Blogging in the CWRL

Course Forums

CWRL forums are now administered with Drupal. This page explains how to create a topic, reply to a topic, and how to set up an account.

Creating a Forum Topic (Instructors)

At the beginning of the semester, all CWRL classes will have forums accessible through http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/?q=forum. To add a new topic to your forum, simply log-in and choose create content>forum topic. Make sure you add the new topic to the appropriate class forum: select your class from the drop-down Forums menu (above the Body field).

Replying to a Topic (Students and Instructors)

Although anyone can read a forum topic and comments, you must log in to reply (account details below). You can either reply directly to the topic by filling out the form at the bottom of the page displaying the active topic and replies, or you can make a threaded reply to a particular comment by clicking on the reply link under the comment in question.

Creating an Account (Students)

To create an account, click on Log In at the top right of the screen. Then choose the register tab and fill in your user name* and e-mail address. This e-mail address will receive a message with your password and instructions, so make sure it is accurate. If you do not see receive an e-mail with the subject 'Account details for ______' within a few minutes, check your bulk/junk mail folder.

*Your user name must be your first and last name. Accounts with nicknames will be deleted.

Course Websites

Course websites, which can range from utilitarian to the most highly sophisticated, are popular with both students and instructors. Sites can include course documents such as schedules, paper assignments, and course policies, and can provide a space for class announcements and updates, assignments, student work, link pages, discussion forums and more. Examples of some recent class homepages can be viewed from the CWRL's Online Courses page.

Instructors now have the option of using the Content Management System Drupal to create course sites. See the Guide for Drupal Administrators for details.

Designing Projects & Activities

Print-based projects
Students can explore the rhetorical advantages and disadvantages of different varieties of visual design by utilizing the graphics, design and desktop publishing programs available on all CWRL computers--programs such as Flash, Fireworks, and Photoshop. They can explore the rhetorical possibilities inherent in print document design using such desktop publishing programs as InDesign.

Web-based projects
In-class web exercises and web-authoring projects engage students while allowing instructors to focus the class' scrutiny on rhetorical principles. The web can bring a wide variety of materials from the outside world into the classroom, and enable students to interact with and receive feedback from many non-academic sources. Students can analyze the political rhetoric of campaign sites, discuss the rhetorical impact of design principles, compare competing discourses, sample newsgroup and bulletin board discussions--imagination being perhaps the only limiting factor to pedagogical possibilities of the Internet.

Multimedia projects
Advanced users can create interactive, multimedia teaching materials that integrate text, sound, graphics, and video with such professional-quality programs as Director, Premier, Peak, or iMovie.

MOO-based projects
The CWRL's Mappe Mundi is a web-based virtual environment where students and teachers can explore and create shared worlds, interact with a variety of responsive characters, find pockets of learning tools and activities, and meet with others in "MOO-space" for classes, collaboration, and discussion. Instructors of rhetoric are finding that role-playing exercises in this environment are an extremely helpful way to give students a deeper appreciation of positionality, audience, and context as they put themselves in the position of the players in a given social situation or issue. See the MOO Resources page.

Managing Your Teacher Folder

This tutorial, written by Tracey Watts, will show CWRL instructors how to access their teacher folder and change folder permissions on both PCs and Macs. It also points users to web sites that have the programs necessary to access their teacher folder from home. The programs are available for free. Students can find information on how to access the teacher folder on both cwrl computers and their personal computers.

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NOTE: As of Fall 2005, your teacher folder has been expanded to include a "public_html" folder, which can be used for your websites, and a "private" folder, which can be used to store personal files that others cannot access. In addition to those two default folders, you can create others that your students will have access to for assignment submission and the like.

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Opening the teacher folder from a cwrl Mac

When you log on to one of the Macs, the first box you see will appear like the one below. If you choose not to open your teacher folder now and close the box, you can re-open it later in the session. Simply click to open the All Applications folder on the desktop, and scroll down to "teacher_open." The dialog box will appear again.

At the following prompt, enter the teacher's last name.

The following box will appear. Log in using the password that you've set for your inital log-on to all cwrl computers.

A globe with the teacher's name beneath it will then appear on the desktop, just below the the globe marking the transfer volume.

Opening this globe will bring you access to the set of folders that are relevant to your course.

Creating new folders and setting permissions using a Mac

Open the Transmit program. In the dialog box that appears, enter syverson.cwrl.utexas.edu as the server and port 1701. Log in with the user name and password that you use to access all cwrl computers.

Once you're connected, a box like the one below will appear. Your folders will be on the left hand side. In order to create a new folder, simply click on the "New Folder" icon in the main menu.

A box like the one below will appear. Name the folder and hit "ok."

The new folder will then appear in the left side space of the main dialog box. At this point, you'll need to set the permissions for your folder. To do so, go to the File menu, and select the "Get Info" tab.

The following box will pop up. Under permissions, you must click all three buttons corresponding to "User" and "Group." What you choose to give the World, however, is up to you. Marking "read" will allow users to read files, while "write" will allow them to write. "Execute" should always be checked.

Once you've set these permissions, each folder within that original will have the same permissions that you just set. The change, in other words, goes down through the generations of folders.

Accessing your teacher folder from home, using a Mac

You'll need to download an FTP program in order to log in to the system. Fugu is a good option, and you can reach it here: http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/.

Opening the teacher folder from a cwrl PC

Open the Teacher-Transfer Folders icon on the desktop. If you are logged on to the cwrl computers as an instructor, the following screen will appear.

Select the folder with your name on it. This is your teacher folder.

Creating new folders and setting permissions using a PC

To create new folders and set permissions on your teacher folder using a PC, first connect to the server using a secure FTP (SFTP). On the cwrl computers, you can click on the SSH Secure File icon (a folder with a ring of blue dots over it) at the menu bar at the bottom of the screen. The following box will appear.

Click on the Quick Connect link. Enter syverson.cwrl.utexas.edu as the host name and 1701 as the port. The user name, as well as the password you'll next be asked for, will be the same as you currently use to gain entry to cwrl computers.

Choose the New Folder icon in the menu bar just above the Remote Name series of folders (on the right side). This icon is the folder with the starry graphic on the upper right corner of the folder. A new folder will then appear under Remote Name, and you'll be prompted to name it. Then right-click on the folder that you wish to set permissions for.

