Writing Together book coming out soon

The new book that I co-authored with former Drexel student Diana Gasiewski is coming out soon. Writing Together: Ten Weeks Teaching and Studenting in an Online Writing Course will -- fingers crossed! -- be ready by CCCC in Kansas City.

Diana and I are excited -- to say the least -- about the book. It's a narrative of a teacher and student's experience in a first-year OWC. It's written somewhat as a "call and response": I describe in great detail how I approached and taught the course that term, and Diana describes her experience as a student -- we draw from Mary Louise Pratt in calling her experience "studenting" -- that same term.

NCTE, especially Kurt Austin and Bonny Graham, has been a great partner, from concept to cover art.

We hope that our narrative approach to composition scholarship is informative as well as engaging, and that it helps open up new channels of inquiry about the student experience in OWI.

We also would like this book to help refine and enhance not just how we see OWCs and teach them, but how we see our students as collaborators in knowledge-making about our field. We write in our intro, citing many other voices in composition, about how absent student voices can be in our conversations, but we're not picking on comp/rhet: This issue is widespread in education.

Our book aims to be a story of teaching and studenting, of how writers came together in a virtual educational community to work and learn together. Above all, we hope you enjoy it.

Observing and evaluating online writing courses

Conducting a course observation/evaluation of an online writing course (OWC), whether peer-to-peer or administrator-to-teacher, presents various challenges. Teaching evaluations in general, or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say the process of conducting teaching observations, can be vexed. You can run into issues ranging from the academic hierarchy to establishing fair criteria

These problems can become more complicated online, especially with OWCs. Evaluators, often administrators, may lack the expertise to "judge" online learning. We have known this about distance learning for a while; Benigno and Trentin said in 2000, “Given the special characteristics of online courses, their quantitative/qualitative evaluation calls for the adoption of specific procedures to assess both the learning process and the participant performance” (1). Our OWI Committee's Position Statement took this problem on, and in a number of Effective Practices we encourage observations specific to OWI:

• Effective Practice 7.11: Online writing teachers should be evaluated/assessed by a peer or supervisor who has similar training and equal or superior abilities/experience in writing instruction generally and OWI particularly.
• Effective Practice 7.12: OWI teacher assessment should occur in the setting and modalities that the teacher uses in the online writing course.
• Effective Practice 7.13: OWI teacher assessment should be engaged as rigorously as—and not more rigorously than—it would be in a similar traditional onsite course.

Quality Matters has a well-regarded review process. But – and I need to talk with my QM certified colleagues and friends more – my understanding is this process and rubric can be challenging to apply to OWCs (although some have made the effort [2]).

Here are some guiding ideas for me when I've observed an OWC or the online component of a hybrid:

"Movie” of the course. First off, my underlying teacher observation strategy, in any modality, is to write a "movie" of the course (I kinda took this from Peter Elbow's "movies of the mind" approach to writing critique  [3]). My letter is just that: Here is what I saw. Ultimately, I’m not the assessor. Someone up the ladder is. I think the idea of a judgment-based evaluation is a problem, so I just say what I see and provide scant editorial commentary. The resulting narrative can be judged by others, and that will help us to avoid stupid teaching observation rubrics that include things like what people are wearing when they teach.

A guided visit. I prefer that the instructor leads me through the course, even if we do that over the phone. Most instructors have been open to providing me with full access, but I'd rather not just wander through unchaperoned. Onsite, the instructor has some control of what I see, and I believe the same should apply online.

The importance of time online. I try to think about the time that both the students and instructor are putting into the work that week. This opens up tricky questions about time and learning/teaching. How much time should someone put into a class? That's tough, and the Carnegie credit is under fire, but once I observed an online course in which the only thing going on one week was that a paper was due. I talked to the instructor about it in terms of an onsite course: What would you be doing all week, sitting in the classroom waiting for students to drop off papers? What would you do with the class time? I try to look at the work of a few students and attempt to get a sense of how long I think it's taking them to read, post, review, etc. Time and space are different online, especially in an asynchronous writing environment.

What does the student see? I try to view the class design and structure from the role of a student, but I don’t obsess over those things. In short, I don’t need pretty, but I do look for function and usability.

There's more to be said about this topic. I have long believed that OWI offers great opportunity for writing instruction. In similar ways, OWCs may offer new ways to observe and understand teaching. In a recent conversation with my colleague Michael Moore from DePaul, we discussed how the “integrity” of observation can be strengthened in an online course, for a simple reason: The whole course is right in front of you. Rather than pretend that a one-shot visit to a classroom one day is good enough for us to say something general about a teacher, we instead can see a broader view of the course and that person's teaching.

Course observations raise good issues that, as I mentioned, I'm going to investigate more over the next few months.

