It’s true confession time. I learned about face-book from a soccer player. He couldn’t get off the site long enough to participate in class. MySpace was the same; one of my sorority girls updated her page each day before class. YouTube I attribute to one of my students showing me my first YouTube video after class one day. This is just a sample of the technologies that I’ve used and the students who have introduced me to them. So how can I turn all of these introductions into familiar technologies? Simple. I start with just a couple of steps that are easy to use in any classroom.

Listen

Just a few weeks ago, I was talking to a student about an article I had read. When I remarked that I should have bookmarked it, she replied “Did you tweet it?” My first response was “No.” (I make it a policy not to directly ask my students for these terms because if they ask me to define a term, I tell them to look it up. For me not to do the same is a bit hypocritical.)

Google It

Back in my office a few hours later, I sat down at Google and typed in the question still on my mind. “What is a tweet?” After skimming over a few suggestions, I elected to check Wikipedia. I knew from the sentence that what I was looking for was a verb. So, as I skimmed the explanations on Wikipedia, I found only one verb:

To send a message via Twitter.

I followed the link, skimmed the Twitter information on Wikipedia, and then I did the unthinkable. I signed up.

Use It

Now, it’s easy to find out what your students are talking about with these technologies, but the first step to learning the technologies is to experiment.

So, what happens if you get to the site and you still can’t figure out what’s the attraction to the site. What if you can’t figure out how to navigate the site itself? Then, you have to do take the difficult step.

Talk to Your Students

Remember, students know things that we don’t. They have their finger on the pulse of Web 2.0. If we’re learning about the existence of the technologies from students then they are obviously using these technologies? Why not give the students the chance to teach us something?

So why am I advocating eavesdropping on students to find out about technologies? It’s simple. As teacher’s we’re automatically slightly out of the loop with Web 2.0. We come home at night and we do “adult” things (cooking, grading papers, reading books). But most of our students get online after dinner and homework. Why? To tinker with their social networks and their web pages. Just as we were the pioneers of the Internet, our students are the pioneers on the Internet. If we cannot admit that our students know something that we don’t, what kind of teachers are we?

I remember being in high school and teaching my English teacher how to do something to her VCR. It was a very satisfying moment for me; I taught the teacher something. But even more gratifying was when she came back to the school the following week and thanked me. I had taught her how to do it right. The best teachers I had growing up were those who allowed there to be a give and take between their knowledge and that of their students. The worst teachers? Those who assumed they knew it all. To truly become the technology savvy teachers that we wish to become, we have to talk to our students. We have to learn what is important to them outside of the classroom. Then, we have to figure out which of the technologies they are using can be incorporated into the classroom. Not all of the technologies they play with are appropriate in the classroom. But if we don’t use the ones that are appropriate, then we lose a chance to engage students. It only takes one technology to engage one at-risk student and change their mind about staying in school.

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In the fall, I ran across a new social bookmarking site–Diigo. I started using Diigo with a paper that I was writing and loved it for several reasons. First, it’s a social bookmarking site which meant that I could peruse the links of other people on the site. Second, Diigo gave me the Furl functionality of highlighting and annotating, but the format seemed easier and the interface was more aesthetically speaking (in my opinion).  While I was in this stage of tinkering, I met with one of my dissertation committee members and I was talking about the focus of my dissertation–blogging. He very bluntly reminded me that my entire dissertation could not focus only on blogging, but needed to be focused on more features. I was in a bind–I wanted to focus on the advantages to writing that came from blogs, not all medias. But the more I played around with Diigo, the more a little grain of an idea began to grow. My dissertation should note about the advantages to writing–but about collaboration through Web 2.0.

So, this semester, I went out on a limb and offered my students the option of collaborating on their research this semester. They were already not looking forward to the research, but the idea of using each other to further their research sounded like a good idea. Still, they weren’t jumping at the idea. Then, I gave them a quick walkthrough of Diigo. Their eyes lit up like they had just been given a present–and it wasn’t even their birthday. One student looked dumbfounded and asked:

“Is it really that easy?”

“It sure is.” I replied. So we set about installing the Diigo toolbar and they started on their research. But I’m leaving the student portion of this experiment here. (You have to want to come back, right?). Instead, I want to talk about the pedagogical approach to using social bookmarking–and Diigo especially–in classes that require research.

