Blogging Pedagogy

Illustration by Mike Rohde.

Most folks these days—avid and casual users of technology alike—are probably aware of the myth that online readers have short attention spans. However, that myth may be, shall we say, "problematized" by recent research. It's also getting a bit of pressure from classroom practices. At an eComma workshop last fall, Kate Buetner reported that her students spent a lot longer doing close readings using interactive online tools than they did with print. Likewise, some DWRL instructors are pushing back against this myth by using teh onlines to teach close reading and analysis.

For her Rhetoric of Social Documentary course (RHE309K) Andrea Gustavson created a lesson plan that helps students with the collaborative assessment of blog postings. The assignment gets students to start thinking and writing analytically using informal language. Gustavson writes, "Although the purpose of the blog is to allow students to begin to generate analytical responses to course content without the pressure of focusing on formal writing, this exercise helps students become comfortable with the loose parameters of the assignment without the instructor placing constraints on creativity by handing down a set of criteria."

In his Banned Books and Novel Ideas class (E 314L), Ty Alyea has created an in-class approach to developing close readings. Aleya writes that "most beginning students have difficulties determining which elements of a given text are worth analyzing and constructing interpretive and analytic arguments." His assignment, then, "helps students identify how rhetorical/literary devices work to deepen and/or tweak the superficial meaning of the text in question."

The DWRL is hosting a Google Earth Workshop at 1 p.m. Friday, Feb. 5 in FAC 7.

The workshop will focus on:

• Downloading, installing, and navigating in Google Earth
• Making basic and customized placemarks
• Working with data templates
• Embedding text, images, links, video, and audio
• Creating collaborative maps
• Incorporating Google Earth into the rhetoric and literature classroom

Google Earth is a free and easy-to-use software program for building
maps and spatially representing many kinds of data—text, images,
audio, video—that can be aligned with a geographic location. These
maps are three-dimensional and dynamic, and readers can interactively
zoom and rotate as well as add layers of information in order to view
the mapped locations, called placemarks, from a variety of
perspectives, from the local to the global. Within the rhetoric and
literature classrooms, the software is useful for many kinds of
writing. It facilitates invention, as students visually identify
intriguing linkages; acts as a medium for visual writing, as students
transform words into images; and encourages collaboration, as students
work together to chart and connect meaningful locations, thus
organically and/or deliberately synthesizing arguments.

The HASTAC Grading 2.0: Evaluation in the Digital Age forum has been really instructive. Plus, it was hosted by our very own John Jones as well as NYU Doctoral Student Dixie Ching and Duke Statistics/Math Major Matthew Straus. Not surprisingly, The Learning Record is getting a lot of play. Topics as diverse as Pecha Kucha and The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age found their way into the discussion.

At 1pm on Friday Nov.20, DWRL staff will be holding a Learning Record workshop in FAC 9. This event is designed to give DWRL instructors a practical overview of how to implement the Learning Record as a system of evaluation in their classes. We will look closely at the Learning Record methodology in theory and practice, and explore how to use PBWorks wikis as a way to implement the Learning Record online. This workshop will be of interest to instructors of 309K, 310, 312, and E314 classes who wish to implement the Learning Record in their Spring classes, and to anyone already using the Learning Record who would like to check out using a wiki as a potential online platform. 306 instructors will also find this workshop useful as they plan for their 2010/11 teaching assignment.

For more information about the Learning Record, check out this Vimeo clip of Professor Peg Syverson's talk at the DWRL last year about "Social Justice and Evidence-Based Assessment with the Learning Record."

If you would like some time to develop a Learning Record plan, or if you wish to begin planning for your Spring class, there will be an open lab in FAC 9 between 2:30 and 5pm. Tech support and practical advice will be available for tweaking the great tech-based assignments you have already developed. If you wish to you add to your teaching portfolio by trying something new for the upcoming semester, then drop by if you need any help or want to chat about an idea.

