Blogging Pedagogy

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.