I know several people in the class are trying to do things with collaborative writing–workshops and revisions and such. I just recently came across this: Writeboard/. I haven’t looked into it that much, but it sounds perfect for what some of you are doing. I know it’s absolutely too late, but cool nonetheless.
It’s nice, isn’t it, that this project is truly meant to be on-going, that although you’ll reach an arbirtrary stopping point for the purposes of the class presentation and grading, you’ll still work with and add to the project after the semester is over? It makes me happy that these projects are ones that will be useful to you, that you’ll want to come back to (or at least I hope you will!). And, again, I so appreciate how you’ve embraced the intentions I set for the course, learning to use Web 2.0 both to manage the writing process AND to create audience-friendly projects.
So today I would like to hear from those of you who didn’t talk about your projects on Tuesday. I would like to ask you to bring your project into viewable form between now and Tuesday. And, finally, please sign up for a presentation day on this wiki page.
What am I hoping you’ll do during your presentation?
I’m imagining each presentation might take around 5 minutes or so. (Feel free to take longer–up to 15 minutes should be fine.) After each presentation, I would like everyone to write a blog entry that speaks to what you understand to be the major contribution of the project, with a link to it. In other words, you’ll be giving some network visibility to the project! We’ll then talk about each project, giving constructive feedback.
OK? Let me know what questions or concerns you might have in the meantime. I look forward to seeing your work!
(And as I mentioned in class, the truly final version, the version that will stand for a grade, will be due the Monday of finals. Also, please reflect on the process of creating the project on your blog for the class.)
Please also take a look at the comments on the “Assessment” topic below and let me know what you think about what’s there.
I love it when I read your blogs and see that you’ve taken an idea from someone else’s blog or when I see someone offering advice in the comments. Thank you all for your wonderful ability to give and take, to be learners and teachers at the same time. That’s exactly what I think Web 2.0 teaches, and so when I see it happening, I believe you’ve really internalized some important lessons!
Rather than keep adding Boice’s rules here (we won’t get to the end this semester; that’s for another class), I’d like to simply go back to what I see as the basics of his advice. Based on his years of experience of working with writers (and his own experience as a writer), he found that most people work best when moderately happy. (Not excessively happy–since that can lead to hypomania and exhaustion!) To help writers stay moderately happy, the basic plan is:
* write a little every week day
* pay attention to your bodily comfort while writing
* pause every 15 minutes or so while writing: take some deep breaths, stretch (doing so helps to keep you comfortable and moderately happy)
And what I’d like to do in class:
-hear from half of you about where you are, what challenges lie ahead, what help you need (we’ll hear from the other half on Thursday)
One more thing: If you haven’t yet responded to the entry below on “Assessment,” please take a minute and give me your thoughts.
Boice’s third chapter is on fluency in writing. He opens the chapter with a quotation from Dorothea Brande’s 1934 book Becoming a Writer:
First there is the difficulty of writing at all. . . . It may be that the root of the problem is self-consciousness that stems the flow . . . Often it is the result of ideas of perfectionism as can hardly bear the light of day.
I hope the practice of writing regularly on your blog has helped address some of these issues. But I know from my own experience that sometimes an ideal of what the final product should be like still can impinge my writing. We may bring various kinds of baggage to the process of writing. (Or maybe you don’t–which is great!): procrastination, work aversion, apprehension, depression in relation to writing, impatience, perfectionism, rigid rules (see Boice 89).
What to do? You might expect the basic answers:
1. Prepare for daily sessions (as mentioned before, plan what you will do during a writing session, perhaps through a bit of freewriting)
2. Make bds a regular habit, but limit them to weekdays.
And two new rules to support these habits:
#10: Learn to accept the planned outputs of brief, daily sessions as all the writing you need or want to do for the day; being able to enjoy evenings, weekends, and vacations without supposing you should be writing is an essential pleasure.
#11: Avoid writing at times when you might better be getting rest or recreation; writing in large, undisrupted blocks of time invites hypomania and procrastination.
I’d like us to take a break halfway through class today, to continue practicing pausing and noticing comfort levels.
Also, if you haven’t seen the entry below on Assessment, please read it and give me your thoughts in the comments. Thanks!