I'm departing from our usual practice of interviewing instructors just a bit, by interviewing myself (which, I note, Michelle Jerney-Davis did, too!). I'm an assistant director of the eComma Project, a team that is developing a web application for collaborative online textual annotation, and this lesson plan demonstrates how to use eComma in the classroom. eComma is a UT project, and has been funded by the English Department, Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services, and by the National Endowment for the Humanities. eComma is also hosted by the DWRL. You can learn more about eComma on the project blog, which also includes screencasts and links to active installations of eComma, such as the Collaborative Rubáiyát, a variorum edition of FitzGerald's poem developed in association with a Ransom Center exhibition. We hope to release version 1.0 by the end of the academic year.

As part of the development process, we've tested the application with many groups of students. But I hadn't yet had a chance to test it with a group of my own students, so as soon as I received my teaching assignment, I began thinking about how I could use eComma in the classroom.

eComma is a tool for close reading, whether that close reading is in the service of literary analysis, rhetorical analysis, or even editing.

Last Friday, November 6, I led a workshop for CWRL staff on eComma, and we'll likely be holding more in the future. Once version 1.0 has been released, we hope that many of our instructors will want to take advantage of this tool. The interview below gives a basic sense of how I used eComma in my introductory literature class, Women's Popular Genres. For this assignment, I asked students to close read a short passage from Jane Austen's Emma using the eComma web application. Students collaboratively annotated the text by adding tags and comments to relevant sections of it, as the following screenshot shows:

Q. How did your students respond to the assignment?

A. They were extremely enthusiastic about it. Several quiet students, in particular, were much more forward about contributing to an online discussion than they usually are in class. Based on the experience of my class, I'd say that this activity allows for even more detailed close reading than can generally be accomplished in a face-to-face discussion with students who are new to the study of literature. With eComma, they can add even their most tentative thoughts as annotations, and work with other students to refine their analysis of a passage. The collaborative annotation process creates texts rich with student commentary, and also records that commentary for students to look back on later in the course. This lesson's annotations are available here.

Q. Is this an assignment you use regularly? Were there any unexpected problems or benefits?

A. This was the first time I've used the assignment in my own class, though I've used it in similarly organized classroom testing sessions. At a later date, my students did create another collaborative annotation of a different passage from Emma using eComma. In that case, they were assigned to add tags and comments outside of class. (Those annotations can be viewed here.) We'll also be using eComma to read and annotate at least one passage from Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle. As for unexpected problems, we haven't faced any so far. None of the students had trouble figuring out how to use the application.

Q. What is your favorite aspect of this assignment?

A. My favorite aspect of the assignment is watching students read and respond to one another's comments on a text. Once a certain critical mass of annotations has been achieved, they begin to create threaded conversations, expanding upon and deepening one another's readings of the text. For this lesson, we spent at least forty minutes of our fifty-minute class period working with eComma, and the students never ran out of things to say about a relatively short passage.

Q. If you were to use this lesson plan again, is there anything you would change?

A. I don't think I would change anything about this lesson plan. If anything, I would try to incorporate eComma into my course plan earlier, as another means of engaging students -- this lesson took place after a month of classes.

Currents in Electronic Literacy (ISSN 1524-6493) solicits article-length submissions related to the theme below. Submissions are due by Friday, January 15, 2010.

Spring 2010 issue: "Gaming-Across-the-Curriculum: Playing as a Way of Learning"

“Good game design,” writes James Paul Gee in “Learning and Games,” “has a lot to teach us about good learning, and contemporary learning theory has something to teach us about how to design even better and deeper games.” The burgeoning field of pedagogical gaming has inspired emergent journals (GameStudies; Games and Culture), new institutions (e.g., the Game Studies Research Center at the IT University of Copenhagen), and interdisciplinary approaches. This issue of Currents features guest editors Jan Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes of Clemson University’s Gaming Across the Curriculum (GAC) program, which examines current and potential uses of gaming within the academy. The issue will incorporate games created by students and faculty, best practices of the use of computer games in teaching, articles that theorize play and pedagogy, innovative approaches to cross-disciplinary collaboration using computer games, frameworks of GAC white papers, and so forth.

