Technology – Writing Across the Curriculum

March 20, 2017March 25, 2017

DigitalWAC and Asynchronic Learning

It seems that a prominent feature on every syllabus I write is a stringent, punitive attendance policy that grants students a limited number of “free” absences, after which they lose points on their final course grade. This strict attendance policy is partly dictated by the school and department; and I have justified the policy to myself because I teach theatre—a collaborative art form that requires everyone to be present and participating. However, the longer that I teach, the more I have come to believe that such an attendance policy is problematic. Especially at an intuition like CUNY, where many students have outside obligations to support their families and/or long commutes complicated by inclement weather and the unpredictable service of the MTA, I believe we need to rethink our classroom practices to accommodate the everyday lives of our students.

The strict attendance policy is based on an antiquated system of education in which students had to be present in the same room with the professor at the same time in order to receive the knowledge that the professor had to impart. This notion is problematic in two senses:

It encourages what Paulo Freire has termed the “Banking Model” of education. This model sees the student as an empty vessel waiting to be filled with knowledge by the “expert” professor. While the “Banking Model” is successful in some instances, it limits the student’s educational horizon to what the professor knows, which is necessarily limited. The student becomes dependent on the professor for the expansion of knowledge. Our mission as professors should be to provide our students with the skills to become their own professor—to ask questions and find solutions on their own.

A strict attendance policy that requires students to gather within the same four walls during a given period of time ignores advances in digital technologies that allow students to participate in class discussion and projects from remote locations and on their own time.

Blended classroom environments that combine face-to-face class meetings with online components help provide a solution to these problems. They allow students to pose their own questions and work together using internet resources to find solutions—under the supervision of the professor who acts as a guide rather than ultimate authority. Blended classrooms also allow students to work in an asynchronic atmosphere—each working within their own time schedules—to complete tasks and work collaboratively.

At the same time, blended classrooms present their own challenges and may not be right for every classroom. They require that students have a certain level of maturity and willingness to complete the tasks on their own time. They also require that all students have equal access to the digital tools necessary for the course. Additionally, Professors must rethink how they deliver content and develop effective digital assignments that engage students in their own explorations of the course content.

Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) is uniquely situated to help our City Tech classrooms explore Blended Classroom options. Asynchonic digital learning will, by its very nature, require students to complete a variety of low-stakes and formal writing assignments from blogs to collaboratively written Wikis. Therefore, I am excited to announce that over the course of the next couple months I will be developing a new section of our WAC website devoted to applying digital tools for writing in City Tech courses.

I would love to hear from our City Tech community regarding the use of digital tools as I develop this resource. Do you have questions or concerns about the use of digital tools in your course? Have you used digital tools and assignments that you have found effective? Please feel free to contact me (jpike@gradcenter.cuny.edu) with any thoughts you have that will improve this new resource.

October 17, 2016October 24, 2016

The Challenges of Online Writing Instruction

The increasing of online courses has brought to attention the need for a reassessment of both teaching practices and course designing, which, in order to be effective, need to be adapted to the specificity of an online environment. Such a challenge is even more crucial for composition classes since their pedagogy has always stressed the central importance of the communicative aspects and of the work done in the classroom. In order to tackle that issue, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) created a committee with the task to come up with a series of guidelines that could help both instructors and institutions in the effort to develop efficient online courses.

The committee came up with fifteen Online Writing Instruction (OWI) principles that sum up all the different aspects and problems concerning the switch from a face-to-face environment to a virtual one.
Here are those that I find the most compelling:

OWI Principle 2: An online writing course should focus on writing and not on technology orientation or teaching students how to use learning and other technologies.
In my experience using online platforms for language classes, I have always found myself receiving several emails from students asking for help with technical problems. This is a big waste of time for the instructors and for the students as well, who should, instead, be only focused on writing. It is fundamental that the institution offering the course assures that students (and instructor) with no technological competence can be able to learn and accomplish as much as any other student.

OWI Principle 3: Appropriate composition teaching/learning strategies should be developed for the unique features of the online instructional environment.
It is obvious that moving to an online setting requires an effort to develop a coherent and functional pedagogy. Instructors should not simply adapt their didactics to the online setting, but they must rethink and reshape their teaching strategies toward a new approach based on the opportunities and benefits provided by the new environment.

OWI Principle 10: Students should be prepared by the institution and their teachers for the unique technological and pedagogical components of OWI.
This is inherently linked to OWI principle 2 and, even though it can seem self-evident, it is worthed to spend few words on it.
A common mistake among institutions is to think that general technology training can allow students to fully participate and success in an online writing course. Such a presumption does not take into consideration the fact that, in order to get the most out of an online course, students should be familiar with its specific components, and they should also be able to know in advance what kind of commitment it requires. For this reason, each course should offer a preliminary training session, conducted by both lab technicians and instructors, where students can get familiar with the tools indispensable to accomplish.