A question has come up about the expectations for the final version of the project. Of course, the beauty of Web 2.0 is that they are always ongoing, never really finished. But where should you be by the end of next week?
I’ve suggested that those of you who are doing blogs might have around 9-10 substantial entries as a way to launch the blog. Perhaps that might translate into a wiki of about the same number of pages?
In either case, the project should show some rhetorical savvy: how does it look? What’s the ethos? How will people find it? How have you created a network for your project to be part of?
What else? You tell me. I say in the syllabus that we’ll come up with some criteria together. What do you think will make a final project successful? Worthy of an A?
Still in the realm of invention, Boice offers two additional guidelines for developing creativity in your writing:
#7: Imagination, or new vision, comes most reliably from revision.
#8: Prewriting distributes the usual suddenness of having to generate our best imagining and wording at once.
Rule #7 speaks to the importance of actually getting something down (and so I hope that by this week–week 4 of your project–you’ll be actually composing for your blog or wiki, if you haven’t already). Getting something down in some sort of formal way opens up the possibility of revision. And, of course, one great way to get to revision is to get feedback.
And Rule #8 is something we gestured toward in our talk last Thursday: prewriting helps you get down ideas without having to suddenly begin. One kind of prewriting is freewriting, which of course I highly recommend whenever you feel stuck.
With revision and re-imagining in mind, I’d like us to look at two or three more projects-in-progress together. Who feels ready to get some feedback from the whole class?
I would also like us to devote one 15-minute bds during class to giving feedback. During that time, please read as many of the class blogs as you can and give constructive feedback.
Also, please give me some direct feedback. I read your blogs, so I have a sense of where each of you is. But please take 10 or 15 minutes to send me an email, letting me know how the work in class is going (do you like having class time to work?), how the project overall is going (will you be just about finished by the end of next week?), and what questions or concerns I might be able to address.
And, of course, keep working on your projects after all that is done.
Yesterday I posted on here one of my assignments for my biology class. I was in one of the computer labs using a Mac, and the stupid thing wouldn’t save my work, so I couldn’t post the assignment on blackboard and couldn’t save it to email it to myself. I thought to myself “there is nothing I can do”. I was just going to have to delete this assignment I spent the last hour working on and go home to my own computer and do it all over again so I can save it and load it up. I was felt defeated and angry thinking everything had gone to waist. Then I started thinking and remembered my wonderful Web 2.0 blog, and thought “hey I can post it on there, and then copy and paste it when I get back so I don’t have to do it all over again!” I was saved by my blog. I couldn’t be happier with Web 2.0 right now and have figured out yet another great use for it. Web 2.0 truly is great and really makes working on a computer a lot easier, especially when you start thinking of unconventional ways to use it to your advantage.
A number of you are already making the transition from gathering information to arranging it. The movement from invention to arrangement is canonized in ancient rhetoric, and it’s also similar to the movement Boice makes in his book, from motivation (patiently gathering, steadily working) to imagination, which is the topic of his second chapter.
The first rule in the new chapter, Rule #6, is
The most fluent, efficient, comfortable, and imaginative writers spend as much time at prewriting as at prose writing.
I see that some of you are already doing some prewriting, writing up some rough blog entries before you actually post them, playing around with the arrangement of your pages. That’s excellent! Boice offers some additional ideas:
1. Use brief, daily sessions to review your notes and sources and to reorganize and annotate them.
2. Experiment with schemes for organizing your information. (Remember the maps! Doing a new one might come in handy here.)
3. Remember that patience still matters. Try not to achieve closure before you’ve given yourself a chance to try out various schema.
4. Also: continue to do some freewriting, alternating with more formal prose writing. Alternating the kinds of writing you do can help to keep you motivated and patient.
Before you begin your bds today, I’d like us to take a look at two projects-in-progress, in order to address some questions that their creators have raised and also to get a good look at where we’re all heading.
