Slashdot Mirror
Innovative Uses for a Computer Classroom?
flard asks: "I will be teaching a Freshman English class at a medium sized public university, in a computer classroom for next semester. Every student has their own machine with an internet connection. I am thinking about using a weblog for them to post their work and critique each other. Do you guys have any other cool ideas on what to do and what NOT to do?" How can the computers best be applied to assist in teaching a non-technical class? Use of a weblog is a start, but are there other pieces of software that can be deployed in such a setting?
Spring 1997 to be precise, I took a College Writing (English) section that was focused on online writing. Some of the things we did in class involved not actually speaking in class, but "chatting" over IRC with each other (even role playing as various internet folks and taking their views in the discussion). Personally, had blogs been as visible then as they are now, I think that would've been a great addition. Many classes have regular journals as part of their requirements anyway.
also introduces them to concept of open source, open peer review.
As they can get at the source, they can build new functions onto it. This could be an assignment.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
Rohcester Institute of Technology has a online submission system that checks for
:) They work great here at RIT. You won't believe how effective the plagiarism avoidance solution is.
1. Minimum assignment requirements met
2. Plagiarism
3. Submission/Deadline requirements
Hope you can get that setup
- Santosh
Santosh Dawara
Strange as it may sound you could have them each log into IRC, set yourself as the Moderator for the channel. Then take turns working on sentence structure, spelling and grammar.
*shrug*
Instead of passing notes in class, the students can use instant messenger to call you names behind your back.
Of course, with a good packet sniffer, you can snatch the notes from their grasp and read them aloud. Just like with paper!
Why not use a Yahoo group and subscribe them all.
You could disallow non-students and maintain a very private discussion.
A weblog sounds like a really cool idea. It would also be neat to have some sort of forum setup for them to access and have disscussion on class topics and such (a forum just seems like a more "live" things than a weblog).
letting them compete for First Post on /.?
...and it degenerated into the teacher saying "stop touching the keyboard" every five minutes. No matter what concept for curriculum one comes up with, as long as the students can get onto the Internet, they will. I even was more creative than most, since I SSHed to the university solaris server, which was an arguably legitimate use, only to then launch a black and white console IRC session. I didn't get caught, but several other students with IM clients or GUI-based IRC clients did. Nothing punitive came of it though, because there were no real enforcement policies.
The class could have been much more efficiently run without computers, or at least without a live Internet connection. Some (like my case) will always find a way though the campus network, but if it can be minimized, that's the only way it will work.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Google for wiki. It's a website that anyone can change, keeping a changelog of course. You could have a lot of fun with one (or a few) of those, especially if any type of creative writing is to be going on.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Post an essay topic, let the kids review the submissions with mod points given to your favorite students. Just like Slashdot.
I think something like the system that powers http://www.sciscoop.com/ would be usefull.
Provide a forum for both discussion of instructor posted "articles" as well as a way for students to post their own writting samples, which can be reviewed/critiqued/commented-on by other students, in such a way that the "cream" rises to the top, and is more visible by all students.
-- The Hoss Man
I say, leave technology out of English. Time would be better spent teaching the way that it has worked for hundreds of years - without the computer. Sure, computers can aid those with good typing skills in getting a paper done faster, but they far and away are useless in such courses as a teaching aid. If it were an engineering course, I would say differently - the world has changed much through the transition from slide rules to calculators to computers. But leave English out of it.
My wife taught an English writing course for several years (to non-native speakers) and used some Perl scripts I wrote for her to do things like forums (where the students were required to participate in online discussions about topics of interest to them) and a "random topic generator" (where a topic like what would appear on the TOEFL would pop up, and they had 30 minutes to write an essay on it). My wife also did the old-fashioned thing and had the students turn in papers, but she would type them up and post them online so that the students could see how each other did. She must have done something right, 'cause the students always loved her class.
I suppose what I'm recommending are forums. Never really used weblogs, so I can't comment on that.
Just wondering if they were tablet PC's or regular PC's (laptop or desktop, doesn't really matter). At Drexel University, we just started using tablet PC's in several classes, but the main one non-computer science/engineering related would be for math courses. The tablet PC's enable students to easily work out problems using the ability to "write-out" the math problems quickly and easily save into Word documents as image files by using the pens to free-hand the symbols, etc., used in math courses.
:P )
Not sure how else you would use them in an english class per say, but it at least would elliminate the need for typing in on the keyboard (not that it would make it easier for the instructor to read later on
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
1) Modifying report cards/grades (old unisys machine login: iladministrator pass: xxx)
2) Porn. nuff said.
I took a class like the one you describe as a freshman, and the instructor spent substantially more time helping students who were unfamilar with web publishing, and even basic computer skills in a few cases, than he did helping students develop their writing skills or discussing course reading materials.
In short, be sure you don't lose focus on what's really important to teach during your course.
I suggest looking at setting up Wiki. Collaborative writing with ability to make links inside and outside the wiki and the ability to edit each other's texts which will put a different spin on the nature of the collaboration. Also, the sheer simplicity of it will focus the students on the content rather than on playing around with a bunch of software widgets.
Use the computers only where it makes sense.
The Weblogs are a good idea, because it allows the students to critique each others' papers on their at their convenience. And of course the Internet is a great research tool.
However most teachers fall victim to the temptation of using computers too often. Putting today's lesson into Flash may be "cool", but it doesn't help the student learn the material. English is about the written word, not about the latest technology.
Also, if you use the computers on a regular basis, there will always be a few students with poor computer skills or who crash the machine that will demand immediate attention. This iterrupts the flow of the class and cuts into precious class time.
Think twice about trying any of the suggestions here. Because college classes should be about learning first, using technology second (or third, or fourth...)
They make dandy paperweights. Sutdents need to know how to do real math without calculators. Hell, I'd even advocate the return to the slide rule and abacus. When the power goes out, what are they going to do? Probably die. Pity.
Things NOT to do in class with pc's
- Do not give students an 'open' environment (shell). They'll break out of it in no time and ignore the rest of the class. Even worse, they'll hack other students' (or the professors') computers and make a mess.