OWI Principle 11: Online writing teachers and their institutions should develop personalized and interpersonal online communities to foster student success.
Collaboration with fellow students is a very important component in composition courses, and its motivational value should be preserved in online classes as well. The sense of community must, therefore, be recreated following different routes. To this aim, it is essential that, first of all, the institutions create an environment where online instructors are able to communicate to each other and re-create their own community. Within this community, instructors can later collaborate to design a series of community-creating activities for students.

If you are interested in the other principles and in the overall discussion around them, see the following link: http://www.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/owiprinciples

December 14, 2015

Workshop Recap: The Creative Classroom (12/10)

Last week we wrapped up the semester with a workshop on using non-traditional activities in the classroom to incorporate more active learning into our courses – and to have more fun! If you missed the workshop, read on to find out what we talked about, and check out the PowerPoint Slides and Handout.

WAC Fellow Emily Crandall and I started off with an active learning game that encourages student interaction: “The Snowball” (or, as WAC Coordinator Rebecca Devers likes to call it, “The Hungry Hungry Hippo” activity). Each person gets a piece of paper with a question at the top – here, “What is one concern you have about incorporating non-traditional (i.e. not lecture/discussion) activities into your classroom?” After writing down a response, each person crumples up the paper and throws it to the front of the room, which just about guarantees some looks of amazement and some hilarity when people’s aim goes astray. After collecting and redistributing the papers, each person opens up the one they’ve been given and some are read aloud. Then each person writes a response to the concern expressed on their paper. The papers are crumpled, thrown, and redistributed again, and the answers are discussed. This activity is a great way to loosen students up and get them interacting, in addition to providing a way for them to raise questions anonymously, without feeling self-conscious.

I then talked about active learning, which is an idea underpinning not just the workshop, but the WAC philosophy as a whole. Active learning, which can be defined as “any instructional method that engages students in the learning process” (Prince 2004), is typically juxtaposed with more traditional passive absorption of information in a lecture format. Of course, we all lecture sometimes, but incorporating active learning has a lot of benefits for your students and for you as a professor. Research shows that students learn better when they engage in a variety of activities (listening, talking, writing, etc); what’s more, having fun actually increases attentiveness, which in turn makes higher-level learning and deeper connections more likely. As a professor, coming up with innovative and engaging student activities can improve your teaching portfolio or even result in a publication in a pedagogy journal.

Moving on to no-tech activities, we focused on small group activities. Most of us have used small groups at some point in our classrooms, but it’s easy for them to feel like a waste of time. We gave some examples of fun and productive small group activities (see the handout for details), and then Emily described ways to make them more effective. For example, it’s a good idea to require groups to generate a written product that they will have to present, so that group conversations stay on track. Ask students to persuade the class when they present those written products, rather than simply summarize. And research shows that groups of 5-6 produce the most conducive environment for interactive learning.

Using multimedia inside or outside the classroom also offer exciting ways to enliven lessons and promote more engaged learning. This can be as simple as showing a video clip and asking students to write for a few minutes in response before discussing those responses in class – a great way to incorporate low-stakes writing into the classroom. Or you can get a little fancier with only minimal extra effort, trying out some instant feedback techniques. Instant feedback can be used to gauge student comprehension, gather questions, provoke discussion, or even take attendance. We demonstrated an instant poll in the workshop using polleverywhere.com, a great resource that lets you set up a multiple-choice or free-response poll, have your students respond via cell phone or laptop, and display the results instantly as they come in. Our poll – based on a question WAC Fellow Wilson uses in her Intro to Sociology classes – started off with a strong lead for Beyonce’s alienation, but a late surge of “Who is Karl Marx?” responses made for a close finish.

Clickers, which some departments have (and if not, you can use technology fee money to help buy them), can be used for similar purposes, or you can even set up a hashtag for your class and have students tweet questions or responses for instant in-class feedback.

Finally, there are some great ways to use technology outside the classroom. OpenLab is a City Tech resource for setting up a course website, where you can post a dynamic course syllabus, run a class blog, or even create a multimedia class project, like this English/Communications class did. They even offer workshops to get you started; you can find schedules on their website.