Notes

1) V. Benigno and G. Trentin. The evaluation of online courses. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. Volume 16, Issue 3, pages 259–270, September 2000.
2) Harkness, S., Soodjinda, D., Hamilton, M., & Bolig, R. (2011, November).  Assessment of a pilot online writing program using the QM Rubric.  Paper presented at the 3rd Annual Quality Matters Conference, Baltimore, MD.
3) In Writing Without Teachers.

The Provoker

An aspect of teaching an OWC that I really enjoy is taking on the role of what I call “The Provoker,” a contradictory anti-voice, in the class written discussions.

I’ve discussed this before, but coming off my winter online persuasive writing course, I wanted to provide more detail about a practice while pedagogically fun is I believe also a key part of my students’ writing education in my courses.

The Provoker is a rhetorically edgy, devil’s advocate-type voice in the class discussions. I post using an alias; for some years, I’ve used the alter-ego “Dr. Logoetho.” I always include a few Provoker threads in an OWC. Sometimes I, Prof. Warnock, introduce our “guest” and facilitate his posts; other times I log into the CMS using a guest access so posts don’t actually have my named attached to them. I do make it clear to students that we’re playing a rhetorical game here (only once was a student confused about this). So it’s me – but it’s not.

Dr. Logoetho takes extreme stances:

Dear students in English 102:

I’m tired of hearing everyone complain about the cost of college. Considering how much people benefit earnings-wise over the course of their lifetime based upon the degree they have earned (see http://www.acinet.org/acinet/finaidadvisor/earnings.asp?nodeid=21), I argue that college should cost MORE money than it does now. I would ask if you agree, but how could you not?: I make a very reasonable and logical argument.

Yep, that’s what I think,
Dr. Logoetho

He writes with more than a little cheek, taunting the students: 

Dear students in Prof. Warnock’s English 102 course,

Kind of nice to see you again. I have something to say this week about Wikipedia. I think that Wikipedia is a completely useless site except as entertainment. No one should ever use it for anything of importance or for real research. Wikis are an unreliable way to build true information. I think the positives of Wikipedia are grossly exaggerated and are only promoted by people who have something to gain from Wikipedia or who don’t understand the informational value of the Web!

There. If you want to take me on, at least show a little argument savvy – Prof. Warnock gave you access to some materials this week, I think – and use some evidence.

I doubt you're up to the task,

Dr. Logoetho

With me, the official Professor, out of the picture, I find that students write with verve and passion while also composing solid, interesting arguments. They use evidence. They have to avoid logical fallacies, particularly ad hominem, when dealing with an often disrespectful interlocutor. They have to think through written, and sometimes emotional, argumentation. And they often work together, building off each other to take down Dr. Logoetho.

Especially in a persuasive writing-type class, I want students to have smart, authentic arguments, but a course can be a difficult place for that. Provoker threads allow students to write and argue without worrying about offending classmates or dealing with the authority-laden quagmire of “debating the teacher.” Term after term, I feel Provoker threads bring out some of their best writing.
It’s enjoyable for me too. I’m competitive and debate them head-on. I even get to bust on myself, old “Prof. Warnock.” Here’s Dr. Logoetho replying to their rebuttals to his Wikipedia “argument”; you can see that, throughout, I cite them directly (pseudonyms below) to show the power of their arguments:

SUBJ: Dr. Logoetho mad. Very mad

Dear students of Prof. Warnock,

You all think you’re so smart. Blair asks, “I only want to know how you can decide what source is valid compared to another source.” I’ll tell you: Peer review! Editors! Experts! Let the experts be the gatekeepers. Let’s get scholarly. Pete writes, “Who is to say that the information on this web page is not scholarly as any other?” Well, just about everyone, Pete! Read Praxis about the definition of a scholarly source. As Wendy points out (but in a nicer way than me; everyone is nicer than me), any buffoon can be a Wikipedia editor (in fact, even poor Prof. Warnock is a Wikipedia editor). Then Janet says, “Scholarly articles and sources are questioned all the time,” – name one time this happened! Let’s stop all this nonsense![...]

From the above, as you might imagine, the students usually “defeat” Dr. Logoetho by week’s end. He slinks away, and Prof. Warnock pops in and congratulates them. It’s fun. And I think it’s also good writing instruction.

Social bookmarking with Diigo

I'm continually struck by the intellectual communities that develop in my online courses. I stress intellectual communities, because so much of their relationships end up being framed around their work in the course, around their writing and conversations. (To the online instruction naysayers: I wonder perhaps if these relationships are even more intellectually robust than onsite communities, based as they are around reading and writing.)

I think a major component of my role as Online Writing Teacher (it's been a while, so I figure I'm due for an eponymous shout-out) is to provide my students with digital tools to help facilitate these types of connections. Social bookmarking applications are great for this. There are a numerous options and they are all straightforward, but I particularly like Diigo.