- Do not allow file sharing whatsoever EXCEPT via a main central shared folder. Any other way will eventually result in warez and pr0n.
- Do not allow e-mail or IMs to be read during class. Another disaster for non-class related communication. Better yet, disable all network communications except maybe port 80.
- Do not allow students to run non-approved programs. If they want to, they should use their home pc for that.
- Constantly run a sniffer on the class segment to check for 'abnormal communication'
Okay, maybe you can create some exceptions to these rules for the highest graders. But you shouldn't.
I'm an instructional technologist for a large university, and your concern here is one I find myself discussing with a lot of faculty lately.
Here are some precautions and some ideas:
* Be careful how much you require your students to learn in order to use the tools you choose -- frustration with technology will overcome any benefit from the tools.
* Identify and use 'peer experts' in your class to help you teach the basics.
* Using Blogging in a writing class is a fantastic way for your students to gain ownership of their writing online, but you'll have to work hard to encourage anything like collaboration, peer reviewing, or even quality. This is a good use for a detailed syllabus.
* An easy way of supplementing a Blog is to require the students to build a web-based portfolio on which they can post edited 'highlights' from their blog.
* Be precise about your requirements. I recommend giving seperate credit for 'participation' and 'attendance' online. This means that they have to do something meaningful to get the 'participation' points, but by simply posting anything they'll earn the 'attendance' points. Sounds hokey, but it really works to show students how to go beyond just posting to posting something worthwhile.
Okay . . . enough edu-speak. Let the technophiles sound off, because I'm curious to hear what these creative minds will offer as alternatives to blogging.
--- Brian Richard
As time goes on, I keep discovering that more and more commonly-used cliche's trace back to famous pieces of literature. (ie, "Neither a borrower, nor a lender be", "Good fences make good neighbors", "Out, out.. damned spot!", etc.). It surprises me how ignorant most people (including me) are about where these came from.
Now, looking back on my English experiences, I think it would have been pretty cool if each student were given a phrase and they had to use the net to find out what literature it originally came from and have to read enough of the surrounding text to be able to describe the context of the scene where the phrase occured (like Lady MacBeth trying to wash the blood off, etc).
Perhaps a weblog for each student would make more sense. A single installation of moveable type (www.moveabletype.org) can service an arbitrary number of weblogs. You could also have one main weblog where each student turns in the link to his work, and where assignments are posted.
Photos.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
P0rn. At least watch their pings some, so that they have a fear of being caught. You can be responsible for what the view during class time, unless you make a "contract" in which their parents sign and it specifies what they can and cannot do. And there might be some skript kiddies too, so make sure they cant install any foregn software such as... nmap and ping flooders. If they can figure it out themselvs, how to DOS someone, or hack into a program. DO NOT TAKE AWAY THEIR COMPTUER RIGHTS!!! Explain to them why it is wrong, and then teach the class about what that child did, and how to make sure it does not happen again. Don't make a child loose privelages because he hacked someone, just make some backups, and use it as a teaching oppertunity. Next, you don't want to make the interface too complicated, not everyone wants to learn about computers and how they work. (nobody important anyways...) Make sure that if they absolutely hate computers, that it wont be too hard for them to do their work. Have some tutorials and README's on hand on a server for their access should the get in a bind. And make sure you're understanding to those who have trouble, not eveyone knows a lot about computers, and we need to integrate them in a friendly enviornment. Most of all, make sure they have some fun learning, because then they'll retain all that you teach them.
OMG OMG OMG WTF OMG WTF BBQ STFU RTFM, OMFG OMG OMG OMG ROFL LMAO OMG WTF STFU ROFLMAO
but the average English teacher/class would have no freaking clue to modify perl code.
A wiki textbook might be a better idea.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Whatever you end up doing, be lienent on those paper deadlines. Freshmen are the worst for doing quality work on deadlines. A good thing to do is set a deadline for class one day. Then say that you think they could use a little more time on their work and push it back by a class session. This is a life saver for the student who punched out 10 pages in one night and really did not have a chance to proof it.
Caffeine Good
"Why not use a Yahoo group and subscribe them all."
Yahoo! Groups is not a good idea for something that is University Curriculum, especially if it is required. If someone managed to break into the system, there is not IT department to run to, and if Yahoo! changes policies, then you are left holding the bag. If you intend to use collaborative efforts digitally (which I strongly recommend against), at least use something that is available locally, provided or maintained by someone that you can go yell at if something goes wrong.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Computers have created a society without attention spans or connection to the real world around them. Writing is a physical activity that should take time to produce quality results. Blogs are useless and a horrible waste of time. Please have your students write well not in excess.
Check out this article from one of Americas best essayist/poet/fiction write
See it as an addon. Don't turn the blog (at home) into the whiteboard (in class). You're a teacher not a webmaster. Refrain from commenting on the blog yourself but merely read it and use it as feedback. Encourage students to use it though but let *them* do the discussing.
(all IMHO of course)
With a cheap mike and headphones, the computer could easily be used to record and playback speech. Sort of similar to the old language labs schools had with tape decks and study carrels that you practiced speech in.
Ever heard yourself talk? Sounds different when played back, and that can be a useful tool when teaching someone proper pronunciation.
-G "We love to buy books, because we are buying the belief we have time to read them" - Warren Zevon
TikiWiki is a combination of Wiki, CMS, Forums, chat, blogs, image/file galleries and a lot more that let users collaborate in a lot of different ways. It also have a very highly configurable permission system, that enable controlling what some can do and some others no, or what features a group or an user can access.
While we're nowhere near the 1 computer for every student mark (something like 1 for every TWENTY) we do have quite a good infrastructure set up for those who are 1337 enough to know it exists.
* We have our own irc server, which is meant to be used for only Uni related topics but somehow falls short of that
* The uni has a newsgroup server and most subjects (at least that I do) have a newsgroup which the lecturer/tutors check regularly and answers questions
* Each lecturer/tutor has an email address that they can be contacted on for answering questions of any type. That is to say questions like "If I were to be sick on Tuesday, how would it affect me" as opposed to "wanna date ROFL"
The downside of all this is that we no longer get assignments printed out and handed to us in class, we have to go to the course website (oh yeah, each course has a website) and download the PDFs and print it out ourselves. Some of them take up MANY pages.