Emily showed the workshop her own class blog (which is private, so no link here – but you can see another WAC Fellow’s class blog here as an example) and talked about the ways to use a blog and the benefits of doing so. It’s a great place to practice low-stakes writing; you can ask students to post once a week before class to ensure that they come to class prepared, but also to promote student interaction online. Requiring students to comment on each other’s posts – or offering extra credit for doing so – can generate discussions that you can continue in class. This is particularly useful for students who might feel intimidated or shy in class; it gives them a different way to participate, and it also can give them the confidence to then do so in the classroom after trying it out online. By asking students to post several hours before class, you can read their responses beforehand, which lets you identify and better address the concepts or issues students were most interested in or confused by.

The tasks you assign for blog posts could be the same each week, or you could change it up and use it as a scaffolding tool, according to course objectives. You could ask them to summarize and analyze of the week’s readings, identify a thesis or evidence, argue for or against the author’s position, connect the readings to personal experience, explain key concepts in plain English, or generate discussion questions. Be sure to give specific tasks for posting comments on other’s blog posts, too!

To wrap it up, Emily talked about a couple of ways to tie all of these ideas together. Of course, you certainly don’t have to incorporate everything into the same class, but if you’re wondering how you’re going to have time to use any of them, thinking about a flipped classroom model could be useful. In the flipped classroom, activities we typically do in class – primarily lecture – are done outside (via existing video content you find, such as TED talks or documentaries, or lectures you record of yourself), and activities typically done outside of class – the application of the lecture material – are done in class. So you essentially make room for in-class activities by shifting lectures out.

That’s it for this semester, but we’ll be back in the spring with several workshops for students, a faculty workshop on applying WAC principles with ESL students in the classroom, and a symposium in May to present all writing certification participants’ work from the year. Keep an eye out for the final schedule!

November 30, 2015November 30, 2015

Technology in the Classroom

Our last faculty workshop of the semester is approaching, where we will be discussing strategies for implementing more creativity in the classroom. An aspect of this workshop involves the use of technology. But whether and how to use technology in the classroom is certainly not a settled debate.

There are broad disagreements over whether any sort of active learning (including technology) detracts from student development of the comprehension and reasoning skills required to digest a lecture. There are also disagreements about the extent to which technology can effectively be used to deliver course content. In particular, the trend toward “flipping the classroom” is largely premised upon taking advantage of available technologies for the explicit purpose of increasing student engagement with course materials. In a flipped classroom, lectures are delivered electronically outside of class, and in-class time is reserved for student synthesis, application, and discussion. Some faculty have even attempted the flip in large lecture hall situations, encouraging student accountability for completing required readings. Proponents of the flipped classroom model have developed many different types of resources for using technology outside the classroom in order to facilitate more active learning before, after, and during class. Ted-ed is one example.

But what about technology in the classroom itself? This can take either the form of technology used by the instructor (e.g. powerpoint, video clips), or technology used by the students, namely laptops. There are many elements to consider when deciding whether to allow students to use laptops. On one hand, research suggests that students demonstrate better understanding of concepts and applications when they take notes by hand. On the other hand, permitting the use of technology may foster a more inclusive learning environment, allowing for more alternatives to the traditional lecture. Chris Buddle at McGill, for example, allows students to use the internet to fact check him during class, which often leads to spontaneous discussions and new avenues for student engagement. It can also expand accessibility for students who require accommodations for varying sorts of disabilities.

WAC philosophy and pedagogy offers a robust defense of active learning. That said, it can be overwhelming to try and integrate so many new and different strategies and resources into a classroom. It may certainly be the case that using technology in new ways does not immediately yield the expected outcome. That need not be a reason, however, to shy away from it. It does not mean that you have to drastically change your curriculum to make it more fun or accessible. But it does mean that there may be ways to deepen student engagement with both your course, and with the pursuit of knowledge more broadly, which might fall outside the traditional lecture format, and may involve writing and reading in more creative styles and venues.

April 20, 2015April 27, 2015

Discussion Board as a Tool for Low Stakes Writing

Digital tools are an increasingly common way for instructors to engage students in the writing process. The use of these tools can be a particularly effective strategy for instructors to facilitate low stakes writing, which is a core WAC concept. In their personal lives, students likely use technology such as social networking sites and messaging apps to communicate with each other on a regular basis. Thus the introduction of this technology into the classroom represents a natural extension, and a comfortable medium for many students.

In 2013 the Pew Research Center released a report in which they asked teachers about the use of digital tools in their instruction. These instructors cited three main ways in which digital technology can benefit student writing. These ways are:

digital technologies enable students to share their writing with a larger and more diverse audience;
digital technologies provide students with the opportunity to collaborate to a greater extent;
digital technologies facilitate creative expression on the part of students.

