These are the slides for an hour-long lecture I’ve done twice now over in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction for Rick Beach’s grad seminar in Teaching Digital Composition. The focus is Basic Classroom Blogging for a mixed audience of secondary and higher ed teachers. (It’s an update of the joint lectures Clancy and I used to do for the Digital Media Center’s Faculty Fellowship program.)

Also of interest: Prof. Beach is the lead author on a new book titled Teaching Writing Using Blogs, Wikis, and other Digital Tools, along with my department’s own Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch, Chris Anson, and Thom Swiss. It’s due out next month, but it doesn’t look like there’s an Amazon page up yet for it. You can find the project wiki here.

Posted at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Useful for teaching verbal delivery, no? (via Infocult.)

Swiftly updated to include: Walken reads The Three Little Pigs whilst wearing a truly terrifying sweater. Quite curious. I cannot decide if it succeeds.

And what the hell — I’ll never tire of the Weapon of Choice video, no matter how many years pass.

Update, 2/17/08: Walken is Hasty Pudding Man of the Year. (Very important photo in that link, btw.)

Posted at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I've been a long-time skeptic of Twitter's utility, but after watching Jenny use it so successfully in the workplace, I decided to incorporate it into my spring design for Emerging Tech in STC.

The course is completely online, and we’re using Moodle rather than Blackboard. (Shout out to UMN for giving us a choice and equally supporting both.) Since we're going to be working in an intensely collaborative environment and doing real-time editing of each other's writing once we get down to wiki-ing, I wanted to devote more time than usual to building community — while still continuing to explore at least one new app each week. Community is often such a problem in online courses with no f2f meetings, which is why I always spend so much time on introductions during the first week. Still, one-time intros only do so much.

Last week, we did some initial reading on distributed work in Anne Truitt Zelenka’s Connect! and Wikinomics by Tapscott & Williams. Then this week we did some reading from the same texts on workstreaming and social platforms, and fired up Facebook and Twitter. It took a few months last year for me to grok the value of Facebook alongside its function as a nonsensical tool for procrastination. I don't think we're entirely up to speed with the 4662W Group yet, although a couple of awesome people dove right in. What really surprises me is how well Twitter is working for us. This week, all 14 of us are assigned to post at least 4 tweets. Installing a Twitter aggregator isn’t part of the assignment, but it is heavily encouraged. I started out the week with Twitterific, but switched to Twhirl after the first unwanted ad hit my feed.

Having Twhirl sitting on my desktop has turned out to be key. The little updates scroll across without any prompts on my part. I’m following 16 people, which means not so many that there's a constant flow of more info to process. And I have a much greater sense of my students as actual people now rather than StudentTrons. I've watch them post tech support questions and help each other out. There have been tiny exchanges about the fabulosity of Mork & Mindy. People have posted when the lightbulb went on for them and they really got what we're doing this week. There was some discussion and schmoozing after Jenny's live chat with us last night. (Check out her VoiceThread lecture on workstreaming. You know you want to. If the text bubbles don't appear, click on the Floating Head of Jenny on the left.) All in all, it’s doing exactly what I had hoped: tying the participants more closely together as a team. (Note "the participants": not everyone has tweeted sufficiently yet.)

I’m still not convinced that everyone in the world should be on Twitter, but it is indeed a good thing for virtual teams who work with either less-than-optimal face time or none at all. We're going to keep tweeting along and see how things go, and I'll let you know.

(By the way, there's some smart, well-written posts over on the course blog. Give 'em some love, won't you?)

Update 2/5/08: Rachel has kindly pointed out this related entry on Lifehacker, which in turn links to this one on academhack. Evidently it is Twitter-teaching season in some academic circles.

Posted at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I made a course design. The catalogue title is “Emergent Technologies in Scientific & Technical Communication,” but I’m calling it “Web 2.0 in STC.” We’re going to be planning, writing, and media re-visioning a wiki on scientific, technical, and social aspects of the 35W bridge collapse. As always, the topic and readings attrition was difficult, but I’m encouraged that all three people who’ve reviewed the syllabus have said, “I want to take this course!” Hell, I want to take the course, since it nicely dovetails with my research interests. (I am not so accustomed to this feeling, since I’ve been mostly graduate-instructing service courses for the past five years.) We’ll see if I’m the only one who still feels that way in a few months, or if the students are still along for the ride. My predictor feels a bit off this time, but I’m hopeful: I have four grad students and seven repeaters out of the 20 registered so far. Anyway, if you’re interested in such things, the syllabus is here.