We also have a place where we can submit our assignments/projects electronically which saves BIG BUCKS on printing costs. For the students that is, the cost is usually passed onto the school which prints them out because it's easier to read for the lecturers/tutors. (bit of a double edged sword that one)
All university administration is handled via computer - ie signing up for classes/tutes etc. which is fantastic when it's working.
I guess a lot of that goes outside the scope of the question, but hey, at least it opens up some branches which you might not have thought of and want to explore further.
Sex Ed. nuff said
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
The phpBB Community Forum is an example of the software in use, if you want to get an idea of its capabilities. All open source. I'm not involved with the project, just a happy user. :-)
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
And since I'm replying to an "interesting" post, mine may not be flagged FLAIMBAIT... maybe :)
Computers are a tool. In this setting, they'll be a distraction. They're not going to make a very non-technical class like this more interesting. They'll just provide an outlet for disinterested people to keep themselves busy.
Back in my day, we used books and notebooks. When it came time to write a paper (a formal effort, not a weblog), we did use a computer. But that was not during class.
I think you really need to look elsewhere for ways to get students interested and involved. Computers will be a mistake.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
He has been playing for about 7 years now. I asked him about the character he plays... and he could have gone on for hours. Read some of the "Role Play Logs". Amazing. And amazing that they're ephemeral - imagine if every action were logged! We could spend years just as spectators, watching wars and communities from hundreds of different perspectives.
--Just the place for a snark!
In that context, they're going to be using a lot of AIM slang, announce on the first day that it's an English class, and you expect English spelling and English grammar. In general I don't like computer classrooms, especially not for English. They get in the way of actual discussion. The best environment for a literature class is a big table where everyone looks everyone else in the face. Don't just ask your students to memorize the plot, ask them to think critically about the books. Why is this an important thing to read? What does it say about society? Literature is more than a fancy way of telling stories, don't let them discuss books on the level that they'd discuss an action movie, they're definitely capable of deeper analysis than "it was cool when..." Also, for high school English, don't underestimate short stories. You should definitely be assigning a lot of novels as well, but frequently young students are much better at thinking about short works critically. On the first day, have them read Hemingway's "A Clean Well Lighted Place" to get the ball rolling. You can read it in 10 minutes and the story obviously exists for a reason other than to tell about some event that happened to some characters. Also, I'd suggest The Bell Jar, Lord of the Flies, Huck Finn, and Catcher in the Rye as great books for ninth graders. If you're going to do any Shakespeare, Othello is probably the most accessible of the 4 tragedies. As far as the computers, I wouldn't use them for anything beyond in-class typewriters. Certainly don't make them do powerpoint presentations or webpages. What on earth does that have to do with English. Some sort of continuing reading response diary is a good idea, but make sure out-loud discussion and debate outweighs typing. Oh and they should be writing an essay a week, at least. It's a shame how poor the writing of most high schoolers is. Anyway, good luck.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
It's been a while, but as I recall freshman english was supposed to drag "victims" of high school english up to a level of proficiency where they would have the reading comprehension and writing skills necessary to survive in a college environment. If this is still the case (maybe skills are better these days - or expectations are lower), I would be careful to avoid using the technology just because it's there. The last thing they need is another distraction. I can see how a weblog might be helpful. However, some of the worst writing I've ever read has been on the internet, and some of the worst of that has been on weblogs.
As I understand them, weblog programs are designed to allow one person to post an article, and then other people to comment on it. I do not think this is well suited to what you want to do, because 1) you will have multiple people posting multiple works, 2) you will probably not want to allow comments from random strangers. Using weblogs, each student would need to have his or her own weblog, which would make it more difficult for collaborative use of the type you envision.
For these purposes, a forum would be much better; forums allow for multiple, separate discussions to take place in a centralized area. They also allow the forum administrator to lock down the forum in such a way that only members can post messages, and the administrator gets to say who can be a member. This would help keep the discussion on topic. Each student's work would go in a different thread -- say Sally M. Haverforth posts the first draft of her argumentative essay on Milton's treatment of women in a thread called "S. Haverforth -- Milton: Masochistic Misogynist?". Subsequent comments from her peers would be replies to that initial posting, keeping the whole thing neatly organized.
If you have access to an appropriately equipped server, I recommend phpBB for the job: it's easy to set up and administer, open source, free of charge, and fairly easy to use.
Have all computers powered up and in fully working order. Turn off the screensavers and make sure the monitor doesn't turn off, and that the network icon is active so they can see that it is connected. You want a nice fat green start menu just begging to be pressed. Now for the entire course anyone who touches their computer gets an immediate F.
The discipline will be priceless.
Anonymous FTP'ing or such things. It took us one weekend with somebody leaving the anon FTP open for a nice 7200 new folders to be found on the server at work (no, it wasn't me)
I'm really not keen on computers in the classroom unless it is required for technical reasons. Face time is too precious as it is, it seems stupid to waste those fifty minutes with everyone's face buried in a CRT when they can do the exact same work on their own time in any public library.
During my freshman year I had a few classes that were located in computer labs such as programming and a business class. In both cases no one would pay any attention to the instructor. AIM, ICQ, news and just surfing were the main culprits. I would recommend pulling the plug when you plan on actually teaching them material and then finding a way to limit there activities on the internet during assignments. I think you will find that most people will tend to do other things during class and not the work at hand. I would have to say keep an English class in a regular classroom, to keep the distractions to a minimum. I would promote the use of these resources as a study aid or way to complete assignments.
~ Luxin There's no place like 127.0.0.1
Technology is ruining our society and social skills... Be a pompus ass and require them to WRITE (with pencil & pen) their journels. Too many kids today have short hand from chat and stuff and it's leaking out into the real world. When I have to do a google search to see what a student meant when he stated in a story that he was roflao, then I knew it went too far!
(Not really, thats a ficticious example, but it does happen!)
