A Multimodal Tools Challenge

Each semester, I incorporate a multimodal/multimedia project or project element into my writing courses. I’ve tried many strategies for introducing students to the wide-range of free tools available to them (see my “Online Collaboration Tool” exercise). Currently, students in my Rhetorical Grammar course are creating multimodal grammar lessons that they can post to YouTube, Prezi, WordPress, or some other online sharing site. To introduce them to some multimodal tools available to them, I created the following “Multimodal Tools Challenge”:

Multimodal Tools Challenge (Computer Classroom Exercise)

An Introduction to Multimodal Tools (Accompanying Handout)

Feel free to use this challenge in your own classroom! I gave the top three finishers candy, which seemed to inspire some healthy competition. In retrospect, this might work even better without the reward. Slower pacing might help the students to relax and gain confidence with tools that might be new to them. Enjoy the challenge!

Note: This exercise is designed for a PC computer lab classroom. It also utilizes Dropbox, which is free online.

Posted in Business Writing, Grammar Approaches, Original Digital Projects, Public Rhetorics, Teaching Approaches, Writing Exercises | Leave a comment

Top 100 Thesis and Dissertation References on the Web

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Made it on the list! :) Glad to know that my blog is helpful to grad students.

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Service Learning in Business Writing Courses

A major challenge for service learning programs is how to create reciprocal, sustained collaborations with communities—a challenge that persists even as digital tools provide new options for collaborative writing. Despite the many opportunities for collaboration afforded by digital media, its use by service learning students often maintains the characteristics of the “one-way street” model, where students write for communities but rarely write with them in a reciprocal relationship. When searching for examples of collaborative digital media that move beyond a “drive-by” or “one-way street” model of
service learning, however, my colleague Stacy Nall and I faced a shortage of theoretical and pedagogical materials. In response, we designed a research project to understand how digital tools for collaboration offer new approaches for university instructors and students to work together with communities in reciprocal ways. Although our complete manuscript for this project is currently under review, here is a snapshot of what students said about conducting service learning in Business Writing classes:

Student Reflections on Service Learning in Business Writing

  • “We’re always open to constructive criticism. We want to think that they think it’s a good idea. I don’t think they’ve ever worked with a class before.”
  • “Yeah, working with an organization involving so much money, it’s great to see that we can work within their parameters.”
  • “Basically, we want to make sure that we don’t step on the toes of the people in charge at the [organization].”
  • “If we push their boundaries, they’ll probably shut down the whole thing.”
  • “The people ‘upstairs’ need to know why it’s useful and important to ask for donations [in this particular way].”
  • “I want the Google Doc to be worth their time to look at, because I don’t want to ask them to read through stuff that’s not worth their time.”
  • “It [Google Docs] reveals your process and could make you feel self-conscience about your writing skills.”
  • “I didn’t want to present anything to her that is not well-organized. Anything south of email isn’t what I like to have with community members because I just don’t think it’s professional.”

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How do you use digital tools to conduct service learning in your classrooms?

 

 

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Teaching Business Writing Online: Strategies, Successes, and Lessons Learned

The most common complaint I hear about online teaching is that students do not get the same immersive, challenging environment available in physical classrooms. Online courses are often blamed for “watering down” the learning experience and allowing students to get easy college credit. Here, I offer strategies and suggestions for making online courses interactive and engaging. From instructional scaffolding and multiple media, to course blogs and video lectures, my experiences with online teaching have been very fulfilling and challenging. I would love to hear about other people’s experiences–successful strategies and lessons learned.