Students Use Social Bookmarking

Just like I learned with blogging in the classroom, I know that students get more out of methods of learning that they use in their free time. So, social bookmarking was a way for me to engage my students not only in the research, but in conversations with the research. Social bookmarking, regardless of the site used, creates a conversation among members interested in the same tag. Each time a member marks a bookmark, they are speaking to their networks and saying “Read this.”

Annotation is Suddenly Fun

Each semester, I try (in vain, usually) to get my students to annotate their text book. I do this to prepare them not only for future studies, but also for the annotation that research demands they do. Diigo, suddenly, makes the students want to annotate their bookmarks. It is their chance to make sure the world (or their group) knows how important specific words on a webpage are to them.

Diigo allows a More Advanced Conversation

As I mentioned above, social bookmarking allows students to engage in a conversation with other scholars on the same topic. Diigo allows this conversation to move beyond just the “Read this” comment and actually allows the students to create a dialogue. Through Diigo, students have a variety of ways to engage in this dialogue.

• Creating Groups–creating groups of individuals within their network who are researching on the same topic allows students to share bookmarks they have found.
• Using Forums–Within a group, the administrator has the opportunity to create a forum that allows each member of the group to ask and respond to specific issues on a topic. For example, if one student cannot find statistics, they can mention this in the forum and receive an answer (or better yet, a bookmark) from one of the group members.
• Highlighting–This allows one student to specifically show others in the group what they find important about the bookmark. But the highlights are not owned or seen by just the individual. If John shares a bookmark with highlighting, Frank can not only see John’s highlighting, but can also add his own highlighting (which is also available to John).
• Sticky Notes–In addition to highlighting, students can add to the conversation on the page. Their comments can be seen by others who read the page (if the notes are public) and their friends can add to this conversation.

Now, I’m looking at the benefits to what happens when students alone share bookmarks. However, keep in mind that in the most public realm, these conversations can be looked at and added to by anybody else in the Diigo network. Therefore, students have the chance to get information from even more sources.

Now, in the grand tradition of my previous hows and whys, I want to look at how I assigned this to my students. This is a bit complex, but I’ll try to simplify it. It’s also very heavily geared towards a rhetoric focused First Year Composition that spends the entire semester focusing on research.

Assignment Part One–Bookmarking

In the first part of the assignment, I asked students to complete research with Internet sources through specific search engines (Google, Internet Public Library,  and the Librarians Index to the Internet). I told them to simply bookmark and tag any site or article that looked usable in research. (At this point, my students were working with three controversial topics, so they were doing research on three different topics.

Assignment Part Two–Sharing Bookmarks and Creating Subgroups

In class the day students were to turn in their bookmarks, I simply had students log in to Diigo and then share their bookmarks to the class group. Then, I asked them to get together with those who were writing on the same topic (they also chose their final topic in class this day) and create a subgroup for their topic. Then, I asked them to share their bookmarks on their final topic with their group and to browse through the class bookmarks for other bookmarks on their topic. This way, they also had the bookmarks from people who had researched the topic, but not chosen it as their final topic. So, essentially each person in the group had the opportunity to get research from up to 10 other students.

Assignment Part Three–Evaluating the Sources via Sticky Notes

For this part of the assignments, students are to go through each of the sources in their group and create sticky notes throughout the essay to identify the author’s use of the three rhetorical appeals (ethos, pathos, logos). Then, I’ve asked them to post a sticky at the bottom evaluating the source and explaining how this specific article would fit into their argumentative essay. (What students are not aware of at this point is that this step is essentially creating their annotated bibliography–the next step in the research process for this class).

Final Thoughts

Each of my students is also linked to my Diigo account, so they can see how I interact with the site itself. I’ve encouraged them to look through the bookmarks and ask questions about why I do specific things on my sites. If they’ve kept up, they had the chance to see my resources double for a class that I’m taking as well as for links for future posts on the blog.

Feel free to poke around through their group and visit Diigo if you haven’t. You can see the 1023-Collaborative Group without an account and you can see what the students are doing with their bookmarks. Or, you can see my pubic bookmarks. If you are a Diigo user (or decide to become one), feel free to join my new Diigo group for TRC.  As always, please let me know if you have questions or need feedback. But  more importantly, let me know if you try this in your classroom. I’d love to know how it goes.

Happy Techno-Teaching

Then, after finishing my M.A. and moving on to a new university to pursue my Ph.D. and teach, I discovered that my students were a lot less receptive to the idea. I diligently provided my information to the students, but of the 60 students I taught this time, only about 5 sent me friend invitations. After the first few weeks, I assumed that the students were just not going to add me as a friend until it got closer to their essay’s due date. But, as the semester progressed and I added no more than students to my friends list, I began to wonder just why there was such a change. So at the end of the semester, I sat down with my students and asked them about this. I was in for a new discovery.