By the way, don't no english folks go correcting me grammer or spelling... (TIC)
Try http://www.nicenet.org . Simple, widely used and FREE. It's designed for the classroom.
Imagine teaching a basic math class to second graders and giving them calculators. They'll learn how to use calculators. They won't learn basic arithmetic.
You'll have to look very closely at what you want your students to learn. This might be the ability to spell-check and grammar-check their own writing without being dependent on a word processor. It might be to write regularly. It might be to read available text and review them.
Whatever it is, you will want to make sure the computer is nothing more than a tool - like a pencil. As several others have pointed out, it is very easy to abuse computers in a classroom setting. Access to the Internet is very hard to control completely and IM/IRC are not much more effective than group discussions.
The main benefit of computers might be minimizing paper. Sending the assignments and notes to each computer and having students do their assignments on the computer to send to you could be a great savings in paper.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
The best thing I would want a computer infront of me for is information
:(
What is my grade? What did I get on that last assignment? When is the next assignment due? Any errata on that? Can I chat with other students in the class re whatever I want?
etc etc etc
Im so borring. Sorry
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
Its to bad you dont have a mac lab, with those it is much harder bypass the restrictions on what you can and cant do, not to mention the difficulty of damaging the actual software. However, i would reccomend you make sure your machines are using Deep Freeze, as it resets the machine to a predefined state at every boot, so if you get a virus or a bunch of p2p software, you just reset and it is gone, it is also very convenient, as you can defrost a drive for one boot, and can set a non protected area, so students can save documents localy.
Since i've been thinking a lot recently about becoming a highschool teacher, i just read it that way.
Anyway, yeah, make sure you teach them to be a bit more critical readers than me.
And apply for a room transfer. A computer classroom is a gimmick. Gimmicks have their place in highschool - it's your job to hold their attention even if they'd rather be 100 miles away, but in college anyone who doesn't feel like learning can just leave. The computers will only distract the students. They can post to a blog using library computers or their own computers during time outside of class. I promise you that your class will go better if you get a better room. Ideally one with a table like I talked about above.
Oh and you weren't very clear in your question: is this an English class as in books and composition, or teaching the English language to those who don't know it? There are a variety of useful computer applications for learning language. Literature on the other hand is for dead trees and human discussion. Your students will be reading their email and not listening if you put computers in front of them.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Will your students be able to type?
Do they have experience using a computer?
Are they comfortaqble using a mouse?
Do they know where the any key is?
The first thing I was taught in my teacher ed classes was not to assume any prior knowledge.
My advice would be to forget the computer room for teaching English. If not your class will turn into a computer class.
Now if there is an additional "writting lab" or something like that that isn't instructional, but hands on (in otherwords the students are expected to be doing something rather than lectured at) that is a great use for a computer lab. Each student can use the time to do what they need to do.
#include
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Well, you could try setting up a forum. I'd go for that in favour of your standard weblog (not that a forum can't be made into a weblog).
Setting up a forum allows you to create different areas, with diferent themes. It could also be interesting that users could pick their own avatars, theme, and you can set static user titles, titles by post count, etc.
phpBB is incredibly easy to setup. If you have a running DB (MySQL, PgSQL, whatever), instalation is is a snap. I suggest you take a look at it. Visit their Community Forums for an example.
Other software you could take a peek at:
OpenBB - another great forum system
Course forum - never tried it, looks good
I've also used InvisionBB, which I don't know the URL offhand.
Have them correct the spelling/grammar errors for any 100 slashdot posts for a particular article.
Shouldn't be to hard to find them errors eh?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
One thing to investigate when you are setting this up is your school's policies on student privacy. At my university, at least, we have to be a little careful about letting students see other students' work. I often do (low-tech) peer review sessions; I will have students read drafts of each others' papers and give comments. It is all anonymous, because in my classes I never have students put their names on any assignment or exam; I do it all my grading by the last 4 digits of their ID numbers. And it is voluntary; I do this on the day papers are due, and those who choose to participate in the peer review get an extension to make corrections. If you choose not to participate, you simply turn in your final draft that day (and leave class early!). Still, my dean told me last term that I need to start having students sign a sheet in which they formally waive their right to privacy and agree to participate in the review.
This post is dedicated to all of those
I adhere to the other extreme: school computers should not be in "computer labs". Students should be using them all the time: taking notes, looking up references on the internet, IMing relevent data to classmates without disturbing the class as a whole, etc. Yeah, this can be abused. But if students are not motivated and involved in the classwork, they'll find ways to goof off, period.
Don't take my word for it. Look at schools that have followed this philosophy. Higher test scores, increased attendance, increased interest in writing...
I think the Squishdot product on Zope makes for a pretty nice weblog. It has nice easy control setting for allowing others to moderate and post things. I have never used slashcode, its probably the same way.
On the other hand, an idea that several of my professirs took up was to allow students to use computer-based forums (web boards, email lists, etc.) as alternatives to class participation. In some cases, students who were obviously petrafied of speaking in front of a live class could offer insightful comments and lively debate via a web forum or email list. Meanwhile, folks like myself who enjoyed shooting their mouths off in front of the prof kept discussions going in the physical world. By having the class room and online activities compliment eachother, rather than forcing one or the other down the throat of a student for whom they might not be appropriate, you give some folks who might not otherwise contribute an opportunity to get more out of (and give more to) the class.
Another useful thing that I've seen in non-tech courses is providing access to sources via a course web site. This is, unfortunately, subject to a variety of copyright restrictions, but students appreciate being able to get sources as a pdf or other document via a web site rather than having to trek out to a library reserve and feed their laundry money into a copying machine. It also has the advantage that no single student (or subset of students) can tie up a resource during a critical period- such as right before a paper or test. I had a professor who would post copies of articles from his private collection of out-of-print sources on obscure East and Central Asian history as pdf or ps documents on the course site, and their availability this way saved a lot of time and money in trying to track down sources.
So the overall recommendation would be this; make it flexible, make it helpful, and make it appropriate for the medium. If you can't say definitively "this is so much better than doing it offline", then it probably means you're about to embark on a serious folly.
you can use the classroom as a theater to watch terminator 3. atleast that is what we did, when i was in school :)
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
If you have any sort of online posting/review process where the students can view and critique an essay or other assignment, it would probably be wise to allow for anonymous posting and response.