Choose Properties.

Under permissions, you must click all three buttons corresponding to "Owner" and "Group." What you choose to give the Other, however, is up to you. Marking "read" will allow users to read files, while "write" will allow them to write. "Execute" should always be checked. Once you've set these permissions, each folder within that original will have the same permissions that you just set. The change, in other words, goes down through the generations of folders.

Accessing your teacher folder from home, using a PC

If you wish to access your teacher folder from home, you can download the SSH program for free from UT. Go to http://www.utexas.edu/its/bevoware/ to view a list of downloads. SSH is listed along with many other downloads under the heading Utilities. Once you've installed SSH, you can then follow the instructions given above for using the teacher folder.

Mind Mapping Software

This page provides some resources for OmniGraffle and Novamind, programs for combining graphics and text on CWRL Macs.

NovaMind and MindMapping

Novamind is a program based on the principles of mind mapping developed by Tony Buzan. (See The Mind Mapping Book, available in the CWRL library.) NovaMind is a truly intuitive program that students can pick up in a few minutes, and so is useful for in class invention or organization exercises.

Creating a mind map:
About mind maps

Guidelines: electronic
NovaMind tutorials

Sample Mind Map created with NovaMind

OmniGraffle and Paper Puzzles

OmniGraffle is a program that allows users to link different shapes and pieces of text. It is useful for engaging with difficult texts by encouraging close reading and making connections among components clearer. OmniGraffle is a bit harder to learn than NovaMind but has more power.

An Interactive Lesson in Essay Organization

Finding Connections in The Waste Land

Overview of Synchronous Chat

Synchronous chat sessions can be very useful in or out of class activities for stimulating discussion, invention, or analysis.

This page will provide an overview of why you would might want to use synchronous chat and what resources are available.

Why Synchronous Chat
The utility of chat for out-of-class communication is clear; however, it may seem odd to be engaged in online conversation in a classroom setting.

It's also a major mission of our web development: maintaining and updating past resources by retrofitting our MOO and iChat pages to new technology. This new node will include a sort of overview for teachers (like these profiles and links to our missing iChat assignments and an
Resources
The CWRL provides a few options of hosting and transcribing chat sessions.

• Our MOO, MappeMundi, is still available, but has become unstable. We do not recommend relying on it too heavily.
• Psi, an open source chat program, is now available. See our documentation for it.

Chatzy a quick and easy html chat program you can do without an extra program and creating accounts. (Good for a quick in-class session.)

Software Supporting Instruction

Online research
While not a substitute for a trip to the library, much research can be fruitfully begun online, and many, many resources are now available for this purpose. Students can search the Web, the UT Library catalog, or access the many (often full-text) online databases that are available from the UT Library Online homepage. Additionally, instructions for efficiently using a wide range of online resources are now available to both students and instructors in the form of the UT Library System's Tilt Tutorial.

Documenting sources
Using programs such as Endnote, students can learn to properly document their work and to format their citations according to MLA guidelines.

Record-keeping and class management
Many instructors utilize spreadsheet programs such as Excel or FileMaker Pro as grade books, using them to calculate grades and keep track of assignments and rosters. Blackboard, an automated course webpage provided by UT to all instructors, also keeps track of rosters and grades, provides a space for announcements, assignments and other course documents, and has other utilities.

Evaluating student work
Former CWRL Director Peg Syverson's Learning Record Online integrates research, assessment, and teaching and learning practices for computer-enhanced literacy development. The Learning Record provides a format for documenting student progress and achievement, based on interviews, observations over time, samples of students' naturally occurring work, and well-supported interpretations of learning across five dimensions. More comprehensive information is available at the LRO website.

2003 MEME Award

John Pedro Schwartz received the MEME award at the 2003 Spring Colloquium for his "Bob Bullock Texas State History MOOseum" project. To find out more about this project, see the page MOO Pedagogy in the CWRL.

2004 MEME Award

Olin Bjork and Matthew Russell received the MEME award at the 2004 Spring Colloquium for their food films Web site assignment. To find out more about this assignment, you can read Olin's article in the Spring 04 CWRL Newsletter (Volume 12, Number 1) and/or check out the following links:

Assignment Instructions: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~russell/fall03/paper2.html

Food Film List: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~russell/fall03/foodfilms.html

Student Work: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bjork/courses/306/fall03/studentsites.html

2006 MEME Award

John Pedro Schwartz received the MEME award in 2006 for a student project in RHE 309M Spring 2006.

Mobile Composition Project

Project Description

Available at: http://instructors.cwrl.utexas.edu/schwartz/node/37

Pedagogical Assumptions

Instructors who teach writing as a cultural, situated act often craft assignments that presuppose a clean, well-lighted writing space like the library, dorm room, or coffee house. The problem is that these spaces homogenize the same material differences that instructors are trying to underscore. For example, a racial minority student writing at home is far more disembodied than she would be writing in the main hall of an art museum. Conversely, an affluent female student writing at a working-class, male-dominated bowling alley feels her status more poignantly than she would feel it writing in the library or the dorm room. Students can better perceive their social, cultural, and historical locations when they visit places of rhetorical activity (e.g., city parks, waiting rooms, shopping malls) and research, write, and even publish on location.

Pedagogical Ends

The project sought to help students:

• understand the interdependency of agency and material structures by confronting students with the effects of these structures;
• see that writing assignments, spaces, and technologies are mutually determining by separating writing from conventional assignments, spaces, and technologies;
• realize that the material conditions shaping what they write and who they become through writing are fluid and changeable;
• learn to compose using some combination of text, image, audio, and video; and
• observe and interact with a wider range of environments.

Electronic Means

Wired and wireless devices and networks facilitated the mobile composition project, in which students researched, wrote, and even published in places of rhetorical activity. The following examples illustrate this claim.

1. For her digital curation project, one student used a digital camera to take pictures, iPhoto to edit the pictures, iMovie to add effects, transitions, and a song, and iDVD to create a menu page and burn the files onto a DVD.

