Swamped by the semester

Wow, where did February, March, and April go! I checked my notes and found I had started a couple new blog posts but never finished. That's what happens when you teach four writing classes a semester!

Now that I've had some time to decompress from the semester, here are some highlights for the middle part of the semester:

Voice

This semester, I've required students to use voice in order to share drafts of essays for composition courses and drafts of poems/stories for the creative writing course.

I hope for most writing instructors, the reasoning is self evident: having students hear their writing helps them to discover aspects of their expression that they will not realize when simply reading silently. The value is mostly for the writer, though it can also be beneficial for the listeners/respondents.

Having an oral reading component in online writing classes has always been problematic. In the early years of teaching writing online, I didn't even try. I considered it as one of the limitations of the delivery method that had to be abandoned. A few years ago, though, around the time when I began to teach creative writing online, I decided I had to have an audio component. Students who write poems and stories had to hear their writing. So I began to use WIMBA, which was supported by the college and accessible through Angel LMS. I would have students read and record their drafts and then asked group members to listen while reading before they responded.

It was all done asynchronously. WIMBA does have a synchronous voice chat, but it is rather clunky, and the archiving it does of mixing text and audio clips is hard to follow. So I stuck with asynchronous posting of oral drafts. I could determine whether or not students recorded drafts, and score accordingly. I couldn't really do so with the listening part. Participation over the years was never one hundred percent (little is!).

SL voice seemed to be a better solution. Students could read drafts, and share text copies in notecards. They could take turns reading their drafts, and elicit discussion, just as I would have them do in a f2f class. And the sense of space and presence would be superior to the bodiless voices of WIMBA or even something some students are more familiar with, Skype.

When it worked, it was great. Several students in their reflective essays at the end of the semester mentioned voluntarily how much they found voice presentation of drafts helpful. But SL voice proved to be buggy. Too often students couldn't get it to work, and one student never did even though she was pretty computer savvy (I suspect network congestion on her end). I think next semester I'll have them use Skype as a back up.

Which brings me to two other issues: too many apps and tech help inworld.

Too many apps

I've found that students get app overload pretty quickly. I lost a scad of students because they didn't read the schedule book concerning using SL, and the computer needs to take this course. Some dropped, or stopped working, right away. Those who stuck it out either were pretty tech savvy or very tenacious. But even among those who stayed, I could tell that having to juggle Angel LMS (including uploading/downloading files, discussion forums, reading web page assignments, looking up grades), Word or OpenOffice, Second Life, Twitter, AIM, and Diigo became difficult, especially for those who were doing online classes the first time. Next semester, I think I'll drop Twitter, even though I found its use quite valuable for quick communication and sharing between students and with me for those who tweeted frequently. However, I found too many ignoring it even though keeping a Twitter log while working on their essays was required.

Also, I plan to use Skype instead of AIM so that I'll have a back up voice chat should SL voice not work, and a back up text IM all in the same app. And for the first semester comp, I may also drop Diigo, though, since I don't use it until later in the semester, I may keep depending on how the group's competency pans out.

The point is that I have to juggle between making a rich online class experience and making it too opaque for weak tech users. As I've mentioned before, I will always lean towards a rich experience, and chance losing students, but I don't want to make it accessible for only the highly proficient tech user. Those with a moderate familiarity with the web and computer use should have no inordinate problem with the course, as long as they set aside enough time to do the work!

Tech help in world

The other issue is finding tech help in world. Students at LCC can get help with software and applications supported by the college, such as Angel (well, usually--they've not been very helpful with WIMBA!). But not with apps that are not supported currently by the college, such as SL or Twitter. Therefore, I have to do the heavy lifting of helping students solve technical problems, which I've done for many years. But I'm not available at all times, nor am I as technologically proficient with VW problems as I'd like to be (though I'm learning!). So I really need to find some places/people that students can contact when having problems in world.

This is really essential. Whether or not SL is effective as a place of learning for online students is directly affected by whether or not they can have a relatively trouble-free experience while in world. Problems will arise, but they need to be solved. Yes, those who try to do SL with underpowered machines or on weak home networks (wireless or Ethernet) or without purchasing enough RAM or a headset will find SL clunky and frustrating. But that shouldn't be the case for those with the right equipment/connection. Too often it is.

End of semester musings

Well, it's a couple weeks out from the end of the semester (actually a month out by the time I finished this blog posting!), and two long distance graduations completed (Sarasota, FL for Jonathan graduating from Ringling School of Art and Design and Berkeley, CA for Rebekah graduating from Graduate Theological Union/Pacific School of Religion--congratulations, kids!!!!).

I found that the use of Twitter and Diigo by and large were successful. Twitter gave students opportunities to see what each other was doing, helped them keep on task, and gave them opportunity to receive quick responses from me. I think for next semester, I'll need to push more frequent and thoughtful tweets earlier, if that's possible. And to use gadgets, widgets or standalone desktop apps to have Twitter available all the time. Too often students would disappear for days, even weeks, at a time from Twitter with the expression that they forgot about it. But definitely worth using again.

