PWR Instructor Michelle Albert

Michelle Albert, a Senior Instructor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric, implemented  into her First-Year Writing and Rhetoric Class.  Albert hoped that when students tracked the threads of their social media conversations using Storify, they would be able to visualize the developments of their research inquiries.  Albert completed the Spring 2015 ASSETT Teaching with Technology Seminar.

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One of the six primary learning objectives for First-Year Writing and Rhetoric classes in the PWR states that students will develop their information literacy, making critical choices as they identify a specific research need, locate and evaluate information and sources, and draw connections among their own and others' ideas in their writing. To achieve this goal, most instructors include an Inquiry Project that typically culminates in a traditional print-based academic research paper. However, the new complex and dynamic information and media landscape in which we and our students live and work -- the near-ubiquity of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in our lives -- requires new kinds of information literacies and thus new information literacy curricula.

As with writing, the creation and sharing of information is subject to social, cultural, political, and technological forces. However, many students (and instructors) have outdated assumptions about the role of research and its relationship with writing. Students associate “research” with library databases, and assume the “research paper” they (dread to) write will be formal and boring, just another hoop to jump through to get the grade they want in the class. Students still commonly assume that their role as learners is to consume information, that their role as researchers is a passive one, and that their writing has no significance beyond the classroom and no audience beyond the instructor.

My project challenges these common perceptions and expectations. A re-designed FYC Inquiry Project will address our new information literacy needs and teach students to think critically about their roles in information and digital landscapes in the both academic and public/civic realms.

Overall, throughout the course of an eight-week Inquiry Project (IP), students will develop practices of self-directed and open inquiry as they pose research questions, navigate conversations, formulate arguments, and compose and circulate their own texts in a variety of modes and media. The IP includes objectives that will help students learn to:

• Think critically about the way they seek out, use, and interact with information within ever-changing digital landscapes;
• Think critically about the digital identity they create in the process of interacting with information;
• Use research to construct knowledge and contribute to networks of information;
• Make informed rhetorical choices as they compose a variety of texts in multiple modes and media and for a variety of audiences;
• Recognize that authority is constructed, and it is constructed differently in different contexts.

For my ASSETT Teaching With Technology Seminar project, I focused on one particular learning objective from the larger Inquiry Project:

• Students will investigate and recognize inquiry and communication practices in new media environments.

More specifically, as part of this objective, students will:

• Understand that ideas and theories are formulated, debated, and reformulated over time;
• Understand how authority is constructed in different new media contexts and learn to determine if specific information matches their needs and purpose;
• Learn to identify meaningful, current, ongoing conversations about an issue or topic they are interested in

Currently, one set of tools people use to share information -- the dominant space in which public conversations take place -- is social media. It’s important for students to learn how people create and share their knowledge via social media, and to learn to think critically about the way they seek out, evaluate, and synthesize information they find in these public spaces.

To help students think critically about information they find in new media, they will complete a short assignment using Storify, an online tool that allows users to create timelines from a wide variety of social and new media elements. This assignment will be introduced about 3 or 4 weeks into the larger Inquiry Project. Prior to beginning this assignment, I will have taught students about assessing and evaluating information to understand how expertise and authority are constructed, and how to determine whether information and sources are useful and relevant to their purposes. Also, I’ll teach students some skills for doing searches on new and social media.

In this Storify project, students will:

• Track a conversation about the issue they’re exploring in their Inquiry Project in a variety of new and  social media.
• Curate the conversation (show how they’ve tracked it) and create a narrative using Storify;
• Present their Storify to the class.
• Reflect on their process in a short paper they will submit to me.

The students’ Storify narration will begin to address their driving research question. They will write and talk about how the information they’ve found gives them new understandings about the topic they’re investigating. Presenting their Storify to the class will require them to organize their ideas and sort through the information they’ve found to determine what is most important for their audience to know, and will also give them the opportunity to get feedback from their peers. Finally, students will write a short reflection paper for me responding to prompts I will give them to get them to think about how and why they chose the sources they did, among other things.

Students will likely refer back to their Storify and use some of the skills and insights they learned through this assignment as they move on to other pieces of the Inquiry Project. The Storify piece will be included in a final electronic portfolio that students will submit at the conclusion of the whole project.

A screenshot from a sample Storify I created as a model for students:

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Lonni Pearce, PhD is the Associate Director for First Year Writing at the Program for Writing and Rhetoric.  Pearce implemented Prezi as a tool for students to visualize how their writing progresses.

