Blogging Pedagogy

If you are going to be teaching video in any of your classes this year, you might be interested in this article on Roger Ebert’s blog:

“How to read a movie”

Now what do I mean by "positive" or "negative?" I mean that these are tendencies within the composition. They are not absolutes. But in general terms, in a two-shot, the person on the right will "seem" dominant over the person on the left. Does this apply even to films from cultures that read right to left or top to bottom? From my treks through many Asian films, yes, it seems to.

On Monday during the DRW orientation, I’m going to be presenting a workshop on tools for investigating narrative arguments. One of the tools I’ve been playing with is Dipity, a website for making timelines that can be shared with other users. Because timelines force a narrative into a strictly chronological arrangement, they can be interesting tools for helping students to see how narrative arguments can be manipulated for the best effects. In conjunction with the use of Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side as this year’s First Year Forum text, I have taken a section of the book—from the end of chapter 10 to the beginning of chapter 12—and created a Dipity timeline based on an outline of the events described in this section.

One interesting result of this exercise is that it makes it easier for students to see how Lewis has rearranged the events he describes so as to achieve particular effects. The most prominent of these effects is suspense, as Lewis introduces a violent episode in the life of his protagonist, Michael Oher, but doesn’t provide the resolution of this event until after resolving another mystery he as set up in the book: where Michael, or Mike, a 6' 5", 300+ pound teenager who was found living on the streets of one of Memphis’s worst housing projects, came from. In bringing these stories together, Lewis has not only used their arrangement to provide interest in and catharsis for these stories’ eventual resolution, but also conflated to very different time-scales: Mike’s history from his birth to the age of 16 when he was admitted to Briarcrest Christian School, and the unfortunate events of a single afternoon in Mississippi.

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.