Currents encourages unconventional and emergent modes of scholarship. The editors solicit articles, games (with instructions and background), GAC curriculum designs, and other scholarly treatments of “gaming-across-the-curriculum.” All submissions should adhere to MLA style guidelines for citations and documentation. Submissions should state any technical requirements or limitations. Currents reserves all copyrights to published articles and requires that all of its articles be housed on its Web server.

It is the policy of Currents in Electronic Literacy that all published contributions must meet the W3C accessibility standards. While all Currents articles are accessible, readers are advised that these same articles may contain links to other Web sites that do not meet accessibility guidelines.

Contact: currents@cwrl.utexas.edu

Teachers of English and Rhetoric are often familiar with ways that pop culture artifacts can acquaint students with advanced rhetorical concepts. However, when it comes to encouraging formal analyses of the texts we run into every day (television, movies, advertisements, web sites, YouTube videos, public spaces, and interpersonal relationships), we often run into a barrage of questions such as "how do we analyze and cite billboards and advertisements?" or "how can we analyze ways in which television shows treat issues relating to gender or class?" Jonathan Silverman and Dean Rader's The World is a Text (Prentice Hall, 2008) seeks to address these questions head-on. Using elements of semiotics and rhetorical theory to set up their method of explaining textual analysis, Silverman and Rader's book seeks to help teachers and students engage with a wide range of texts and how they can be used to engage topics such as race, gender, class, and technology.

Since the most recent edition of Silverman and Rader's book is fairly new, Blogging Pedagogy sought out instructors who have been trying out the book. We caught up with Catherine Coleman, who is currently using the book for a course entitled "The Rhetoric of Texas." Check out her responses to our questions below.

Q: What are the best and/or most useful aspects of the book? CC: I like the fact that The World is a Text breaks down rhetorical analysis into mediums and focuses on one medium, critical lens or topic per chapter. For example, I teach the first chapter, "Reading and Writing About the World Around You" early in the semester because I feel that it encourages students to jump into rhetoric. In this chapter and throughout The World is a Text, Johnathan Silverman and Dean Rader strive to make readers aware that the things they experience every day -- their campuses, fashions, video games, social networking sites and videos viewed and posted on YouTube -- are also rhetorical situations that they can gain a clearer understanding of and critical perspective on through observation and analysis. Another very useful aspect of The World is a Text is that Silverman and Rader provide concise introductions to each medium or topic (including race and ethnicity, gender, advertising, journalism, mass media, and relationships, to name a few) and then include well-rounded selections of unexcerpted critical essays on each medium or topic written by scholars, journalists and even some college students. These essays help students in Rhetoric to recognize how academic cultural studies work. Q: How does the book familiarize students with or help you teach rhetorical concepts? CC: The World is a Text foregrounds the rhetorical principles. By the end of the Introduction (the first twenty-two pages), Silverman and Rader have provided students with a brief and helpful introduction to semiotics and semiotic situations, the history of rhetoric, the interconnection between writing, reading and thinking and a guide for building good arguments about popular culture texts. By the time that students reach page seventy, they have been exposed to a helpful guide on how to find an approach for writing essays, a detailed tour through the basic steps of the writing process, a guide to making solid arguments and the types of rhetorical appeals and fallacies that we will return to throughout the semester. Because Silverman and Rader try to make this part of the text so concise and accessible, I have found that moving too quickly through it can leave students overwhelmed and confused. I tend to try to slow down the pace by providing supplemental materials and by making sure that I create activities that challenge students to really learn the concepts and not simply read them and never think about them again. The book never returns to these concepts explicitly, so I find myself revisiting them with my class and referring students to this part of the book when they need to refresh their understanding of important concepts like ethos, pathos and logos or when they encounter fallacies in their own arguments. Q:What kinds of classes might the book work best for? Are there any courses that this book would be less useful for? CC: This book would be fantastic for any class that takes up many different mediums, types of media and subjects. The primary virtue of The World is a Text is definitely breadth and not depth. It was perfect for a course like RHE 309: The Rhetoric of Texas, where the different units ask students to first explore folk culture and music, then representations of Texans in the mass media and finally Texan films and films about Texas. However, if an instructor is teaching a course geared around rhetorical study or analysis of a specific type of media (like advertising or film) or critical approach (like critical race or gender studies), they would probably find this book to be too broad. Q: Is there anything that you find lacking in the book? If so, have you found any good ways to compensate for these drawbacks? CC: While this book is excellent for introducing students to cultural research and analysis, it does not include any information on scholarly research or the use of databases. I supplement the text by spending part of a few class days introducing students to the library website and database searches. Also, as I state above, Silverman and Rader's treatment of rhetorical concepts is cursory and would likely require supplementation in most Rhetoric courses. Q: Do you have any other comments about the book that might be worth sharing? CC: The essays and images in this book are great.  Silverman and Rader have done a great job of securing engaging and inspiring pieces of cultural analysis and visual rhetoric and my students have responded very positively to these parts of the text. Although a number of the concepts Silverman and Rader introduce in the text are new and therefore quite challenging for most Rhetoric students, (the authors introduce semiotics, critical race and gender studies, feminist, queer, and Marxist approaches to cultural texts) the book is also written in an incredibly accessible and inviting style.