Diigo also seemed beneficial. It is quite clunky with library databases, so I need to work on creating more quickie tutorials on doing so for next semester. Also, I've yet really to see the value of groups in Diigo for classes. I'll have to explore that more fully. But the ability to have bookmarks that include highlighted material and sticky notes (though I didn't see the latter used as much) and accessible on any computer was quite an improvement to what students have been using--from printouts to emailed articles.

So fall semester--I'll be using both, though I'll need to adjust based on the class. WRIT 121 is not as research intensive, though I still think that getting students to search for articles and read before each essay will make Diigo helpful. And I'll have to figure out how to juggle them with Second Life (at least for one class) without overwhelming them.

Twitter and Diigo and AIM, oh my!

A month into the new semester. In my comp II classes, I introduced the use of Twitter and Diigo. I started with Twitter in the very first week, as a very simple assignment. Sign up, log in, and tweet to me, "@danholt, [student name] in WRIT 132 is all set to use Twitter." Here's a link to the assignment. Among the 50+ students I had, only one had been using Twitter previously, so for most all of them, it was a new experience.

I got a range of reactions, from "Wow, this is cool we're using Twitter" to "Why in the world are we using Twitter?" And several had difficulty with tweeting as I requested, so that class members would be able to search easily for class members to follow. Finally, a good number simply didn't do it.

Not unusual. Usually students who have some online experience, especially with online classes, have no problem with jumping in and exploring a new app. However, with students who have never taken an online class before, or may have but are overextended--6 classes, 40 hour a week job, part time job, rearing children on his or her own (and if you think I'm exaggerating, think again!!!)--being able to take the time to follow instructions carefully often hinders the student.

Of course, the problem with instructions and certain populations of students has been a challenge in teaching online classes since I started in 1997. Granted, early attempts left lots of holes since I was unfamiliar with how to translate the give and take of guiding students through an assignment in an online world. But now, especially from students who've taken a number of online classes, I receive positive comments, relieved they can follow and implement the tasks I lay out before them.

But I'm noticing with this semester, as I require students to do Angel discussion forums, chat, AIM, audio essay submissions, Diigo, Twitter, that I'm pushing many to the edge, very like what we had with students first trying online education in the late 90s. 

Add to that the fact that Angel has been buggy--students unable to log in at one point a couple weeks into the semester because of problems with communication between Angel and Banner. I know of at least three students who threw up their hands and dropped because of the log in problems. Furthermore, the discussion forums have been squirrelly, working with one browser, but not another, problems with uploading files, even emails sent through the discussion forum appearing as a single word: null.

Even so, my goal of offering a rich environment for a writing community, seems to be working for many--Twitter still has naysayers ("still can't see the value in doing this!") but some interesting reactions. A couple students have mentioned that they really like using Twitter because it helps them to stay on track by seeing what class members are doing.

And Diigo, though rather clunky with library online databases, has been a hit with most students. 

But even so, I had to drop a scad of students because of non-participation. So, should I make classes rich in applications to benefit those who have some experience with online classes and who devote appropriate amounts of time to the work, or should I make it easy and spare, so students who have little experience with online classes and/or have little time to devote to the class can succeed? 

I guess it's simply not in my nature to do much capitulation toward the latter.

Web 2.0 assignments

I've been working on possible assignments to use next semester with Web 2.0 applications, focusing so far on Composition II, using Twitter, Diigo and Pageflakes.

The first two are part of what I hope to have students do in the spring on their first essay. Twitter will be used as a research/writing log, where students will be asked to jot down "What are you doing?" concerning their exploration, research, reading, writing of the first essay. I expect to make it a running assignment throughout the semester. I'm hoping that class members will begin asking questions and helping each other a bit more readily than has been the case with standard Angel fare.

I've also been writing instructions on how to set up the two programs, which take a good number of steps. There are some video instructions on setting up Twitter and Diigo:





Both of the videos cover more features than I do in my instructions, and especially with the Diigo video, do so quite quickly. But I figure that students can have them as resources to review features they might want to add later. Or that I may want to expand upon as the semester progresses.

I've also been playing with Pageflakes, an aggregator that is like iGoogle, but allows you to create pagecasts or public pages. What I would like to create is an essay resource page, a one-stop aggregator that students can use to work on their essays. I wanted to include access to the essay assignment page but soon found that I'd need to reformat in order to read easily in the widget.

Pageflakes is pretty easy to use, though you need time for trial and error. One aspect of the application that is announced often on the site is that you can easily take a widget someone else is using and put it on your page. Just click on the faint envelope in the corner (just above the cursor arrow on the top right):



The only problem is, no instruction on what to do with the html that is offered. I finally figured out how to add it to one of the widgets, but it would have been nice to have been told!

Also, at first I thought I'd have a page for each essay, but I soon realized that would be impractical, redundant and cluttered. So I figure I'll change the essay widget when we change essay assignments. And I'll have one page available for both WRIT 122 and WRIT 132, with separate essay assignment widgets to choose from.

I was also going to talk about some educational experiences and discussions I had this week in SL this week, but I think I'll leave that for next week.