LEM: Semester Project / Student Choices

Because I used my existing courses to do the Learning Environment Model design challenge for today, I decided to put the post here. Unlike the LEM challenge I did yesterday (see post), this time I did the drawing first and then wrote the narrative to accompany the drawing. The semester project has a lot of elements I cannot capture with the modeling tools, but I tried to surface the key aspect of the design challenge for today, which is the element of student choice. You can see that multi-stage choice process running down the middle of the diagram. See below for a narrative to explain that choice process.

LEM Semester Project Drawing

(or click on image for larger view)

Exploration/Planning. What I tried to show here is how there is a brainstorming process that happens in the first few weeks of the class in which students brainstorm and plan their semester writing project (downward arrow flow on the left of chart; this process can last for up to 4 weeks), and then they create the project through an iteration of writing stories and revising for the rest of the semester (11, 12, or 13 weeks, depending on how many weeks they spend on the planning process — the writing process is on the right side of the chart). 

Project Choice. Each student creates either a Storybook Website or a Blog Portfolio. The Storybook consists of a set of interrelated stories on a topic of the student's choice (see Storybook Archive for examples), while the Portfolio consists of a curated section of the student's class blog, containing their best stories. I started offering the Portfolio option a couple years ago when it became clear that there were always a few students who were not really enthusiastic about their Storybook project (for all kinds of reasons); the Portfolio is a way to create the same type of semester-long writing project with the flexibility of choosing new topics/styles every week. The challenge, then, is how to help students choose which type of project will be best for them! As a general rule, it has turned out that about half of the students choose Storybooks and half choose Portfolios.

Iterated Choice. As students go through the 2, 3, or 4 weeks of planning, they are pondering a big choice, which I show in the middle of the chart; there are three vectors as it were that they can follow as they go through this iterated process. Since the Storybook is an entirely new kind of idea for most students in the class, I ask them to spend some time in Week 1 and Week 2 exploring Storybook possibilities. Then, after they get feedback from me about the Storybook topics they have proposed (I focus on connecting them with useful online resources), they can decide if there is a topic that grabs them... or not. If they really don't have a topic that grabs them, they can start their Portfolio in Week 3. If they do have a topic that they are excited about, in Week 3 they start planning how the Storybook would actually work (stories to include, styles to use). They then get feedback from me again, and again they choose: if things are not falling into place, they can start their Portfolio in Week 4. If the Storybook plan is going well, then they build their Storybook website in Week 4.

Writing Project. By Week 5 of the semester, everybody is engaged in their writing project. The Storybook and the Portfolio have the same writing "experience" — writing, feedback from me, feedback from other students, revision, more writing, more feedback, more revision, and so on. The difference is just the content (semester-long topic in Storybook versus weekly topics in Portfolio) and the medium (Storybook is a separate website while the Portfolio is a labeled section of the student's class blog). Everybody ends up on their own schedule since they might start the writing part of the project in Week 3 or 4 or 5, and any give story might require one or two rounds of revision. By the end of the semester, a Portfolio might have as many as six stories in it; a Storybook might have as many as four stories plus an introduction — but it varies a lot; there is no fixed requirement about how many finished stories each student might write.

Themed Portfolios. One really nice surprise that happened as a result of the students exploring the Portfolio option was that they started creating something like a Storybook inside their Portfolio, pursuing a theme over several weeks or even over the whole semester. That was not something I suggested, but the students started doing that on their own... so now I also suggest that in my comments on their Portfolio stories! Unlike the advance Storybook planning, these Portfolio themes evolve in an ad hoc way as the students react to the stories they are reading for the class or as they discover through their own writing a style and/or character that they use to connect their Portfolio stories.

As you can see from all the elements in the drawing, there is a lot that goes into this process, and I'll return to this drawing with more narrative in future posts... which will probably help me improve the drawing too! But for now, I am really happy with how this version of the drawing surfaces the element of student choice and how there is an overall learning process that the students can share together while each going through their own discovery process to launch their own project.

Revision Challenges: What Students are Choosing

I just flipped through the revision assignments that students turned in over the weekend, and it is so much fun to see the different "revision challenges" people set for themselves. I thought I would take a minute to write them out here and show the results of how that works. I guess it is my favorite innovation to my classes this semester! You can see the projects that the students are working on here: Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics.

In the past, I used to ask students to choose a revision focus but I did not have a specific list of challenges to choose from. Now it is going so much better! Here is the list of challenges the students browse through: Grow Your Writing: Editing Challenges. And, yes, the list itself keeps growing because sometimes I'll add a new challenge to the list when I'm reading a student's story during the week; a good challenge for one student might work for others too! Over the summer, I'll try to prune and reorganize (I don't want the list itself to become intimidating), based on the choices I've seen students making this semester.

Using the language of growth and challenges fits in nicely with the growth mindset theme I am trying to promote throughout all the class activities, and the element of choice is also powerful. Earlier in the semester, a lot of students were choosing the punctuation and other writing mechanics challenges, but now they have (re)learned how to cope with those topics. As a result, the research challenge is becoming more popular, which I think is great. There is always more they can learn by doing research, and they can share what they learn in the author's note even if they do not revise the actual story.

Most importantly: instead of seeing revision as just "fixing mistakes," the students can get a sense of revision as something open-ended, driven by their own choices from many possible strategies.

So, without further ado, here are what students chose as their challenges in the stack of assignments I am looking at right now from this weekend. I get such a boost from reading this list and seeing what the students wanted to learn about!

For this week I used dialogue punctuation check for my editing challenge. I liked it because I tend to add more commas than necessary to be safe, and this helped me edit them back out. 

The editing challenge I used was the Author’s Note. My author’s note was pretty short, so I did some research and expanded on that.  

For this story, I used the Research and Learn challenge. I worked on looking up more details about the animals that I mentioned in the end of the story so I can be better prepared to write the next story! I'd love to use this challenge again. It's very helpful!

Active and passive verbs. It went well. There were a lot that I changed.  

This week I chose “Slow down and read out loud”. I actually found quite a few typos when I read the story out loud. I read through the story silently before I turned it in, but it is obviously more effective to read it out loud when error checking. Hopefully I will simply do this every time I turn something in.

This week, I did the ‘names’ editing challenged. I attached links in my author’s note to each pig’s name to show readers where they originated from. 

