Katt Blackwell-Starnes's List: Dissertation Related Blogs

• In my view, the fundamental challenges of blogging are not very different from those of any kind of writing. One requires sufficient exigency to write. Where does this come from?

   
  • An urgency to the subject matter (e.g. a current event)
   
  • An important and reasonable purpose (e.g. writing a job letter to get a job)
   
  • A sense of authority, feeling qualified to write about a subject
   
  • A strong personal interest (e.g. creative writing, political writing)
   
  • An audience that will give you positive feedback

  • This is another to pull in with the Chronicle article.

• • This post is linked to the Chronicle post I want to make. Before I do that, I need to finish the links for Technology (from digital digs) to see if there is anybody else I need to reference on the post.
• Ganley was immersed in Elbow and other writing process teachers, but in 2001 got very involved in classroom blogging; students did all their work out in the world in a transparent, connected space, but it became impossible to stay in the classroom anymore. Writing was an opportunity to work with students in public, and she encountered more walls within the academy, rather than without.
  
  We know about ubiquitous computing, we are comfortable with it. Noted unrest in Iran -- do we know yet how controlled our understanding of that experience is?  In the academy, we continue to use terminology that emphasizes the gap between us and them; the rest of the world is out there on Facebook and texting, but what do we as writing instructors?
• At UBC, students said in their own personal learning environments, the only things they do online for school are the things they know are going to get them better grades. It's all about the grade, yet we know that students are doing really interesting things outside the classroom. [Yes, I agree with that -- I recently had a student who did all sorts of creative photography outside the classroom, but settled for the bare minimum, in terms of creativity and engagement, in the classroom. Another student lamented how rarely her in-class work felt "fun" for her major.]

  • Emphasizes the scope of the last Chronicle article (on the Stanford study)
  Add Sticky Note
• progressive pedagogy (bell hooks)
• Papers that students write only because they want the grade are not engaging deeply with what they care about.
  
• We study more and more the scholarship online is in multimedia -- why not do more of that with our students?  UVa's digital history students go around rural Virginia, and learning from those locations (digitizing them and presenting, as undergrads, their findings.)
• Ask students to evaluate -- what would look like success at the end of your project? Let students explain what they feel they need to learn on their own. As a group they come up with the criteria, then they decide individually and together what they feel their grades would be, and they defend that. (Her students had to argue for their grade.)

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