Class Matters in Teaching Fiction – Rashmi Bhatnagar, U. Pgh

OOOOOOOOOh, NWP teachers! I wish you had all been in this session to hear the struggles that Dr. Rashmi Bhatnagar has in trying to get across to freshman comp students that there may be violence in capitalism which is borne by the workers. My e-mail is cwolfe@pitt.edu if you want my long notes from the session, sorry no pix of the presenters but some lovely ones of the Cathedral of Learning! Bottom line= students say that internet jobs make workers class-less and everyone can benefit if s/he works hard. We audience members felt differently, natch! She perseveres in respecting student opinon and assigns a final paper about class analysis which does get some students to recognize for example “the waitress’ lot.” Rashmi says that she uses Jan Beatty’s (great) poem “A Waitress’ Instructions on Tipping.”

 

Class Matters in Teaching Writing, Just the Larry Needham thoughts

Okay, shorter! This one directed to “Sis Gensure” who wanted to attend. Wow, how different the 2 presenters were! This post will only deal with Larry Needham, who discusseed Wm Carlos Wms “The Use of Force: A Class Allegory.” His allegory was great, the working class girl could resist the doctor with her body… (kept her mouth closed), but Larry Needham was reluctant to have students personal writing as a response as he is nervous that this is not properly teaching rhetorical writing in a class situation. He did say that Paolo Friere and feminists would support personal writing as having “transformative potential…” You decide. The idea that doctors and foremen at factories could examine and judge workers by their teeth or throats (the doctor sincerely wanted to know about possible diptheria) did smack of slave auctioneers. So (my comment) wouldn’t there be great arguments available if students DID respond with personal writing…

 

Session #A2 Class Matters in Fiction

The first session that I attended (more on the opening ceremony The Point of Pgh, really great theatre! in another post) was 4 professors presenting papers on how to have a discussion on the working class issues in novels by: Marge Piercy, Diaz, LaHeri (not sure on spelling of those 2 authors) Carolyn Chute, Sherman Alexie (his newer novel INDIAN KILLER), Maxine Hong Kingston and Sandra Cisneros. A fascinating delineation of how to read these authors vis-a-vis working class identity, immigrant exclusion etc. Each reader is different, some of the authors were new to me (LaHeri who is discussing Indian immigrant families and Diaz writing about Dominican immigrants) but even more compelling were the ways the authors approached readers: Piercy, Cisneros, Diaz and LaHeri draw IN the reader with complimentary comparisons while (in this book at least) Alexie tries to show how alienated his Native American structural ironworker is from “the corporate White man” and Chute draws such “trailer-trash grotesques” as to disgust her audiences. I even asked, “Who would read the 2nd kind of novels unless assigned in class, but the presenter for Chute (Sylvia Cook) made a comparison to Flannery O’Connor’s grotesques. Maybe so; but it did not sound like readers responded that way, Chute rewrote the book called THE BEANS (family surname) of EGYPT, MAINE. Presenters? Would NWP folks know them? Possibly. They were Sylvia Cook rom Ul Missouri at St. Loius, Christie Launius at U. Wisc, Michele Fazio, SUNY, Stony Grook and Michelle Tokarczyk, Goucher. I have extensive notes and photos of presenters in the sunny cathedral of learning if you want to e-mail me at cwolfe@pitt.edu I have not discovered how to post my pix to this blog, plus my notes are WAAAAAY long. So if this blog! I will learn.

 

Alan November at NECC09 (continued)

Part 2:  The Student as Contributor:  The Digital Learning Farm

I didn’t know the title of this session until now and I think Alan November must have changed his content since he submitted the session because there were no references to farm/farming that I heard.  However, he did outline what he considered to be the jobs of students in the classroom:
• create tutorials using screencasting (Example:  Factorization with “Bob”)
• contribute to the curriculum by expressing curiosity and finding their own answers.  Through researching answers, students can contribute sources to a custom Google search engine for the class.  A custom search engine shows results only from sites that have been pre-selected.   (Example.  Type a math term in the search field to see how the search is limited to only pre-approved websites.  Learn about creating your own custom search engine.)
• take perfect class notes using collaborative writing such as Google Docs.  Teacher supplies headings for the day.  A student is assigned each heading.  Periodically notes are projected for review and correction by the class.  Teacher can also review to see if any material was omitted in his/her presentation.
• find the work of other kids and build on it
• contribute to the knowledge of the world

My V-8 take-away:  “We underestimate the level of responsibility students will take for their own learning.”

