Workshops
Graduate Research Network (GRN) (All Day)
Janice Walker, Georgia Southern University
The GRN consists of roundtable discussions, grouping those with similar interests with discussion leaders who facilitate conversations and offer suggestions for developing your projects and determining suitable venues for publication. The GRN welcomes those pursuing work at any stage, from those just beginning to consider ideas to those whose projects are ready to pursue publication.
Using Online Essays for Ubiquitous and Sustainable Assessment and More The Consortium for Research and Evaluation of Writing (CREW) (All Day)
Les Perelman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Suzanne Lane, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Irvin Peckham, Louisiana State University
Marlene Miner, University of Cincinnati
Andreas Karatsolis, Albany College of Pharmacy and Carnegie Mellon, Qatar
Sandra Jamieson, Drew University
Kathleen Yancey, Florida State UniversityThis workshop will focus on various ways online essays can be used for several kinds of student assessments, collecting student writing portfolios and furthering instructor training and development. The morning session will introduce online assessment through presentations that will discuss
- the pedagogical and economic advantages of online essays
- a survey of current uses of online essays
- the role of online essays in directed-self-placement
- the effectiveness of online essays at campuses with diverse populations
- the advantages of online grading
- the differences between SAT Reading and Writing scores and online essays
Most of the afternoon session will be devoted to working with participants who will develop prototypes of online assessments to fit the specific circumstances and educational objectives of each participant’s institution. Although we will be using the web-based iMOAT system, the emphasis will be on generic applications that might be adaptable to other services, such as course management software.
The last part of the workshop will be spent on designing effective arguments for funding online assessment directed to department colleagues, chairs, as well as Deans and upper-level administration.
We already have compiled a sourcebook of various types of sample assignments, checklists, protocols, as well as various memoranda that have been effective in gaining institutional support. We will update and expand this sourcebook, put it online, and handout hard copies to all participants.
Composing Digital Scholarship: A Workshop for Authors (Morning)
Cheryl Ball, Editor, Kairos, Illinois State University
Douglas Eyman, Senior Editor, Kairos, George Mason UniversityThis half-day workshop will guide and encourage authors interested in composing digital scholarship for online journals. Editors will discuss authoring processes from the beginning of research projects to the publication stage, including visualizing your design to add value to your research project, storyboarding/prototyping, creating sustainable and accessible designs, querying editors, finding local resources, submitting webtexts, and revising in-progress work. Although the workshop’s primary emphasis will be on webtext-sized digital scholarship (for journals like Kairos), authors interested in larger projects such as online collections and digital books will also benefit from this workshop. The editors in attendance can also speak to individual authors’ needs regarding the teaching and evaluating of digital scholarship.
Format: Editors will start with a Q&A session about digital scholarship, followed by one-on-one or small group feedback in a flexible format allowing authors to raise questions and get help on any stage of their research with the aims of publishing that research in a digital environment. After the break-out groups, workshop participants will return to share their project/idea with the group and create networking and support opportunities for the future.
VoiceThread - An Introduction to Visual Podcasting
Area 3 Writing Project (A3WP) Workshop 1 (Morning)Gail Desler, Elk Grove Unified School District
In this hands-on session, participants will explore VoiceThread, a free, web-based digital-storytelling application that allows users to share their stories through audio, images, videos or text. We will examine the many ways teachers and students are using this Kindergarten-Adult technology as a storytelling tool, a deep thinking tool, a research tool, an expository communication tool, and even an assessment tool.
Best Practices for Online Writing Instruction (Afternoon)
Geoffrey Middelbrook, University of Southern California
Keith Gibson, Utah State UniversityWeb Newbold, Ball State University
Vicki Martineau, National University
Sharon Henriksen, IUPUI
Rich Rice, Texas Tech
Becky Rickly, Texas TechThe CCCC Committee on Best Practices for Online Writing Instruction will bring together those currently involved (or with an eye toward getting involved) in online education. We have two goals for this workshop: 1) a demonstration of current approaches to online education; 2) a conversation about determining best practice for online writing instruction.