The critique portion being anonymous is simple. If someone wants to point out negative aspects of the assignment, they don't have to worry about the other students thinking they are a "teacher's pet" or just being malicious. Once the novelty of posting anonymously wears off, you should start getting some honest feedback. Of course, you'll need some mechanism to prevent responses that don't fit within guidelines set forth at the beginning of the course.
The anonymous nature for the author is, perhaps, not as necessary. It would allow a student who is below the average level of ability to escape being branded as "slow". Some teachers in my past felt that embarassment was a powerful motivating force. I don't think I agree with that. Embarassment is always associated negatively. Why would anyone think a negative emotion would encourage a positive reaction? Maybe that's just me...
You could also throw in a few "fake" anonymous essays along the way. Perhaps they would reinforce or remind the students of topics covered a week or two ago, or possibly introduce a new topic coming in the next couple of classes.
Freshman English you said? no problem!
Just install some FreeBSD's with the Lynx browser, make them write their work in SGML using vi.
Then, if you see someone whose eyes don't roll like a Slot machine when you announce this , let him browse Slashdot while the others concentrate on your teachings.
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
My freshman year of college I had an English professor who focused on teaching us to write for an online audience.
To illustrate the difference between writing for print and writing for the web, one of our projects was to write a research paper and then adapt the content for a website. She taught us the bare basics of HTML, as well as some design styles.
But the main thing she focused on was how we had to adapt the content for the medium. Paragraphs had to be much shorter--preferably not paragraphs at all, but rather a list of bullet points. As a rule of thumb, she told us that we had to cut the length of the information to 25% of the length of the paper. Much less than that and you lose important information; much more and you lose the interest of the audience.
Also, she demanded that the websites be readable in any page order. No fair making users click through the pages in order, because they simply won't do it. So while you can lay out a nice long cohesive argument in a research paper, you can't do that in a website. You have to post your conclusions right on the home page, and then have links to other pages that have supporting material, but in such a way that each page can be read without having read or seen any of the other pages.
Competant communication in online media is a deceptively difficult skill, so if you can teach your students a few simple things like that (and if they actually learn) you will have helped them immensely.
This is not to say that you will end up with a bunch of people who are morons critiquing everybody else's work and ending up with them all dumbing down even more, but it's a possibility. Another possibility is that they'll all rise to a level of Borg-like hive mind and produce amazing work. Personally, I'd bet on the former more often than the latter. Although in classroom settings people often open up the door to peer review and discussion about works and ideas, it's almost always moderated and on subject, so that the instructor/moderator immediately has the opportunity to call "Bullshit" when Sally is full of it, or "Bravo" when she has a deep insight. If you've got blogs gone crazy, you don't have that control.
Peer review on something technical probably works much better because you're focused on getting something done, and on getting the correct results.
It might be better if we knew what type of English class this is? Are you teaching them the basics of the English language? Are you teaching creative writing? Is it literature, comparative or not? Is it focused on a particular style of writing and literature? English covers so many different things that the possibilities for effective use of technology are really different for each of them.
But something that you probably should do if you don't pay heed to the many people telling you to get the heck out of hte computer lab for the English class is something I've seen for business meetings. They're systems which are essentially whiteboards where students can post questions online for you to cover during the lecture, as well as comments, anonymous or not. So if you're covering Wuthering Heights and aren't properly covering the psychosis of Heathcliff, someone can say something like "Please cover more Heathcliff's obvious lack of proper seratonin function" or even just "slow down, you're going too fast" and you (and/or everybody else) can see and/or respond live.
I have taken 3 graduate classes that were internet based. My experience is that unless I just absolutely enjoy the subject being taught then forcing me to do online that which could be done, the real interactive way, in class is a horrible waste of your students' time. So,please don't rob your students of the valuable input that comes from the spontaneous interaction that can only happen in a classroom setting, especially when it comes to asking for critiques of one another. Doing this in class or face to face can save lots of their time. However, you can have students post the process that a particular paper is going through; their changes and what not. For instance: documenting in a blog what he/she incorporated from student X's critique. I have six years of paid teaching experience in Spanish and just as many in other areas on a volunteer basis...
If you're going to be using computers as a major medium in your teaching, why not include in the subject(s) Internet Lingo (also known as Ebonics for Geeks) and all the pretty acronyms people come up with for...EVERYTHING. With all the Text Messaging done with cell phones, and now being carried over more and more onto the internet, it's able to become an acceptable form of the English Language. It may seem lazy, but i see more and more people, even those that are older, using it. Why not give the students an advantage with being taught about it, where it originated from, and all the many uses for it. This may, infact, be a good learning experience for yourself, since i'm sure most of your students know most of it already. Make it a big group discussion, ask around the room for different ones, and opinions on them, and most of all, have fun. Students seem to have the ability to learn things better if it's something that they use out of school, and if you can link these things to more of the basics of English, they just might understand :D
your sins into me, oh my beautiful one.
Giving an elite few the ability to moderate posts on the basis of favoritism barely works on Slashdot, let alone a high school classroom.
Imagine the resentment that could be generated towards the class mods for weighted moderation.
Imagine the abuse of power that a mod could use against a classmate they didn't like.
Teachers have favored students, no question. But giving mod points on that basis would undermine at least the illusion of fairness.
I think the only reason Slashdot works at all is the relative anonymity of the posters. Most moderation here seems to be on the basis of the posts alone.
If you use Slashcode in the classroom , give everyone a mod point per topic. I think it will save you a lot of headache later.
If anyone thinks this is some sort of commentary about our beloved Slashdot , you might be right. I'm only a little bitter about never getting any mod points myself.
This sounds like 1998 style overenthusiasm for the net.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
What is gained from using a computer in a classroom? If you can't answer that question, then don't do it. There are plenty of good uses for computers as resources for the course (writing papers, research, email listservs, class messageboards), but having every student on a computer during class time sounds like it would take away from teaching English.