The students had wanted to use the Virtual Office Hours, but could not. Many of these students did not own their own computers. This, I realized, was the luxury of working at a private school where each student was packed off to college with a shiny new laptop. In the world of public education, few students get new laptops or even have computers at the school. I still did not understand this problem. I teach at a university that literally oozes technology. Students have access to about 6 computer labs and 2 cyber labs, a library that allows students laptops with wireless internet, multiple computer classrooms (including the one I taught in), and various computer kiosks around campus. So, I could not see why not having a computer in the dorm room was a problem. Since I required students to turn in their assignments via email, I knew that they were finding computer access somewhere. But then the students opened my eyes.

“We can’t download software onto the computers.”

That posed a bit of a problem. So, I walked away at the end of this Fall semester curious about how I could go about re-implementing Virtual Office Hours for the entire class. The following Spring semester, I tried Blackboard’s Virtual Office. But I had little success. It was not that the students were not using the Virtual Office, but Blackboard automatically logs you out after a pre-determined amount of time. Unfortunately, it also does not tell you that it has logged you out.

Then, I found Meebo. With Meebo, I found a solution that my students could use without having to download any software. They could use the site from any computer on campus and never had to do more than log into the site. My students love it. So, I want to pass this information on to you about not only how to use Meebo for Virtual Hours, but also how to set up Virtual Hours so that you and your students get the most out of these hours.

Two Different Ways to Use Meebo

From the Website

To use Meebo from the website, all you have to do is log in with an instant messenger account. It’s that simple. If you prefer, you can set up a separate account through Meebo so that you can manage multiple accounts through a single login. If you provide your students with various Instant Messenger preferences, this is the way to go. Once you create an account, you can log in and add your other accounts to this one. It works like an online version of Trillion or Adm.

From Your Course Homepage or Blog

The other way to use Meebo is to sign up for a meebo account and then get the widget to put a Meebo box on your class website or blog. You’ll notice off to the right of this entry is a Meebo box. This is a simple widget that you get from the Meebo website. You can put it on any site that allows you to add HTML to the site. To be seen as online on your website, you still need to log in to Meebo. If you’re running Firefox they have a plug in that allows you to log in while bypassing the actual site.

A Few Guidelines for Initiating Virtual Hours

Since creating a means for students to access you during your Virtual Hours, let me also share with you a few things that I have learned about setting up Virtual Hours over the past few years.

Do

• Be Flexible. Remember that your students have lives. If you consistently set up virtual hours weeknights between 4 and 9 p.m. then you are putting students who have a part time job in a bind. On the other hand, if you only set up weekends, you’re putting those students who work weekends or spend their weekends with their family in a bind. So be flexible; choose a night or two during the week and a few hours over the weekend that you can feasibly stay close enough to your computer to answer an occasional student question.

• Be Consistent. Set up a plan for Virtual Hours at the beginning of the semester. If you want to be available to your students every week, then make that commitment. Make sure, though, that you are available at the hours you said you would be. If, however, you decide that you only want to maintain Virtual Hours when students are finishing up a major assignment, make sure that you let these students know a week or two in advance (and I recommend email as well as verbal notice) that you are having Virtual Hours. Remind them of days and times.

• Set Guidelines. Make your students aware of things that you simply will not accept during Virtual Hours. These are best presented on the handout that you provide to students with your contact information. This way, everything is there together. Here are a few of my rules.
  • Do not IM me to ask what was done in class when you were not there.
  • Do not use text message language in the Virtual Office setting. Please, use plain English.

• Keep a Log of Pet Peeves. Trust me, after a few weeks of Virtual Hours you will have discovered several things that bother you. You will want to add these to the list for your next group of students (or at the least address them with that group).

Do Not

• Do Not Be Unrealistic. It’s easy to think that if you’re at your computer all day Saturday, you can just set up an all-day marathon of Saturday hours. Inevitably, something will come up on Saturday that must be done before the end of the day. Make sure that you give yourself time to prepare for these problems.

• Do Not Be Shy with Rule Breakers. If a student breaks the rules that you have set up with the Virtual Hours, do not hesitate to end the conversation and (if need be) block the user. Remember, the Virtual Office is an extension of your own office. Don’t put up with anything there that you would not put up with in the classroom or in the office.