Read about my online teaching strategies in a brief report by clicking here (and opening the PDF file in your web browser): Teaching Business Writing Online (ENGL 420Y). Or just read through the final recommendation section of the report, which I copied below:

Recommendations for Future Online Teaching | After my first semester of teaching online, I have a number of recommendations:

  1. Uphold a Mental Rhetoric of Conversion | Conceptualize online courses as conversions of an original, face-to-face (F2F) experience. I highly recommend teaching a F2F version of the course before “converting” that course into an online experience. By teaching the course in person first, instructors can establish expectations for interaction, participation, writing, design, and teamwork that can then be applied directly to the online version of the course. While designing an online Business Writing class, it was essential that I apply the same expectations as my F2F class, but to utilize different media to help students achieve those standards.
  2. Make Your Course Site Clear | Use a consistent organizational scheme throughout your course site. In Blackboard Learn, I recommend creating unit modules under the “Course Content” tab. I release the second module only once we are completely finished with the first, and so on.  Within each unit module, you can organize individual files, PowerPoints, videos, web-links (including embedded YouTube videos and SlideShare presentations), PDFs, quizzes, and assignments. By keeping all of the readings and assignments for each project together, students are less likely to feel lost or overwhelmed. For my particular course, I create a PDF for each unit schedule, which explains in detail the homework and due dates for that unit. Since we used on online textbook and an online course site, students sometimes felt confused about the location of their many homework readings. Therefore, after my first unit, I developed a consistent scheme for explaining the location of each reading in my syllabus. I now give procedural directions for locating readings using arrows, as follows: Blackboard > Course Content > Unit 1 > Project 1 Prompt.
  3. Involve Students Weekly | By utilizing instructional scaffolding, instructors are better able to monitor student progress and encourage regular involvement. By requiring weekly writing tasks (from responses to project plan memos to report drafts), students are less likely to drift from the class, procrastinate on projects, and face writing blocks. Weekly writing and responding also encourages the same (if not deeper) level of discussion-involvement by students.
  4. Provide Example Projects and Feedback | In my final evaluations, most students commented that it was extremely helpful to read example projects and my feedback on those projects. In my F2F classes, I often display examples on the projector and discuss with the class the strengths and weaknesses of the project. Without that direct interaction, it is invaluable to provide your online students with examples of the kind of the feedback they can expect from you.  
  5. Reimagine Modes of Transmission | Perhaps the richest opportunity of online teaching is the constant need to reimagine the ways we deliver information and interact with students. During my first semester, I created vidcasts, slideshows, and PDF handouts; emailed revision suggestions; provided marginal and end-comments on digital drafts; and sent email announcements and updates. Other digital possibilities I hope to explore this semester include: audio feedback, video announcements and welcome messages, and more regular email interactions with teams as they write collaboratively online. Reimagining the possibilities for delivering and responding to our students is perhaps the most creative aspect of online teaching.
Posted in Business Writing, Original Digital Projects, Teaching Approaches | 4 Comments

Best Rhetoric & Composition Books, Articles, and Experiences of 2012

It’s that time of year again! Inspired by the Crunk Feminist Collective‘s annual “Year of Crunkness,” I’d like to take a moment to share my favs of 2012.

  1. Ralph Cintron’s Angels’ Town. Though the book was published over a decade ago, it was the most inspiring read of 2012 for me. Most memorable moment from the text: How do we offer respect to those living under conditions of little to no respect?
  2. Transforming Places: Lessons from Appalachia. 2This newly published book was the first on my dissertation reading list. After all that crammed reading for courses and then for prelim exams, I sat down and cozied up with this book for the slowest, most patient, happy read I’ve experienced in two years. A powerful interdisciplinary gaze at activism in Appalachia.
  3. Thomas Rickert’s Cultural Studies course at Purdue University’s Rhetoric and Composition program. It was fate that my final coursework in RhetComp would be a weekly feast of cultural studies, from the Birmingham School to English punk rock, with my future diss. director. Favorite readings included: De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, Nealon’s Foucault Beyond Foucault, and Ingold’s Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and Description.
  4. Believe it or not, a grammar is on the list this year: Martha Kolln’s Rhetorical Grammar (new 7th edition out this year). This wasn’t necessarily a cozy, happy read, but it’s on the list because it was an absolutely essential read. For all the times I couldn’t explain exactly why a grammar rule worked the way it did… I should’ve read this book a long time ago.
  5. Don’t know how it didn’t end up on the list last year, but Internal Drive Technology Camp has to be the best summer experience for rhetcompers interested in game studies, digital literacies, and public rhetorics. I’ve had the great luck of directing and teaching at iD Tech’s Purdue campus during my grad school summers, and couldn’t recommend the experience more highly. If you love tech, kids, camp, fun, video games, and teaching, this is the perfect summer job. Watch the YouTube video I created two summers ago, and you’ll be a believer:

Happy New Year, Everybody!