I was going through some of the other blogs on the site using the “next blog” link and I came across the most interesting and diverse blogs. I know we did the exercise in class were we tried to find links between our blogs and others but this time around I was just being nosy so I got to look at the blogs differently. In four or five clicks I saw a postcard collection, a stupid american fansite, the growth and development of a handsome little boy, and much illegal activity promoted by a Hispanic gang. Only in the blogosphere would these people/things be lined up together. I would have to say the that most interesting ones were the one dedicated to the people who believe americans are stupid. It was a picture of the evolution on man that had man going from a ape to a pig over the course of five generations. I guess that would be poking fun of our domestic weight problem and obession with fast food. There was also pictures of people and their pets that were actually pretty fun especially one with this big buff guy holding a tiny little puppy. The whole site was in a differeent language so no telling what was really being said but the visuals said it all. There were also a lot of exclamation points. I guess to show passion.
Also the blog of the Hispanic gang was different. They had pictures of drugs and guns just posted on the net like it was legal, free, advertisment. I couldn’t believe that they had that stuff up. It was pictures of people posing with guns, throwing up signs, and everything. What I couldn’t understand was why would they have a blog? Real gangster wouldn’t put their business out their like that. So that begs the question of whether or not that was a real gang blog. It was up to date but in Spanish so I wasn’t sure what it said but it was interesting to say the least
I can’t remember the last time I posted a blog entry on the class blog. So, I’m posting my Progress Report from today.
I added a lot of posts to my blog today that are modified sections of a research guide I made for students and practitioners last semester. The goal of the posts, and guide, is to show researchers the most efficient sources, particularly when doing Medicaid research. I think the “Research Guide” entries are a good way to start the blog because they are general and may be helpful to students and practitioners.
One problem I had was copying and pasting out of word creating re-formatting issues when creating a post. There are very limited options when posting in terms of formatting (particularly with regard to bullets or outline formatting). Is there any way to expand these options, or am I stuck? I assume that I am limited to what’s available in the bar above this little box. I prefer to type my posts in MS Word and copy and paste them here. I suppose I’ll just have to wait to format the text until it in this “create post” box.
I have a question (that I should know the answer to) - I need to link to other blogs so that they will link to mine. Do I need to do that in the text of my entries, or is it sufficient to have links in my sidebar? I am worried that my blog will go unnoticed for too long.
I’m so happy that I’ll be back in class with you all today. Last week was quite busy, full of stress-inducing situations, and so it will be a joy to return to the refuge of our classroom!
Thank you all for continuing so earnestly with your work on your final projects. It’s been a pleasure to read your blogs and to see what you’ve been up to, even if some of you feel that you’ve hit a wall or are having a hard time getting in the swing of things.
Happily, we have Robert Boice to help us. We’re up to Rule #4 now, but I think it may sound familiar:
Practice a regular habit of writing to instil reliable motivation.
Boice advises writing in brief, daily sessions (”bds” for short) of 15-60 minutes each. I would like to ask each of you to commit to this plan for the next three weeks (starting today). Please do some work on your project every week day, even if it’s simply finding a few more websites or reading over what you’ve gathered so far and doing a little freewriting. Report what you’ve done on your blog. In other words, I’ll be expecting a little report on your work:
* tell me how long you devoted to the project
* tell me briefly what you did
* report any discoveries and/or questions that came up
(You can continue to write just four entries each week, as long as one of those entries contains two reports.)
In addition, I’d like to offer a few strategies for keeping your thoughts flowing (these are also adapted from Boice):
1. Do a little focusing freewriting before you begin your daily bds. What do you hope to accomplish today? What concerns do you have?
2. Do a little planning after you complete your bds. Where will you start when you do your next bds?
Finally, let me add Boice’s Rule #5:
Stop.
Why “Stop?” Boice explains that stopping when the time for your bds is important in order to practice patience (remember Rule #1: Wait). It also keeps you from bingeing, which leads to hypomania and burnout. So to keep the writing going, it’s important to do it regularly, but it’s also important to do it moderately.
Panel discussion on Second Life
I returned to Second Life last night. Couldn’t stay away for long. I’m looking for info to use for my final project in my “Teaching Alternative Literature” class, remember that’s using Second Life to teach some concept of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. I went on the SL island for the University of Kentucky, thinking there might be an art museum or streaming music I could have students use to see and hear the setting of the Appalachian Mountain Region. No luck.
