new connections to be made that influence this idea of making connections and questioning things going on in the world because in away this is connected to the real world
- Takes "the classroom" and what is expected to occur in the writing classroom and puts much more of a global spin on it with real life consequences and stakes
- FYW typically follows assignment pattern: Literacy Memoir, Cultural Artifact, Disciplinary Literacies, Remix, Revising Literacies
- Because this is an online class and requires use of multimedia, I am adjusting the scaffolding to follow: Literacy Memoir, Remix, Cultural Artifact, Disciplinary Literacies, Revising Literacies
- I feel it necessary for the remix to come right after the Litearcy Memoir because I will then build in other multimedia components into daily assignments and larger assignments throughout the semester
- Adjusting Remix then requires students to become more familiar with technology
- Also the learning goals of the remix build in technology but also ask for students to begin developing a critical consciousness in this task
Kenneth Rogers, "Crowdmapping the Classroom with Ushahidi"
- Rogers, too, suggests that digital media as a tool better engages students in critical concepts.
- He states that “most productive occasions of successful pedagogy might begin in the classroom but become truly generative when they are directly linked to a student’s life experience in an altogether different social environment” (p. 232).
- To do so, Rogers then argues that teachers should use digital tools to bridge “utility and applicability to more than one sphere of society” (p. 232). For Rogers then using online tools can help bring these two worlds – the classroom and other social environments – into greater proximity in the courses.
How "Community" Relates to Technology
AL871 Symposium Presentation
Redesigning a FYW Course
- In Learning Through Digital Media (LTDM), Gold and Rogers make connections regarding how technology and community relate
- Additionally, Gaver adds to this in the piece “The Affordances of Media Spaces for Collaboration”
- 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
- Impacts the day-to-day conduct of the classroom
- Impacts the global significance of the classroom
Course Concept
- This course redesign is based off of MSU's FYW courses
- Redesigned this course once before
- Found a scaffolding issue when teaching the course "WRA150: Evolution of American Thought"
- Lacked a theme for students to follow and understand how their writing built upon each other
- Spring 2012 semester taught WRA150 no longer as "Evolution of American Thought" but as "The Communities We Write"
- Idea was for students to select 1 community that they belong to and write about this community throughout the semester
- I continued to follow the pre-assigned FYW assignments but slightly adjusted assignments to fit "community" writing
Interaction Grids
- Finding as designing interaction grids, that the use of technology and an online course allows the opportunity to make it a much more "decentralized" classroom compared to F2F sessions
- Much of the interaction I am designing focuses on student-to-student interaction with the teacher overseeing this
- An issue I foresee though is that urge for even the teacher to check out because less day-to-day classroom activity is required of the teacher
Course Learning Goals
- As a tier-one writing course, all of our goals will align with MSU’s tier-one writing goals. Additionally, we will strive as a class to achieve the following goals:
- To develop, individually and as a class, a definition of the term “community”
- To develop a broader understanding of what writing does and can do
- To write for a global audience
- To critically think, question and write about communities
- To write with purpose and use rhetorical skills to convey your thoughts with a global audience
Background: Spring Community Writing Course
- Purpose of this revised course was not to erase the goals of tier-one writing at MSU. Instead, to better align with the goals of the course in a more critical and conscious awareness to push upon the expectations of our students so that they develop as not only good writers but better citizens (Coogan, 2006). This attention to making not only better writers but better citizens belongs in the composition classroom (Herzberg, 1994).
- I am aware that there are other FYW courses like "American Radical Thought" and "Public Life America"
- However, much of my teaching interest is rooted in Freirean critical pedagogy concepts
- Therefore, I wanted to begin exploring how to apply critical pedagogy concepts and theories into actual teaching practice
- Further, my teaching statement is rooted in my own belief that all courses are to a degree responsible in engaging student's critical consciousness
Why do I focus on this concept of "community"?
- More diverse (in terms of language, ethnicity) students are entering the college classroom and finding their way into FYW courses (College Composition and Communication, 2001).
- To create a space that welcomes and values this diversity, I applied Gere's (1994) "extracurriculum" concept by asking students to write about events, places, people outside of academia
- It is an attempt to bring students personal and private worlds that can at points seem not to matter in academia to a classroom setting where they could both:
- 1)find a space to share their own cultural/community history and do so in a way that values those stories
- 2)teach others about various cultures/communities that may be foreign to them - in this sense, raise others "critical consciousness" (Freire, 2008) about the world around them
Feedback, Please!
- What do you think of the website? Do you like it? Suggestions? Am I missing something?
- Do you know how to incorporate blog updates onto a Facebook page or group?
- Ideas on how to encourage outsiders to actually want to read this.
- I really want to convince my students that they are writing for a larger audience. How do I do this?
- Any useful materials to consider including?
- Thoughts on twitter. I would like to incorporate a twitter stream on the website but how many students actually use it? Would it be helpful to include?
- Am I missing anything else?