A mix of approaches in this term's asynch OWC

I'm again teaching an asynchronous first-year online writing course (OWC) this term, and in an environment of increasing AI apps in which teachers not only worry about academic integrity but have more fundamental concerns about what it means to teach writing, I have found myself working from established practices while still refining them to account for the fast-paced changes we're facing.

I'm engaged in a variety of practices to try to maintain a writing-heavy class environment, some of which I've written about individually before:

• I'm again using the "textual brew" of unusual texts and discussion prompts.
• I'm trying to strengthen the relationship between the discussion posts and the major course projects.
• Speaking of discussions, I'm using them in a tried-and-true way to see a great deal of informal student writing: It's mid week 4, and in a class of 20 we're already over 550 posts (including my contributions).
• Drawing on the fundamental nature of low-stakes, informal writing, I'm having students in mini  assignments--right on the discussions!--analyze and revise their own posts; e.g., revising out instances of the verb "to be" in a post they choose.
  
• I've included the stoplight approach to AI that I mentioned last time.
• I'm asking students to include a one-page metacommentary about their use of AI in conjunction with that stoplight approach.
  
• Working with several of my colleagues in a mini teaching circle, I've assigned a fantastic book that helps students take a critical look at technology, Jason Ohler's Taming the Beast.

How's it all going? Talk to me after the quarter is over. However, I'm enjoying it: The challenge is there. These practices have created a productive pressure on my pedagogical approaches.

Generative AI and integrity concerns: More discussion board support

As I wrote a few months ago, the hand-wringing about generative AI and academic integrity that has been taking place in academia caused teacher me to return to a fundamental educational technology that has served me well: Message boards.

The writing assignment submission approach I'll briefly describe has lots of pedagogical upside, but I'm talking about it here in the context of AI-driven concerns about academic integrity.

For my current course, students submit four short writing projects in addition to many low-stakes assignments. I call these writing projects Exploration dialogues; you'll see why in a moment.

They submit these projects in two ways.

One, they submit to a Turnitin dropbox in our Blackboard (Bb) Learn course, a method I use not for plagiarism policing so much but because Turnitin has an effective audio commenting function that is great for response and is seamlessly integrated in Bb Learn. Although I don't require submitted rough drafts of every project, they also must submit rough draft material, even photos of notes from class. (The photos, by the way, are great and super fascinating.)

But they also post their final drafts to a Bb Learn Discussion, and I provide them there with these instructions:

Please cut-and-paste only your final draft of your Exploration dialogue Project 2. Do not use an attachment.

On this thread, read two of your classmates’ projects and respond to them. From the Syllabus:

On a Discussion board for each project, you will read two of your classmates’ projects and write short (at least 50 words) but meaningful Reactions. There is no fixed framework for your Reactions, but asking questions and seeking points of clarification are ideal. These Reactions may also allow you to connect the project with your own work in the course or perhaps your own experiences. The project author then will reply to these Reactions, either individually or collectively. 

Feel free to ask me questions!

Philosophically, this approach is nothing whiz bang new. Teachers do things like this. These straightforward threads have yielded interesting results in terms of student dialogue and learning for this course. I could talk more about that, as I mentioned.

But I believe this approach provides a constructive approach to academic integrity in a time when teachers are not sure what to do. Can students still misrepresent their writing, generative AI or otherwise? Of course! But there are implications if they submit a paper that is not theirs.

For one, they may reveal weak mastery of the content, which could become apparent as these message board conversations unfold.

More importantly, they are doubling down on integrity issues by writing about something that isn't theirs! I mean, they have to really have ice water in their veins to engage in a conversation about writing that is not theirs, fooling not just the professor but their own classmates. Could it happen? Does it happen? Of course it could! But shoring up against such behavior through an open course writing environment like this seems less like cheating vigilance and more like using good pedagogy for a collectively good end.

AI apps and student writing worries?: An old, reliable OWT practice can help

I wish I was writing about this cool, high-tech (and maybe high-profit!) way of dealing with the AI chatbot app storm and the implications for students submitting inauthentic texts in your courses.

But I won't leave you in suspense: I'm not.

Instead, to help increase the chances that you are reading authentic student texts, building on my last post, I suggest you lean heavily on three things:

1. A "text brew" of different, course-specific readings that students must synthesize into one piece of writing.
2. Students drawing on their personal writing and learning experiences.
3. A dialogic writing environment on message boards.

This approach won't solve all your problems, and it takes me back to one of the first posts I ever composed for this space, back in September 2005: using message boards!

During my winter '23 course, I realized what most of us have: When assigning writing assignments, we cannot now do what we've always done. Short response papers, canned/recycled essay topics, papers that are just exams-disguised-as-writing--AI chatbots can easily, and sometimes expertly, respond to them. We need to be nimbler and more innovative.