I looked at other university sites and came across Cybrary City where a panel discussion was being held on role-playing and identity in Second Life. I sat my avatar down on a bench in the outdoor classroom and listened in on the IM chat.
There were a dozen avatars in attendance, four being on the panel in front. The audience/class asked questions and the panel answered, as would happen in real life. During a pause in the conversation I asked how many roles they play. One said he had 5 avatars, another several personalities to assume when visiting different “islands” in SL. I said I didn’t know you could have more than one avatar, to which the answer was yes, but only one at a time, unless you had more than one computer running SL at the same time. I asked how do you find time to role play so many different scenarios, do you have a job in “real life.” One said it helps that he’s retired, another is a librarian, another a computer technician, another confessed to spending 3 hours the other day on a wild west island.
They talked about how role playing is a way to make a new “reality” changing yourself as needed per role, and I said isn’t that what we’re doing in real life when we blog or use Facebook. The response was yes, that while we have different images on blogging and Facebook, the role-playing games are the ultimate in creating a new identity.
It’s very interesting to “sit” in class beside a black wolf, a lacy-winged fairy, and a nodding-to-sleep oriental “man” and yet, talk sense. Only in cyberspace would this be considered normal …
A neat thing that happened, though, is that one of the avatars emailed me this morning (or maybe I should be alarmed that she was able to contact me in real life, so I’m not really anonymous on SL?) and asked if she could help me with my final project regarding Faulkner? That was another question I’d posed to the group, whether they knew any islands that could assist me in completing that project. I’ll be interested to hear back from her. It could be that she is the administrator of the “island” where Cybrary City is located, and in that capacity, she had access to my email address in real life.
Oops, haven’t posted an entry here on the class blog since March 1st. My bad. Here’s one from March 19th from my blog:
Flags and such in the backgrounds
Today I pulled up an article on a news source I subscribe to, Common Dreams, and there’s a picture of Obama giving a speech. The article begins “In a breathtaking speech, delivered before a backdrop of American flags, Barack Obama attempted yesterday to lance the boil of the ugly racial row that threatens to destroy his campaign for the presidency.” Geez, that’s a lot of “snarl” words (as opposed to “purr” words). Is that “Pomp and Circumstance” I hear, or perhaps, “Hail to the Chief”?
I thought it was interesting the writer said the speech was “delivered before a backdrop of American flags” which is part of the rhetoric of this picture and of the speech, the message to me from Obama being “I’m patriotic because I stand alongside the American flag, the proud, the brave, the righteous.”
Earlier today I saw a news clip of Hillary standing behind a podium with an American flag to her right and a black man to her left … her message being “I’m patriotic and I’m not racist because I’m standing beside a flag and a black man.”
I just thought it was interesting how the pictures were constructed for the public …
In our pausing practice today I realized that only good can come out of pausing. When you pause, you simply reflect. If we don’t take time out to reflect on things and events that happen in our lives we let it pass us without acknowledging them. Everybody and everything deserves its recognition.
Victor Hugo said,
“Be like the bird that, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings.”
To me this means, acknowledging things helps you to live a better life. If someone has a bad day, its okay. Recognize that you have a bad day, tell others about your bad day, and move on! You cannot appreciate a good day without experiencing the bad ones. Always pause for a minute after major events and minor events in your life. You will gain a larger appreciation for everything.
Boice’s Rule #3:
Remember that impatience blocks writers by associating writing with rushed, incomplete work. (And that the opposite of impatience, patience, is a form of active waiting.)
Boice emphasizes the need for “comfort” in writing. In order to become more aware of how impatience may build as you write, he advises writers to stop every 5-10 minutes to do “comfort checks”: how does your body feel? Take a breath. If you’ve been sitting for more than half an hour, stand up stretch. According to Boice, pausing and paying attention to comfort while writing helps to instill an overall attitude of calm patience, an attitude that helps keep writers writing.
So we’ll try this today. Just to see how it works for you.
And, as with Tuesday’s class, you’ll continue gathering sources for your project. If you don’t save websites to del.icio.us, please save them somewhere so that they can be viewed. Be sure to spend the last 10 minutes or so writing an account of what you accomplished today and what you’ll need to do once you come back from Spring Break.
