palimpsest

instant messaging: the new office hours

I'd like to hear from others about their experience using instant messaging as a means of interacting with students (or with professors, if you are a student). I put my IM info on all my syllabi, and I tell my students that if they catch me logged in, they can ask me questions, discuss assignments, or just talk about whatever they like. I'm logged in pretty frequently, and I find that I interact with students much more in this way than during live, in-person office hours.

Now, when I was an undergrad myself, I never made use of professors' office hours: there just never seemed to be a good reason. It seems that I was not unusual given that my students now don't really drop by very often, either. So I'm wondering:

1. Do students make use of your in-person office hours?
2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using IM in addition to traditional office hours?

teaching with new tools

Via Liz Lawley, educause on educational social software:

The September/October issue of Educause Review is devoted to “New Tools for Back-to-School: Blogs, Swarms, Wikis, and Games.” The articles are well worth taking a look at.

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.

Digital Blake Assignment

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

Lit/Rhet/Comp resources

Lisa at IT: Instructional Technology writes,

I wanted to point to a few resources for blogging among teachers and scholars in literature, composition and rhetoric that have emerged since the CCCCs conference. First, a list of blogs by teachers and scholars in composition, literature, and rhetoric hosted by Kairosnews.org. Second, a listserve growing out of the CCCC SIG for "comp/rhet/lit folk devoted to exploring the personal and professional applications of weblogs and wikis in teaching, writing, and research."

And I recommend her blog. Her tagline is, "Useful tools, sites, references, and opinionated commentary about technology, with particular attention to Instructional Technology and the Humanities, from the perspective of a Digital Medievalist."

students' frustration with distance education

Via Dennis Jerz: an article from First Monday entitled "Students' Frustration with a Web-Based Distance Education Course" by Noriko Hara and Rob Kling. The abstract reads

Many advocates of computer-mediated distance education emphasize its positive aspects and understate the kind of work that it requires for students and faculty. This article presents a qualitative case study of a Web-based distance education course at a major U.S. university. The case data reveal a taboo topic: students' persistent frustrations in Web-based distance education. First, this paper will analyze why these negative phenomena are not found in the literature. Second, this article will discuss whether students' frustrations inhibit their educational opportunities. In this study, students' frustrations were found in three interrelated sources: lack of prompt feedback, ambiguous instructions on the Web, and technical problems. It is concluded that these frustrations inhibited educational opportunities. This case study illustrates some student perspectives and calls attention to some fundamental issues that could make distance education a more satisfying learning experience.

Letterpress Printing

Photos from a letterpress workshop that (I think) do a pretty good job of documenting the basic process of setting type, locking up the press, and the kind of equipment one sees in a print shop.

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. ;-)

Atom Feeds for Blogger Blogs

I thought you all might be interested to know that Blogger is now supporting Atom feeds, which means that instead of having to check 41 student blogs a day to see if they've updated, I can let my newsreader (as soon as it supports Atom feeds) indicate which ones have been updated and which ones haven't. Those of you using blogs in the classroom can imagine how much of a time-saver this will be.