  Listen to description of project (MP3)

Information Travels: Students Mapping Research in a First‐Year Writing Class

“The notion of ‘hybrid spaces’ and ‘hybrid lives’ is one that some rhet/comp scholars have explored as a reframing of our experience of the everyday as well as our communicative practices. The students who enter our classrooms have generally grown up in this hybrid kind of life, with ICTs melding, shaping, and mediating their experiences of space and time. One of the significant implications of this hybridized life are the frequent shifts among various rhetorical situations that students navigate‐‐‐‐sometimes successfully, sometimes not‐‐‐‐without being able to clearly articulate what’s appropriate/effective/persuasive in these different situations. As they shift from F2F, academic writing, social media platforms, emails to instructors, lab reports, how do they understand the choices they make and how can we as writing teachers give them a fluid, transferable framework for understanding the constraints/opportunities of different rhetorical situations? How do we help them learn how to learn what is needed in writing situations that vary so widely?” (qtd from my from Teach with Tech workshop post #1, February 2015)

Now that I’ve completed the Teach with Tech workshop, this question endures, but I’ve explored a subset of this question by focusing on the nature of first‐year students’ interactions with information—if students can develop a more nuanced, richer understanding of the texts they encounter and how those texts function within a complex spatio‐temporal conversation, they are better prepared to respond to and apply the information they find not only in their academic writing but in the hybrid spaces they inhabit.

Ultimately, my project is designed to offer students the opportunity to create a visual representation of their research on a particular topic of their choice.

Project Means/Deliverable:

Using a set of scaffolded in‐class and homework activities, students will incrementally build a “map” of their research sources using Prezi. Students will start with a “pre‐search” map that represents what they currently know about their topic, then—over the course of several class periods—add sources and locate them on the map using proximity, shape, size, and color to create their map.

Note: Why Prezi? The open‐ended nature of a blank Prezi makes it ideal as a platform for designing this type of map. A blank Prezi is essentially a blank canvas where content can easily be arranged, sized, nested, linked, etc. In addition, various types of content can be included—text, images, sounds, video, etc.—so students can represent the many different types of research they gather.

Project Goals ‐ As part of students’ larger inquiry project, this sequence of assignments will:

1. Increase students’ engagement with their research and their topic
2. Help students identify spatiotemporal relationships among sources, and find connections, contradictions, tensions, agreements, etc.
3. Deepen students’ understanding of the complex conversation that surrounds any topic, issue, question – a conversation that occurs over time and across multiple genres
4. Prepare students to locate their own perspective within the conversation, and write persuasively in the next phase of their inquiry project

Project Outcomes:

Students will complete and present their research map, explaining to their peers the relationships they’ve mapped and the choices they made in locating/representing sources in a particular way.

Conclusion:

While this project addresses only a very small sliver of my larger question, it’s a step toward helping students become more savvy readers and writers by explicitly directing their attention to the inherently relational nature of rhetorical practices across multiple genres and the persuasive strategies used to stake a position within a larger conversation.

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Catherine Kunce’s first year writing students create their own Public Service Announcement videos.  Kunce, a ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder Program for Writing and Rhetoric Senior Instructor, planned this feature of her course with the support of the Fall 2014 ASSETT Teaching with Technology Seminar.

Watch Kunce discuss her project here:

[video:https://youtu.be/b90hMKQJolM]

I want the capstone project for my first­ year writing classes to improve in quality.  The assignment has students, working in teams, design a project that supports a concern/s of an “adopted” student organization.  For example, students “adopting” (meaning studying, via texts, interviews, and interactions with organization activities) the student-­run Gay Straight Alliance, can produce a poster, film, or give assistance to a sponsored event.  (Earlier assignments relate to learning about or advocating for the students groups, which are elected by the class members.)

The results sometimes are disappointing.  Students frequently choose to work on the easiest “product,” a poster.  Students that work on more time-­consuming ventures, such as a short film, generally do not have time to produce the high­-quality and rhetorically informed work that I expect.

Using the ideas promoted in our ASSETT readings, I would like to revise the assignment so that students can maximize the opportunities to learn inherent in the assignment.

Goals

Excellent final projects (one to two minute Public Service Announcements‐‐PSAs‐‐ posted to YouTube).