I decided to do vocatives once again. In this story I added more vocatives in the middle of sentences rather than the beginning. It is also the biggest grammatical problem that continues to show up on my stories. I also decided to work on semicolons. I never actually payed much attention to the use of semi colons. Next story I actually made a goal to have no more that 2 vocative problems!

I chose to give my author’s note a make-over for this editing challenge. After reading the comments, I saw that I was mostly just summarizing my story. I chose to provide a little history about the different religious practices in India so the readers could see that Vishnu and Shiva are still widely worshiped today and Indra is not.  I think this challenge went well and I learned a little history along the way.

This week I decided to do the challenge that prompts the author to read the story more slowly aloud in order to catch more errors. I found this challenge to be extremely helpful because I caught so many more mistakes than I would have if I had just been reading on the screen! I printed my story out with size 14 font, which felt really big. It allowed me to really see the story as a whole, though. It also gave me the freedom to read each sentence individually and make notations as I went. All in all, I felt like this was a really good challenge for me. I should probably make a point to print out my story and read it very slowly aloud for the rest of the semester!

I chose the paragraph length editing challenge. I thought about my paragraph lengths after reading some other peoples stories and thought I could break mine down some. I split a couple of my paragraphs in half and think it works well.

I did a research challenge this week! It was interesting to see that Coyote had its own section on the Wikipedia page for "trickster." It seems that in many myths from all different cultures, the coyote has the role of the trickster that dominates over other land creatures.

For my editing choice, I decided to add more clear details throughout my story. I also added a blurb at the  beginning of the story to tell where the tale came from. I wanted my readers to get a better sense of the stories background and history! 

This week I chose the research challenge. I read a traditional version of this jataka where the tale was told by the Buddha himself. I found this version very interesting. I liked how the tale was given context. The Buddha was walking through the garden of a squire when he came upon area that was without vegetation. The squire's gardener explained how the bald spot came to be and the Buddha replied with the jataka. This gave it a parable-like feel that had reminded me of some of the tales that Jesus told in the Gospels.

For my editing challenge I focused more on my author's note. A lot happens in the story of the twenty-two goblins and I had left a lot out in my story to make it fit. This made it important for me to include what the reader missed inside of my author's note. I think it went really well and it is something I think is very important so I may use this challenge again. 

I read over the apostrophe rule and maintaining the same tense throughout a sentence and the use of commas.  I always thoughts that commas were used when you wanted to slow the flow of a sentence like you were taking a breath. Now I know there are different types of commas.

I used the research challenge once again. I was really happy to find the video I included at the end, because it discussed a lot of symbolism surrounding the festival, and especially the gudhis, that I hadn't run across while writing the story. 

Keep on learning, people:

Curiosity is not sedentary and passive.

Storybooks: Student-Created Content for Long-Term (Re)Use

In preparation for our upcoming Twitter chat this week on textbooks and open content, I'm going to be writing some posts about how I use — and reuse! — content in my classes. In particular, I want to focus on student-created content and how I reuse that from semester to semester.

The Storybooks. Although I do have class readings, that is not what I consider to be the most important content of the class. Instead, the most important content in my classes is the content created by the students themselves. In addition to their weekly blog posts, the students create semester-long storytelling projects called Storybooks. In this post, I'll explain some of the ways that I am constantly re-using my archive of student Storybooks to provide ideas and inspiration for the new students every semester. Then, in a separate post (this one is already too long!), I'll show how this focus on the Storybooks as the central content of the course is an organizing principle that drives my whole approach to course design.

First... some history. The students have been created Storybooks in my classes since 2002 using webspace (3MB per student) provided by my school. Sadly, my school's IT department deleted hundreds of the Storybooks in August 2010; it happened without warning just before classes started for Fall 2010, and that was the hardest semester I ever faced as an online instructor. Luckily, a few students had been using Google Sites already (mostly Study Abroad students working in Internet cafes who needed a 100% browser-based web publishing option), so in Fall 2010, I switched from recommending that the students use OU webspace and urged them to use Google Sites instead.  That's proved to be a great choice. I'm now into my fifth year of students using Google Sites, and it's still working really well as a solution! Most of the students leave their projects online after the class is over, and I've now got 600 Storybooks in my archive.

The word "archive" makes it sound like a static collection of content, but that's not actually the case. The Storybooks are published in the students' own Google accounts, so I don't actually control the content. Instead, I keep track of the Storybooks by means of links, and I display and share those links in different webspaces using a variety of tools. Here is how that works:

E-Storybook Central. This is a Blogger website that is my main link repository. After each semester is over, I update the list of links for each class with the Storybooks that the students have left online: Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics. I don't keep track of the students' names as you can see; many of the students do put their names on their Storybooks, but that is their choice. All I need is the Storybook title.

Randomizing Widgets. Using the links along with screenshots I make of the Storybook homepages, I use Randy Hoyt's RotateContent.com tool to create three different javascript widgets that present a showcase of the Storybooks at random: a Myth-Folklore widget, an Indian Epics widget, and a combined widget. These widgets are incredibly useful! You can see these widgets on the front page of my class procedures wiki, in the sidebar of the class announcements blog, at the top of the Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics link lists, and also in various assignments where I ask students to browse the Storybooks for ideas, like in this Storybook Favorites assignment from the first week of class. Here's a screenshot of how it looks at the wiki; a new Storybook comes up each time at random.

Daily Announcements. In addition to specific assignments that ask students to browse the Storybooks, I include a Storybook every day in the class announcements. Because there is only room for appx. 100 daily announcements in the semester, I run this list of links with a spreadsheet which I update at the end of every semester, adding in the Storybooks that seem like they would be especially useful to share in this way. My goal in sharing a Storybook every day like this is both to give students ideas and inspiration for their own work, while also reminding them all semester long that the Storybooks they are creating are as much for future use as for the present.