You aren’t required to blog over Spring Break, though you’re welcome to, especially if maybe you have some catching up to do. (At this point in the semester, you should have blogged on a total of 34 days. That’s a lot of writing! Thanks to all of you for your continuing efforts to meet this challenge.)
I my quest to find interesting web 2.0 media a came across a very diverse set of videos. I guess that goes to show how diverse Web 2.o is. I noticed that many were made by your average person and very low quality. Most were just personal thoughts and ideas on how to use or become wealthy with applications. I believe that most American think that web 2.0 is a pretty profitable business from blogging to online businesses, many videos were tutorials on how ro make money. The video that I liked the most Aaron posted to the class blog. I thought it was a pretty cool video that actually showed all you can do with the applications. I’m kinda mad he posted it first. So i guess my second runner up would be this video. I liked this video for two reasons. One, I had never considered the impact of web 2.0 outside of the business realm and two I had never associated podcast with web 2.0. I thought that this assignment was going to be easy but most of the videos on web 2.0 are junk!
It’s time to begin 5 weeks of work on your final project! Here’s how I am imagining our classes will proceed for the next 5 weeks:
And that last bullet point gets me to Rule #1 for fluent writing:
Wait.
(I take this from Robert Boice’s wonderful book, How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency: A Psychological Adventure.)
Yes, wait. But don’t wait passively! This isn’t about waiting for inspiration to strike. It’s about gathering information and sources before you know fully what you’re doing. It’s about trusting that the process will take you somewhere. So please don’t worry if right now you don’t have all the details of your final project in your mind. You’re just starting! Give yourself time to gather, to aggregate, to see what’s there. In particular, try to find various kinds of sources:
B: Background sources: who is already doing similar things to what you want to do? Gathering these sources will help you think about what you want ot do differently.
E: Evidence sources: what information do you want to put into your project? Gather sources that will come to be at least part of the content of your project.
A: Argument sources: if your final project makes a statement of some kind, who are you arguing with? Who’s arguments are you drawing from?
M: Method sources: where can you go to find out HOW to do what you want to do? Find examples of other blogs or wikis whose design ideas you might want to borrow. Find how-to sources to help you do with your blog or wiki what you want to do.
(Thanks to Joe Bizup of Columbia University for this set of heuristics.)
And, of course, I highly recommend saving the URL for all these sources on del.icio.us. You might tag each source according to what KIND of source it is, using the above labels, or some labeling system that makes more sense to you. This will make it easier to draw from them when you’re ready to do that.
Finally, I want to introduce Rule #2 from Boice (he has a total of 32):
Begin before feeling fully ready or inspired (because motivation comes most reliably in the wake of involvement)
As I said in my previous post, prior to this class the only wiki I ever used or knew of was Wikipedia. Truthfully, I didn’t know that Wikipedia was a ‘wiki’ and assumed when hearing the term wiki it was referring to Wikipedia. I had no idea there was so much to learn. Wikinomics did a great job of introducing me to the potential and possibilities of wikis.
I found the comparisons between the traditional workplace and the workplace of the Net-Generation quite interesting. The changes that have already happened and the progress that is predicted to come are both encouraging and excited for a generation of students about the enter the work force. I think if more employers thought like Stephens and ran their business on the same ideals that Geek Squad does, there would be far more happily employed people.
“I’m deathly afraid of wasting time and energy trying to get peoplet o do something they don’t want to do.”
There is an important lesson to be taken from what Stephens learned in trying to force the use of wikis on his employs, when they had already found better and more effective means of accomplishing the same goal.
I had never previously really considered the extend to which technology impacted life on the professional level.
“E-mail enables employees to share information far more efficiently than they could with typewritten memos. Client-server computer architectures gave them access to company data that used to be guarded jealousy by senior managers. Cell phones and BlackBerrys gave staffs the ability to work on the move and spend more time out of the office.”
It’s almost impossible imagine the workforce before technologies like email and cell phones. I’m sure in another 10 to 15 years the same will be said about new technologies that are sure to develop.