Results tagged “database” from Collin vs. Blog

This is going to be a short one, as I'm a little pressed for time, but expect a longer retrospective in the next day or two. Tonight, if I have time.

My course is still going quite well, but I've made a couple of changes. First, I lopped off a week, and inserted a catch-up week, so that folks could get on top of the note-blogging and the delicious account. What I realized early on was that I'm not super happy with the available tools; the combo of WP and Delicious has been okay, but not great. It's made it easy for folks to fall behind, and so I gave us a week off from the grind to get caught up. Were I to do a course like this again, I'd build it in. Normally, I do this in my syllabus anyway, but I didn't have this course organized soon enough to be able to.

The second change I made was to our class meetings, and to be fair, it was at the urging of a couple of the students. For the first 5 or so weeks, students were reporting out on their four articles in 10-15 minute chunks. After spring break, though, and after our pause week, we shifted to a model where they reported only one article at a time, and another person would pick up the conversation by connecting one of their articles with that one. As one of the students put it, it allowed us to focus on the conversation rather than coverage--as the semester went on, we were having trouble fitting everyone in anyway, as they became more comfortable with their areas.

This shift has them thinking less about their articles in blocs, and more in terms of the tags, themes, and the transitions that they might make from one of their essays to another person's. It has the added bonus, I think, of keeping everyone alert to connections and transitions.

I'm not sure that this would work straight out of the gate, though, so I'm happy with how it's gone. I think they needed to feel anchored in their areas, and so the longer report model was a good way to start. But as the weeks marched on, it was good to change it up, and to focus their attention differently during class time.

This week I hand out the question for our final exam, which they'll be taking in a little less than 2 weeks. I continue to be amazed at how well this all has gone, and continue to appreciate how enthusiastically the students have taken it up. I'm very thankful. Having the course go well has been a real boost for me this semester.

I have a few overall sorts of thoughts that I'll share soon, because there are aspects of the course that I feel like I've lucked into a bit, ones that wouldn't make this model quite as useful in other contexts. But I'll save those for another entry. One of the things I'm thinking about doing is inviting the students to write up the course with me and submit it to the Praxis section of Kairos, so I definitely have some incentive to keep thinking about it...

That's all. Happy Sunday.

I figure it's time for a little update on how my course is going.

We're 2 weeks into the "10 years in 10 weeks" part of the course, and while I'm going to wait a bit for the kinks to iron out of the database part of the course before I think about it, the class sessions themselves have been interesting.

To remind: what I'm asking the students to do is to read each week that year's Braddock and Kinneavy Award winners (the best essays annually from CCC and JAC respectively), and then each student has to locate 4 other essays from that year (ideally no overlap among students), annotate them on our course blog and tag them on a course delicious site.

I was a little unsure about how class meetings would go, given that we were approaching class with a minimum of shared material. For the past two weeks, we've gone around the class and reported out, with me reporting on the 2 Award winners. First week, the reporting went pretty quickly, since we'd planned on using the second half of class to do the delicious work as a class. This week, though, we had to rush at the end to fit everyone in, and that was with 2 folks missing from class. This week, people in class (myself included) started talking back to the reports, asking questions, noting patterns, etc., and to my mind, that's a good thing.

I think it would be easy to fall into a groove where we were asking too much of our essays--it seems obviously risky to attribute to 4-6 essays some sort of essential year-ness, but that's not what's happening so far. Instead, I think we're doing a good job so far of treating the things we notice as hypotheses to be tested rather than conclusions to jump to. And what's been interesting about the class sessions themselves is that I think we're all learning a bit about the range of topics that different people are taking up (cross-cultural rhetorics, WAC, WC, queer rhet/comp, technology, race, etc). I'm encouraging people to listen for connections across "areas" as well as patterns within their own foci, and I feel like that that's happening.

For my own purposes, it's been interesting to read the two Award winners across each other, finding themes and tags in common in essays that I wouldn't have paired in a million years otherwise. And I'm looking forward to seeing what happens once everyone begins readings essays that are citing some of the ones that we've already covered.

The "payoff" for the course will be a final exam, one that simulates one of the minor exams that our students do as part of their comprehensives. I've never given a final exam in a graduate course before, but it made a great deal of sense to me in the context of this course design. It'll give the students practice at exams, the opacity of which tends to be intimidating for some of them. But more importantly, it will hopefully have been good practice at assembling a focused list of works, reading that list steadily, and reading it with the kind of openness and alertness that we ask from our students at the exam stage.

If I can say so without jinxing, it seems to be working well. The interesting thing about it, though, is that, in addition to helping them learn to prepare and read through a topic area, this process will expose them to a range of different areas, encourage them to see some of the connections among the various areas in our field, and perhaps even encourage some of the meta questions that I find really fascinating: how do areas develop? why do certain areas develop in certain ways, and others in different ones? etc. There's some interesting politics and sociology of knowledge that I'm hoping we'll get at a little this semester.

So if I sound optimistic about the course, there's good reason. I think the folks in my course have really taken this idea up well so far, and I hope that continues.