Pinterest Boards. I use Pinterest Boards to give students a different way of browsing the past Storybooks: Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics. Like the randomizing widgets, these Pinterest Boards are a kind of showcase of Storybooks, ones that I think will be especially useful to future students. Here's a screenshot of the Myth-Folklore Board:

Diigo. I use Diigo to tag Storybooks so that I can share groups of Storybooks with students as they explore different topics and different storytelling styles. So, for example, this Diigo link is for Storybooks in diary style, and this Diigo link is for Storybooks about Vishnu.  I have not been doing a good job of keeping up with the Diigo links, mostly because the totally UN-visual style of Diigo is not really appealing to the students, even though Diigo is very useful to me for record-keeping purposes. You can compare the Pinterest Board screenshot above with the Diigo screenshot below and see why students are intrigued by Pinterest and not by Diigo:

One of my projects for Summer 2015 is to transfer the most useful Diigo link lists to Pinterest Boards: I will keep using Diigo for myself because it is great for record-keeping purposes, but for the students, I need something more visually attractive.  Since Pinterest will let me have up 500 Boards and 200,000 pins, I won't run into any limitations that get in the way: I really can have all the Boards I need! Plus, it is far more likely that students will grab and re-share Pinterest pins; I have never had any luck in getting students interested in using Diigo for their own research and bookmarking purposes. And, to be honest, I don't blame them. I use Diigo because it is powerful, but it's never really fun to use... and fun is a big motivating factor — not just for the students, but for me too!

Closing Thoughts on Student-Created Content 

When I say that the student Storybooks are the most important content in my classes, I mean much more than content as "information" to be digested and regurgitated, as is so often the case with textbook content. The way students use the Storybooks is not to get information (sometimes that is the case, but not often). Instead, the students are using the Storybooks for ideas and inspiration as they develop their own projects that reflect their own interests. That's why it is so important that this is student-generated content. When current students see the work of past students like this, it sparks an "I can do that too" moment. I really need that spark because most of my students are not confident as writers, and most of them have never published anything online before.  The Storybooks also show students that there are really no limits to the topics and styles they can explore. Sure, I can tell them to be adventurous in their brainstorming about topics and styles, but the enormous variety of the Storybooks shows them with examples more powerful than mere words from me.

So: GIVE IT A TRY. This is the kind of effort that builds and builds over time, but it also pays off after just one semester. I love the fact that I now have hundreds and hundreds of Storybooks in the archive (all of which bring back happy memories for me as a teacher), but nothing so enormous as my archive is required for this content strategy to be effective. If you are thinking of doing something similar in your classes, even just one semester is enough to get a good start on a student archive, and in just two or three semesters you will have an archive that will be really exciting for students to explore. So, don't let your LMS consign your students' work to the digital trash can at the end of the semester. Instead, start saving it online, in open spaces beyond the LMS. Who knows: it might even turn out to be the most important content in your classes too!

Comment Wall

One of the biggest dilemmas I faced in switching from the Ning group blogging platform to Blogger was losing the great Ning Comment Wall feature. A simple solution — having students create a post called "Comment Wall" at their blogs — has turned out to work just fine! Not as good as Ning's Comment Wall... but definitely good enough!


BRIEF DESCRIPTION. Each student creates a simple post called "Comment Wall" in their blog which is easily accessible via the Comment Wall label. The post exists so that visitors to the blog can leave comments there. This is how students comment on each other's websites, and also how they leave thank-yous and other miscellaneous messages for each other. You can see how that works by looking at the Storybook listing for Myth-Folklore. As you can see, each Storybook has a link to the student's blog with Comment Wall. (For the Portfolio, since the writing consists of blog posts, students can just leave comments at those post although, interestingly, some students choose to do that at the Comment Wall instead and, of course, either way is fine!)


DETAILS.

Students do brainstorming and develop their Storybook projects during Weeks 1-5 of the semester, and then in Week 6, they begin commenting on each other's Storybooks. By that time, they have been leaving comments on each other's blogs for five weeks already, so they have become proficient at that, so the Comment Wall makes sense as a mode of communication. They receive feedback on their Storybook in this way for Weeks 6-12, which means every student should get around 10-15 comments total, and sometimes they get more if they are selected as a "free choice" in addition to the commenting group assignments.

I subscribe to the comment feeds for all my students' blogs, and I am really pleased by the quality of comments that are left both at the Comment Wall and also on the individual blog posts. Thanks to the power of Inoreader, you can see an HTML clippings view of the comment feels in my two classes. The Storybook comments are longer than the individual blog post comments as you'll see:
Myth-Folklore Comments
Indian Epics Comments


HISTORY.

For five years, I did all the student blogging in a Ning, and I used the wonderful "Comment Wall" on the Ning Profile page for students to leave comments for one another. That was the single best thing about the Ning: the Comment Wall really fostered CONVERSATION, in addition to comments, because it had a "reply" link with every comment, where you could create a threaded conversation back-and-forth between Comment Walls. Admittedly, though, students rarely took advantage of that option, and I suspect that was because the Ning had a strangely impersonal quality (see below) because of the generic design that did not allow individual customization.

In any case, I was very sorry to give that up that threaded conversation feature when I switched to the blogs, but I'm still pretty happy with how things have worked out: I use an Introduction blog post which serves much the same function as the old Profile Page did (I should write up an explanation of that also!), and the Comment Wall post solution has been working just fine.

One way in which this solution is superior to Ning is that when students visit another person's Comment Wall, they go in through the blog's main page, using the Comment Wall label to then click on to the Comment Wall. This means they get to see at a glance the person's latest posts, giving them an impression of what that person was doing for class over the past week. In the Ning, the Comment Wall was not integrated with the blog in that way and given how nicely the students are customizing their blogs to create a sense of personal presence, I really like the fact that to get to the Comment Wall you go through the blog home page.

Another factor that is contributing to the quality of interchange is how the students are in groups of three for their Storybook comments each week (new random groups each week). So, that means that they are both giving-and-getting comments to-and-from the people in the group. As a result, there is a sense of interchange that results from the round-robin strategy of using the groups. The comments are connected to one another in a kind of conversation among the group members each week.  Much of my approach here was driven by the QuadBlogging approach, along with a combination of randomization (so that everybody can meet everybody) and free choice (so that people can connect and reconnect based on shared interests).


GOALS. I consider student feedback on the Storybook to be one of the most crucial components of the class:

* Students have an audience for their work that is not just me.
* Students tend to provide holistic, personal feedback that is different from the feedback that I provide.
* Students learn how to provide feedback by practicing this skill every week while also receiving feedback each week from others.
* Students receive feedback in a timely fashion that allows them to improve their project week by week.
* Students can access all the project comments in a single place to review each time they spend time working on the project.