I also made this apple cake, substituting dried cherries and golden raisins for the cranberries because I had them on hand. It turned out to be a rustic and fabulous recipe. Too fabulous, in fact. I’m foisting half of it off on the well-metabolized Compatriot G so I won’t finish the whole thing. I’m sitting across from him right now in a coffee shop, and he has no idea that I have half a cake in my backpack. (Or that I’m blogging when I’m supposed to be Being Scholarly. But I am limbering up, dammit.) This fact amuses me inordinately.

I am also making a dissertation, as it turns out. All this time I’ve been feeling distinctly un-started. Thoroughly convinced that I’m unstarted, in fact. Then last week one of my chairs nicely said what amounted to, “Send me something NOW.” After silently panicking and hearing my internal voice squeal, “But I have nothing! Nothing!” I looked around and realized that I have 80 pages. There is no mathematical way in which 80 pages = Unstarted. Let that be a lesson unto me.

Posted at 7:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Voicethread, which enables simple sound and image layering. See explanatory post here on my friend Candance’s blog.

Podomatic. So many of my students had issues with Odeo the last time I taught podcasting, so I’m looking around for other, similar systems. (Suggestions welcome!)

Posted at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I finally got my course evals from the Internet Tools & Issues I taught last spring. Mostly high scores and mostly good comments — and then there’s the one bugaboo that stands out right in the middle of the comment sheet:

This class assumed I knew how to blogg [sic], I took this class because I thought it would teach me how to...it did not.

This from an online course that required them to post to the course blog and comment on each other's posts for sixteen straight weeks. They learned to incorporate images and comics and video and audio into blog posts. They read and wrote about blogs as citizen journalism. They considered Google and privacy. They discussed net neutrality and user-generated content. And then we talked about it in a zillion other ways as well. In short, they were as up to their eyeballs in the composing practices of bloggery as I can possibly encourage distance-learning students to be.

Le sigh.

Posted at 3:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When us Sci/Tech Presentations teachers get together to carouse, we get into disagreements about the importance of demonstrative presentations and whether or not they’re worth including in syllabi. I continue to teach them simply because they were the most common type of presentation I did when I was in industry. If I had to do them all the time, then chances are pretty decent that my students will too.

I’m a-gonna use this Rancho Gordo video the next time I teach how-to presentations, I think. Since the music completely obscures Steve’s verbal delivery, it’ll be an interesting way to talk about how much and what sort of instruction is actually needed and, therefore, what decent audience analysis can accomplish.

I've come to rely pretty heavily on cooking shows for teaching how-to's, since they so completely fit the bill: scientific, technical, and demonstrative, plus it’s usually quite easy for students to figure out why the demos are successful or failures. (Or both at the same time, in the case of the Martha Stewart & Nathan Lane videos below.) I also recently dug up a couple of old Frugal Gourmet VHSs at a library sale. One of them features some truly horrific 80s French cooking, which ought to be good for something. Here’s a few others I’ve used before:

Successful:
Emeril makes Crab Remick
How to wheelie a motorcycle (not cooking-related, but still successful)

Bizarre:
Rachel Ray opens jars
Nathan Lane on the Martha Stewart Show, part 1 and part 2

Posted at 1:56 PM | Permalink

I usually teach delivery as we go along in Scientific and Technical Presentations, and tend to rely on speeches as examples because duh, look at the course title. But last semester I taught a consolidated lesson on it after the students had done a couple of presentations, with the thought that they could compare their previous performances with the artifacts we were analyzing. This version also incorporated quite a few pop culture examples. They understood the point a lot better than they did with the all-speeches version, but they also said that they should have had this lecture at the beginning of the semester. So this time I came out of the gate with two days on Cadence. We’re using pop examples at the start and then segueing into straight-up oratory.

For analyzing ethos and physical delivery, we looked at two of Apple’s Mac vs PC commercials and Weird Al’s White and Nerdy. The Apple ads seemed to work particularly well. White and Nerdy went really well last semester, not so much this time. As examples of ethos and verbal delivery, we examined What’s He Building In There (Tom Waits), the intro to Make My Funk the P-Funk (Parliament), and I Know You (Rollins). To bring the two concepts together, we analyzed Talaam Acey’s True Lies. I was impressed with the discussion that surrounded that one; I did my usual song-and-dance about being forensic rhetoricians who analyze rhetorical elements, not personal politics, and they all came up with smart, insightful things to say. We’ll bring all this to bear on “I Have a Dream” next.

An aside: This is the fourth time I’ve taught this course, but the first time I’ve taught it with low enrollment. There are 7 of us instead of 20-25, because it’s an off-peak class than meets until 3 p.m. MWF. (Nobody wants to be on campus for a required course on public speaking late on Friday afternoons.) The vibe is entirely different, of course, but I’m thinking it’ll work out well with this particular group of students. We’ll see.

Posted at 8:31 AM | Permalink