One digital tool that instructors can use in their classes to encourage low stakes writing is a discussion board. Discussion boards allow students to express themselves in an interactive manner. Students are put in a situation in which they have to articulate an opinion and defend their position against other students who may disagree.

When organizing a discussion board, the instructor must balance the desire for students to express themselves freely with the need to advance course objectives. If the discussion board is set up correctly, this balance can be achieved. There are a few things instructors should keep in mind when setting up a discussion board:

Good topic questions are key. This is a fundamental step to stimulate a lively discussion. The question should be tied to course outcomes. Further, there are many types of high quality questions. For example, one type is a comparison-type question where the instructor asks the students to compare themes or issues and take a stand. This is a natural way to create debate amongst students.
Maintaining a flow to the discussion is critical. It is the instructor’s role to make sure that the discussion is staying on topic and that students are not engaging in unproductive dialogue or conflict. This might require the instructor to reframe the question or ask more probing questions, particularly if the discussion has hit a lull. It also requires bringing closure to the discussion with some type of summary that ties the discussion to course content.
High quality, widespread participation is the goal. To this end, instructors might want to make participation in a discussion board part of the final grade. However, instructors will also want to be clear about what represents high quality participation versus comments for the sake of comments.

These are just some of the things to keep in mind when organizing a discussion board, and certainly a discussion board has its unique challenges. Nonetheless, discussion boards represent one interactive and fun way in which instructors can encourage students to write more. It also may be a particularly effective way to elicit participation from shy or typically quiet students.

November 10, 2014November 10, 2014

Thinking About How to Avoid Student Plagiarism

“Hold the newsreader’s nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.”

The above gem of English locution is from a British television comedy show from the 1980’s and ’90’s called A Bit of Fry and Laurie. The sketch, called “Tricky Linguistics,” calls this an example of a unique sentence, one that—despite being made up of ordinary words—has never been said before “in the history of human communication.”

Most of the time uniqueness in student writing is something good. It can reflect a student’s personal engagement and original thinking, and display their “voice.” Many of us consider voice or personal style in writing a mark of writerly maturity, and if we think about our own favorite writers we can probably identify words and phrases that instantly tell us who we are reading. This tendency of writers to use and reuse words is the basis of algorithms like Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbably Phrases and term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf), both of which can help determine what role particular words and phrases play in a text or body of texts.

At this point you may be asking yourself, what does all of this have to do with Writing Across the Curriculum? Well, in preparation for the upcoming workshop on avoiding plagiarism, I wanted to talk a bit about one electronic resource available to City Tech faculty that uses the kind of technology mentioned above to help spot, as well as educate students about, plagiarism.

The Blackboard learning platform (available for all courses at City Tech, not just hybrid or online classes) has a tool called SafeAssign. This allows students to turn in their writing through an electronic system that checks the text for exact or near-exact matches to documents publicly available on the internet, on the closed-access database of publications ProQuest ABI/Inform, and in archives of documents previously submitted by City Tech students. The system then produces a report that marks passages of concern and links to their possible online sources, as well as providing a calculation of the percentage of the paper that matches existing text.

This may seem like a wish come true to time-pressed faculty members—an instant plagiarism detector!—but as with all tools it makes a real difference how you use it. Rather than its capacity to alert the instructor to possible issues of citation (intentional or unintentional) I want to suggest that one of the great things about SafeAssign is that the reports that it generates are not only visible to the instructor, they are visible to students. Even better, there is an option to allow students to run their drafts through the system without turning them in, so that they can see what the problems are before it is too late.

In many cases, what looks like plagiarism is actually poor citation practices and a lack of understanding of paraphrase. Using a tool like SafeAssign to allow students to see where their work is falling short in these areas at the draft stage can take some of the pressure off of the instructor and improve the overall quality of the finished product. More importantly, it can encourage students to be proactive by providing an opportunity for them to self-correct or to seek outside help.

No single tool is the answer to when it comes to student plagiarism. There are lots of ways to address the issue before it becomes a matter for the Academic Integrity Committee. For more ideas join WAC fellows Jake Cohen and Claire Hoogendoorn, and library faculty member Bronwen Densmore for the Avoiding Plagiarism and Using Library Resources workshop this Tuesday, November 11 at 1pm in Namm 1105.

February 10, 2014

Using Blogs in the Classroom: Some Quick Ideas

As instructors, we frequently hear pleas from our administrators and departments to integrate more technology into our classroom teaching, to meet our online-savvy students on ground with which they’re already familiar. Yet, we often come up short when it comes to actually implementing “technology,” which is itself so broad and varied a term that it suffers from its own lack of specificity. What do “they” mean by “technology”? And more importantly, how do I use this “technology” if I’m admittedly not tech-savvy?