GENERAL THOUGHTS

The switch to Blogger which provoked me to use this "Comment Wall" post solution has been one of the best things that has ever happened in my classes. I had not realized what a negative effect the sameness of the Ning interface was having on the interactions: all the Ning blogs looked more or less the same (in a mini-Ning, students all had to use the same blog design), and all the comment walls looked more or less the same also. With Blogger, the sense of individual student presence and personality is so much stronger than it ever was before, which I think has given a big boost to the quality of the comments overall, with much more of a person-to-person dimension. I am very pleased with both the blog commenting and also the project comments at the Comment Walls!

(photo by Alan Stanton at Flickr)

Writing - Feedback - Revision

My anecdotal impression is that students do very little revision in their other classes and, even when they do revise, they have very limited feedback to go on. If we want student writing to improve, we have to offer offer multiple revision opportunities with abundant, detailed feedback.


BRIEF DESCRIPTION. In addition to their weekly blog posts, students complete a formal, semester-long writing project, and revision is a key component of that process. You can see the overall writing and revising schedule here: Storybook and Portfolio Schedules. For each assignment that they turn in as part of the project, the students receive detailed feedback from me which they then use in the revision process, and they also receive feedback from other students.


DETAILS. In other posts, I've written about these semester-long Storybook projects and Portfolio projects (students choose one or the other). In this post, I will focus on the role of feedback and revision in those projects.

Student writing workflow. The basic workflow is as follows:

* new story: students publish a new story and get detailed feedback from me, with ongoing feedback from other students
* revised story: students published the revised story, and they again get detailed feedback from me, with ongoing feedback from other students
* final revisions + new story: students revise the story one more time and also publish a new story, on which they get detailed feedback from me, etc.

As a result, each story in the project is revised at least twice, once substantially and once more for light editing. If needed, it's easy to add in an extra week of revision; the semester-long schedule is very flexible that way. As I've explained elsewhere, there is no grading component here, so students are not penalized in any way for needing an extra week of revision. There are no grades given on any of these writing assignments. No grading: instead, it's all about the feedback.

My comment workflow. Here is my comment workflow:

* Students alert me that their story is ready to read via an email that contains a completion checklist.
* I copy the text of their published story from the website into a plain text editor.
* I insert running comments into the student's writing, sentence by sentence and/or paragraph by paragraph.
* I write a paragraph or two of general comments at the top when I am done.
* I paste the result into an email replying to the student's checklist email.

Using plain text this way means that I do not have to worry about specific software choices: plain text email works well with any program on any device the student prefers to use. It is fast, convenient, and highly reliable.

Feedback contents. When the students turn in the stories for their projects, the first round of feedback they receive from me is extremely detailed, often sentence by sentence or even phrase by phrase. My aim is to share with them my experience as I read their writing, responding to it on a variety of levels such as:

* remarks about the story's overall development (character, plot, etc.)
* comments about composition at the word, phrase, and sentence level
* detailed identification of writing errors of all kinds
* questions about gaps, bumps, and other composition problems
* suggestions for further research and reading (links to online resources, other students' writing, etc.)

Here is a screenshot of a typical chunk of running comments inserted into a piece of student writing. My comments are marked with ==>

Canned comments. For comments related to writing mechanics (which is a huge problem for many students), I rely on an ever-evolving document (appx. 30 pages long now) which contains canned comments and links to online help. The comments have "xxx" in them where I can paste in the specific word or phrase or sentence from the student's actual story so that they can see what needs fixing, along with a link to an explanatory help page. You can see there the kinds of problems the students struggle most with at my writing support website: The Writing Laboratory.

Revision comments. When a student turns in a revision assignment, they get more limited feedback from me, focused strictly on remaining items that still need their attention. These are almost always just canned comments about writing mechanics, although if a student has substantially rewritten the story rather than just revising it, I'll treat that as an original writing assignment and provide sentence-by-sentence commentary a second time, which may or may not lead to a second week of extensive revision.

Time required. As you can guess, the time required to provide this type of feedback is considerable. I have designed my classes so that I am able to spend almost all my time each week providing this feedback to the students. I have 80-90 students each semester (three sections, 25-30 students per section), and the stories are typically 800-1200 words in length. On average it takes me appx. 20-30 minutes to comment on a new piece of writing, while a revision assignment goes much more quickly, usually taking just 10-15 minutes. My weeks alternate between original and revision weeks and, luckily for me, the students are also on slightly different schedules (the Portfolio option has also helped with that), so that in an original writing week I might have 50-60 new stories and 20-30 revision items, while in a revision week I'll have 50-60 revision items and just 20-30 new stories. Either way, it's real work: in an original writing week, I'll spend easily 30 hours writing up comments, but then I get a break in the revision weeks, when the load is more like 20-25 hours.

Feedback nirvana. Yep, you read that right: 30 hours. 20-25 hours. I am a full-time online instructor, and providing feedback to students is the single most important part of my job. Luckily, I also enjoy it enormously! When the day comes that I am not excited to get to work every morning, then I will redesign my courses from scratch to re-ignite myself. So far though — and I've been doing this for twelve years now — I find myself liking the job more and more, largely I suspect because I am getting better at it, which means the students are having a better experience too. That's a positive feedback loop for all of us!

In addition, the piecemeal nature of the commenting process means that I can take frequent short breaks, allowing me to attend to other class-related tasks (writing class announcements, responding to other student email, setting up the weekly comment groups, etc.), as well as spending time interacting with other teachers online. My use of social networks like Google+ and Twitter fits in very nicely with this intensive but piecemeal workload, so that I can take "social media breaks" all day long, often sharing what I am learning from my students as I work through the stack of assignments.

Daily quota. To make sure I keep up with the work and finish every week by the end of the day on Friday, I have a daily quota, Monday through Friday. I use labels in Gmail to flag the incoming assignments and to determine my daily workload. I also share my progress through the writing stack with my students as I've explained here: The Stack. I do no work on the students' projects over the weekend, although I sometimes choose to do course-related development activities ... like writing this blog post on a lovely Saturday afternoon. :-)

Feedback from other students. The students also provide feedback on the Storybooks and Portfolios each week. Their comments tend to be more holistic, not the sentence-level detail that I provide. This feedback takes the form of comments at the "Comment Wall" at their blogs.  Helping students learn to provide specific, useful feedback is an important goal, and it is often something new to them. Here are some of the materials I use to help the students learn how to provide useful feedback: Giving Feedback: Details, Details, Details and Storybook Feedback.