2. For his soundseeing tour project, one student recorded commentary and ambient sound with a digital voice recorder, transferred the audio to a computer, then used a podcasting program called Audacity to convert raw wave files into MP3 format.
Example: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~schwartz/spring06/johnston/mobile/dragtour.mp3

3. For their digital curation projects, some students created moblogs using camera phones to capture images and video and send the files via MMS (multimedia messaging service) to their moblog accounts, provided free by such sites as Yafro.
Example: http://www.amio.textamerica.com/

4. For their digital curation projects, some students built websites using Dreamweaver.
Example: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~schwartz/spring06/Mosteller/mobile/

2007 MEME Award

The Visual Rhetoric Workgroup (John Jones, Nathan Kreuter, Tim Turner, and Vessela Valiavitcharska) received the MEME award in 2007.

viz. / Visual Rhetoric Portal

The site can be accessed at http://viz.cwrl.utexas.edu/

Pedagogical aims

The increasing interest in visual rhetoric in the composition classroom and its continuing importance in composition studies suggested that there needed to be a resource where composition instructors and students could find up-to-date information about this rhetorical practice. The aim of the workgroup was to create such a resource, with the dual goals of providing both instructors and students a context for understanding visual rhetoric as well as suggesting creative means of integrating visual studies in the composition classroom. These aims were pursued by creating

• introductions to the theoretical foundations of visual studies,
• examples of assignments designed to illustrate the importance of the visual in communication and provide experience for students in crafting both arguments about visuals and visual arguments,
• a forum for discussing contemporary visual culture through theory, analysis, and examples of visual communication, and
• a general bibliography for exploring these themes in greater depth.

Integration of pedagogy and technology

To achieve our pedagogical aims, the visual rhetoric workgroup has attempted to use the website to provide multiple technologies for teaching and learning about visual rhetoric. The site uses examples of video and still images to illustrate theoretical concepts, provides instructions for creating visual arguments in presentation and flow-charting software, and uses the Drupal blog module to create a forum for conversations about visual culture, theory, and pedagogy. By combining these different methods of visual and textual communication, the site has made great strides toward achieving its goal of being a resource for analyzing, theorizing, and teaching visual rhetoric. Further, in following the University of Texas’s guidelines for web accessibility, the site is an accessible, mobile resource that anyone can use whether they are in the classroom, dorm room, coffee shop, or anywhere else in the public or private spheres.

Pedagogy Roundtable: Visual Rhetoric

Dr. Faigley's Visual Rhetoric lecture was the beginning of an interesting discussion about teaching Visual rhetoric. We hope to continue that discussion when the CWRL's Visual Rhetoric Workgroup hosts a pedagogy roundtable on Thursday, October 12 at 5:00 in FAC 9. This will be an opportunity for instructors to brainstorm ideas about visual rhetoric teaching strategies and assignments.

Pedagogy Roundtable: Virtual Communities

As a follow up to Dr. Jerry Bump's lecture about Second Life on September 14, the CWRL will host a pedagogy roundtable about strategies for online communication. We will discuss ways to apply virtual communications and communities in the classroom. The Roundtable will take place on Wednesday, September 20 at 5:00 in FAC 10.

Blogging Pedagogy

In past years, the CWRL and the Division of Rhetoric and Writing have developed tools that allow for collaborative teaching. By encouraging instructors to share assignment ideas, the lab and the division have embraced the idea that pedagogy should always be reflexive. In keeping with this tradition, instructors in the DRW have developed a new blog called "Blogging Pedagogy" in which teachers can share ideas and assignments.

"Blogging Pedagogy" is similar to the assignment database that the DRW has maintained for many years (the "Blue File" system), but the blog format also adds to this model. The new blog allows for more conversation about both assignments and broad pedagogical issues. In addition, it allows instructors to share ideas in narrative form, giving the assignment a more situated feel. Assignments can now be presented as part of a teaching philosophy, and this gives instructors a better sense of how an assignment or in-class activity might work (or not work) in their own classroom. Users posting to the blog are participating in a community text while also developing a small archive of their own teaching progress (each post is part of both the community blog and a user's individual blog). This allows for both peer review of assignments and personal reflection about teaching.

"Blogging Pedagogy" also offers a more general space for instructors to share their thoughts, successes, failures and frustrations about teaching. The blog is password protected so that professors and Assistant Instructors can be candid and open. Those interested in joining the blog can register for an account - accounts are authenticated by system administrators. Once an account is authenticated, users can view and post content.

[Photo credit: Kais0r at Flickr.com]

A Message from the Feminist Pedagogy Workgroup

As we continue redesigning and adding content to our website, the feminist pedagogy workgroup asks our colleagues for insights, assignments, and other materials. Primarily, we would like lessons and assignments that, to quote our website, "urge students to deeply question the politics of domination. Doing so first and necessarily involves asking students to question the instructor's own power over them as a teacher inside the classroom. In theory, doing so is the initial step towards encouraging students to question the politics of domination outside of the classroom." If you have created anything for your classroom that fits this description, we would love to send it into cyberspace via our website (http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/feministpedagogy).

Additionally, we would like to ask that you visit our website and send us any feedback that you may have about it (Is the site informative? Is it useful? What might make it more useful? What would you like to see posted on the site?).

We would also like to let fellow labsters know about an upcoming presentation by Susannah Stern entitled “Gender, Youth, Cultural Production and the Internet," which will take place in Gebauer, Room 3.312 on April 26, Noon-1:30 p.m. It is part of the Gender and Technology Speaker Series which “brings together leading scholars to address the gendered implications of new technologies.” See the website of the Center for Women's and Gender Studies for more information.

Game Design in the CWRL: Rhetorical Peaks

The CWRL Game Design/Virtual Communities work group is currently working on a video game called "Rhetorical Peaks." The game will allow students to navigate a murder mystery narrative and collect evidence about "Who killed the Rhetoric Professor?"

The group is designing the game using the Aurora Toolset, which accompanies the game Neverwinter Nights. They are hoping to have "Rhetorical Peaks" completed next semester, and they will be designing a set of assignments to accompany the game. The members of the Game Design/Virtual Communities group are Anthony Matteo, Noah Mass, Wooseong Yeom, Lynda Boudreault, Jeff Howard, Joe Moser, Malavika Shetty, and Vessela Valiavitcharska.

