The Online Face-to-Face Classroom

UPDATE: The encoder is behaving better now. I have recorded a higher-resolution version and re-uploaded it here.

This is my final project for ENGL5060:


This is a supporting video - a simulated online writing class (or writing lab) as proof of concept. For best results, view this video in HD, full screen.

Nobody Reads Your Blog

The unspoken argument Miller and Shepherd see to be making by including quotes about blogs that were meant to be "secret" but were eventually found out and distributed is "You're writing in public. Somebody you know will read your blog."

But the evidence is quite to the contrary. People will likely not find out, unless they go searching. It's well established that almost all blogs have 1 reader - the author. I wrote a blog for several years and struggled to develop a regular readership of more than 20 or so readers. Of course, it's foolish to expect anything one writes online to remain private, but I think the "public" nature of blogs is only theoretical in most cases. You may foolishly dress in front of the window, but nobody is looking in.

I think the difficulty in raising an audience is the reason that blogs are no longer as popular as they were around the turn of the century. (And this is the problem with a genre analysis of such a new genre - by the time people read it, it's out of date!) Since they are more likely to garner much larger audience son sites like Facebook, where are friends are already spending hours every day, many no longer see the need to "blog." (I suppose one could see this as a Darwinian development as Facebook has subsumed the blog as the primary sharing genre because it is more "fit.")

On the other hand, there is a new(ish) kind of blog that is a lot more like the earliest blogs that Miller and Shepherd describe - the lightly annotated link or picture list. This is the genre that Tumblr seems to have filled. There is very little writing on Tumbr - it's more of a place to share pictures and links. Tumblr users follow one another and in a way, Tumblr is its own social network just like earlier blog communities like LiveJournal. But Tumblr and communities like it are not so much venues for ideas, narrative, and debate as much as they are venues for thoughts, photographs, and occasional musings. (Come to think of it, Tumblr is essentially a fat Twitter.)

Haswell through Du Gay

I was delighted to see Richard Haswell on our reading list this week because we discussed the "minimal marking" technique he pioneered in my last class, "Teaching Technical Writing." I was then further delighted to see him frame writing instruction in Du Gay's "circuit of culture," which we discussed extensively in Dr. Rice's "Intercultural Communication" class.

As a recovering grammar geek, I'm interested in the ways Haswell discusses criteria as a part of "regulation." We've covered pretty thoroughly the ways in which these criteria (standard grammar, syntax, spelling, and the like) function as shibboleths for the elite. With very few exceptions, these criteria mark us by our class.

Particularly interesting to me was Haswell's treatment of genre and mode rules. He disagreed with Donald M. Murray, who argued that six qualities bridge all discourse modes: meaning, authority, voice, development, design [organization], and clarity. "What a marvelous concept," I thought, "A universal rubric for good writing." Haswell argues that Murray's argument is easy to counter. After all, technical communication is voiceless. (But isn't that a kind of voice?) And surrealist poetry is deliberately non-sensical. (But isn't that a kind of meaning-making?) I do agree with Haswell that Murray's "qualities are mediated quite differently by different genres and modes." (p. 1266) In other words, Murray's "qualities of good writing" are only universal because they are so flexible. While professors have no trouble understanding how these qualities bridge genres, students have a lot of trouble with the concepts. (I suppose because they're not already good writers.)

So I began to think about these qualities of good writing — all these adjectives Haswell uses to describe good writing throughout the piece:

• productive
• appropriate (to some criterion)
• efficient
• accurate
• clear

To these we could add the classic (having already covered "clear"):

• brief
• and sincere.

And it seems to me that we have come to the fundamental difficulty of teaching writing. It's not that teaching writing is impossible. Teaching writing is very both very difficult and quite variable, so if one masters teaching one type of student in one discipline, that knowledge does not always transfer. It's a rhetorical act, so everything depends on the audience. (To ameliorate this difficulty, the theme or essay comes into the void, a piece of writing that appeals to no audience in particular.)

This difficulty is complicated by the fact that most of us learned to write in a way completely different than the way we teach. Unlike math, which very few students grasp without explicit instruction, most writers learn to write by reading a lot. They absorb the patterns and reproduce them much in the same way they absorb spoken language.