You can get a sense of the kinds of comments students leave for one another by browsing through their blogs; you will see a "Comment Wall" link in the top navigation or sidebar for each student's blog, along with comments on individual blog posts: Blog Directory. The students' eagerness and willingness to help one another with their writing is one of my favorite things about these classes!


HISTORY.

I was extremely naive when I first started teaching at the University of Oklahoma in 1999. I had no idea how much support my students needed in their writing, and I was also surprised at how uninterested they were in improving their writing for its own sake. When the students turned in their first papers in my first semester of teaching, I was simply overwhelmed. I realized that it would be impossible for me to comment on all the papers in a meaningful way while still returning them in a timely fashion, so I offered the class two options: get a grade on the paper but no comments, or rewrite their papers based on detailed comments from me, but not for a better grade. The comments and revision would simply be in order to improve their writing. Out of 50 students, exactly one took me up on the opportunity to rewrite his paper — Randy Hoyt, now a game developer and web programmer extraordinaire, and also a great writer.

So, that moment in Fall 1999 was my wake-up call. I realized that I was trapped in a meaningless, grade-driven writing nightmare, and I decided that I had to do something completely different. The next semester, I switched from traditional essay-writing to creative writing, helping the students to publish their writing as stories online, and so the Storybook was born. It was a great success: students loved writing the stories and they loved sharing them with their fellow students online. They were also extremely eager to learn how to create websites. Back in the year 2000, it was still quite an unusual skill to have. And even today, in 2014, the vast majority of my students have never published a website or even a blog.

So, solving the engagement problem was easy: the students were now eagerly writing stories that were truly a pleasure to read. In terms of writing mechanics, though, they still had serious problems, and it was harder for me to find a way to find a solution to that problem. In fact, it took another several years until I finally settled on the writing-feedback-revision routine that I now use. I simply did not realize at first that I had to make revision weeks a formal part of the process so that every other week students were doing revision, and nothing but revision, before they moved on to the next new story. I am very happy with this routine now, though, and it works well for students with a whole range of writing skills and motivation. Every student benefits from the opportunity to revise, and I try to adapt the feedback and revision expectations to the individual skill level and motivation of each student.

In the 2013-2014 school year, I embarked on a new dimension of the revision process, hoping to promote more autonomy in the revision process and encouraging the students to develop a personal repertoire of revision skills independent of the feedback they receive from me. This is still a very new project and, while I have seen some early successes, I still have a long way to go. It is proving to be a good challenge for me as a teacher, and I am learning a lot as I watch the students attempt to build up their independent revising skills. I have some new ideas I want to try in that regard next year; I'll write some more about all that in a separate post!


GOALS. Here are just a few of the goals I have in mind for this writing-feedback-revision process:

* to help students improve their writing
* to encourage students to feel a greater ownership of their writing
* to show students that writing is a process, not a one-time event
* to give students experience in commenting on other people's writing
* to separate evaluation of student writing from the grading process


GENERAL THOUGHTS

I have to note here that this all happened by accident: I never set out to be a writing teacher. If during that first semester of teaching the students had turned in assignments that were more or less acceptable, I probably never would have felt compelled to turn my classes into writing classes. I am so glad things turned out the way they did, though, as I have ended up with a more exciting job as a teacher than I ever imagined. Every week of every semester is so stimulating, filled with wonderful reading experiences for me and also with great teaching challenges as I am continually reminded of how difficult it is to write in English, but also how worthwhile it is to rise to that challenge.

What I like best is being able to feel confident about every single student, even if they might not be feeling any confidence in themselves. After having done this for so many years, I know for sure that every student has stories to tell, and I also know that they can learn to tell those stories well, using the power of language to bring their stories to life. With abundant feedback and opportunities for revision, they will all learn to become better writers.

Sad to say, though, my class might be the only college class in which their writing really improves, and there are all kinds of reasons why the writing process is badly neglected in other college classes. Here are what I consider to be the top three reasons:

1. The teaching of content trumps the teaching of writing.
2. Writing, and the teaching of writing, both take a lot of time.
3. Almost no college instructors are trained as writing instructors.

These are not easy problems to fix, yet I do not see how we can continue to graduate students with poor writing skills and low confidence in their writing. I find it frustrating that we hear an endless chorus of praise for "critical thinking skills" yet almost nothing about the teaching of writing. The next time you read some high-minded defense of humanities education, take a look to see exactly what the authors say about the teaching of writing and what specific proposals they offer to fix the serious structural problems listed above. They might opine about the importance of writing, but such platitudes don't help to solve the actual problems we face.

If college students are going to learn to be confident, skilled writers, they require abundant feedback and revision opportunities, and I think it is time for us to have an honest conversation about how we can make that happen. If we are not going to have that conversation, then we need to be prepared for Kaplan and Pearson and the other purveyors of standardized education and standardized testing to take over higher education, with no one to blame but ourselves: they are only filling the educational vacuum that we have created.

We can and must do better!

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. — Robert Cormier.

The Portfolio Option

One of the biggest new experiments for me this semester is the Portfolio as an alternative to the Storybook, and now that Week 5 is over, I can report on how that is going since Week 5 is when the students made their choice!

Update: Week 10. I continue to be really pleased with how this option is working! One student decided to switch from her Storybook to the Portfolio option because she was so pressed for time, and that ended up being okay too. I was a little worried about how that would work since she was switching in Week 7, but she had so many good storytelling posts to choose from by that point in the semester that it has gone really well!


BRIEF DESCRIPTION. Each student completes a semester-long writing project, choosing to do either a Storybook (writing on a single topic) or a Portfolio (collecting their best weekly blog posts). You can see the schedule of assignments for both projects, along with information I provide to students about choosing between the Storybook or Portfolio.


DETAILS.

I have always required that the students do a semester-long writing project with a fully developed writing process: brainstorming, research, writing, revising... and revising some more. LOTS of revising. Since I started teaching these courses back in 2002, that project has taken the form of a Storybook, in which students choose a topic and come up with a storytelling plan that suits their topic. You can see an archive of past projects to see the results: Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics.