This semester, I'm teaching an introductory literature course entitled Women's Popular Genres, aimed primarily at students who intend to major in English. Perhaps because of the content of the class -- two words: Jane Austen -- it has also attracted students from other majors who want to read and talk about the works. Some students feel very comfortable with the process of writing about literature, while others who work primarily in a different discipline find it more of a stretch.

In this first half of the course, they write three short papers (2-4 pp.) analyzing some element of a work we've read. These papers are intended to help the students learn to construct short, specific analytical arguments about literary works. This requires them to construct strong and narrowly focused thesis statements.

I wanted to create a thesis-building worksheet for my students: a simple step-by-step process that would offer students who are new to making literary arguments a structure upon which they could model their own theses. As I Googled around a bit, I discovered that it's tough to find good examples of this sort of thing -- every college writing center has a webpage or a PDF handout with plenty of explanatory text about creating thesis statements, but very few present more linear instructions. I ended up producing my own handout, which I'm attaching to this post, in case anyone's interested. I also found a number of useful primers on developing a thesis.

For literature classes, the neatest is Dartmouth's page on thesis development, which not only includes this handy checklist:

• Does my thesis sentence attempt to answer (or at least to explore) a challenging intellectual question?
• Is the point I'm making one that would generate discussion and argument, or is it one that would leave people asking, "So what?"
• Is my thesis too vague? Too general? Should I focus on some more specific aspect of my topic?
• Does my thesis deal directly with the topic at hand, or is it a declaration of my personal feelings?
• Does my thesis indicate the direction of my argument? Does it suggest a structure for my paper?
• Does my introductory paragraph define terms important to my thesis? If I am writing a research paper, does my introduction "place" my thesis within the larger, ongoing scholarly discussion about my topic?
• Is the language in my thesis vivid and clear? Have I structured my sentence so that the important information is in the main clause? Have I used subordinate clauses to house less important information? Have I used parallelism to show the relationship between parts of my thesis? In short, is this thesis the very best sentence that it can be?

... but also an excellent walkthrough of the process of developing a thesis based on specific literary evidence, under the section entitled "Constructing a thesis: a writer's clinic for beginners." Highly recommended.

Other sites I referred to when constructing the worksheet include the Harvard writing center's page about theses and, of course, UT's Undergraduate Writing Center, which has a nice handout on thesis development as well.

In "Invention, Part I" I elaborated an invention strategy that emphasizes experience and juxtaposition. What I failed to do, however, was to provide an overview of more canonical (pun, pun) conceptions of invention. In this post, I would like to use the occasion of reviewing two contemporary textbooks, Elizabeth Stolarek and Larry Juchartz’ Classical Techniques and Contemporary Arguments (Pearson/Longman, 2007) and Catherine G. Laterell’s ReMix: Reading + Composing Culture (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010), to fill that void.