 

Alan November at NECC09

Part 1:  Designing Rigorous and Globally Connected Assignments

Summing up the session:  Wow!

If nothing else, watch this incredible video of things soon to come:

Unveiling the “Sixth Sense” (a TED video)

Other take-aways:
Copy and paste plagiarism is the result of teachers not redesigning the work we give kids.  Work that students cannon plagiarize (perhaps counterintuitively) requires more structure.  November gave an example of comparing what students learn about the American Revolution with the British view, giving students a requirement, say,  to find five primary sources and communicate with British students.

We need to give students assignments so compelling that students might even work on them in the summer, as in this student-created ning:  Student News Action Network

Students need to own the learning.  November’s suggestion:  give students a list of the course’s ten hardest concepts to understand and have them find the solutions for learning them.

Biggest V-8 idea  (the kind where I slap my forehead saying why didn’t I think of that?):  When encountering a page link that proclaims Page Not Found:  use the Internet Way Back Machine to find it.

 

Hello from NECC!

I am here during my second day at the NECC Conference in DC along with several other folks from the writing project — Gail Desler of Area 3 WP, Sandy Hayes from Minnesota WP, Maria Angala from the DC Area WP, and Joe Bellino from Maryland WP. I’m sure there are others too!

Gail has already been blogging from here on Blogwalker. Here are a couple highlights from her Live from NECC series just to give you a sense … stay tuned for more — the conference runs through tomorrow.

• Best Practices in Fair Use for 21st Century Educators

• Live from NECC – Scratch Community

I also attended the Scratch session and Resnick is definitely among my personal heroes in this work. And although this session was in a big ballroom and not particularly interactive, it was really interesting because we got to see so much student, and teacher, work. In addition to what Gail already shared above, he also shared examples from Karen Randall’s Room 209 at Expo Elementary in Minnesota that I thought were interesting as they show a range of projects (it would be wonderful to hear more from Karen herself about this work — and I noticed this wiki page she set up in Classroom 2.0). Resnick also showed us how the Scratch tools work quite a bit like legos (pretty cool!) and also how using sensor boards in Computer Clubhouses, students have been working to make real legos (and other real-world objects) interact with these online animations (see PicoBoard for more on this). He also announced this Creative Computing Workshop for teachers coming up in July at MIT (and emphasized that it was appropriate for all grade levels too).

In another session I was introduced to Remix America which looks like an interesting resource: “Remix America is a nonpartisan, nonprofit in-browser editing tool that allows citizens around the country to remix the great words and speeches of American History with the hot button issues of today.” And I participated in a birds of the feather session with teachers who are using Quest Atlantis in their classrooms across content areas.

More to come! Christina

 

Computers & Writing meets #CW09

For NWPers (and others) who could not attend the 2009 Computers and Writing at UC-Davis, a fairly full archive of audio and video from the sessions is available at iTunes U in the UC-Davis channel. This archive allows you to dip into the rich content of many of the sessions — and since so many sessions followed the relatively common ‘paper presentation’ format common to higher education focused conferences, the recordings give a fairly faithful representation of the official content of the program.

But 2009 might also be the year when a critical mass of attendees experienced the cross-walk of the f2f experience of the conference and the twitterfied experience of the conference at CW09. Several of the blog postings pick up this theme. So in honor of the somewhat addictive nature of twitter and the impact of twitter (or of the addiction, not sure which), it seemed appropriate to bring in a recent posting from Kevin Hodgson, one of the editors of Teaching the New Writing, about twitter. Kevin, who blogs as dogtrax at Kevin’s Meandering Mind, was motivated to serenade our twittering digital companion in song. Follow the link below to listen.