Make no mistake, these assignment adjustments will require preparation time. We need to find texts that speak to a topic you want to discuss, develop a prompt about those texts, and then have the students write and respond to each other on threads. However, we may find ourselves increasingly replacing the time we spend assessing/grading "big" papers with more closely looking at these types of student texts.

I taught a first-year writing course in the winter, and I ran some of my prompts through ChatGPT; I was struck by the inability of the app to respond. In simple terms, I knew who was on the other end: No one.

For instance, I used this combination of texts several times:

1. Two articles from the excellent anthology series Writing Spaces, which contains chapters about writing written for a student audience.
   
2. An article from The Atlantic Monthly magazine; I had assigned an issue of the magazine as a class text.
3. A student-authored reading from something special we have at Drexel: A long-standing annual publication The 33rd, which features award-winning student writing and faculty writing in various genres and disciplines.

I shook up this "brew" of texts and wrote message board prompts asking this of students:

1. Address a specific aspect of writing discussed in the Writing Spaces chapter.
2. Use the Atlantic and 33rd pieces to provide specific examples of that aspect of writing.
   
3. Describe their own specific writing experiences in the context of this conversation.
   

Of course, this was happening on message boards, so part of the writing requirements were that they respond directly to each other in context. Note that the posts are evidence-driven; I even ask that they provide brief works cited/resources lists. Also, I emphasized that message board posts are informal: I don't expect them to be mechanically perfect.

On a given thread, students wrote substantively, sometimes easily surpassing 1,000 words in multiple posts.

My prompts aren't foolproof, but based on my sample runs, ChatGPT didn't have command of Writing Spaces texts and had zero "knowledge" of The 33rd, so its efforts to respond to my prompts were awkward at best. Because of my "informal" guideline, the AI-generated texts also stood out and looked odd.

What I'm suggesting isn't perfect. Right now, nothing is. But tilting my class away from "traditional" papers to dialogic writing helps me feel that when I look at student writing, what I get is, well, theirs.

Tough debate in asynchronous environments

Here's nothing new: It can be tough finding common ground with people nowadays. (Hopefully Thanksgiving last week wasn't yet another proof of that for you.)

With bad models from Facebook to cable news to the holiday dinner table, where can our writing students refine the ability to have reasoned debate? A bloodless course paper with no real audience (i.e., writing for the teacher only) isn't the best platform. In-class, face-to-face discussions about sensitive topics can fall flat, even in the hands of skilled teacher-moderators; outrage is possible, but silence and hesitancy are more likely.

I was thinking about how students are skilled in digital communication, mainly through social media, but how seldom they have "curated" or moderated debates in such modalities. This thinking, coupled with my preparations for my winter asynchronous first-year argumentative writing course, led me back to a familiar place: Asynchronous discussion forums.

I wondered if those common, humble forums, in the context of a course, could be especially productive places to practice tough debate. 

I've said in the past that teachers are often intimidated by students' digital experience and fluency, and, yep, they are social media wizards. But they come to us often never having had an academically/pedagogically moderated argument in writing in which they had to articulate carefully points and perspectives. They seldom write in in-depth conversations.

This week, as we are concluding our course The Peer Reader in Context (a writing-intensive course taken primarily but not solely for potential Drexel Writing Center tutors), my students and I read "Interactional dynamics in on-line and face-to-face peer-tutoring sessions for second language writers" (1). In this Journal of Second Language Writing article, the authors reviewed transcripts of face-to-face and online tutoring sessions in second language contexts and discovered, surprisingly (especially in 2006), that it was the face-to-face sessions that seemed "to lend themselves to more hierarchal relationships in which tutors take control of the discourse" while "on-line interactions" appeared "to lead to more egalitarian relationships, with clients controlling the discourse more."

Why am I mentioning this article? Because in emphasizing that students may feel more at home on their own "turf" online, I thought that students' general digital familiarity coupled with a teacher-moderator creates a learning space in which students debate tough topics respectfully, thoughtfully, and in writing.

In previous first-year asynchronous argumentative writing courses, I would introduce at least one real hot-button topic thread during the term. It wasn't a mandatory thread, so students who didn't want to discuss that topic didn't have to. But now, when perhaps cultural temperatures are higher, I may use these forums more frequently as a renewed way to find our way into dialogue.

Note:

1) By Rodney H. Jones, Angela Garralda, David C.S. Li, and Graham Lock. Published in the volume 15 issue on pp. 1-23.

If you're teaching writing or literacy online, you need a second screen

There was a time when I often wrote about using audio or audiovisual tools to respond to student writing (1), and to reinforce one point about the importance of these technologies for teachers, I would draw a comparison with roofing nailers, and how, since their development, asking people to crawl around a roof with a regular old claw hammer would be inhumane; while writing teachers don't risk falling, the repetitive writing and typing of comments could lead to crippling and career-disrupting wrist and hand issues like tendonitis or carpal tunnel syndrome.