  Invention:

Inventio is the first of Aristotle’s five canons of rhetoric, the subsequent four being memoria (memory), pronuntiatio (delivery), dispositio (arrangement), and elocutio (style). In their Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee define Invention as “the part of rhetoric that helps rhetors find arguments” (36), but their decision to include six chapters under the heading of “Invention” suggests the breadth of the process. They begin with a discussion of kairos, the timeliness of an argument, but also, with regard to invention processes, an indicator of the role of experience, quotidian or otherwise, in generating ideas and inquiries. Crowley and Hawhee then move on to Cicero’s stasis theory and Aristotle’s topoi, both of which represent relatively conventional methods of arriving at an argument in composition classes. But they also include the analytical tropes of ethos, pathos, and logos, suggesting the role of reading/analysis/interpretation in determining one’s own arguments.

In summary, I would say that Crowley and Hawhee demonstrate the significance of cultural, daily, and communal experience in juxtaposition with those of others and, in particular, how they are articulated in speech and writing.

Classical Techniques and Contemporary Arguments:

For the most part, Stolarek and Juchartz offer conventional invention strategies, including using pro/con grids and brainstorming in the context of “Examining Argument Through Dialectic and Induction” (chapter 3), as well as Cicero’s stases, freewriting, and mapping in the context of “Writing Inductive Essays and Mediated Arguments” (Chapter 4).  But I want to attend here to a sometimes maligned technique included in this textbook: stylistic imitation. Though the authors include line-by-line stylistic imitation assignments in the context of teaching rhetorical situation and strategy, my own use of similar assignments suggests that imitation can often lead students to more self-consciously approach the invention process itself.

Stylistic imitation requires a kind of blend between rhetorical analysis and literary close-reading as it asks the students to identify their “sense” of the passage’s or text’s style as a first step and then to move on to interrogate the text for how and why the text reads like it does. Once they answer those how and why questions and they identify a different context, but similar situation, they can dig more deeply into the syntactic, figurative, grammatical, and other stylistic elements as they’re forced to copy the sentence structures to apply to their particular situation.

For example, in the first weeks of my Rhetoric of Southern Rock course, we spend a lot of time introducing the Deep South and arguments made about it, one of which is W.E.B. DuBois’ "Of the Black Belt" in The Souls of Black Folk. In that descriptive essay, DuBois moves from North to South and then from East to West in rural Georgia, describing the depredation and dilapidation such little towns have incurred since Reconstruction. For the stylistic imitation assignment, I ask the students to think of an abandoned landscape or a place to which they may have returned after many years and to select a related passage in the essay that they can imitate on the level of structure. Overwhelmingly the students enjoy the assignment, and they often comment that it was more difficult than they originally thought to copy someone else’s style. At the end of the imitation, I ask them to reflect on the assignment, why they made some of the choices they did, what they notice about each rhetorical situation, and how they had to reconsider themselves as composers. Even at this early stage in what is usually an intro-to-rhetoric class, students will remark that they had to shift some syntactical unit to accommodate their different situations, or they will comment on the author’s extensive use of adjectives, prepositions, etc.

In line with my own idea of invention, then, this practice encourages students to begin thinking of themselves as writers in juxtaposition to other writers or communities of writers. It also encourages them to begin thinking about how their own experiences inform how they write.

In accordance with the conventional approaches and “classical techniques” mentioned above Stolarek and Juchartz boil invention down to "idea generation," a move that enables them to make the following caveat about writing’s recursivity:

While early rhetoricians may have seen invention as the first stage of developing an argument, contemporary composition theorists believe that idea generation can occur at any stage of writing…Some students resist suggestions to generate more ideas once they’ve begun writing their essays. These students may prefer processes that develop in linear patters. But writing is often very messy…Your willingness to re-see and rework something that you may consider already completed is central to becoming a good writer. (160)

We have all probably made some variation of this statement in teaching revision. Indeed, it highlights the need to more reflexively attend to invention as a component of revision, even if we don’t necessarily agree with the simplified "idea generation" definition these authors offer.