Starting in Fall 2014, I am offering an alternative project: instead of a Storybook, students can instead choose to compile a Portfolio of stories chosen from their weekly storytelling blog posts. This is similar to the Storybook in that it is based on writing and revising, but the stories are not connected to one another. Instead, they respond to the weekly readings in the class, using whatever style the student happened to have chosen that week for their storytelling experiment. So, just as for the Storybook stories, students will be turning in a new story to me every other week, and I will give them detailed comments back; they then revise the story, I read it again... and the it is time to add a new story to the Portfolio. At the end of the semester, the students will have a set of four or five stories labeled as "Portfolio" in their blog, accessible via the label link. To see how this is going to work, here is one student's Portfolio for Fall 2014 (one story so far).

So, as the semester begins, all the students explore past Storybooks and go through the brainstorming process for a Storybook, which culminates in writing an Introduction in Week 4. Then, they decide which way to go: carry on with the Storybook or opt for the Portfolio instead. The Storybook brainstorming is productive for its own sake, and it is also very helpful in preparing students for the kinds of writing they are doing in their Portfolio also, so in no sense is the time spent on early Storybook work lost time at all. In fact, one of the first Portfolio-related assignments I ask people to complete is to look at existing Storybooks to brainstorm about all the possible styles they might want to explore in their Portfolio over the course of the semester: Portfolio Brainstorm.

I'll surely have more to say about the Portfolio project as the semester goes on, but my verdict after the first week of Portfolio assignments is that it was a big success. I read and replied to all the Portfolio stories, and next week those will be coming back in as revisions, while students will also be getting feedback from other students this weekend, just as for the Storybooks. I'm really excited about that! In the old system, the students who were struggling and/or behind on the Storybook did not get any feedback from other students until their Storybook was actually online and ready to read. Sometimes that meant they were out of the student feedback loop until Week 6 or even Week 7. Now, with the Portfolio, they are going to be part of the give-and-get of student feedback this weekend, along with everybody else.

I'm so happy how this has gone so far, and I'll report back again later in the semester!


HISTORY.

I had been troubled by the fact that every semester 1 or 2 students abandoned their Storybook projects before the end of the semester. It was never more than 1 or 2, but it was a persistent problem. Not every semester, but almost every semester, at least 1 or 2 Storybooks never got finished, and I felt badly about that, since the experience was surely not very satisfying for the student. It also made me wonder, of course, just how many Storybooks students were finishing because they "had to" and not really because they wanted to.

So, this had been simmering on the back burner, but it was never really a big enough problem that I devoted a lot of thought to it specifically; I had other, bigger problems to work on, ha ha. But then, one day last spring, I had a BRAINWAVE. I can date it specifically to March 29 as I learn from this old Google+ post. It was kind of eerie to read that post now and realize that the idea was kind of a "birth of Athena" thing, because what I ended up doing is almost exactly what I figured out in that moment of revelation back in March. Freaky!

And here's how it turned out this Fall! In the Myth-Folklore class, the first time this option was offered, 7 students chose the Portfolio out of 48 students total. In the Indian Epics class, 7 students chose the Portfolio out of 32 students total. I really did not know what to expect, but I knew there would be more takers in Indian Epics because the reading load in that class is more demanding than in Myth-Folklore, so the students are pressed for time, and it's also the case that finding a topic for Indian Epics is more challenging, especially when Indian culture may be something completely new to the students, as it often is. So, that means 14 students out of 80 overall chose the Portfolio. I will try to remember to update this post every semester so that I can keep track of this over time!


GOALS. Since the semester-long projects are really the heart-and-soul of my classes, it's hard to list just a few goals; I have so many goals here. So, please look at the goals that I have listed for the Storybooks: TEACHING WRITERS. All those goals hold true for the Portfolios too, and I've reproduced that "teaching writers" graphic below.

As a special subset of goals, here is what I hope to achieve by offering the Portfolio specifically as an ALTERNATIVE to the Storybook:

• Choice. Give students a wider range of semester-long project options.
• Time Management. Help students who are facing serious demands on their time.
• Blogging. Provide students the chance to develop a "curated" section of their blog, featuring their best posts.

GENERAL THOUGHTS

I am glad that there are enough Portfolios in both classes that it is not going to be seen as stigmatizing in any way, although I am still worried about that. I am hoping to gather some testimonials from the students at the end of this semester about whether they are glad or not about having chosen the Portfolio. I think their testimonies could be very useful in helping students decide to opt for the Portfolio. I really think BOTH options are excellent, and I am delighted by both writing projects. If all goes well, the students doing Portfolios will have a good experience with that, and I can find a way to share that positive evaluation with next semester's students so that people will see that the Portfolio is a great option, one that every student might want to consider!

In particular, I was glad to see that some students who are strong writers DID choose the Portfolio option. I suspect they did so because they are feeling overwhelmed by their many obligations, so it just makes sense for them to choose the option that lets them build on the existing stories in their blog, rather than writing additional stories. So, as students read the Storybooks and the Portfolios, they will see strong writing in both types of projects, along with less strong writing, since in every class there is an incredibly wide range of writerly experience, writerly interest, etc. Luckily, though, it is not going to be the case that students will be associating the stronger writing with the Storybooks. There is a range of writing to be found in both types of projects and, of course, with the revising, both the Storybook stories and the Portfolio stories will get better and better, week by week, all semester long!

(thanks to Larry Ferlazzo for the graphic)

Storybooks: The Big Picture

For Connected Courses (#ccourses), I had posted something about the Storybook project, so I thought I should start the arduous task of documenting that project here too. It's the heart and soul of my classes, and there's so much I want to say about it. For an attempt at an overview, see the Connected Courses post: Why? Writing!


BRIEF DESCRIPTION. The Storybook is a semester-long project in which each student chooses a topic related to the class, finds traditional stories on that topic, and then retells those stories in their own style. They publish the Storybook as a website, and the students share and comment on their Storybook projects week by week. You can see an archive of past projects here: Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics.


DETAILS. There is so much I will need to say about the Storybooks, but for an overview, take a look at the week by week assignments which you can see here: Weekly Storybook Assignments.

As you can see, there is an alternate project called the Writing Portfolio. That is something new for Fall 2014, so I will write up something about that separately when I see how many people choose the Portfolio option. It's totally new and I have no idea what to expect.

