palimpsest

Art of (Class) Participation

Every wonder what class participation has to do with sprezzatura? Sage advice, via Kari Kraus.

evaluating student blogging

Those teachers who require their students to blog for class might take a look at Dennis Jerz's brief entry titled "Framework for a Weblog Portfolio." For the first time in a long time, I'm teaching a writing class, and this semester I'm experimenting with student blogs, inspired largely by Chuck, who continues the practice in his Fall 2004 course titled "Rhetoric & Democracy.

pirate powerpoint

From Earth Wide Moth:

EN106ers commandeered the course two weeks ago; they organized, mobilized, demanded an opportunity to take the PowerPoint sequence one step farther by siphoning two speeches of historical import into slideshows...
We switched into groups for the speech conversion activity; they worked in clusters to remake Ursula LeGuin's "A Left-Handed Commencement Address," and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech into PowerPoint shows (admitting, along the way, that such gross reductions felt irresponsible). Their essays--due Tuesday--are framed loosely as critiques of the process, critiques of the other group's work at identifying key bits in the speeches. Here are their shows, if you're interested.

Ursula LeGuin, "A Left-Handed Commencement Address"
HTML version | PPS version | Full Speech

Martin Luther King, Jr., "I Have A Dream"
HTML version | PPS version | Full Speech

If I did this again, I would build in a round of peer response--some kind of interchange and revision for polishing the shows (this part of the process was left off due to time constraints in the semester). The best part of the sequence was our class session the other day when we started to talk about the process by borrowing the premise of the extreme makeover programs on television lately. We had a good time working through the transformation in light of the mad-dash grab-n-fix that is so popular on the tube. The Extreme makeover: discourse trope was fun and seemed to be an incredibly rich pop culture pass-card toward theorizing what PowerPoint does--and in ways we didn't appreciate as fully when we worked from the smattering of articles.

blog redesign assignment

Jill Walker points to her course assignment (PDF) for blog redesign.

Note, the assignment is in Norwegian, but perhaps Jill will provide an English translation. (I looked for a babelfish-like tool to translate, but could not find one that handles Norwegian-to-English).

Digital Blake Assignment

Modest comparative and analytical assignment using various Blake resources on the Web.

linked assignments, or the long-distance scholar

In my department, the upper division classes are typically taught to both graduate students (who sign up at the 500 level), and undergraduate students (who sign up at the 400 level). This semester, I'm teaching Eighteenth-Century British Literature II (syllabus in PDF , course website).

I give my students multiple assignments over the course of several weeks leading up to the final paper: research, idea for argument, rough draft, feedback and revision, final draft. Here are what the assignment sheets look like:

• Annotated bibliography
• Prospectus and final paper

I will also provide them with a peer editing worksheet, but I have not yet revised the one I use for my entry-level classes in order to make it suitable for this level.

Students live with the project bouncing around in their head for weeks. They talk about it with me, and ideally they talk about it with others. They are required to talk about it during the rough draft, peer-editing day. They get feedback at multiple stages of the process. Scholars do not write good papers (including research, drafting, and final revisions) in one caffeine-fueled sleepless night, and the aim of these linked assignments to to teach students how to grow from being experts at the 100-yard dash into long-distance runners.

You'll be able to see what a student prospectus looks like when I post them all to the course website next week. Students (and I) will then provide feedback using the online discussion features of the website.

Intro to British Literature, 1

Here, as PDF documents, are some materials from my Spring 2004 Intro to Brit Lit 1 course. The historical range is from Beowulf to Gulliver's Travels. All English majors at UMKC are required to take all four survey courses (Brit Lit 1 & 2, American Lit 1 & 2), but non-majors can also fulfill core requirements by taking the course. My goals in the course are for them to learn the history of British literature from its origins to the early 18th century, but also to begin to understand how interpretation and argumentation work. The course website is up and running, if you want to check in on the online discussions (no commenting, please).

• Syllabus
• Precis and Critical Analysis
• Prospectus and Final Paper
• Rules for Ivanhoe

I welcome questions or feedback.

Close Reading Exercise

Here's an in-class close reading exercise I used in my American Literature survey last week. It focuses in particular on the Zuni emergence tale "Talk of the First Beginning," but the exercise could be adapted to any text. The idea is to try to develop student skills in connecting words, phrases, images, events recounted, etc., in a short passage to a larger theme. I've provided the HTML version above and, from a link on that document, a Word format version suitable for modifying for your own purposes.

Rhizomatic Writing

Awesome set of lesson plans, mini-lectures, and hands-on exercises for anyone interested in Oulipo, dada, electronic media, or other forms of experimental writing from someone named Siegel out of Virginia Tech.

We made haiku machines in class the other day. ;-)

Syllabi

This semester, I have one blog that routes information for my various classes: 318. The syllabi, which are all linked from that page, include: 1 section of composition, 2 of Brit Lit II, and 1 of the Victorian novel.

There are also, so far, links to 2 assignments: response papers for the novel course, and a locally infamous poem memorization assignment for the survey.

Like everyone, I'd like to move to the Liz Lawley courseware implementation, but have been thwarted thus far by the Demons of IT. I've also been meaning to put up archives of old classes, especially the MOO course from Georgia Tech.