ReMix: Reading + Composing Culture

In many ways, this text is the polar opposite of CTCA. It doesn't, for example, refer explicitly to rhetorical principles as rhetorical principles, kneading them instead into a more contemporary and popular lexicon. Invention in this text, therefore, is always implicit; however, ReMix's conceptual framework is basically founded on the juxtaposition (re-mixing) of experience and cultural artifacts from a variety of media. In other words, invention--at least as I think of it.

In the "Introduction for Students" Latterell identifies the three guiding principles of the book:

(1)[...] as a participator in culture, you are already equipped to investigate it; (2) [...] the things that are closest to us--that we most often take for granted--are most worthy of investigation; and (3) [...] behind these artifacts of everyday life are collective assumptions that shape and reveal a culture's thinking.

This last emphasis on collective assumptions, what Stolarek and Juchartz might call commonplaces/topoi, frames the text's major methodological component. So, in "Reading and Thinking Like a Cultural Critic: Four Steps," two (and perhaps three) of the four relate to teasing out the "cultural assumptions" undergirding the artifact. Step 2, for example: Identify Cultural Assumptions; Step 3: test assumptions by considering context. The possible third is Step 1: Ask Questions.

ReMix thus begins with one of the most difficult analytical elements to impart to students: identifying an argument's warrants. But in the subtitles to its seven sections--Identity, Community, Competition, Romance, Entertainment, Nature, and Technolog--the author uses questions in the secon-person that demonstrate the text's goal of incorporating the students' experience into their evaluation and analysis of "cultural assumptions." In other words, the whole text could be seen as an extended engagement with processes of invention, demonstrating, as S&J do, its recursivity and role in the composing process.

I personally haven't used ReMix in one of my own classes, but I think at least portions of it might be really useful for getting students to more self-consciously and self-critically analyze the arguments around them.

We've been asking members of the DWRL to respond to a series of questions about the National Day on Writing, which is today, October 20. Remember that today is also the date of Cynthia Selfe's talk on the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, at 4 pm in the African American Culture Room (4.110) of the Texas Student Union. We hope to see you there!

Today's responses come from Dr. Davida Charney, professor in the Division of Rhetoric and Writing at UT. We'll be posting more responses from DWRL community members throughout the week.

What does the National Day on Writing mean for the DWRL?

The National Day on Writing means that, for one day, every person in the United States, literate or illiterate, is a stakeholder in a rhetorical situation that calls for epideictic rhetoric. By writing in response, we are all realizing through performance just what Congress performatively declared: the importance of writing.

What are some ways in which rhetoric and composition instructors can take advantage of the National Day on Writing?

Assign five minutes of free writing; ask students to create "found poems" from bits of text in their immediate environment; ask students to recall the first occasion they can remember writing; send students to the Ransom Center website to look at the on-line materials on early writing; send students to the Ransom Center to visit the Gutenberg Bible.

What does "writing" mean in this context? And how is the concept of writing changing?

Writing means using durable symbols that continue to convey meaning after the moment of composition/utterance is over. At one time, writing meant impressing symbols onto a physical object. Today, it can means getting pixels to show up. For me, the concept of writing normally involves using alpha-numeric symbol system.  Without those, it would be hard to distinguish writing from art or music.

What, in turn, are some of the ways that literacy is changing?

Literacy has broadened.  It is no longer confined to a skill usually gained in early childhood--it is a matter of life-long learning.

Regarding the DALN, why is it important to begin collecting literacy narratives at this moment? (This is related to the question of why it's important to establish such a central place for writing).

Pixels aren't as durable as clay tablets but they are much more geographically dispersed.  So we need to make sure that we have records of today's and tomorrow's forms of literacy acquisition.