English teachers thought for a long time (and many of us still do) that we can reconstruct that knowledge explicitly in the form of grammar and style handbooks. If students will absorb this structured meta-knowledge, then surely they can produce the writing. Hartwell (pdf) put that to rest for us, didn't he?

So what does Haswell propose? I found this to be particularly insightful, "Teacher feedback can largely be a waste of time, for both the teacher and student, unless the critical language is grounded in the specific rhetoric of the field under study." (p. 1279) This is probably impractical in a large class, but I wondered what might happen if we ask our students, on the first day of class, to write about their career and/or personal aspirations. If a student is interested in accounting, he or she might get different feedback then a student who is interested in English or education. Could we offer a variety?

Wandering a bit further afield from Haswell here — Aside from feedback, could we offer students a variety of assignments taken from the essays Haswell offers in his bibliography of writing within disciplines? A business student might need to learn correspondence (email, primarily!), report writing, with a particular emphasis on concision. A history student would likely want to write a classical academic research paper. An English student could write an essay.

I loved this essay, but I wonder if Haswell's thesis about attending to problems with "as little effort as possible" considering the enormous task really boils down to less effort: "eschewing the traditional cover-all bases appraoch to writing response and adopting a smaller task-specific, problem-specific, and learner-specific method" (p. 1282) is really the way to less effort, or if it's the way to more effort, but better feedback. I suppose that efficiency only comes with experience.

In Which I Learned About the Underlife

This entry is running late. I apologize. I'm still traveling in Honduras. I hope to post on Saturday. Better late than never, I always say.

One of the many delightful aspects of studying communication is that the scholarship so often crashes into other fields. Robert Brooke's take on the Underlife is just such a delightful detour into sociology.

Brooke defines underlife as "the activities (or information games) individuals engage in to show that their identities are different from or more complex than the identities assigned them by organization roles" (p. 722) In class, we discussed how teachers can use this underlife to enhance student learning. It seems to me that Brooke's description of underlife in the writing classroom is about more than asserting identity. First, Brooke describes how students engage in asides during class, taking classroom activities and materials "which are purposefully different form those the teacher intended" (p. 724) It's interesting to me that if this underlife activity were teacher-directed, we would call it "higher order learning," but if it's student directed, it's an ever-so-slightly transgressive "underlife" activity in the eyes of some teachers.

Brooke also discusses another important aspect of the underlife: "information games." The students aren't solely asserting their identities when they are playing "information games." Brooke writes that students use information games to figure out how to "get by" or game the system "without losing themselves in its [the classroom's] expectations." (p. 726) I would argue that students aren't merely trying to assert independence from the system. They are also figuring out how to get the best grade for the least effort.

Isn't that OK? Isn't this the kind of behavior that we try to encourage and maximize in daily life? It seems to me that if our assessment methods are vulnerable to gaming to such an extent that a student who hasn't learned the material can still earn a good grade, they are inadequate. We know that even if students are intrinsically motivated to learn, they are extrinsically motivated by grades quite apart from this intrinsic motivation. (As pass/fail studies have shown.)

I like that Brooke takes a non-judgmental attitude toward "information games" because there is little point in deploring them. They are present in every kind of human activity, and the classroom is no exception. So what is a teacher to do with them?

In 2001 I was working in a small university in the Educational Technology Department. They made the entire campus a WiFi Hotspot (which was fairly rare in 2001) and issued each student a laptop computer. Many teachers simply forbad their students from opening their laptops in class. These were the teachers who liked to take roll, then stand at the front of the class and lecture for the entire class period. It seems that they saw anything but rapt attention and note-taking (on paper) as a violation of their divine right as the sage on stage. Of course, the students who would have been distracted by computers distracted themselves in other ways. They wrote notes, (as Brooke described) did homework or read for other classes, or daydreamed. To be sure, the computer offered even greater opportunities for distraction, but we argued (mostly unsuccessfully) that teachers could learn to use the computer in class to improve student engagement. I can think of several ways students could engage more effectively even with a traditional lecture, using a laptop computer. They could take notes collaboratively, annotate notes with additional sources, find competing viewpoints, and add multimedia content to their notes. But of course, the best use of classroom time is probably not the traditional lecture, especially in the writing classroom.