For every thing you come up with, ask yourself if that could just as easily be done outside of class - the blogging suggestion does not need to be done during class time. The computers will be a distraction. I think they will be more likely to hinder teaching than help it.
the Wiki is the new real medium.
An easy way to write. Content oriented. Accessible from anywhere.
wiki wiki wiki.
-pyrrho
Warning: the book was originally bundled with a CD with all the Perl source files in Mac format. (Sad how often this happens.) Perl interpreters on other platforms don't grok this, so they withdrew this printing and replaced it with a corrected version. The screwed-up version was sold off to remainder houses. You can save money buying the screwed up copies, but you have to convert the files, or download corrected files.
Usually the way these things work is by comparing against a giant database of "papers available on the web" and using various algorithms for judging similarity. This catches at least 95% of people who downloaded a paper from the web and made minor changes to it. In CS, where submissions are usually electronic, profs will often augment this database with all previous submissions for the course, sometimes dating back a decade or so. This catches at least 95% of people who copied an assignment from a friend who took the class a year or two ago (or even someone who graduated 5 years ago) and made minor changes (like search-replace on variable names, or some minor structural reworking) to it. Obviously this is harder to do in the humanities, unless you require electronic submissions in some format parsable as text or you OCR everything turned in.
As for unattributed quotes, you're certainly correct there. It's a completely intractable problem: the only way to know for sure that a particular sentence (or paragraph) was not plagiarized from somewhere is to check it against every single paragraph ever written in the history of the written word. Checking against some common sources might work decently though, especially if limited to a specific field (i.e. you can probably catch a significant percentage of plagiarized paragraphs in an anthropology paper by using a database of the 1000 most-cited anthropology books/papers).
But in any case, these things are mainly targetted at outright cheating: copying entire essays or large portions of essays from someone else.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
One very nice implementation of the wiki concept is TWiki. My school's CS department has its own TWiki set up, divided into subwebs for many different courses. The courses on our wiki are almost all Computer Science courses, but there are a few First Year Seminar webs (located here, here, and here) that might give you some ideas as to how to use a wiki in a non-technical class.
We did this all the time in our CAD labs and Structural Systems lab class. Where ever you were on campus we could log into our vax acount then intern log unto IRC, or e-mail. One teacher had a system of walking around the classroom then reading peoples e-mail out loud. It was pretty funny when one girls crush became public as she desperately tried turning off her monitor.
You can write weblogs, technical articles, reviews, however the majority of the content seems to be well-written stories. Users of E2 vote on write ups and the authors can see its overall score. There is a lengthy list of editors and management persons who, I am sure, would be more than happy to help you with a project like this.
You may have to be careful about what they read, however, there are a couple "explicit" write ups. But it is all text - no pictures and anything extremely vulgar or inappropriate gets removed.
The site is interesting to browse around and contains lots of good stuff, which helped me realize the true difference between quality literature and normal bland cookie-cutter writing.
I say, leave technology out of English. Time would be better spent teaching the way that it has worked for hundreds of years - without the computer. Sure, printing presses can aid those with good type setting skills in getting a paper done faster, but they far and away are useless in such courses as a teaching aid. If it were an engineering course, I would say differently - the world has changed much through the transition from cuniform to inked quills to illumination. But leave English out of it.
Put the book online and let any reader select a block of text and associate it with a thread of discussion. The text would then be highlighted so that other readers would know that it is being discussed.
The students could use the computers to add and subtract!
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Speaking as a longtime prof, one way to spark lively discussion in a computer classroom is to set up an anonymous quiz/voting booth. Technically it's a simple operation: set up a javascript on your class webpage, use a bit of perl or whatever suits your educational software.
Let's say you're teaching a rhetoric course: use a voting booth to let the students vote which of two takes on a topic was the more persuasive. Then the class discussion can roll on into the why.
Many students feel inhibited from raising the hands or expressing their views verbally in class. But when they see that 33% of their classmates voted the same way they did, they might be more inclined to speak to the point.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
You want "Cool ideas"? It sounds to me like the computers in your classroom are there for novelty value rather than education purposes.
Focus on your job, which is teaching English, grading your students' papers, and discussing the appropriate literature.
J.R.R. Tolkien never had a computer, and he wrote masterpieces. J.R. Kipling, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Melville, and Poe didn't have computers; can you imagine how computers would have improved their skills?
J.K. Rowling doesn't even use a word processor; she just writes her Harry Potter masterpieces in long hand on a yellow pad of paper. (That's a bit extreme.)
How many of your students are going to win a Pulitzer Prize, a Nobel Prize in literature, or even write a book worthy of Oprah's book club?
You should concentrate on that. If you want to be "innovative" in education, make sure you have a set of results that you will achieve. Otherwisee if you want to play with computers, switch to another job. Don't waste your students' or taxpayers' money just so you can goof around pretending to be "innovative".
I agree with the above poster.
In the early 90's I worked on a project sponsored by AT&T to install classrooms of the future in a few universities. While there are undoubtedly things we did poorly and have been improved upon, one of the most striking findings of the project was that some classes did very poorly in the room. They had booked a variety in the theater the first year and found while some technology & science classes obviously benfitted a lot, other classes such a arts & history had a harder time in the room than in a normal classroom.
A few of the findings:
* students often appeared more distracted
* time spent learning software was not made up in efficiency
* less personal contact with the professor & with the material
* transient failures would disrupt the class
If you are searching for ways to use the classroom i would wager that at least to a degree you will be changing your course from english to one that also involves learning about computers or techniques such as blogs. Is that really what you want to teach? If it was me i would seriously consider asking for a room change or for students to turn off the computers during the class but i'm no professor.
Don't get me wrong they had great uses but i think the biggest thing we learned (somewhat as suspected) was that they are not for everything.
This is just my opinion, but...
Try to get them to think about the structure of their documents, rather than just the appearance.
What is a sentence, what is a paragraph? What is a section, and a chapter?
If you can get them to think more about the structure, flow, and content of their writing, it'll help a lot more in the long run than having a huge selection of fonts.