Google Maps in the CWRL

If it is true that students learn more by doing than by passively absorbing information, then Google Maps offers students a blank canvas of the world on which they can create a narrative in response to the questions that are raised in a rhetoric classroom.

During the CWRL's fall orientation, Jim Brown described how Google Maps might be used in for pedagogical purposes. You can read his original blog post describing a pedagogical use of Google's My Maps feature here. Since then, other CWRL instructors have explored further uses for Google Maps which resulted in engaging active learning experiences for their students.

Sean McCarthy has developed a research-oriented use of Google Maps in his section of RHE 306. He says:

I’m lucky to have a class with a lot of energy and little fear. The response to an assignment that did little more than barely connect ‘immigration’ and ‘map’ has resulted in clever and imaginative invention. A typical pattern in the class was to start out in familiar territory (mapping the journey of the Yuma 14 in The Devil’s Highway, for example) and to gradually move out into more adventurous territory once they became familiar with the concept. One student began mapping markers of immigration between her apartment and school, which has turned into an examination of how ethnicities of various Caribbean islands become part of the deal in packaged sea cruises. A rugby fan started out by charting the history of his favorite sport across the globe and has since become fascinated by the relationship between colonialism and sport. These are only a few examples plucked from a great bunch of ideas and some clever presentations.

In hindsight, I didn’t really need to give the students a prompt—they came up with it themselves. What they have made of my vague and cliched ramblings at midterm is how movement—be it of a person, group, an idea, or a cultural practice—across physical and cultural boundaries is a transformative process. They’ve learned enough about argument this semester to realize that the world turns on how information is used and presented and argued, and they have put their shiny new rhetorical tools to good use in their maps. Notably, how my mapmakers manipulate research differs considerably between page and browser. They realize that a well-placed hyperlink or YouTube clip can tell a thousand words, that an annotated Flickr photo can move their writing away from the what to the why in a few deft clicks. Yet, to understand how to present an argument on the web, they have to understand how it works on paper. I’m finding that the interactive narrative techniques are reinforcing what they learn about more traditional rhetorical techniques.

You can see an inspired map project—a comprehensive map documenting the Tibetan Freedom Struggle's international scope in the wake of ground-breaking protests inside Tibet—by one of Sean's students here.

Krzys Piekarski, an AI who teaches the Rhetoric of Vietnam, uses Google Maps to supplement the introduction to the complex history and political underpinnings of the Vietnam conflict. By asking the students to create their own maps using a short historical text as a guide, students begin their learning journey as active creators and contributors to an amalgamated class map of Vietnam's history. Everyone's map can be seen by other class members, and the most important events are nicely captured and summarized for all to see. Rather than keeping the learning private to each individual, the entire class benefits from seeing each other's maps.

For further information, you can watch a video on YouTube describing how to use Google Maps here, or read a blog post showcasing different kinds of Google Maps mash-ups here.

Taking a Closer Look

Opening remarks from CWRL Director Clay Spinuzzi at the CWRL Colloquium, 11/5/2005

In the past, CWRL colloquia have been two and a half day affairs. They were presentations, based on the model used at large conferences such as CCCC and Computers & Writing. And there was a good reason for this: The colloquium gave staffers a chance to run through presentations that they would later give at those large conferences. That practice was beneficial – but the net result was that presenters ended up talking at rather than with the audience. The discussion was often one-way, and consequently staffers didn't have much opportunity to share their ideas with each other, to engage critically, or to set courses for future development.

This year, we wanted to "take a closer look," as the theme suggests. We wanted to focus tightly on the core mission of the colloquium, which is to share a vision of what we do here. We wanted something that is more intimate, more focused, more conversational. In short, we wanted to foster a collaboration.

Whenever I think of collaboration, I think of a study that Rebecca Burnett published a few years ago. Burnett is very interested in collaborative writing, so one day she had her students pair up and take a writing assignment to work on collaboratively. She also gave them tape recorders and asked them to record their collaborations. When they
brought these back, she graded the papers and transcribed the conversations. And she found three typical patterns of collaboration.

Let's call the first kind "agreement." Essentially, this model involves no conflict whatsoever. This collaboration pattern goes something like this:

Margaret: --for the memo. In fact, I think that this covers most of the memo; this will be, like, 75% of the memo just describing the different -- how we should organize the facts. Um, let's see. The main idea we had for organizing the facts were using titles and subtitles?
Jessica: Yes.
Margaret: And key points and bullets under the titles
and subtitles. Is that correct?
Jessica: Um. Yeah. Titles -- a title for the product name.
Margaret: Okay.
Jessica: And subtitles for a specific product component, coupled with a few descriptive sentences stating their benefits.
Margaret: Okay.

Since the two collaborators never disagreed, they never got a chance to sharpen their ideas. The resulting assignment got the second worst grade in the class.

That's not what we're after.

Let's call the second kind of collaboration "disagreement." Essentially, this model is the opposite of the first: It's all about conflict. It goes something like this:

Josh: What font do you think we should use?
Pete: I personally think we should use Geneva 12-point.
Josh: I kinda like Chicago 12-point. Makes it a little more spacious.
Pete: I'll have to see what happens on the computer
when I put it on, but I really like the Geneva 12.
Josh: Do you? And I prefer the Chicago 12, so --
Pete: Chicago 12 or Chicago 10?
Josh: Chicago 12. It's more spacious.
Pete: Well, we'll see. Geneva comes up better and bolder.
Josh: Yeah. Well, we'll see.

The two collaborators disagreed throughout the collaboration, but on a trivial matter, and neither was able to move the other. The font, finally, was set as Chicago – because Josh was sitting at the keyboard. And, predictably, the resulting paper was the worst in the class.

That's also not what we're after.

The third type of collaboration Burnett calls "substantive conflict." And you can guess how it looks. I won't go through Burnett's dialogue here except to note that the interlocutors were both focused on a larger goal, both respected each other, and both were willing to disagree in order to meet that goal. Their collaboration worked by challenging and sharpening each other's ideas.

That's what we're after.