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New Vidcasts for the OWL at Purdue

I’m happy to share the vidcasts that I created for the OWL at Purdue’s YouTube channel. Enjoy!

Introduction to Rhetoric:

How to Write White Papers:

Invention and Prewriting:

Introduction to Pathos:

Posted in Film Compositions, Original Digital Projects, Teaching Approaches, Theories of Composition and Rhetoric, Writing Exercises | Leave a comment

Business Writing and The Pedagogy of “Targets”

Today’s post is the start of a new project. It ends with an open-ended question, and I’d love to hear your answers!

In my Business Writing courses themed on social media, I often hear myself speaking of targets: “Who is the target audience of this advertising campaign? What group is our business targeting with this approach? What issues or struggles are you targeting here?” In a culture of targets—target audiences, target weight ranges, target locations, target treatments, law enforcement targets, Target© shopping, and even Sarah Palin’s infamous “target list”—it is surprisingly comfortable to conceive of goals, places, and even (especially?) people as targets.

Photo courtesy j.reed on Flickr.

Introductory Composition hosts a long history of questioning the rhetoric of target audiences, attempting to show students how they themselves are targets of cultural advertisements that want them to identify, purchase, and repeat. Assignments advocating rhetorical and visual analyses of cultural artifacts emerged with Jim Berlin’s Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures (1996), and with the larger Cultural Studies movement in our field. As a leading figure in this movement, Berlin argued that cultural critique could help students understand “the role of culture in shaping them as the subjects of their experience and their role as critical agents in a democratic society” (132). The purpose of such work, he argued, is not for students to reject their cultural positions, but rather to recognize them and become “reflexive agents actively involved in shaping their own consciousness as well as the democratic society of which they are an integral part” (132). Inspired by the ideal of the democratic classroom (and resulting democratic society), Berlin’s pedagogy continues to inspire cultural critique in first-year writing classrooms.

Since I began teaching first-year Composition in 2008, my syllabus has always included an assignment focused on cultural critique—from visual analyses of advertisements to cultural analyses of community spaces. When I began teaching Business Writing (BW) in 2011, the kind of cultural critique I encourage in my teaching philosophy statement and in my approaches to teaching Introductory Composition seemed strangely out of place. This is partly due to less flexibility in Business Writing syllabus approaches at my University, but more importantly due to pressures beyond my institution’s control. As I composed a syllabus for my future junior and senior-level students, I seriously considered how our assignments might help them obtain and maintain business careers. I felt an intense personal responsibility to prepare them for professional work and for writing efficiently, respectfully, and knowledgeably within business settings. In other words, I found myself in a mode of operation nearly opposite of my Introductory Composition classrooms. Suddenly, I was teaching my BW students how to do the kind of targeting that I taught my freshmen students how to resist.

I first realized this contradiction in the midst of a discussion on target audiences in social media. My BW students were writing white paper reports for local businesses to share current research on advertising with social media. Mid-lecture, I heard myself ask students to consider who their businesses should target with social media, and which sites might host such “targets.” The targets in my suggestion were, of course, people. More strikingly, however, since most of my students were writing for local businesses (most of them adjacent to campus in a college town), the targets I spoke of were in fact my students. I was teaching my students how to target themselves.

Why is it so difficult to align everyday practices with larger theoretical or ideological positions—especially in the realm of academic “business”?

Posted in Business Writing, Public Rhetorics, Teaching Approaches, Theories of Composition and Rhetoric | 1 Comment