What is Diigo? Diigo is Web-based tool that helps you organize, categorize, and share Websites and other content. The Diigo About page lays it out nicely:

Much of our information consumption and research, whether at home or at work, has shifted online. We are now spending a big part of our day working with online information - reading and researching related to travel, health, shopping, career, hobbies, news, online learning, smart investing, school papers, work projects, you name it.

Yet the workflow with information, from browsing, reading, researching, annotating, storing, . organizing, remembering, collaborating, sharing, to connecting dots into knowledge, is still largely ad-hoc and inefficient. Diigo is here to streamline the information workflow and dramatically improve your productivity....

Like most of us, every day I get tons of emails with links to stuff that I want to remember or save, but I don’t always have a good, efficient way to file/store that information.With Diigo, you can save content and then mark it with tags and commentary and easily store sites by category. And you can readily share everything with others.

All of this functionality makes Diigo excellent for your classes. Using the free teacher console, you can create a Diigo group for your class and invite students to it in a non-intrusive way. From there, you and your students can easily share materials, annotate them, and tag them. Group members receive a once-a-day email update so you don’t have to remember to go and seek out the info. Of course, while students are working with Diigo, they are also learning about the possibilities for sharing such material in digital environments, thinking through rationales for identifying, tagging, and categorizing content as well as being introduced to other communities of learners.
 
I think it's a valuable, powerful tool. On this site, a teacher-blogger describes "13 reasons teachers should use Diigo," including that Diigo "has tools that encourage students to collaborate with others to analyze, critique, and evaluate websites" and that "by joining groups of like-minded users... Diigo allows you to gain access to the ‘collective intelligence’ of the internet." Teaching online leads us, inevitably, I think, into issues of how to manage digital content, and the goals of our instruction need to includ facilitating conversations about how to talk about that information. Social bookmarking tools like Diigo help us accomplish those goals more effectively.

Keeping the conversation going online

I often am asked how I build an active, conversational asynchronous writing environment in my online courses. Front and center, I have to say that I think building such dialogue is a key part of good teaching in online writing courses. And I think there are many that we can encourage students to engage in this kind of discourse.

In fact, clear guidance and course structures are crucial. Without a good sense of what they should do, students may indeed fall into simple, almost reflexive response behaviors that often characterize their Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or texting communications. But with guidance about what is expected in this course, students will have incredible conversations in writing. My advice: In your course materials be clear and specific about what you want them to do, and make sure the course structure (and your own writing behaviors) support these goals. For instance:

1) Differentiate and define post types. Create different types of posts and define them clearly. If you call a post a "primary," "response," or "secondary" post, students will understand better its role in the overall conversation.

2) Length. This may be a simple criterion, but it's effective. For instance, I ask that "primary" posts be about 150 words and what I call "secondary" posts be 75. It's rare that their posts are even that short, and they are almost never shorter. Why? Because the expectations are clear about length.

3) Evaluation criteria. First off, create rubrics/evaluation guidelines for posts (I have some guidelines here). Then, overtly include in those materials that you want to see conversation.

4) Moderators. Use moderators to build conversation. (I discussed this a few years ago in this post.) These students can be invaluable in defining and promoting conversation. I recommend that you provide a small grade for moderating, which becomes another low-stakes way of building conversation.

5) Model conversation yourself. How are students supposed to know how to build a message board conversation if the teacher himself merely replies with one-word answers? You don't and shouldn't respond to everything, but you should model good dialogue.

6) Work from mid-week "progress/summary" posts. On your threads, mid-way through a week-long conversation, write a post summarizing where the conversation is and build from there, providing them with a fresh direction.

7) Multiple posting deadlines. Use multiple posting deadlines during the week, which helps create conversation by encouraging students to avoid procrastination; you won't get bunched-up posts at the end of the week. So have one deadline, say Wednesday, for primary posts, and have a second deadline, say Friday, for secondary/response posts. The staggered deadlines create opportunity for reflection and subsequent conversation.

8) Grading. Some teachers don't want to grade discussions. I get that. But I must say that a low-stakes grading strategy can be a great way to encourage your students to build dialogue (I'm feeling very self-promotional in my links this time, but here's a link about low-stakes grading). They can be accountable for participation online in ways that I think make a lot of solid, pedagogical sense to everyone. The key, again, is that the grades are low stakes and that the criteria are transparent.

So what if despite it all, they don't talk to each other much? Well, I never give up, but at some point they have to work with you, whether in a brick-and-mortar classroom or online. Only once have I had a really reticent f2f course. I tried everything in my teaching toolbox, but at the end of the term I realized I never quite got them to work with each other. This is no different online: Do your best to build conversation, while understanding the ultimate outcome, good or bad, is not always about what you did.

That being said, one thing I want to emphasize is that if you want conversational posting behavior but aren't getting it, change what you're doing. I always find the written conversations on message boards to be incredibly rich and full of teachable moments. I think we owe it to our students to create that kind of learning environment in our courses.