To that end, we've arranged the presentations as roundtables, and we encourage you to join in on the conversations. Get in on the action; engage in some substantive conflict. Doing so will help us all to sharpen our ideas. It will also draw our attention to possibilities that workgroups will realize in the spring. It will spark discussion that can connect past work with current and future projects. And it will start true conversations: not talking at each other, but to each other.

Thank you.

Take Two: Student Movies Give College Writing a New Look

Last summer, rhetoric instructor Jenny Edbauer borrowed the CWRL's digital video camera and looked at Austin through it. "I taped stuff and made a mini documentary for myself. I thought, 'This is another kind of writing.'" That insight enabled unique projects in her course RHE 309L: The Writing Process, in which students spent the semester researching topics of their choice and producing documentaries about those topics.

Edbauer's students worked in multiple media--one produced a bound book capturing the Red River Shootout from the perspectives of many generations of Longhorn football fans, others created Web sites, still others made movies about, for example, UT gym culture and the recent history of the Austin music scene.

Working on technology-rich projects energized them, Edbauer says. "They weren't just writing another essay. Their approach was more, 'I'm doing this and it's kind of amazing--I've never done anything like it.'

"Students commit themselves in a way I've never seen before because these projects are theirs," she adds. The movie-makers, in particular, "put hours into editing, making all these decisions--music, cuts, effects--it's a tremendous amount of work."

Through the documentaries, Edbauer covered "all the things you're supposed to cover" in a writing class: students learned research skills and to use quotations; they discussed style, audience and revision, she says. But their engagement with these course components was transformed from academic and removed to everyday and integral.

For example, research was more than a boring necessity for Edbauer's students: it became a "creative process," she says. Edbauer required both primary and secondary research from her students. "They had to search for what's interesting rather than just fill in slots." She challenged students not to let their preconceptions guide interviews with sources, but to let people surprise them, and lead their projects in new directions.

That sense of research as an open investigation meant starting early. "If you're still planning rather than producing midway through the semester, you're behind," Edbauer says.

Edbauer is quick to point out that supporting student video projects can be tough. She recounts many one-on-one help sessions, long hours working with students, and the trouble of getting technological resources in students' hands. "And it's all experimental for me, which is scary, but it's also the only way to start."

But striving toward her teaching ideals made the extra anxiety worthwhile, she says. "I'm committed to the idea that the future of writing classes will be more than just writing with words. And, as I become more dissatisfied with teaching genres of academic writing--say, types of arguments--I'm increasingly interested in the production of different types of non-academic writing that help make people more able to deal with the world on a daily basis."

Found in translation

Each student in Eric Dieter's RHE 309K: Rhetoric of Media created a five-minute movie as part of a semester-long focus on adaptation from word to image. Dieter wanted students to see the many decisions that go into transforming a narrative from one medium to another--and, thus, become more aware of the many arguments embedded in every text, he says.

"What we are asking is how and why images, ideas, issues, people, places, and events are translated between different kinds of art," Dieter writes in his course description. "Then we will try our hand at making, and justifying, decisions in translations. We will concentrate on the translation of word into film, including short movies by you, starring you."

Dieter asked his students to write personal narratives, then trade stories: each student would make a movie of another's narrative. "While maintaining a certain sensitivity to the original document, students would adapt or translate that situation or story with their own thumbprint," Dieter says. Or, as he puts it in his course description, "What will you show? What will you cut? How will your movie look/sound/feel? You will answer these questions, and plenty of others, before you shoot a single frame."

The movie-makers also produced "validation essays," Dieter explains. "They would write, 'Here is the film I was trying to make,' and include evidence from the film and the personal narrative. 'Here's what I tried to do and how reality set in.'"

Dieter was happily surprised that about 14 of his students had access to video cameras; for the rest, he checked out hardware from UT's Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. He allowed students to borrow those University-owned cameras from him for four-hour blocks.

Managing limited resources and learning to use new software was challenging, Dieter says. "I had played around with iMovie [a digital video editing program] a bit over the summer, but a lot of my learning was on the fly."

Many students matched his extra efforts. "My expectations for the films were low--they didn't need to have music or dialogue. But they worked on it twice as long as I'd expected, each student averaging six or seven hours of in editing time alone.

"I had a lot of anxiety about the project--that they would think it was too hard or I'd be exposed as a fraud--but that never happened. They seemed to appreciate the time I spent with them. I thought making films would be cool and interesting--and they seemed to think so too."

Framing the Future

Science fiction is a genre of apocalypse--and of hope, suggests Peter Caster in his RHE 309K: The Rhetoric of Crisis Cinema. The course considered representations of the future that imaginatively engage current social problems, offer visions of future social transformation, and call for change.

Or, to put it another way: "by projecting current problems into a future consumed by them, [science fiction] imagines annihilation and can offer that imagination as a means of change. That is, seeing the future can extend the invitation to change it," Caster writes in his course description.

His students presented their own visions of the future in end-of-semester multimedia projects: many created short movies. "Whatever you make needs to meaningfully engage our course topic, and it needs to be cool," Caster writes in his assignment description.

Caster offers instructors who might assign movie projects some practical advice: "We need to try making films ourselves to see how much work is involved--our own attempts help us see how hard it is to make even a bad film."

And students should have "a lot of agency in the things they make," Caster says. That freedom will help them find projects that truly absorb them, which is important because making movies is "an incredible amount of work," he adds.

Caster bases his assessment of student movies on analyses the students write of their work, not on the movies themselves. He writes in his assignment description: "You will write a paper that describes what you intended to do and the process of making your project, including an account of who did what. Then, you will offer an analysis of the degree to which you feel you met your goals, where you fell short and where you succeeded. What does your project mean ? What does it do ?"

By Lee Rumbarger, CWRL Assistant Director

Steps toward a Successful Classroom Blog

For many writing teachers, our first response to the growing popularity of online weblogs is something like what my colleague exclaimed when I first showed her a number of blogs: "Cool! But, how in the world would I actually use this?" My colleague's response reflects both the potential and the difficulty of integrating blogs into the computer classroom. While blogs can encourage a dynamic and community-oriented writing environment, there are some steps an instructor can take in order to create a more successful experience with classroom blogs. In an effort to share some of these ideas with other writing teachers, two CWRL instructors, Tom Nelson and Mariela Hristova, discuss their own experiences with classroom blogs. Although they use blogs in different ways, Tom and Mariela suggest some basic strategies for productive classroom blogging. Both instructors agree that is important to pursue a clear purpose and context when integrating blogs into a writing classroom.

