CCE

Commenting on CommentPress

As promised in earlier comment: I first learned about CommentPress from this post on Dan Anderson's blog I Am Dan. Anderson describes a project undertaken by his first year seminar students to annotate "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" integrating text, commentary, and video clips. The video reflection he provides on this assignment is fascinating on a number of counts, certainly pedagogically but also from a  technological perspective (esp. to  someone like me whose first experiences of technology were sliderules and computer punch cards).

I did a little research to find that CommentPress is "an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine," developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book. I'm no techie, to say the least, so it took me a while to figure out (and I'm not sure I have the terms right--feel free to jump in, anyone) that you need to have wordpress installed on yr own server in order to be able to install CommentPress directly.

However, again surfing around semi-aimlessly, I discovered yesterday that edublogs has added CommentPress as one of its themes (take 2 minutes to sign up for a blog, go to presentation from the dashboard, and CommentPress is one of yr options for a theme). Feel free to check out the test blog I set up to see what it looks like and play around with commenting options. Comments are attached at the paragraph or whole-text level. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. Word's comment feature and the publishers' web-based tools I've used all allow commenting at word/phrase level as well; on the other hand, perhaps for someone like me with the tendency to "micro-mark" (my old proofreader's habits dying hard) the paragraph limitation would be a good thing. And I still do have that preference for reading on paper rather than the screen, which opens up another kettle of fish/can of worms (pick yr cliche).

So, what do you think? Ready for that paperless peer review??

The Zen of Not-Posting

"In order for it to be a true zen experience, one must not- post, but be aware that that is what one has chosen to do. Simply forgetting that the blog exists does not count."

Well, despite the quotations and italics, the above quote was written by me, and can't be found anywhere but here.

Not-Posting is what I've been up to lately.  On both of my blogs, I've felt the need to slow down, not abandon, but slow down the amount of writing that I do and think about why I've been blogging for the past two years.  The reasons boil down to three:  one has been busyness in my personal life, and the other two are:  feeling like I'd "hit the wall" regarding technology in the classroom, and feeling like I wanted to give my writing time over to projects that were more personal or which involved research.

The hitting  of the technological wall is what I want to talk about here because it most directly relates to technology in the classroom.  Last year this time, I was immersed in a course about pedagogy and technology  through Harvard's Distance Learning  campus.  Along with the weekly readings/writings, there was my own paper to research as well as work on my online student textbook.  It was a rich, exciting semester, and I didn't feel  the effects of being overwhelmed until the fall semester.

There were other things in my life that made me feel overwhelmed in general, but I did reach a point, professionally, where I felt it was important to step back from blogging, textbook writing, and so forth and observe what my two Basic Writing classes were experiencing in terms of using technology.  So no experimenting with Wayfaring.com  or any other website.  The only site we'd visit was the textbook site, where there were already formatted activities.  We tried using Writely as I'd done in the past, but once Google absorbed it, it created so many problems for my students who were in the middle of creating a web page as a project that, finally, I had to give everyone a passing grade because there were so many computer-related errors that weren't their fault.  The other problem was the perennial issue of having students with widely varying computer skills in a course whose ultimate objective is to teach writing.  Sometimes helping someone catch up is easy, sometimes having a more experienced peer sit nearby works, but there are many times when a student just quits trying because it's too confusing.

This semester, I've scaled back my plans.  Yes, we still use technology and meet in a networked classroom.  But instead of putting everything online in a WebCT site or a blog, I've gradually introduced the class to an on campus, online folder where I store all of the handouts.  When I started to assign units from a computer program called Skillsbank, we visited the Computer Writing Center as a class and did the first assignment as a group.  In terms of writing assignments, I've taken to teaching the cut and paste word processing function as part of a larger writing task.  Sending me an email has become not only an assignment, but is now an official lesson, where we talk about the differences between emailing a friend and emailing a professor, and go over a series of email slides that I created in Powerpoint last year. 

The other part of not-posting is that I've been busy implementing all of the ideas that I've gathered online from my many colleagues in cyberspace.  Time that used to be spent reading and writing blogs is now used to adapt or create ideas for Basic Writing, or to create blogs for other courses.  All of which take time if I am serious about implementing technology in a useful way.

We will be visiting Wayfaring in a week or two, and it will be interesting to see how it goes.  I'm not certain that I'll be back here posting regularly, but you all know that you are welcome to write your own posts.  Just send me an email.

John Lovas

"A Writing Teacher's Blog" is back online!  Maybe I'm the last one to find out, but as I was testing links on my personal blog, the page opened to John's blog.  Some days I can't believe that he's gone, but it has been a year since he passed away. 

I've always felt that his blog is a good text for new teachers, and for the rest of us, it's full of advice and ideas to keep us going into the next hundred years.  So glad to see WTB back in cyberspace!

Promotional opportunity

In my neck of the woods (Providence, RI), the TYCA-Northeast conference is scheduled for Oct. 19-21. I wondered if anyone was interested in putting together a proposal promoting blogging (this blog in particular, blogging as the new faculty coffeehour, blogging use in the classroom--what other ideas do you all have?). Proposal deadline is June 1. (Those of you in other parts of the country, feel free to post links to yr own regional conferences and/or solicitations for fellow presenters.)

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

Dean Dad is asking readers for suggestions--he's creating Utopia CC.  I say, let's start with big offices for all faculty.

The schema comes from Smart Draw, BTW.