A basic description of the assignment:
Here’s how I describe this assignment in the syllabus/course description for the course:
Your research will focus on some connection between technology, writing, reading, and/or culture. The goal of this project is to introduce you to the scholarship in the field, perhaps laying the groundwork and interest for a future scholarly project– an MA project, a conference presentation, an article, etc. Your project will involve contributing to an annotated bibliography wiki, presenting your progress to your classmates in the middle of the term, and a 2500-3000 word text (or its hypertextual/electronic/multimedia equivalent) which makes an argument about a specific topic concerning the theory and practice of “technology” as it pertains to the teaching or practice of writing.
“Just what are you looking for, Steve?” We will of course talk about this more, but here are some basic guidelines:
- Imagine a “text” that I could include as a reading in this class or something that you could give as a presentation at something like the Computers and Writing conference.
- It needs to be specific– not “my project is about the Internet” or “my project is about computers.”
- You need to have a “point,” not “I’m going look into the use of blogs,” but “blogs are not useful in secondary school English courses.”
- It needs to include a variety of different pieces of evidence, but it should not be an “information dump.”
Topics of recent projects from past classes include:
- Hypertext in first year composition
- Laptop computer programs in K-12 schools
- Online computer labs
- Automated writing grading tools
- Technology and assessment
- Electronic portfolios
- Technology and ESL teaching
- Incorporating visual rhetoric into first year writing instruction
Topics for projects that seem to me to be relatively “current” and potentially interesting:
- Gaming and writing instruction
- “Viral video” (as a writing phenomenon, as a teaching tool)
- podcasting and/or videoccasting (as a writing phenomenon, as a teaching tool)
- just about anything having to do with blog writing
- social networking sites like myspace or facebook, especially for/in secondary school
- Wikis and/or wikipedia
There is one topic you can’t do this term, though: anything having to do with “the lack of access.” I set up this restriction with some reluctance, but my experience has been in recent years that a lack of access has too often been used as an excuse to not attempt to do something new. I actually have a long blog entry about this available here, if you’re interested. But the short version is you need to do a research project on something other than issues of access, particularly the lack thereof.
The parts of the project:
This is a “project” instead of just a “paper” in that I am expecting you start working on this right away and to continue to work on this project throughout the semester. Here’s what you need to do and when you need to do it:
- Blogging. As part of the blog you will keep for this course, you need to post at least one entry a week on your research project. Obviously, the initial entries on your blog about your research project are going to be brief and fairly sketchy– after all, you will be trying to figure out your topic. Nonetheless, it is important to start this process at the beginning of the term, which is when you should also start thinking about your overall research project.As part of this process, I also want you to read, respond to, and comment on the blogs of others in the class. I don’t have a specific number in mind regarding how many comments/responses you will need to do during the course of the term; suffice it to say you should strive to engage with your classmates on their blogs on a regular basis.While your blog can mostly be a place for you to write notes and thoughts about your project, there are two required blog entries you will need to make this term. They are:
- A “topic proposal” blog entry, where you will sketch out in an entry of 1000 words or so what you want to do your research about, and where you will post your working thesis for your project (e.g., the “point” you are trying to make). This entry is due February 12.
- A peer review posting, where you will post a version of your project with guiding questions and concerns for your peer group members. This entry is due on April 9.
- Annotated Bibliography on the English 516 Annotated Bib Wiki. By “annotated bibliography” entry, I merely mean citations that include a paragraph or so summary regarding that citation. These sources can be things like journal articles, books, book chapters, web sites, etc. The “English 516 Wiki” is the wiki site where you will post your entries, along with reading and commenting on the entries of other students.You will need to have a list of at least 20 different sources from different publications, up to half of which can be online (in all likelihood, web-based) sources. You should strive for including a variety of publications in your annotated bibliography (don’t have 20 articles all from different issues of one journal, for example), and I would strongly urge you to take advantage of the academic resources available to you at the EMU library. Obviously, you don’t need to use all of the entries in your annotated bibliography in your final research project. In fact, I would assume that all of you will have some entries on your annotated bibliographies which aren’t directly about your project but which helped you focus your project and which pointed the way to better readings. I do assume though that all of the resources/references you include in your final research project will be posted on the annotated bibliography wiki.You will post each of these entries on the English 516 Annotated Bib Wiki; we will discuss in class and online the options we have for how these entries will be posted. The first ten of these entries will be due by March 12; the second ten of these entries will be due by April 7.
- A brief, mid-term presentation on your project. The details of this are to be arranged, but during the week of March 8 through March 12, each of you will give a brief and virtual presentation about your research project and progress.
- Finally, the final project. The project itself can take a variety of different forms: a traditional “words in a row” essay of course, but it could also be a web site, a movie, an audio file, or some combination of all of these different forms and genres.
Alright. Looks intense, but that’s good, I like intense. I have no idea where to go yet with my project although I am very interested in how we’re going to be applying the Phaedrus to our discussion – can’t wati!
Of course you would be excited for Plato
I was thinking about researching how the internet and other forms of technology have positively influenced written literacy. So often we hear about how the modern forms of communication– email, blogs, texting, etc.– have killed English as we know it. Well, we are aware that it is transforming the prescriptive form of English, but isn’t that the history of language already? It’s constantly changing! And, it is getting people beyond a classroom writing and self-publishing. Perhaps I should post a proposal on my blog. But I also just want to get Krause and my classmates’ feedback on whether you think it is a relevant topic to pursue. Thanks!
