Audio still sounds right for student response

I'm a ways away from blogs and other writing I've done about audio--and at times, audiovisual--feedback (see References below).

In practice, though, I've been sticking to it, lately using Turnitin's built-in audio function (Turnitin itself is built into Blackboard at Drexel), which gives you a one-click option for a three-minute audio response to student assignments.

As I've described, there are many advantages to audio response, including comprehensiveness of response, time spent on task (audio response is fast), and psychological load of responding to student writing.

It strikes me that audio also may be more relevant than ever as teachers struggle with AI, because I think among the authenticity/integrity issues that we're running with AI tools into is the way they may depersonalize the student-teacher writing relationship.

When you provide voice commentary, students hear you--I intentionally emphasized both words. Will that make them feel bad, feel sorry, feel reflective about me as their instructor? I don't know. But I do think that it makes them feel something about me, because I'm clearly on the other end.

What does a student who has intentionally and perhaps maliciously cheated think when they hear that raspy voice of mine enthusiastically and often discursively responding to their work? Perhaps they have ice water in their veins, but it seems my chances of receiving authentic writing from them improve.

Perhaps I'm fooling myself. But it doesn't matter anyway, because providing audio or audiovideo response is faster and more thorough. If it personalizes me along the way, all the better.

A few pieces about this I've written:

“The Low-Stakes, Risk-Friendly Message Board Text.” Teaching with Student Texts: Essays Toward an Informed Practice. Eds. Joseph Harris, John Miles, & Charles Paine. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2010. 96-107.  

“Cutting Keystrokes, Improving Communications: Response Technologies for Writing Instruction.” California English 15.1 (September 2009): 27-30. 

“Responding to Student Writing with Audio-Visual Feedback.” Writing and the iGeneration: Composition in the Computer-Mediated Classroom. Eds. Terry Carter and Maria A. Clayton. Southlake, TX: Fountainhead Press, 2008. 201-27.

Messy final drafts and metacomments

Like many teachers, I've been thinking about how writing studies faculty can help ourselves and our colleagues by drawing on our expertise to keep up with some of the challenges AI poses in writing instructional environments.

One teaching strategy I have been using is discussion-board dialogue about final student projects , as I described in "AI apps and student writing worries?: An old, reliable OWT practice can help"and "Generative AI and integrity concerns: More discussion board support."

That was a mixed bag. I used this teaching strategy in two very different courses. In one class it worked great. In another class, not so much.

In the latter class, I think the lukewarm success was partly because the course assignments didn't lend themselves to conversation. This course, The Literature of Business, has assignments that, while students can make them their own, does create somewhat similar results.

So I lived and learned. In recognition of those problems, I added another layer. I started also using metacomments: simply put, I ask students to write about their own writing as part of the assignment. This is an old composition practice, and in fact Julianne Ross-Kleinmann and Wess Trabelsi recently described a version of it in a smart T.H.E Journal piece "Teaching and Learning, Cheating, and Assessment in the Age of AI":

Another way to change teachers' method of assessing papers is to ask students to defend their work. This means having a conversation with them about their paper, either in person or when they upload it to the learning management system. Why did they make this argument or include that fact? What is the crux of their position? If they can't answer these kinds of questions, maybe they shouldn't receive a good grade on the paper — even if it is an excellent piece of work on its own. (emphasis mine)

Metacomments push students to talk about their practice and to defend their choices. In asking for these comments at the paragraph level, I am seeking granular analysis about their rhetorical choices.

My primary goal is constructive pedagogy, but if we're worried about authenticity and plagiarism, these comments head off a lot of clear, wholesale "borrowing": even if generative AI (or their roommate!) wrote a paper for them, they would still in many cases have to think through what each paragraph means in the context of the assignment.

If they tried to get AI, they still have to cut-and-paste individual paragraphs and generate the purpose--note, not the summary--of that paragraph in the context of the entire assignment. They're going to have to do some work in most cases.

My students have produced strong metacomment work. At times the comments are good. Sometimes they are fantastic. And occasionally they are better than the writing project itself.

However, I had to shake myself out of normalcy and embrace a new mindset when reading student writing. While in writing studies we often talk about embracing process, we traditionally still want something clean handed to us. Indeed, I think most teacher-readers are enamored of the "clean draft": neat, tidy, finished. I get why, but if we use metacomments the way I'm suggesting, we're asking for a "messy final draft," one in which students accompany each paragraph with comments about what they want to achieve; such writing will be intrusive. 

I don't require students to be fancy in formatting their metacomments. Footnotes or endnotes are ideal, but I'm fine with inserted bracketed or boldfaced comments after each paragraph: Messy, but functional for this purpose!

Ultimately, I'm moving away from the cleanly "typed" paper toward a product that vividly shows the often messy excellence of student thinking.