I'm starting to get to the same mindset of conviction with second screens. If you are an online writing or literacy instructor, a second screen should be standard operating procedure. I have had a second screen for years, but only recently, driven by my pandemic at-home work schedule, have I really started using that second monitor for all of my online teaching and other work.

As many of you know who regularly use a second (or perhaps third) screen, it is indeed work- (and thus, life-) changing. 

For online teachers, a second screen is especially valuable if you teach with complex asynchronous discussions. Using discussions well is a central piece of my faculty development work, and a front-and-center question from participants is how to moderate and manage these conversations. I describe a straightforward process that involves having a Word notes file open while I am reviewing student discussion posts and threads, and I use those notes to cut-and-paste student comments and help prepare my individual responses and overall thread synthesis posts. 

I would like to see a biological eye fatigue study, but anecdotally I'm sure many people would reinforce my experience: It's a whole different experience simply to glance up or over at another screen that has these notes vs. using the ALT + tab (on PCs) to move among different windows. 

This isn't purely about ease of work or eye fatigue, either: It's about being a better teacher. It's kind of like moderating an onsite class in which the students make a bunch of comments and then you must exit into another room and then return to moderate the conversation. There would be a hiccup.

With the second screen open, it's all in front of you. You don't lose track of your place.

Also, and the same goes for responding to student writing, when we're tired we can become crabby, terse, and perhaps unfocused. Students might not be getting our best selves when we're clicking through various windows on our screens. We might want not to see a great point they made, for instance, so we don't have to click back to the notes screen to compose a response.

Second screens should also be standard operating procedure for remote synchronous teaching. I have done many presentations and workshops using a small Surface screen. I like my Surface a lot and it functions well, but to have available slide note files or the Zoom gallery of faces on a separate, larger screen--such functionality makes me a better teacher and workshop facilitator.

Many people in higher education believe we will not go back, ever, to pre-pandemic teaching practices. We will all continue to incorporate more technology-driven approaches. We need to have the proper hardware to do so, and a second screen seems to me to be such an integral piece of pedagogical equipment.

Note

1) For example, “Streaming Media for Writing Instruction: Drexel’s Streaming Media Server and Novel Approaches to Course Lessons and Assessment” in Streaming Media in Higher Education, edited by Charles Wankel and J. Sibley Law (2011), or "Responding to Student Writing with Audio-Visual Feedback” in Writing and the iGeneration: Composition in the Computer-Mediated Classroom, edited by Terry Carter and Maria A. Clayton (2008).

Annotate PRO for responding to student message board posts

Annotate PRO is a tool, developed by 11trees, that helps teachers streamline response to student writing by providing a library of common comments that they can easily insert into writing projects.

The Annotate PRO site asks teachers, "Do you ever feel like you say the same thing over and over again to students?" While acknowledging that of course teaching often involves repetition, the site asks what would happen if teachers could streamline that process when responding to student writing, thus putting more energy into deeper feedback and teaching. A series of screenshots show how to use Annotate PRO:

• Once downloaded as a Chrome Extension, Annotate PRO appears as a sidebar.
• Users simply click anywhere that feedback can be provided within a browser: "Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Dropbox, Box, Blackboard, Canvas, Google Classroom, Schoology, Gmail – just about anywhere you can type feedback into a webpage."
• From there, users add a comment.
• Groups of comments can be saved to create personal, program, or even institutional libraries.

Annotate PRO allows for "smart automation." Teachers can use it to reduce repetitive keystrokes, but they can customize it using a "Free Form Comment" function that pops up in sidebar when using the tool.

Annotate PRO has great functionality for helping teachers respond to digital papers, and, I suppose, such is still the traditional framework of teacher writing feedback: A teacher giving feedback to a student essay/report/paper. 11trees provides a video description of this core use here.

However, I want to focus on another aspect of Annotate PRO: Its use in developing a library of responses for electronic forums like discussion boards.

As I have written about numerous times, a large component of student writing, and not just in OWCs, involves short, informal writing on electronic platforms. In many courses, students compose most of their words in these environments.

Teachers want to encourage this, but how do they respond/moderate in ways that are helpful for student learning? I've come across and written about a number of strategies--a favorite source is the book Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators by George Collison, Bonnie Elbaum, Sarah Haavind, and Robert Tinker--and I think Annotate PRO is a smart tool that offers another possibility.

With Annotate PRO, after installation, I simply opened a Discussion in Blackboard Learn (my LMS) and clicked in a message. Voila! I could instantly drop in a comment that had been stored in a library.