Twitter This by Kevin Hodgson

Lyrics
I get up in the morning and I twitter all my dreams
140 characters is just enough for me
Then, each moment of the day becomes a Twitter storm
until the world is at my doorstep and everyone belongs
to

This Twitter space
inside this Twitter place
I’ve got a little bit of smile
on my Twitter face
Take me as a friend
or leave me out cold
I’m gonna keep on Twittering
until the platform gets old

I’m reading all my friends — the ones I haven’t met
from all across the globe, it’s a safety net
We’re putting pressure on Iran — let the China wall fall
let the information flow so we can all crawl to

This Twitter space
inside this Twitter place
I’ve got a little bit of smile
on my Twitter face
Take me as a friend
or leave me out cold
I’m gonna keep on Twittering
until the platform gets old

 

Stay tuned for news from NECC 2009

Walkabout bloggers will be at NECC in Washington, DC June 28 – July 1. We wait to hear what they have to say. In the meantime, check out the feeds at NECC, NECC09, NECC2009. (Alas, folks are not all using the same tags.)

 

Computers and Writing 2009

Computers and Writing is always a fabulous conference but this year was especially wonderful. The beauty of UC Davis certainly played a part in that.

I so much appreciate how welcoming and encouraging attendees are. Whether one is a graduate student, like me, or a first-time attendee, or a seasoned pro, there are always opportunities for dialogue, for engagement, and for support.

At the start of the conference, Joyce Walker, who is moving to ISU, identified newcomers to the conference and encouraged attendees to do their best to support new attendees by attending at least one newcomer session. It is this type of sensitivity that makes this conference so very good.

At a Town Hall meeting, Jeff Grabill told us that he has been has been thinking a lot about sustainability. He talked about the need to have shared concerns and asked a number of questions: What is really at stake? What do digital processes look like? What is the value of the technological investment? What is precisely digital rhetoric? These are big questions that we should be thinking about. Grabill noted how we talk a great deal about applications but less so about platform structures and contends that we need to think more about platforms, particularly as they relate to sustainability.

I can understand Grabill’s concern. The lure of new technologies is great. So: to get it out of my system, I’ll list below some of the new applications and practices that really inspired me, while agreeing that we do need to continue to think about platforms:

1. Twitter
Many were twittering while people were presenting. Overall, this was quite fun. I am still learning twitter etiquette though. One thing I’ve been thinking about: twitter critiques don’t twitter away and need to be made with the same diplomacy that we use in ftf conversations. A new technology you might want to try is TweetDeck—http://tweetdeck.com/beta/. It can help you keep track of your tweets and your facebook postings too.

2. Barbara Ganley reminded us of the importance of playing with new technologies. She got me interested in Prezi — http://prezi.com/ — “the zooming editor for stunning presentations. All online. She told me that she had just begun using it. You’d never know this from looking at her prezi presentation — http://prezi.com/108186/ — “Ecotones and Crossroads: Reimagining the Spaces of Learning in an In-between Time” I really like the fact that she made her presentation available online. It gives us all a chance to think about some of ideas.

3. Madeline Sorapure also introduced me to some new tools. Her excellent presentation, “Playing with Data,” introduced me to a number of ways that students can visualize data. They can study their iTunes music habits and present them visually as well as study more global and social issues.

Her are some links (many more are included on Sorapure’s presentation.

• Microcosm — http://mycro.media.mit.edu/ —Microcosm allows you to share snippets of the minutiae of daily.

• Bedpost — http://www.bedposted.com/ —can give you some insight into your sex life. Not sure how useful this one would be in the classroom

4. For those of you who would like to hear some of the sessions, you can do so at
the iTunes U archive of C&W sessions: http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/ucdavis-public.2193375483.02193375496

 

Georgia Southern discusses technology access in rural areas at C&W 2009

You can listen to Georgia Southern’s session on iTunes U, UC-Davis, Computers and Writing, session B2.