Tom Nelson: The Purpose of a Classroom Blog

Tom is currently using blogs in his Rhetoric 309m course, where students are divided into "blog groups" according to their interests. The groups in Tom's class include blogs on such subjects as politics, sports, movies and music, food, and technology. Students post weekly writings that relate to their group's topic. Rather than imposing the criteria for what counts as an acceptable post, however, Tom asked students to create their own rules for what the group's blog should include. The groups were asked to collectively decide on guidelines for each post's content, style, and length. Students responded to this assignment by reflecting on the rhetorical goals of the blog, the needs of their audience, and as the desires of the group. For example, the technology group decided that posts to their blog "should discuss some aspect of technology and how that affects people. Post should offer answers as well as questions into the future of the technology being discussed." In addition, the group specified the blog's style should take "a more casual approach . . . in order to gain a more personal experience. All technical terminology that is uncommon to most should be defined or linked. Sources must be stated if they exist, and general good conduct is expected."

A look at the technology group's blog in Tom's class.

By asking the groups to devise their own criteria, Tom suggests that students are able to define their own purposes of what the blog should accomplish. This helps students to engage more with the rhetorical situation in which they are writing. A student can use her group's own guidelines as a way of determining whether or not her post is helping to accomplish these goals.

In addition to designing their own guidelines, Tom asks the groups to further define their rhetorical purpose by addressing a clear audience. The groups achieve this goal by generating their own "blog rolls," or lists of relevant links to other blogs that relate to the same topic. Students research similar blogs and add links from the group's main page. This kind of "blog rolling" helps students to refine their own sense of the discourse communities that surround their group's subject.

A view of the sports group's blog from Tom's class

Mariela Hristova: Putting Blogs into a Context

Mariela currently uses blogs in her Rhetoric 306 class. Unlike Tom, Mariela asks students to keep individual blogs, where students post reflections about their development in the course. This allows the blogs to serve as a kind of online portfolio for students, helping them to track their own progression from one assignment to the next. More than just a "progress report," however, the portfolio-style blog can also help students to generate invention work and ideas about current projects and future revisions.

In past semesters, Mariela has also integrated a single class blog into her courses. Students were asked to post responses, questions, and thoughts about the week's readings. While many teachers require such reading responses from students, the blog format makes student responses immediately available to the entire class. Mariela often began her classes by reading aloud these posts as a way of generating discussion. She explains that this helped to put students' blog writing into a real context, bringing various "out of classroom" ideas back into the classroom. By putting blog posts into actual use within the day-to-day exchanges of a class, students are encouraged to view their own writing as existing within a specific context.

Mariela suggests that framing class blogs within a context is crucial. Students better understand their rhetorical purposes for writing when they envision their writing within a real context. This context--the sense of having an audience who want to engage with the writer's ideas--also helps to create a rhetorical purpose for writing (beyond just fulfilling an assignment). Instructors can even contextualize student blogs by having cross-classroom blogging exchanges with other classes or a real group of readers outside the classroom. As Jill Walker writes:

Weblogs are good as learning journals (searchable, writing practice, catching thoughts, intellectual workout. . . ) but all these things could be done in a paper notebook - though the knowledge that other people are (or can be) reading is important. What's more important to teach our students is network literacy: writing in a distributed, collaborative environment. Bringing network literacy to the classroom means jolting students out of the conventional individualistic, closed writing of essays only ever seen by your professor.

By stressing the importance of a broad writing context, Mariela echoes Walker's arguments about network literacy. If a blog's writing never seems to circulate outside of the student-teacher loop, it is difficult to achieve the fuller collaborative and dynamic potential of classroom blogs.

A student's portfolio-style blog from Mariela's class.

Summary

Both Tom and Mariela suggest some specific ways to achieve more successful and productive classroom blogging. These include:

• Encouraging students to generate their own guidelines for blogs.
• Asking students to create "blog rolls" that engage the same discourse communities that they wish to address.
• Integrating students' blog posts in day-to-day classroom discussions.
• Pursue cross-classroom networks of readers.

Although these are only a few examples of how to implement blogs in the writing class, Tom and Mariela point out two important things for instructors to consider: (1) students should be able to recognize a rhetorical purpose of their blog by (2) understanding a clear context for their writing. When both of these elements are well planned, the classroom blog promises to deliver many exciting possibilities for composition classes.

More information about classroom blogs

Into the Blogosphere
Jill Walker: "Weblogs: Learning to Write in the Network"
Meg Hourihan: "What We're Doing When We Blog"

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by Jenny Edbauer, CWRL Developer

Melanie Ulrich's Feminist Pedagogy

"Technology is not the revolution but, in an increasingly technologized world, it is a critical part of it. Feminist teachers can use it and so contribute to a pragmatics and politics of hope and utopian yearning by imagining a world without injustice, inside and outside of the academy"
-- Carol L. Winkelmann, 35

For this spotlight on feminist pedagogy in the computer classroom, I spoke with Melanie Ulrich, graduating PhD Candidate in the English Department, about two of her courses: Reading Women Writers and the Rhetoric of Anglo-American Feminism. Throughout our conversation, we discovered that we would like to see more resources for feminist teaching in the computer classroom. This spotlight is an attempt to begin such a resource base; here I focus the spotlight on two of Melanie's central uses of technology, context and collaboration. In order to demonstrate the centrality of Melanie's own teaching work to a growing field of pedagogical writing on feminism and technology, I weave in voices of three authors from the field of feminist pedagogy and technology. This conversation between Melanie and the authors provides an accessible beginning for those instructors new to feminist pedagogy or for those feminist instructors considering a technology-based classroom.