And I think his application of the underlife to the writing classroom is where Brooke gets really brilliant. If Dr. K. has told us once, he's told us a dozen times: student writing is too often (almost always?) a performance rather than a communicative act. This is where "getting by" and "gaming the system" become huge problems for the teacher. Because the student is thinking, "What does the teacher want?" instead of "How can I communicate?" Brooke writes, "if all our classrooms were to focus on fostering thee identities of students as thinkers in our disciplines rather than merely on transmitting the knowledge of our fields, then students might easily see the purpose for these particular 'information games.'" (p. 731)

So here's my question for you, dear commenter. How can a writing instructor encourage an undergrad to think of himself/herself as a producer of new knowledge, as an original thinker, as a writer rather than a teacher-pleaser? I think that one way is to devolve as much power in the classroom as possible to the student. The more I read in theory, the more I tend to think students should play a role in the creation of the syllabus, in deciding how they should be evaluated, and when projects are due. Is this too much to ask of an undergraduate? If we give students power in the classroom, are we helping them redefine themselves? I'd really like to hear what experienced teachers think.

Conversation, Meaning-Making, and Collaboration

What students do when working collaboratively on their writing is not write or edit, or least of all, read proof. What they do is converse. They talk about the subject and about the assignment. ... Most of all they converse about and as a part of writing. (Bruffee, p. 553)

Writing is both a process and a product. I have to admit that it struck me when I read "They talk about the subject..." You mean, they're not just talking about the assignment requirements? They might actually engage with the subject? What a great idea!

More important, and germaine to Bruffee's point, is that their discussion is meaning-making. This creativity that we so prize is socially generated because it springs from knowledge that is socially generated. Yes, there are certainly lone auteurs who get all their inputs from books and write in a bubble, insulated from the world. But the rest of us have to talk with one another, work through ideas, get clarification, and work through drafts. And why should this surprise us? Most TCers, copywriters, and journalists write in community. So why shouldn't students write in community as well? (I'd like to note here the irony. I never liked group projects in school.)

Abnormal Discourse

The discussion of "abnormal discourse" in Bruffee really perked up my ears as well. Does creation of new knowledge really require "abnormal discourse?" In a previous class with Dr. Kemp, we discussed the concept of "disturbed knowledge." In order to publish anything useful and anything someone will want to read, we have to introduce disturbed knowledge, or "abnormal discourse."

As I get older, I find myself much more tolerant of outlandish or transgressive expression in art, in rhetoric, in music, etc -- all cousins of "abnormal discourse." (Like de Koonig's "Woman", right) I look at a lot of art and architecture that I find ugly, repulsive, or stupid, but I also think, "Thank heavens someone is doing something different." This outlandish and transgressive art or rhetoric may never be accepted by the mainstream, but it will influence the mainstream, adding variety, vitality, and consequent robustness to the culture. (At least, I hope it will!)

Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations

As I read Shaughnessy again for this blog entry, I got angry. How could a school system allow students to graduate high school without the ability to pluralize nouns? My eight-year-old can do that. It seems like a terrible injustice to me that students can be so ill-served by public education that they have to wait until college to master such fundamental skills. Doubling the injustice is that so many of these students are from underserved, minority backgrounds. I'm puzzled as to why this isn't considered a civil rights issue.

Triply unjust now is that many of these students believe that the only way they can succeed is by entering a college that is not well prepared to receive them. (A college that doesn't have the SEEK program like CUNY of Shaugnessy's day) Then they take massive loans that can never be discharged, then they drop out of school because they are so inadequately prepared and inadequately taught. So now they are uneducated and in massive, undischargeable debt. What a crock of manure that is.

Then I remember that my job is not to fix all the injustices in the world -- my job is (I hope someday) to teach the students in my class, whoever they may be - wherever they come from. This is why I admire Shaughnessy. She doesn't spend any time belaboring the unpreparedness of her students or complaining about the impossibilty of her situation. She seems to take the tack that she is faced with a very difficult, but solveable problem. She made Basic Writing into a discipline and looked for ways to fix the problem. This is quite admirable.