They are getting access to computers for a non-technical class? Your budget must be way too high.
/.... oh, um, never mind then).
Computers make no sense at all for this kind of thing - except possible for rock bottom (~$100) old machines that can function as a cheap yet flexible typewriter. You want them to lean how to write, not how to participate in the endless circle jerk that is blogs (and
At least make them write their essay in vi - that way they might learn something useful at the same time.
Beep beep.
I have to disagree. People will, by their very nature, take the path of least resistance, for what they want to do. If you provide a kid, an adolescent, or a college student with something that they would rather be doing, rather than the prescribed activity, they will do what they want, more often than not.
Education is dictatorial. You're not supposed to get what you want, you're supposed to get what the educational institution offers. By and large, students don't like this. The ones that do are usually in classes whose names are appended in "A", "AP", and "H", and even there you find the bored genius going insane. (S)he'll learn if you provide the knowledge, but if you provide a ready-made distraction, you've just lost.
English needs to be taught in an an immersive way, in my opinion. Computers do not help English instruction.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
And, your Weblog idea falls in the memory space. You are trying to save the written conversations with one or many in a chronological fashion. So, in a way you are trying to create an institutional memory.
You could show your students what a wonderful "institutional memory" Google is. Do searches or exact quotes by remembering just a few words of the quote. By showing how easy it is, you can teach your students to be more precise in their use of references and paraphrasing ideas.
You could also show the students a wealth of english literature on the web that is freely available, You could introduce them to efforts like the Guttenburg project http://www.gutenberg.net/ and let them know that good books don't have to be expensive or out of easy reach locked up in some library somewhere.
You could explain to the students as to how things can be so easily checked for plagiarism, that it is better to give credit where it is due rather than claim it. It might help cultivate a new generation that has no hesitation in acknowledging where the ideas came from - thus, later allowing for a better public discourse in their civic life.
You could show them the power of weblogs in the evolution of ideas, by exposing the various stages of idea development to criticism by peers - seen and unseen. Though a lone author can come up with a great work after being in isolation, I think the probability if a great work is higher if it is exposed to some criticism as the ideas are coalescing in the writers mind. You could also introduce them to literary discussion groups.
You could expose your students to the chunking of ideas in electronic and cyberspace , because ideas have to be expressed in screenfuls, and thus a sort of an unnatural frame is created around the idea. You could also expose them to the different style of organization of chunks of ideas needed when the reader has some element of choice in deciding the sequence. If there is another post on this subject soon, I will try to put more of my thoughts across. I think, as long as you keep you focus correct, and not get caught in the computing aspect, by explore the networking aspect, you can't go wrong. After all, what is writing - it is just a network of words and ideas.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
The question is about teaching in a classroom that has a bunch of computers, not about teaching over the internet. The question is asking: "What can I do to take advantage of the computers that will be in front of every student?"
Exactly how many English classes have ever used a printing press? This tired rhetorical technique is even worse when the idiot using it makes a bad analogy.
...a whole university class full of fresh-monkeys armed with a high-school grasp of English are provided with glorified electronic typewriters. Creation of whole new works of Shakespeare should be right around the corner. :)
(Yes, I know they tried that experiment already. Maybe this bunch won't make a mess on the keyboards.)
We had a targeted group and taught free classes to sell the Mall Vendors Products. It made pretty good income for them.It is a way to to give them new ideas for maybe targeting online businesses
(such as word processing and virtual meeting and collaborative tools that won't require groups to meet in the same place to work on group presentations/papers, for example)...There is the use of that technology for flushing out the "quiet ones" who normally wouldn't have the force of personality to cut across the background noise to support their assertions. Should make the class more lively.
Students could challenge each other's assertions with alternate, internet, sources. Isn't the OED online?
Of course, it raises the bar on your ability to impart knowledge in an insightful and engaging way, since you will, in effect, be competing with the computers.
You could have a website for your tests. No (hardcopy) papers. This would probably be most helpful for final exam, since you could make it live at the beginning of finals and then pull it down at midnight on the last day finals.
Who am I? Why should you listen?
I was an English major (B.A.) who now codes for a living (double minor in Computer Info Systems and TESL - and for the Lingustically Challenged, that's Teaching English as a Second Language).
Good luck. It's the wave of the future.
You want "Cool ideas"? It sounds to me like the computers in your classroom are there for novelty value rather than education purposes.
Focus on your job, which is teaching English, grading your students' papers, and discussing the appropriate literature.
J.R.R. Tolkien never had a computer, and he wrote masterpieces. Twain, Dickens, Kipling, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Melville, and Poe didn't have computers; can you imagine how computers would have affected their skills?
J.K. Rowling doesn't even use a word processor; she just writes her Harry Potter masterpieces in long hand on a yellow pad of paper. (That's a bit extreme.)
How many of your students are going to win a Pulitzer Prize or a Nobel Prize in literature? How many of your students will write a book worthy of Oprah's Book Club (TM)?
You should concentrate on that. If you want to be "innovative" in education, make sure you have a set of measurable results that you will achieve. Otherwise if you want an excuse to play with computers, switch to another job. Don't waste your students' or taxpayers' money just so you can goof around pretending to be "innovative".
Desktop computers are designed to take the user's full attention. They've got a big screen right up in your face and the keyboard and mouse demands use when your hands itch to fidget. It doesn't help that a hundred pleasant distractions wait a few commands away, but I don't think it's the main issue.
Also, I don't know about you, but when I look away from a CRT, the flickering activates my primitive motion vision and draws my eyes back.
Pen computers would be much better suited to classroom use. Current desktops just demand too much of your attention.
You've got a lot of half-assed generalizations and pet theories. My lack of interest in these is extreme. Let's talk about real-world teachers. I've known good ones and bad ones. Good ones don't care about distractions -- they even use them. Bad ones blame their failures on distractions, immoral influences, "human nature" -- everything except their own lack of skill.
But I am grateful to you for one thing: you've made me invent a new epigram: Fascism is the last refuge of the inept.
We used to have web boards for some classes in colloge. You were supposed to read the material and post a comment or question about it ahead of time, which could be used to drive discussion in class.