I. Context in E314L: Reading Women Writers

Course Website: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~ulrich/rww03/
Margery Kempe Context Website: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~ulrich/rww02/margerykempe/

In Melanie's E314L, she recognizes that the distance in time between the texts and the students' lives may make inhibit "collaborative discourse [...] related to current social issues in their own lives," as Sara P. Pace, then Assistant Instructor at Texas Women's University, describes above. To generate understanding and collaboration in spite of this gap, Melanie explains, "I use the computer to create a cultural historical context for the texts. [...] Context makes alien texts more concrete, puts a face on people and places that are otherwise a blank for my students." By creating a context for the text, Melanie restores women's voices to historical narratives by placing women's works in conversation with 'standard' historical information. According to Melanie, this builds "connections between what you're doing and other things that are going on at the time," making a reading of women's texts "not hermetic, but relevant, larger." Melanie builds this context in two ways: through context websites she builds for her class and through a series of MOO [Multi-user domain Object Oriented] projects she conducts with her class.

The examples I offer here from Melanie's class relate to one text from that course, The Book of Margery Kempe, a text from the 1430s narrated by an illiterate Margery Kempe and transcribed by a monk (or several monks) and written in the form of a spiritual biography. Because texts like The Book of Margery Kempe present us with "an alien worldview," Melanie uses "technology to make that world clearer" to students. These context websites transform lecture topics into an interactive presentation guided by Melanie. She generates the website as a truly networked space that includes links, sound, images, and text to immerse students in the world of the text. Melanie guides her students through the website during class, but because it is online, students can access the website at any time. You can visit her context website for The Book of Margery Kempe at the website listed above, and you'll find other context websites linked from her course website, also listed above.

Melanie developed a companion project to the context website; the MOO projects provided space for students to participate in the world of the text. The MOO is a virtual space that can be shaped by students or instructor to include images, objects, and sounds in a series of rooms where students can 'talk' with each other in a text window. For a brief introduction to the MOO, visit http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/technology/moo/mooing.shtml. Melanie developed MOO spaces for several of her texts in this course (including Aphra Behn's Ooronoko and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre ). For The Book of Margery Kempe she constructed a medieval hall where students would interact in character as either Margery Kempe or another medieval person responding to Margery Kempe.

The MOO was a benefit for the class because it decentered authority, "made [Kempe] more fun," and offered students a break from classroom dynamics (like an aggressive student). Xavier University Associate Professor Carol Winkelmann explains cyborg feminist theory through which we might view the MOO as ideal for feminist pedagogy: "[C]yborg feminism rejects both androgynous and essentialist views of gender. Instead, human nature is understood in a multiple-term schema that 'allows for connection in difference rather than in constantly guaranteeing identity through opposition or uniformity'" (24). Providing a space to take on alternative identities and experience difference, the MOO offers context both for the text and for a feminist learning environment.

There were some problems with the MOO, however. Having several MOO projects worked for Melanie because the first time there were technology problems, and at first it was difficult to know how many rooms to set up or how to make sure people are equally distributed among rooms. Students continued to complain about the lag time in communication, challenging the MOO's billing as a "synchronous" environment. Sara P. Pace had similar problems with the "asynchronous" environment of the discussion board, and determined that one solution is to learn the "genre" of the tool so that we can "let students develop a familiarity with the [...] genre" of the learning tool. Repeated MOO projects throughout the semester again helps here to familiarize students with the goals and limitations of the tool.

II. Collaboration in RHE209: Rhetoric of Anglo-American Feminism

Course Website: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~ulrich/RHE309/vicfemhome/
Women's Issues Then and Now: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~ulrich/femhist/

Pamela Whitehouse, Technology Specialist at Harvard Graduate School of Education, designed her online women's studies course to achieve the feminist goals of "individual and group ownership of the class," "creating a safe place," and "building a community of active learners" (221); Melanie combines online with in-class learning to incorporate these goals into her rhetoric course. For Melanie, the computer classroom is a vital tool for countering student stereotypes about feminism: "The Internet helps to build a feminist bubble, especially when students say, 'Oh, feminists, what are those ? I'm not one of those !' We can say, 'Look, we've got a Web presence.'" Ultimately, students in Melanie's course contribute to that web-presence and thus become a part of feminist history.

Melanie introduces students to the existing feminist Web presence by assigning for the first project a rhetorical analysis of a website. Their final project, then, is transformed into a collaborative website. This prepares them to critically read websites as well. Carol Winkelmann points out that "electronic technologies are not inherently liberatory" (26), and Melanie conveys this to students, explaining, "So much of their culture is coming to them via Internet, they need to be alert when they're constructing and reading electronic texts." Winkelmann articulates this construction as a tool "used to reconceptualize or rewrite classroom life because [it evokes] reading and writing practices as naturally collaborative or collective" (26).

For Melaine, the Web project makes the class more student-focused because students can choose their own issues and the paper format prepares them for their independent application of that learning. Melanie sees her class, then, as providing "a space for feminist community," and "the website makes that more concrete." "We're exhuming buried histories." You can view these histories at the collaboratively-constructed website "Women's Issues Then and Now: A Feminist Overview of the Past 2 Centuries," at the URL listed above.

Sara P. Pace describes the significance of keeping these classroom histories from being buried: "Given that scholarship dealing with feminism in the technology based first year composition classroom is sparse, it is crucial to examine how well we as feminist instructors can fit our pedagogical objectives in both modes of instruction: face to face and online" (104). Melanie's use of technology to uniquely create a classroom that generates context for and collaboration among students offers another vital example of how feminist instructors use technology to achieve our pedagogical (and social justice) objectives.

Works Cited

Pace, Sara P. "Feminist Pedagogy and Daedalus Online: the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning." Academic Exchange Quarterly . 6.1 (Spring, 2002) : 104-110. Expanded Academic ASAP . Gale Group Databases. University of Texas Libraries, Austin, TX. 4 Nov. 2004. <http://www.infotrac.galegroup.com>.

Whitehouse, Pamela. "Women's Studies Online: An Oxymoron?" Women's Studies Quarterly . 3&4 (2002) : 209-225.

Winkelmann, Carol L. "Women in the Integrated Circuit: Morphing the Academic/Community Divide." Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies . 18.1 (1997) : 19-42.

Other Sources to Explore:

Blair, Kristine and Pamela Takayoshi, eds. Feminist Cyberscapes: Mapping Gendered Academic Spaces . Stamford, Connecticut: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1999.