It was impressive and powerful in its simplicity, and I saw immediately how Annotate PRO reduces the literal keystrokes and would free up time for for more substantive teaching. Library comments could help me with the frequent encouragement and questioning posts while I used "Free Form Comments" for more specific moderating and commenting posts.

A common--and, at times, legitimate--complaint from students is that they feel no presence from their teachers on discussions. Teachers are seeking strategies and pedagogies to work more fully and carefully with students in discussion environments. (The Community of Inquiry framework [1] offers a way to think about teacher presence.) Annotate PRO provides them with a technology to help them do that.

Note
1) As described by Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher educationmodel. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105.

Updated Guidelines for Participating in Discussions

Periodically I update a document in my courses that I call Guidelines for Participating in Discussions. I'm sharing with you the latest:

Guidelines for Participating in Discussions

Conversations that we have via Discussions will make up a major part of the work in this course. Whether you are responding to a question or issue I’ve raised or you are collaborating virtually, we will be working on your thinking – and writing. A few general rules:

• Read all posts. Part of your responsibility in this class is to read every Discussion. All of them. “No boldface posts by Friday!” should be your mantra.
• Check the Discussion boards regularly. Start good habits in Week 1.
• Sign your name at the end of your post. We want to know how to respond back to you.
• Build a conversation. You will write primary, secondary, and peep posts. After reading them, I will post specific questions, especially on Wednesdays, throughout the term, as will your colleagues. Make sure you read my questions and respond to them. You’ll soon see how this works, but do not simply reply over and over again to my initial prompt.

Each week, I will let you know how many posts are due.

1)       Description of posts. Your posts should be

-Detailed. Each post must represent a substantive piece of writing; see below for word counts, although I’m not as interested in precise word count as I am in the depth and development of your ideas. Obviously, a post like "Me too!!" doesn’t count—although it can be a peep!

- Semiformal. Your posts should contain some degree of formality: spell-checked, organized, etc. However, they will be part of a dialogue, so they will differ from major writing projects. It takes a few days for us to reach a mutual understanding of the appropriate level of formality.

-Referenced. You won't always need citations in your posts, but you should seek opportunities to reference our readings, other sources, or your colleagues' comments.

-Courteous. We don't always have to agree, but no one should resort to flaming attacks.

2)       Primary posts vs. secondary posts.

- Length. Primary posts should be at least 150 words. Secondary posts need only be 75 words. (“Argument Statements” are slightly more elaborate primary posts.)

-Organization and structure. Primary posts should not be one paragraph, and I expect them to reflect reasoned thought on your part, beyond what you might put into a normal email or chat message. My students and I have found that these mini-essays present excellent opportunities to refine the ability to make a clear, focused point when writing. In other words, these posts are great practice. Secondary posts can be one paragraph.

-Replying. Either kind of post can be used to reply to another student.

3)       Peeps. Peeps are very short posts between you and other students. They serve as conversational “glue” in the course. If you post 10 of them during the term, you get 10 points, but you cannot make up all peeps at the end of the term. Write one or two each week.

4)       Grading. Discussion work will be worth 20 to 40 points each week. To evaluate your posts, I will use the rubric below, considering these factors:

-If you complete the posts in an adequate manner, you will receive Bs.

-If you go above and beyond the basic assignment requirements, you will receive As.

- Very good posts—completed with a great deal of effort and thought—will receive full credit (e.g., 10 out of 10). You can also get full credit for posting with great passion or imagination.

Your Discussion posts will receive a C or below if they

- are too short.

- show little thought (especially if they respond in the same way others have responded).

-are excessively sloppy in grammar, spelling, and mechanics, especially to the point that they are difficult to understand.

-engage in personal attacks or other breaches of common online etiquette.

- are late.

5)       Staying current. In the Weekly Plan, you will see what is due and the deadlines for primary and secondary" posts. A major responsibility for you is to check the Discussions frequently and stay current on the conversations taking place there.

6)       Reading. Again, you are also responsible for reading all posts in the class.

-Don’t post and run. Once you post, you’re obligated to see what people say. In some cases, it seems weary students abandon their ideas after they post. More specifically, if someone responds to you, you should follow up with a response, however brief. I must admit that I feel miffed (and sometimes a little lonely) when I post and am ignored.

-Don’t post ignorant. Be original. Read before you post. Don’t repeat other writers. Part of your job is to build dialogue with each post.

7)       Shorter posts. Remember rules for primary and secondary posts, but in the spirit of keeping the conversation flowing, feel free to post shorter, informal comments on the Discussions; for instance, writing a quick sentence to clarify a point or to state your agreement with another author’s point of view. When you’re reached the limit for peeps, you will receive…

8)       …Extra credit. Diligent, active Discussion writers will earn a high grade for this part of the course. Excellent posts or posting several on-time, extra posts in a week can earn flair points for extra credit (some of you may naturally find that you have more to say on some of our topics--you'll be rewarded!).