• Do Not Give Up Mid-Semester. If the Virtual Hours are not working for you, wait until the end of the semester to stop using them. It’s just bad form to quit in the middle of the semester.

If I can clarify anything in this post (or if you wish for me to post a step-by-step guide to using Meebo on your homepage, please let me know.

Happy Techno-Teaching!

Why Teach Wikipedia In the Classroom?

It teaches students to pay attention to authorial credibility

Given the open contributions allowed on Wikipedia, I have chance to teach my students why it is important to pay close attention to the ethos of their author. Since so many of these authors are not identified on Wikipedia by professional affiliation, it opens the class up to discussions about finding out about their authors.

Tone and stance become a discussion instead of a lecture

If you hand a student a scholarly article or even a newspaper editorial and ask them to talk about the author’s tone and stance, they clam up. But I’ve found that asking my students to discuss a Wikipedia author’s tone and stance means that I don’t have to lecture at them. Instead, this discussion becomes a group discussion. I think this stems from the fact that they feel Wikipedia is more their “turf” and scholarly materials are my “turf.” Regardless of why this works, I know that students comprehend more when we can begin a dialogue. I also know that dialogues only begin when students feel comfortable with what they’re talking about. So to get students talking about credibility means that I can get them to pay more attention to credibility in their research because they feel more comfortable assessing the author’s ethos.

Students learn to evaluate an argument early in the process

With the divergence of authors on Wikipedia, it’s easy to discuss evaluations of argument with students. As students are comfortable with Wikipedia, they feel more comfortable pointing out weak points and lack of counterargument in articles and pages on Wikipedia than they do in scholarly journals early in their research. Essentially, evaluation works in much the same way as authorial ethos. When students feel comfortable with what they are reading and talking about, the dialogue lets them learn a lot more.

Good resources for further research

One thing that I always teach my students is to follow the links and sources provided by authors. So asking students to begin with Wikipedia provides them with a good number of sources to begin their research with. While the articles on Wikipedia may not be usable in their research, they do at least learn that this is a good place to get access to some good research material.

How to Teach Wikipedia

Pick a controversial topic that students know a good bit about and one they know little about

When students are well versed in a controversy, they feel more comfortable talking about it. I choose a topic based on the amount of dialogue that students engage in during the classroom. This year, we’ve been using the abortion debate to discuss the controversy students know about because all of my students have engaged in this discussion.

When I choose a topic that students don’t know much about, I try to come up with one that has a good bit of research material online, but not as much in scholarly journals. Recently, I’ve been using the Ashley Treatment controversy. My students are not familiar with this topic, but discover early on that they have very strong opinions on this issue. We start by reading the blog and then I introduce them to the Wikipedia site on Ashley.

We spend a good bit of time hypothesizing about the paper we’re writing on Ashley. We follow the links (both inside and outside of Wikipedia) and discuss broadening research and evaluating sources. As we do this, we’re also talking about the other controversy, and we discuss it first. This way, students’ knowledge of the first topic informs their own sources and decisions with Ashley. This discussion gets them talking about how counterarguments on the parents’ blog as well as in the research of other scholars and bloggers. Bloggers are one reason that I love to use the Ashley Treatment. When this issue was new there were several very credible bloggers writing on the subject which also leads to the discussion of blogs in research (but that’s another topic).

As we come to a close on the Wikipedia topic, I have students spend a day in class following links on their topics Wikipedia site and beginning their working bibliography using only the sites that are credible and relevant to their research. This way, I have the chance to reinforce the positive aspects of Wikipedia in research while helping students comprehend how to write a paper without actually citing Wikipedia.

I hope this helps all of you caught in the great Wikipedia conundrum. If you want any further point in this explanation explained, don’t hesitate to ask. Also, if there’s another topic you would like to see under the “Hows and Whys” section, please let me know. I’ll even give you credit in the post

Happy Teaching!

Continuing the Discourse

Anytime I see another quality post on a topic I’ve already posted, I like to go back and extend that discourse just a bit farther by updating my own post. So, today I saw a couple posts on this Wikipedia debate that are worth mentioning.

First, there is Nicholson Baker’s article this week in the New York Review of Books. Baker’s discussion looks at how and why Wikipedia has changed over the last eight years. He looks at specific posts on Wikipedia and the way that these posts appeared, disappeared, came back more complete and then began a dialogue.