Gerrard, Lisa. "Feminist Research in Computers and Composition." Computers and Writing Conference. Utah State University, Logan, Utah. 30 May - 2 June 1996. 13 Nov. 2004 <http://www.hu.mtu.edu/cwc96usu/cwc96/papers/papers/G1LisaGerrard.html>.

Hawisher, Gail and Patricia Sullivan. "Women on the Networks: Searching for E-Spaces of their Own." Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words . Ed. Susan Jarratt and Lynn Worsham. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1998. 172-197.

Haynes, Cynthia. "Inside the Teaching Machine: Actual Feminism and (Virtual) Pedagogy." Currents . 2.1 (Spring 1996). 13 Nov. 2004 <http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/currents/cwrl/v2n1/haynes/index.html>.

Selfe, Cynthia L. [1997-8 CCCC Chair] "Technology in the English Classroom: Computers through the Lens of Feminist Theory." Computers and Community: Teaching Composition in the Twenty-first Century . Ed. Carolyn Handa. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1990. 118-139.

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by Kristen Hogan, CWRL Developer

Melanie's Homepage: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~ulrich/
Academic Portfolio: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~ulrich/main/

George Waddington's Novel Ideas

George Waddington, who has also taught RHE 306 and RHE 309K: Rhetoric of Autobiography in the CWRL, has incorporated multimedia group presentations with textual analysis in his E314L: Banned Books and Novel Ideas. Waddington successfully combined two projects that are potentially onerous for students: group work and technology. By providing a clear framework, expectations for the assignment, and hands-on tutorials, Waddington's E314L students were able to create engaging websites that allowed them to become experts on one of the class's novels, sharing their research not only with their peers but with a larger virtual classroom.

The assignment:

For the exact assignment, go to Waddington's class website at www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~waddington and click on the Fall 2002 version of the website. Then click on the group presentation or author websites link. To see the Spring 2004 version, click on group presentations and author websites. The finished products can be accessed by clicking on the presentation schedule on the Spring 2004 site or on the images of the texts at the bottom of the screen on the Fall 2002 page.

Students often complain about group work but a clear and structured assignment allows students and instructors to take advantage of the computer classroom's unique capabilities. In order to address the importance of the assignment, Waddington begins by establishing the pedagogical impetus behind group presentations in his classroom. He states in the first lines of the assignment: "I firmly believe that class presentations encourage student participation and investment in course material; thus they make for a more intimate learning environment and more exciting class time. Student presentations dissolve the traditional, polarized instructor/class dialectic to allow class members to learn from one another and about one another." In addition, Waddington emphasizes the importance of confident and successful presentations to the majority of students' career choices, saying that "oral presentation is a great skill that goes back to the importance of rhetoric and professionalization." This initial phase of the assignment grounds the importance of the group presentation to the students as individuals and as a class.

Although the assignment initially called for a PowerPoint presentation (and could still very easily substitute a PowerPoint presentation for the website), Waddington decided to have the groups build websites about their texts. He started with the goals of the textual analysis, which were fairly open, telling students that they were "largely free to pursue their own interests as long as presentations are grounded in a meaningful discussion of the relevant text." Through class discussion of the texts he further elucidated what he was looking for in the presentation, modeling different approaches to close reading. In order to give more structure to his assignment he offered a few options for organizing the presentation, including focusing on "an historical, social or personal theme as long as it advances your audience's knowledge of the novel in question [or] what literary critics have to say about the book and offer up these critiques for class discussion." He steered students away from superficial close readings and biographical lectures about the audience, emphasizing the importance of connecting textual details with contextual background during class discussions about the literature and the assignments.

In E314L Waddington decided to shift his focus from PowerPoint, which most students are able to use without a problem, to designing websites in HTML code. Waddington borrowed from David Barndollar's approach to teaching HTML code. In order to ground the web design assignment pedagogically, he explained to students that HTML code is in fact a metaphor for the reading and writing process. If the computer is unable to "read" the code, the "writing" will not be clear to its audience. By connecting the traditional reading and writing process with a virtual reading and writing process, Waddington was able to connect two seemingly disparate elements of his course: literary analysis and web design.

In order to teach web design, Waddington scheduled two one hour and fifteen minute classes to walk students through basic HTML code. He also gave HTML homework, emphasizing that students would "learn through doing" much better than only modeling his lesson in class. He then gave limited class time to the groups to begin their initial organization.

Several groups in the Fall 2002 class explored author biographies and applied different schools of criticism to the text. Waddington says that a number of the editions of the novels used in class provided essays that explained the literature in terms of literary theory, and students had brief discussions of the applicable schools of theory in class. His personal philosophy is that although some students were successful at reading the texts through the lens of literary criticism, requiring such readings is not practical in an introductory level literature course. In his Spring 2004 class Waddington adapted the assignment slightly. Students still designed their web pages and made presentations but this time Waddington encouraged them to base their presentations on their own textual interests and interpretations, including topics for discussion that could be incorporated into the presentation. This resulted in less psychoanalytic readings of Lolita and more discussions of the use of religious imagery in The Bluest Eye or contemporary media manipulation in relation to 1984.

The web design element of the assignment emphasized "collaboration, technical achievement and innovation as equal parts," encouraging students to master a new technological skill while working together creatively. The web pages in both semesters were meant to visually complement the students' written analysis and oral presentation; by incorporating written, oral and visual elements, Waddington offered students with different learning strengths a means to contribute significantly to the group.

Outcomes

Waddington says that the websites and group presentations were very successful from both his perspective and that of his students. The students felt that they had learned a lot, both about their text and how to interpret it for an audience and about HTML code and web design. He also notes that the assignment "allowed the class to bond and learn from each other as well as from the instructor," fostering a stronger classroom community. After using this assignment in his classroom twice, Waddington has a few recommendations to make it more successful. If at all possible he recommends that the instructor model the type of website and presentation he or she would like to see. Although the websites came out very well, Waddington says that "sometimes the presentation was not as successful." Although many groups did great presentations, others could have used a concrete example to help them create their own smooth, professional presentation of the material.

This assignment gives instructors a classroom-tested template for a project that incorporates technology, literature and group interaction in a way that fosters community and encourages not only discipline specific skills like close-reading but overall professionalization.

by Colleen Hynes, CWRL Developer