One easy way to incorporate a technological platform into the classroom is with a class blog. Blogs are an interactive place that can serve as a locus for discussion and group study outside of the classroom, allowing you as the instructor the opportunity for creating writing assignments without using up valuable class time devoted to course content. And one great aspect of this is that with a well-designed low-stakes assignment, your students will do most of the work and you can just sit back without taking on a mountain of extra grading.

At CityTech, we have a great blog platform in OpenLab, already available for every class. OpenLab has an excellent introductory guide for faculty, and their staff is also happy to work with faculty to design a site and assignments that can work for them. Once you’ve figured out the basics, there are a number of ways you can make the blog work for you using low-stakes, informal writing:

Create a short prompt. This can be a provocative question related to course content, a response to an article or statement made by a public figure, or a response to a particular aspect of the course content.
Post a piece of media for the students to “dissect”: either a clip from a film or TV show, a short piece of a documentary, a song or other piece of music, a news report, or a photo.
Have students post a critical review of an article, news report, event, museum/gallery/concert visit.

Require every student (or select a small number which rotates weekly throughout the semester) to write a short blog post. Then require every student to comment on at least two posts. This last part is key, because it requires the students to read and engage with each other’s work. You’ll find that the students begin to engage with each other in a highly collegial and productive exchange of ideas. As with all assignments, it’s important to still make sure we’re telling our students exactly what we want them to do and how to do it.

As an example, here’s a blog-based assignment I used when teaching music appreciation at Baruch College, and here are the student responses. I wanted students to use the vocabulary of the course to engage with music that they enjoy and doesn’t get covered in class, thus reinforcing core concepts such as form, harmony, melody, and rhythm.

We know that students enjoy this sort of online interaction for a number of reasons: it varies their mode of learning; it provides a way for them to engage in the class outside of the classroom; it prepares them better for class; it fosters discussion (and can be great especially for students who shy away from in-class speaking); and it utilizes technology that students know and with which they feel comfortable. A post last year from the Metawriting blog shows that one professor’s students responded “with overwhelming strong agreement” that “the instructor uses technology to establish good relationships with students.”

We at WAC support class blogging because it provides a platform for students to do expressive, low-stakes writing that isn’t graded in the traditional sense. Similar to using a journal (which we wrote about in this post from last fall), this kind of writing fosters “the building of connections between course content and real life experiences within one or two pages of writing.” In turn, students practice writing-to-learn, engaging with course content in a risk-free environment.

Have you used blogging in your classes? Share your experiences below in the comments.

August 28, 2012September 5, 2012

WAC examples on the OpenLab

There have been so many great assignments posted on the OpenLab, and since the course privacy settings are set to public, we can browse through and share them. These are some that make good use of media, either through links or by embedding it directly in the site.

Art History (Humanities)

Sandra Cheng, ARTH 1103: Posting with art images: Prof. Cheng includes images of the artwork the class will discuss and elicits comments from students.

Sandra Cheng, ARTH 1100: Students posting with photographs: Here, students are writing posts and including photographs by the photographers they are studying.

English

Jody R. Rosen, ENG 1101: Responding to two versions of an image: I used to distribute copies in class, but I like how I can keep within copyright and still have students write about Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker cover and their own view of New York. I wish I could embed the images in the post, but that, too, would violate copyright.

Hospitality Management

Karen Goodlad, HMGT 1101: Tourism Video: Students imagined they were the concierge of a new hotel near Brooklyn Bridge Park and created videos to show guests some of the great features of the area.

John Akana, HMGT 1102: New York Times Dining and Wine RSS Feed: Students can follow along with current articles in their subject through the feed on the right-hand side of the site.

Mathematics

Jonas Reitz, Math 1275: Mathematical Treasure Hunt: Students were asked to find instances of particular terms they studied in class, such as parallel and perpendicular lines, parabolas, or repeating patterns. They had to post an image of each and explain what the image represented.

Jonas Reitz, Math 1575: Infinity: Students reflected on their earliest encounter with the concept of infinity, defined it in their own words, and included a photograph or image that represented the concept.

Jonas Reitz, Math 1575: LaTeX: Students used the LaTeX plug-in and coded sequences to create beautiful mathematical problems. They could solve each others’ problems for extra credit. They offered advice to classmates unable to get their problems to appear properly.

Speech (Humanities)

Justin Davis, Speech 1330: Evaluating Speech Competition: Students watch uploaded videos to rank contestants, and then write briefly about the strengths and weaknesses of each speaker–which was done off-line in class.

Tag: Technology