Course Details

This assignment is for first‐year writing classes, WRTG 1150, which I teach once a semester, one or two classes, 20 students each.  Their final project is a capstone assignment, used once for the semester.  I want the plan to be implemented for all first‐year writing courses.

The plan will include:

1. Better temporal planning
2. Use of D2L-delivered lectures on designing films (by Dave Underwood)
3. Smaller assignments that build on skills to produce better PSA’s
4. Model lower stakes assignments by making one myself.

The Plan

I need to start students on producing the capstone PSAs much earlier in the semester.  To that end, I will have them start assessing PSAs on YouTube., even before their own topics for the PSA have been determined.  One assignment will have students view and comment on five PSAs on You Tube‐‐they will deliver their assessments via video.  I will model the assignment by delivering a video instructional guide to the class.

The rubric I have in place for determining the grading of the projects needs to be improved, although only slightly. So, if scores on the assignment improve, this will indicate that their products (Public Service Announcements) have improved.  I also plan to ask a colleague (Petger Schaberg)  to show me his measures of film production excellence.

I am also thinking of having students track the number of hits on YouTube‐‐but I have to think about this a bit.

I will also ask students to critique my “model” PSA‐‐which is  a video that discusses what I want them to do for the “Assessing Public Service Announcements” assignment.  I’m going to try to make this at home on my own.  Then I can have Caroline and/or Amanda critique it before submitting it.

In this project, the proof will be in the pudding.  The goal of the doing changing my approach to  teaching how to produce much more effective PSAs will show up in improved quality.  I will also have students evaluate the other PSA, using the evaluation guides offered throughout the semester.

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ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder Program for Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) instructor Michelle Albert believes in preparing students to write, "... in the 21st Century! ... This is what I like best about teaching."  Last year, students nominated Albert for an ASSETT Outstanding Teaching with Technology Award for her teaching of Writing 1100.  The class is designed for first year students who could use extra help with extensive writing and is capped at 15 students.  "Good writing needs small group work and one-on-one ..." says Albert.  "[Students] feel like they can experiment and explore and try new things and know they'll get support."  In nominating her for the award, one student wrote: "[Albert] introduced me to Google Docs, iMovie, Prezi, Wordpress, and she really made it a successful class and gave me a lot of confidence in my writing abilities."

As she designs her classes, Albert considers, "What does it mean to be literate in the 21st Century? ... What literacy practices do students need to be able to use to communicate effectively now?"  So guides her courses: "The emphasis is ... on composition meant to be read in a multimedia environment," says Albert.  She explains that, "One of the PWR's overall goals is to ... learn write for a variety of audiences."  Therefore, Albert coaches students in making digital creative presentation choices.  She says that she is, "... helping [students] develop useful academic skills that they can use in the rest of their college career ... I think that it's a crucial skill for students to leave college knowing how to compose in various digital environments."  Albert encourages students to create their own YouTube videos, Prezi presentations, or Wordpress websites when appropriate: "In the intro class [Writing 1100], I introduce [students] to Prezi and web design tools ... and show them a range of tools and have them choose a tool for their purposes."  When students are deciding which medium to use in their own writing, she asks them to consider: "'What am I interested in? ... What audience are you appealing to, and why?'"  Albert tells students that, "A public audience can be real if you choose," and students often choose to create websites or YouTube videos that they share publicly.

Creating Class Websites

Albert also creates her own class websites to communicate assignment guidelines.  "I use Wordpress for my class management tool," says Albert.  "It helps keep the class clear and organized."

Albert's class websites also serve as the venue for her students to share their writing online.  Albert assigns topics for blog posts, and, "[Students] can all write posts and comment on each others' posts."  Keeping in mind the digital environment, she may set a minimum number of hyperlinks for students to include in their writing.  On creating a class website, Albert explains, "It takes time and saves time;" class websites require the instructor to spend some time before the semester to set up, but they also help students keep track of what's due when!  She still uses D2L for confidential correspondence about grades, attendance, and personal feedback.

When Albert is not teaching students, she serves as the PWR Information Literacy Coordinator.  Albert shares best practices for teaching with technology with the department.  "I design materials to help professors integrate those digital literacy tools into their classrooms."  She leads, "... new faculty trainings," and ongoing instructional sessions about information literacy for instructors.  Albert says that she enjoys balancing this coordinator position while teaching small writing courses: "I like the combination, and they both inform each other ... I can learn a lot about where students are coming from and what they know and don't know.  I like variety."

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