There is no getting around the fact that Standard American English (SAE) is a shibboleth. It is the a very good way for students to enter the world of the middle class - the world of high salaries, good schools, good nutrition, and safe neighborhoods. Of course, the trades are another way into the good life, but it seems to me that as our service and manufacturing economy becomes more sophisticated that even the trades require a great deal more education than they did before. I'm certain that avionics technicians, diesel mechanics, microchip fab workers, paramedics, and other high-paying developed-world tradesmen and women are earning at least an associate's degree and thus taking the concomitant composition requirements.

So I like that Shaughnessy doesn't back down from this fact. She may not like that students are criminally unprepared. She may not like that errors are so distracting to educated readers that they destroy the message. But she knows she can't change these things. So she came up with an entire framework and a discipline for fixing what should could fix. So "Basic Writing"was born.

As for me, I'm very interested in this concept of "basic writing" and how it relates to my undergraduate degree in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. I'm particularly interested in the affective domain aspects of "basic writing,"not just whether students react well to instruction, but how their emotions affect their writing and their ability to learn. Is error correction freezing them in their tracks the same way it does for second language learners? I'll be exploring this question further.

Toeing the line

I've been thinking about the bright line between "bad writing" and "good writing," at least as we can draw it in the most traditional way. I think that many of the rules Dr. Kemp mentions in his discussion of formalist "error-free" composition are vestigial holdovers from Latin. Some of them didn't come from Latin, but they no longer mean anything. Why does it matter if I split an infinitive in English? Why can't I end a sentence with a preposition? Sometimes a sentence should start with a conjunction, even if doing so technically makes it a fragment. Who cares? Because these conventions do nothing to make students better writers. I've read many awful, yet error-free papers.

On the other hand...

I'm sure that many experienced composition teachers can provide examples, but I can't think of a single student paper that could be considered in any way "good" when the student demonstrated a fundamental ignorance of the conventions of style, grammar, and spelling. Those papers were universally awful quite apart from their significant mechanical problems.

In other words, if a student hasn't mastered the basic conventions of written language, there is very little chance that he or she has mastered higher-order skills like style, invention, metaphor, storytelling, or argumentation. Dr. Kemp said it in the podcast: good writers are readers. And readers pick up the mechanical conventions at the same time they pick up the higher-order skills.

So that leads to the question...

It's a series of small questions, really, but it's interesting to me. Which skills are important? What constitutes an error? Isn't every composition toeing a formal line? Writing strictly formally, here are are the errors up with which I will not put:

1. Misspellings and the abuse of homonyms
   The former led to the spellchecker, which obscured the latter in mechanistic camouflage. And while we're at it: "Their," "they're," and "there." They're not that hard.
2. Egregious misuse of punctuation.
   I don't really care about the Oxford comma, or the placement of commas in dependent clauses, unless this placement affects meaning. For beginners, I encourage liberal use of the period as a check against the dreaded run-on sentence. Many problems can be fixed by breaking these gargantuan crimes against style into smaller sentences. Of course, the apostrophe is a terrible punctuation mark, but I insist that students learn it.
3. The run-on sentence and the comma splice
4. Various sins too egregious to count
   Yes, this one is a cop-out. I'm writing here about errors that are so ungrammatical that they confuse the reader. I mean the truly egregious errors that give English teachers a shiver and make Shakespeare twitch in his grave: subject/verb disagreement, true (nonsensical) fragments, mixed tenses, and their many, many counterparts.
5. Inauthentic voice
   A broadly defined crime against writing, "inauthentic voice" comes when students try to write for no audience in a tone they imagine as "academic." This inauthentic voice is the perpetrator of: esoteric words that don't quite fit, the use of "myself" when "me" is the correct pronoun, tortured constructions, long sentences, nominalization, deletion of the agent, weak verbs, vague propositions (especially in introductions) and the like. It's hard to pin down in a short description, but it is awful. You know it when you see it.

I suspect that even the most anti-foundational teacher of composition forces students to toe a line somewhere. Where do you draw yours?