That’s an okay place to start Ashlee, but before too long, it will get a lot more specific than that. Really, what you’re saying here– how technology has positively influenced written literacy– is pretty much the topic of the class as a whole. So you’ll want to focus in on a more narrow and more researchable aspect of this.
It’ll make more sense soon. Probably….
I definitely agree about focus! I always start broad and work my way in. Truthfully, I wanted to do using technology in language teaching (since literacy and second language acquisition is my focus) but then saw that it was a recent pick and didn’t know how keen you were on repeats. It’s just something I was interested in in the past and thought this project would be a good excuse to do some research on it. However, I suppose I could possibly do some variation of that? Hmm.
I wonder if you could connect social networking speak/text speak to written literacy acquisition in a specific context, like first-year comp, or high school, or even adult literacy classes? Something I wonder/worry about is how much the Twitter-generation will value longevity in their prose, since mircoblogs, status updates, and text messages are so brief! Will they consider 140 characters the standard length of a communication event? I guess that’s more of a concern, and you’re going for the positive stuff. Hmmm….
I get criticized for this sometimes, but I like the idea of doing quantitative analysis of prose. I think it would be very cool to do a study where you solicit writing from a group of people (emails, for instance) and code them for things like internet slang, abbreviations, and maybe even emoticons. I bet you could draw some pretty interesting conclusions.
Anyway, just some ideas. Hope they help you! And I hope your commute home was a safe one!
Carrie, this isn’t exactly what you’re talking about, but there are some people who have talked about datamining literature and other texts and studying reoccurring terms and phrases. In fact, the guy we just hired here at EMU, Derek Mueller, did a dissertation project that was sorta/kinda about the use of tag clouds to interpret and understand texts. Sorta kinda. You’d have to ask him for the details.
What abotu the idea of using social networks in a face to face classroom to enhance the learning experience. The idea being can they aide with the discussion and how to make the effective. Just an idea I have.
Would this be like our course shell discussion threads? seems like it could work.
I was thinking more like FB or a ning that they can do different things as well, such as blog and things like that.
Oh I tried this once also in a class last fall and it didnt go over very well. Some were very resistant to it, but others used it. I am doing it again this semester in a Journalism class so we shall see how it goes.
For my research project, I’m considering exploring the use of Web 2.0 tools in basic writing classrooms. (Like Ashlee, I’m also taking John Dunn’s course on teaching basic writing at the college level, so this could be a cool way for the two interests to overlap.) I’ve helped with some of the curriculum revisions for our basic writing class at UM and think such research could be useful to Instructors in my writing center; it would also inform my future teaching, I’m sure.
Does anyone currently use any Web 2.0 tools in their teaching? Are there any you’ve found particularly useful, or disastrous? Or, are there any tools that you just like and use often? Thanks in advance!
I’m not really sure what I want to do yet, but I did my research proposal for 514 last semester on Web publishing/2.0 and how it relates to/affects the writing process. Maybe I’ll pursue that a little further (since all we had to do was a proposal). Though, I’m also interested in looking at wiki’s as a teaching resource for first year comp (and beyond). It just seems that with their flexibility/customizability (yes, i’m aware that it’sprobably not a word!) , they can be very useful in such a context.
I think we’re thinking about similar ideas Dave, except miine will be geared toward high school.
I’m not entirely sure what I want to do yet, but I know it will definitely be something to do with the secondary classroom. Something like “using ______ to teach writing in the secondary English class is helpful to student progress” etc. Like I said, not entirely sure where I want to go with this yet (as in Twitter, Blogs, podcasting, etc) but I’m excited to think about it!
BTW, three general things to think about with these research projects:
* Generally, think small. What I mean is a project/working thesis like “I’m going to research how the internet is useful for teaching writing” is WAAAAAYYYYY too big and broad. I have some examples above, and I think that what Angie is suggesting about using ____ to teach writing in ______ situation is a good way to get started. Though it doesn’t have to be about “teaching” per se; there are other ways to talk about (for example) the impact of _______ on the practice of writing in ______ situation, for example.
* It has to be something you can actually research. A major (the major?) goal of this project is to get you to look at the scholarship in the field; if you are trying to do something where there is no research to speak of, well, that would be a problem. And BTW, I’ll help guide you in this process since I’m obviously familiar with the scholarship.
* It has to be something reasonably current. For example, researching MOOs/MUDs would be problematic (look it up if your curious!), as would be researching newsgroups. Researching email and word processing would be problematic for similar reasons, though I can imagine certain angles on those technologies.
I’m with Brian. Sounds intense. I teach 131 and 132 composition and I am interesed in my students blogging. Some classes are harder to start a discussion so maybe they would be more at ease blogging than face to face discussions. The technology is atttractive to them. I am still mulling ideas. This is intense.
I understand that we need to have professional sources to back us up, but I was thinking of (obviously I have to see if there is info available) researching whether writing with technology changes student attitudes or perspectives about writing. Would I be able to do some research on my own; perhaps measure how students feel about writing in class with pen compared to in the writing lab?
in our district, we’re piloting formulative assessment, versus standardized assessment- which is based on subjective assignements, giving critique versus grades. I’m thinking that technology in the classroom could help with formulative assessment, and am persuing this as a research topic….