The Storybook project begins already in the first week when students browse through the archive of past project, looking for ideas and inspiration: Storybook Favorites.

There then follow two weeks of brainstorming, divided (somewhat artificially) between brainstorming about Storybook Topics and Storybook Styles. I will write up separate posts explaining how those assignments work.

Then, in Week 4, students should be ready to write their Introduction, based on the plan that has emerged from the two weeks of brainstorming. Based on that Introduction, they then make their choice: carry on with the Storybook project, or switch to the Portfolio instead.

Students who carry on with the Introduction then create a website for their Storybook and publish the revised Introduction. (They already created a practice Google Site so that they are now ready to make a website for the Storybook.)

After the website and Introduction are both online, students then start reading and commenting on each other's projects; I'll have more to say about that in a separate post. You can see the projects for the current semester here: Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics. I also keep Pinterest Boards for the Storybooks!

The rest of the semester consists of alternating weeks of writing and revision as students add new stories to their Storybook and then revise those stories. I'll have something to say about the writing-and-revision process in a separate post.

The schedule is flexible so that if a student misses a weekly Storybook assignment, they can still carry on after having missed a week. I'll explain more about the alternate schedules in a separate post. The alternate schedules are an important part of how the project works: it's a demanding project, and while I want the students to work on the project every week, I totally understand that there might be times in the semester when that is just not possible.

At the end of the semester, students nominate their favorite Storybooks and we have a ballot, just for fun, where they vote on the most-nominated Storybooks for the best-of-semester projects. I'll say more about that in a separate post also.


HISTORY.

I've used the Storybook approach since I first started teaching online. In fact, one of my biggest motivations for wanting to teach online was to make the students' websites the natural focal point of the class. When I first started, I very naively did not have a cycle of writing-and-revision. Instead, I asked the students to add a new story every week while revising their previous story at the same time. That worked for some students, but many students needed more help with their writing, so starting in the second year, I switched to the alternating weeks of writing and revision. The next year, I created the alternate schedules to help students see how they could stay on track even when missing some of the weekly assignments.

As for the websites themselves, the students originally published them in webspace (4MB) provided by the university, using Netscape Composer (later Mozilla Seamonkey) to create their pages and upload them with FTP. Then, without warning, my school deleted hundreds of student projects from the archive. It was the single greatest setback I have ever experienced as an online instructor; I spent Sunday, August 15, 2010, literally in tears as I clicked through one broken link after another after another, realizing that hundreds of websites had simply vanished overnight, just a few days before the start of the Fall semester. Luckily, some of my students had been experimenting already with Google Sites as a publishing alternative (for students working in computer labs, a 100% browser-based option was much more convenient), so starting in Fall 2010, students began publishing with Google Sites. That is why my archive of past projects only goes back to Fall 2010, and it is also why I will find it hard ever to really trust my university again for any kind of web hosting.


GOALS. I have far too many goals even to possibly list here, but there is a graphic about "teaching writers" as opposed to "assigning writing" or "teaching writing" which really sums it up for me (thanks to Larry Ferlazzo for sharing the graphic at Google+):

GENERAL THOUGHTS

I cannot begin to describe my enormous satisfaction with the Storybooks. They are a pleasure to read, and watching the students create the Storybooks every semester is like watching a magic show as they summon the Storybooks out of nothingness using the magic wand of the imagination. Even though I have taught these courses for over 10 years and have seen now what must be over 2000 Storybooks, each semester always brings new topics, new styles, new approaches that no one has ever tried before. As a teacher, I had always believed in each student's creative powers as an abstract principle, but the Storybook project has demonstrated that principle in action year after year after year: the students' creative powers are awesome. Every semester, there are Storybooks that make a huge impression on me, stories and styles that I will never forget.

Even more important: the students have the same experience too, being surprised and delighted by their own creativity while also reveling in the creative powers of their fellow students. The Storybook project has been a great experience for me not just as a teacher, but just as a person; these projects are an important part of my life. Plus, it's a very flexible type of project: I would urge anyone who is looking for a writing-based semester-long project to give it a try. I'm sure it could be adapted to just about any class where the students are reading and writing and sharing their work!

Here's a screenshot of the Indian Epics Storybook Archive at Pinterest: so much goodness — and all created by students in MLLL-4993-995. Please feel free to browse and enjoy! There's an even bigger Myth-Folklore Archive Board, too. :-)

Proofreading Skills Assessment

The first course element I thought I would discuss is the proofreading skills assessment that I do in the first week. It's not going first for any reason of importance, but simply because this morning I toted up the results for this semester and shared them at Google+, so it's something on my mind today. In this post, I will try to expand on and contextualize what I said in the G+ post.

Proofreading Skills Assessment

Brief Description. Students choose two stories (out of six) which contain numerous errors in spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure. Their task is to correct the piece of writing and send the corrected piece back to me via email. I then look at their corrections and send them back detailed comments via email.

Details. You can see the instructions provided to the student and the six stories here: Proofreading Practice. To get a sense of what kinds of proofreading skills I am trying to assess, take a look at one of the stories. Students struggle the most with the special punctuation rules for quoted speech (very important for narrative writing in this class), and, like everybody else, they struggle with the many different types of comma usage. Some students also have more basic problems to work on, such as the use of the apostrophe.

History. This is the fourth year I have done this assignment. For the first year, everybody did the Panchatantra story of the mouse-bride. The next year, I changed that to the Japanese fable of the stonecutter. Each student thus did the same story, and it was a story approximately 800 words long. Last year, I went for the "choose your own stories" option, with six stories that are each approximately 300 words long. Although the mouse-bride and the stonecutter were both excellent stories that I was glad to share with all the students, this choice-driven approach is much better. See below for more about that.

Grading. Like all work in my classes, this assignment is graded on a complete/incomplete basis. If students complete the assignment, they get 5 points. Because this assignment is part of the Orientation Week, students are required to complete the assignment; everyone completes this assignment and, if they miss the due date, they receive reminders from me until they do complete it. When they are done, the fill out the Declaration at D2L and the points are automatically recorded in the Gradebook.

