Today I had the students in my class to do peer reviews of each other’s collaborative writing projects, and, at first, I was a bit stumped on how to organize the workshop. Typically before peer-review sessions I provide a handout with a list of questions for individual student reviewers to respond to when they read each other’s papers, but since I was working with collaborative groups I didn’t think this method would work. First, I didn’t think that individual peer review would be appropriate for collaborative groups, and, second, I felt that at this point in the semester the students knew more about their papers than me, and it wouldn’t be best for me to dictate what issues the peer reviewers should look for.

Since my students have already had some experience working with a number of different revising strategies, what I ended up doing was having each group generate a list of questions for their peer reviewers to respond to, questions that could address what the group perceived to be the current limitations of their paper. The activity seemed to work well, generating some good discussion over both the questions and the responses to those questions. I’m not sure if it seemed successful because the students identified their own problems with their papers, or if more conversation was generated because the students read each other’s papers in groups. In either case, I think I’m going to try it again.

Click on “read more” to see assignment description.

If you are looking for soemthign to do with your class on Monday or Tuesday of next week, this article from Slate provides an interesting template for deconstructing style or structure in a text. The article’s example is the writing of Lewis Lapham, longtime editor of Harper’s.

“The swarm of cameras following Monica Lewinsky on her progress through a Washington airport or a New York restaurant wouldn't have surprised the Roman mob familiar with the expensive claques traipsing after the magnificence of the Emperor Nero, their eager and well-fed sycophancy presumably equivalent to the breathless enthusiasms of Barbara Walters.”

In essence, Lapham was rephrasing Ecclesiastes: All is vanity. There is nothing new under the sun.

306 instructors might be interested in sending their students to hear Bill Nericcio read from his book Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America at the Cactus on Thursday from 4–6.

More info

Those of you who are studying music in your classes or requiring your students to create mashups or podcasts, you might be interested in looking at Bob Ostertag’s w00t.

Google has posted a video on the logic behind Google Docs and how to use the service. It’s charmingly low-tech and suitable for passing along to students who need to use the app but are having problems getting started.

Google Books has introduced a new feature that allows users to embed clips from books that are out of copyright directly into their webpages. All you have to do is click on the box graphic in the toolbar above the book, then highlight the area you want to embed. When you are done, a popup window with the embed code will appear.

This could be an interesting feature to use for class blogging—if you want your students to discuss a portion of a text, you can embed it directly to the blog for them to view. I’m sure people will think up lots of other uses for the feature as they become more accustomed to it.

I’ve posted an annotated list of visual resources that RHE 306k instructors can use in teaching The Devil’s Highway over at viz.

Read/Write Web has posted a Self-Publishing Tool Kit, where they bring together a number of web tools you can use to write and publish your own novel. The steps outlined in the post might be a good place to begin talking about the writing process with students.

Read/Write Web has posted a roundup of Web 2.0 tools for students, including free office suites, mind mapping tools, calendars, and bibliography creators. This might be a helpful list to share with your students in the fall.

Here's the whole article.

The CWRL’s visual rhetoric workgroup would like to announce viz., a portal for teachers and researchers of visual rhetoric. Viz. offers a blog, a bibliography of visual rhetoric sources, and various assignments for instructors. The goal of the site is to “explore the ways in which rhetoric, visual culture, and pedagogy interact with and inform each other. In keeping with this mission, the viz. blog is a forum for exploring the visual through identifying the connections between theory, rhetorical practice, popular culture, and the classroom.”