To accomplish our first goal, we will encourage those currently involved in online education to demonstrate their programs and describe some of the strengths and weaknesses of their approaches. We will meet in a computer lab, so we will be able to see the content management systems, interface options, etc, that have been employed in various settings. We hope to have several participants in this discussion, providing a number of perspectives on successful online education.
The discussion of these perspectives will lead to the second portion of the workshop: piloting an online survey regarding online writing instruction, to be administered on a large scale within the composition and rhetoric community. We will engage workshop participants in an open discussion about the survey design, structure, and question items, eliciting feedback and critique for the overall improvement of the instrument.
Based on the analysis of data collected from focus group reports and field visits conducted throughout Year 1 and 2, the intention of the Committee’s survey is to examine and measure issues concerning the identification of best practices for:
- online writing instruction in hybrid and distance-based composition classrooms;
- using various online media and pedagogies for the teaching of writing with both synchronous and asynchronous modalities and taking into consideration currently popular learning management environments;
- using online writing instruction for English language learners; and
- training and professional development of online writing instructors.
The results of this workshop will help the committee produce and distribute a survey that will be theoretically grounded and pedagogically useful as we work toward establishing best practices for online writing instruction.
Adobe Presenter: Moving Towards Seamless and Sustainable Online Instruction (Afternoon)
Teryl Sands, Arizona State University
Jill Scheifelbein, Arizona State University
Rob Morales, Arizona State UniversityThe purpose of this workshop is to present Adobe Presenter as a means of moving towards seamless and sustainable online instruction. Students may feel distanced from their instructor in an online course. The use of audio can make an online course present as more interactive for students. Adobe Presenter provides instructors with the ability to give audio lectures over PowerPoint slides. The audience for this presentation is writing teachers, both new and experienced, who are, or are contemplating using audio as a feature in their online courses. We will focus on Adobe Presenter, which is a plug-in feature for Microsoft PowerPoint, as a way to provide audio content for online courses.
The workshop will draw from current practices and teaching experiences in online learning environments. The presentation will provide teachers with instruction on how to use Adobe Presenter. We will also address the most effective strategies for teaching writing courses using Adobe Presenter such as enriching chapter presentations. The panel will describe our experiences using Adobe Presenter by giving examples of successes as well as failures with our own online courses. We will include current theory and recommendations on practices in the field of online learning on how use of Adobe Presenter moves us closer to the goal of seamless and sustainable online instruction where teachers are able to develop more personal online presence to students.
We will provide participants with a handout providing instructions and guidelines on developing their own Adobe Presentation. Examples will be given from own online courses focusing on function and best practices for using Adobe Presenter, and we will answer questions throughout our presentation. Workshop participants will have hands-on experience developing their own Adobe Presentation during this workshop.
Area Three Writing Project (A3WP) Workshop 2 (Afternoon)
Blogging is Academic (1:30-2:45)
Lou Buran, Corning Union High School and Northern California Writing Project
Blogging encourages students to write academically. After considering features of academic writing, we will discuss how writing blog posts incorporates many of these features. We will examine how standard blogging practices and common blogging tools reinforce academic skills. We will consider the claim based nature of blogs, how research is typically quoted and cited within blogs, and how tools such as wysiwyg editors shape the writing. We will look at examples of student work and techniques used in blog posts such as "linking", using "blockquotes", and formatting with "pagebreaks". Attendees will learn some common and simple web coding familiar to bloggers.
http://lmnob.com/lou/practice/academic-blogging/
Beyond the Box: Crafting Meaningful Curriculum For Our Multi-Modal World (3:00-4:30)
Bee Foster, Area 3 Writing Project
Beyond the Box: Crafting Meaningful Curriculum For Our Multi-Modal World
To succeed in today's world requires the ability to navigate a wider variety of media. Newspapers, books, magazines, and other kinds of "traditional" text, are no longer the primary means our students use to interact with the world around them. Using the California Writing Project's new definition of "text" and "text-sets" participants will be given the opportunity to explore ways non-traditional text fit the reading and writing process.