Feedback. I have a set of "canned comments" which are able to address most of the errors which students either do not correct or which they correct incorrectly. I can also anticipate some of the errors that they will introduce on their own. At the same time, students provided unexpected responses to this assignment all the time, such as introducing new kinds of errors I've never seen before or completely rewriting a given sentence. That makes it interesting for me to read each of their papers. Even though they are writing on the same stories, it is not at all like grading a quiz. It is much more interesting! As a typical example of canned feedback, here is a sentence from the story that needs to be corrected:

Can't you tell there's a hurricane coming.

If a student does not add the question mark, I send back to them the uncorrected sentence plus my comment:

Can't you tell there's a hurricane coming. 

==> even though this is a rhetorical question, it still gets a question mark at the end: Can't you tell there's a hurricane coming?
(you can review rhetorical questions and other kinds of questions here:
http://writingwithaesop.blogspot.com/2010/08/questions-direct-indirect-and-rhetorical.html)

Depending on the number of comments I need to return to a student, marking one of these might take 10 minutes or it might take 20 minutes, or perhaps more. Overall, then, it takes me anywhere from 15-20 hours to mark and return these assignments, but I consider it time well spent (for the many reasons why, see "goals" below). In another post, I will say something about the language I use in communicating about writing problems with students, trying very hard to emphasize the positive steps they can take to make improvements. That will be a topic for a later post!

Results. Every semester, the results are pretty much the same: there is a more or less smooth continuum that ranges from just one or two errors to thirty or more efforts. No really significant clusters, just a continuous range of performance. That is a huge challenge for me as a teacher, but one that I welcome: I aspire to make this class a valuable writing experience for every single student across that whole range. In a classroom, I don't know how I would respond to that challenge, but by teaching online, I can work with each student individually on their writing every week. Here are the results I compiled for Fall 2014, showing the same pattern that I see every semester:

The numbers per se are not important and do not justify any kind of detailed analysis. Since the assignment is open-ended (some students introduce a lot of new errors!), there is no "maximum" number of mistakes to use in assigning any kind of percentage score.

Also, when a student is struggling, I do not mark all the items that I might mark for a student with strong proofreading skills. For example, I do advocate the use of comma before a conjunction that joins two independent clauses, and that is something I point out to a student with strong proofreading skills. If, however, a student is having basic problems with other punctuation usage, I don't worry about pointing out this particular comma usage. So, for those students with more than 15 errors or so, their actual error count would be higher if this assignment were graded by a machine. But it is not graded by a machine, and it could not be graded by a machine. That is a very important topic, and one far too big to explore in this blog post... but I promise to come back to that later. I'll even create a draft post now to remind me to do so!

Goals. This exercise has many goals. I will not call them learning objectives (ugh, I am not a big fan of that term at all)... but "goals" sounds good to me! Here are what I consider my top five goals for this assignment:

• Learning experience for me. This assignment gives me a lot of insight into the students' writing in general. Because the assignment is open-ended in nature, every semester I see new results — new corrections that the students devise, and also new mistakes that they introduce into the text). When the assignment ceases to be a learning experience for me, I will come up with something different, but clearly I still have lots to learn about the kinds of errors students are prone to make. It gives me a chance to review and expand as needed the writing support materials I provide here: Writing Laboratory.
• Wake up call for students. This assignment lets the students know that I really will be working with them on the formal aspects of their writing. The class may be a total free-for-all in terms of creative subject matter, but it will not be a free-for-all in terms of punctuation and spelling. For many students, this is the first time they have ever received word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence feedback on a piece of writing. They also learn to get used to the way in which I return comments in plain text, with my comments inserted and marked with ==> (see example above).
• Areas for improvement. The assignment also alerts students to the specific problem areas in their writing. When they start doing some writing for their class projects in Week 4, I ask them to look back at this assignment as they define their own proofreading and revision strategies. So, I don't worry too much if students only glance at this feedback now because they will be revisiting it again later. If, however, they do use this as an occasion to start reviewing these topics, so much the better!
• No punitive grading. The grading for this assignments demonstrates to the students that writing deficits are not going to be penalized; instead, they will be treated as learning opportunities. This is not about red ink, not about grading — it's about learning. Everyone gets the same number of points for this assignment, and they declare those points for themselves when they turn it in. I return feedback only; I do not grade. Also, as mentioned above, I try to couch my feedback in very positive, proactive, empowering terms, emphasizing what the students can do to improve their writing. I promise to write more on that important topic later!
• Story variety. In its current form, the assignment introduces the students to the kinds of stories that they will be reading in these classes, and it also introduces them to the idea of making choices, which is a fundamental part of the class design overall. From my perspective, it is so cool to see how all the stories get chosen every semester, and I really enjoy reading the comments the students make about the stories themselves. It provides an occasion to make some person-to-person connections as I learn more about what kinds of stories they enjoy and why.

General Thoughts:

As the long list of goals might suggest, this is an assignment that I consider to be very important. I want to continue working on this assignment to improve it if I can, but I would also say that the assignment is working very well at this time, helping me to achieve all the goals listed above. Because there are several other writing assignments in the Orientation Week, students realize that not all of their writing is going to be scrutinized in this way (that would be crazy-making, both for them and for me!), but I will be giving them feedback on their class project in the same way that I provide feedback here. The difference, of course, is that when I give them feedback on their own writing, most of my feedback is about the content of the writing. At the same time, I want to prepare them for the feedback they will receive on the formal elements of their writing too — not because they will be punished for it in terms of the grade, but so that they can learn to master some of the rules of written English that, for whatever reasons, they have not mastered thus far. 

Since I teach mostly college seniors, this class may in fact be the last opportunity these students will have to master those rules of formal written English. Sadly, very few college faculty work with their students on writing mechanics and proofreading, which means the students get very little feedback and reinforcement for any of the skills I am trying to foster in this class. There are many reasons why most faculty don't work on the nitty-gritty of writing with their students: perhaps they don't have time, and/or they might be scornful of students who don't already have these skills, and/or they could be applying these skills unconsciously but without the ability to articulate them consciously. In some cases, the faculty might not even have the skills themselves to begin with — believe me, after working for several years in the editorial office of a prestigious academic journal, I've seen it all! 

For me, personally, I cannot imagine not trying to engage with students in this way. I love to read the stories that they write, but at the same time I do notice — I cannot help but notice — the problems they often have with written English. That is a topic that extends to the whole writing process that I try to promote in my classes, though, so I will wrap this up here, and I promise that this larger topic of formal writing instruction is going to come up again and again in future posts!