Then, to prove that the pro-Wikipedia argument is not just in the arts side of the university, Science Progress demonstrates that Wikipedia proves resourceful to the hard sciences as well. One point in this article specifically stood out to me because I think this is the debate at the core of both sides of the Wikipedia argument.

What is perhaps more important and useful, though, is the extent to which Wikipedia also preserves the debate and discourse around a particular subject. Two of the most important features that I point out to students when I teach them about Wikipedia are the history pages and the discussion pages. Unlike traditional archives, Wikipedia preserves not only its past representations, but also the discourse which produced the current entry. (Wikipedia and the New Curriculum)

This idea of the discourse is one that needs to be explained thoroughly in the classroom. If we can’t teach our students to look at the discussion that led to the insertion or deletion of a point on a Wikipedia page, then we are not teaching them all of the critical thinking skills they will need in the real world. Instead, we’re teaching them to passively accept what is written in print. This idea went out with hardback home edition of Encyclopedia Britannica.

Post last updated 3.23.2008

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First, I like to break the actual teaching of the annotated bibliography up into several different days. Then, I focus on specific information that students need to know in order to create their annotated bibliography. The unit that I teach the Annotated Bibliography in usually lasts about 2 weeks, so I have four lessons to teach them in and two days that I devote to in class work. (This is not to say that you must spend six full hours working on the AB, just that you can utilize six classes.) I spend the first half of class going over specific aspects and then circulate through the class to make sure everybody is on track with the day’s lesson (granted, this is much easier in a computer classroom). Here’s the general layout by class period:

1. Formatting a Bibliography
   1. This is by far the easiest and at the same time the most complex. For this day, I return to the MLA handbook and review the Works Cited page format and the formats for specific forms of entries. I cover book, journal, magazine, newspaper and online sources first. Then, I find out if there are any other forms of citations that my students want to cover.
2. Annotating Sources
   1. This is one of the most important aspects of teaching an Annotated Bibliography that you can give your students. I assign them an article for homework (due this day) that we can annotate together in class. I ask them to make notes, as they read, of the topics of each paragraph and a brief note as to the overall idea for the article. Then, in class, we discuss the main points of each paragraph and create one sentence summaries for these paragraphs. When the class has agreed on the sentences for each paragraph, we create a two sentence summary of the article and assign it a specific audience.
3. Creating an Annotation
   1. Last semester, I was introduced to the idea of writing a rhetorical precis and have now incorporated that into the annotation section of my student’s papers. I like that format because it is strict enough that I don’t have to feel around with the content of my students’ bibliographies. This allows me to look at the specific content contained in the annotation and grade it on that.
      1. Whatever style you choose, make sure that you are clear with your students about order and information to include. If you are not clear, the annotations look haphazardly written.
   2. Using the article annotated in our previous class meeting, I walk my students step by step through the creation of their annotation (I do not call the form a “rhetorical precis” because it confuses students who can only focus on creating an “annotation”). We write, as a class, each sentence for the article. This allows me to aid them in understanding the importance of word choice, structure, etc.
4. Creating a Judgment Statement
   1. Some instructors do not include the judgment statement in their students’ annotations, but I feel it is imperative that students learn to judge sources in relation to their own writing. Before this class, we will have discussed evaluating websites, searching online to find the credibility of ambiguous authors and the criteria that create a useful article in a research paper. So, during this class, we sit down and return to their class article, examine the author’s ethos, source of the publication and make a judgment on whether we would use that source in consideration of our topic.
   2. Once we have established whether we would use the source, we discuss why. Then, I have them create a judgment statement that includes the author’s ethos, credibility of the source, and specific reason why (or why not) they would use the source in the essay.
   3. For example, my students’ sentences might look like this:

Though Palmer is a known columnist at the Daily Planet, his article is largely based upon misrepresented and uncited sources, thus leading me to decide against using his article in my essay.

Brown’s background as a copyright activist along with the article’s publication in the Wall Street Journal, supports my decision to use his facts about Napster in my essay on copyright infringement.

Once I have gotten my students through this much of their annotations, I feel that they have all the information they need to successfully write their Annotated Bibliography. I then provide them with two in-class writing workshops where I help them individually to finish their work. This gives me the chance to look at nearly completed ABs and aid students in correcting specific aspects of their work.

Hope this helps! If you see anything that I’m missing or that you would like to add, feel free to comment. I’ll be updating all entries in the next few weeks and I’ll be happy to hear suggestions.