One practice was to wait until shortly before class started, check the discussion board, pick a comment by someone you didn't like, and post a comment about how you disagreed with everything they said. I could see how that kind of environment could get ugly on a slashcode site.
That being said, if everyone had some mod points, and the prof did a reasonable job of checking for abuses, I think it could work. Most people would think twice about posting obnoxious trolls or flamebait if they're being graded on their participation.
Just don't do it. Teach English. Earn your money the old fashioned way. Computers in the classroom won't help you if you can't teach without them.
Obviously YANAT. As someone who is, let me respond to this:
Just as you can't please all of the people all of the time, you are not going to have every student totally interested and completely focused all of the time. The only way you might be able to achieve this (for a brief period) is with some theatrics which probably adds nothing to the lesson as a whole.
Now, lets say a student mind wanders off... if there are few other distractions one of two things are likely to happen:
- The student will daydream a bit then snap out of it, or
- The student will daydream for the rest of the class.
Either way it's an isolated student. They may miss the lesson entirely, but that's their problem later on.
Now, lets create an environment where it is easy for someone to access the web, IRC, IM, etc:
The same student drifts off and decides to check, say, Slashdot. They start reading an article. Decide to post a response, etc. Suddenly 20 minutes has gone by. At this point even if they turn back to the lesson odds are they've fallen way behind in it and will have trouble following it. This can lead to less than brilliant questions about content covered 10 minutes before - wasting other peoples time (and irritating those who are paying attention). They may distract and disturb those around them.
You're right when you say if they're not interested they'll find ways of goofing off. But when it's a student on their own they aren't likely to disturb others, or encourage them to stop paying attention. If they're ICQing classmates, banging away during a lecture, and what not, they are far more likely to be a disturbance to others.
Since we are in networked computer lab, and actually need it for our classes, this sort of thing can happen. The students who are totally wiped out from work and need a few Zzzz's I'll tend to leave alone. Those who are just goofing off, well, they get called on a lot. Hearing your name and looking up to see the lecture has stopped and everyone is staring at you tends to encourage people to follow along.
Learning is work, nobody likes work. It's a balance though, a sterile and boring class will hold nobody's attention. You try to mix things up and keep it interesting as much as you can while keeping it relevant... but sometimes rules and enforcement are needed for the good of both the distracted student, as well as the class as a whole.
(and this is coming from a one time class clown turned into College teacher. If I ever had myself as a student, I'd have kicked my own ass!)
Blockwars: you know you wanna play.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Check out Moodle (http://moodle.org) it is the best open source LMS available right now and does an awesome job of facilitating discussions. Discussion should be the center piece of any type of online learning. Moodle is easy to setup, easy to configure and easy to use.
Visit moodle.org.
It covers the weblog part of what you want and allows the addition of Journals, Surveys and Quizzes.
Incorporating computers in an English class may give you the opportunity to examine the ways in which technology affects our thought processes and therefore our communication.
One earlier poster said to completely disallow AOLisms. I suppose this means things like LOL or RTFM, etc. I would tend to disagree. Allowing these types of things â" in fact, encouraging them â" gives you a chance to examine them. It's a fact of life that computers are changing the way we communicate and even order our thoughts.
These changes are very recent phenomena but they open up the discussion for other technological changes in the way we communicate. For instance, you could trace the development of different types of "literature" through various technological innovations. It may be difficult to think of oral tradition as a technological innovation (or even literature), but there were very organized methods necessary to transfer a body of knowledge from one generation to the next. When the written word came along, it began to formalize language, providing more structure to our communications and eventually ordering the way we form the thoughts in our head. When the printing press came along, we are suddenly dealing with mass-communication and all of the new rules and structures that come with it.
These are all innovations in the long history of communication and literature, but you can take the computer, a piece of technology for which they've witnessed the development, and use it to point to and compare with these other innovations. Then, choose pieces of literature that illustrate literary concepts from each of these technological ages.
You might check out Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word by Walter J Ong. You could try Life On The Screen by Sherry Turkle. These point to ways that technology affects communication and culture.
As a current major in Computer Science, I feel I have a unique view into the use of technology in a college lecture. I just completed my first year at a university, and I would just like to make a few points. First of all, allowing computers in a classroom seems like a good idea, but it really is not. Though many students will proclaim that they can take notes much more easily on their computer than on paper, which may be true, it is hardly more effective. Personally, I have tried taking computer notes and it doesn't work for me. I need tangible paper and a pen to write with. I need freedom to draw arrows and underline easily, etc, that isn't accesible from a word processor which makes you conform to rigid formats. For me, at least, it didn't work. I also know that my notes were much better than those of my peers who took them with their laptops. Secondly, I know at my university there are wireless internet connections availible from all the classrooms. I also have an insider view on what people are doing with such internet connections. Almost all of them are chatting on some instant messaging program or a chatroom. Some are playing FPS games and some are showing the latest Strongbad email to their friends. Hardly any of them are taking effective notes online... half the typing they do is to friends, and the other half are not very good notes. While I'm contantly writing on my paper with my pen, they are chatting away and definately not listening to the lecture. As for professors using computers to teach a lecture... well, I hate it. Every student hates it, but they're unwilling to confront professors about it. The ones who do not hate it are the ones who don't really care about learning anyway. My physics professor this year used powerpoint presentations instead of writing on the board. He went very, very quickly through the notes because he also posted the powerpoint (in PDF format) online, so we could, I quote, "Take notes on it at home." This was a horrible idea. I need to take notes as the professor is speaking, and powerpoint presentations with pretty boxes and multicolored animations just do not facilitate notetaking. I need to see the professor write on an actual chalkboard. I need to write things down right away so that I can remember all the essential information. Basically, I would prefer a professor who'd never heard of a computer over one who wants to do "cool new things" with them in the classroom. Well, ok, I would not want a computer science professor who hadn't heard of a computer, but you get my point. As for your weblogs, I notice that other comments have mentioned AOL speak, etc. I completely afree with them. I would be very careful about having students compose work online and then allowing commenting by any other student in the class. It sounds cool in theory, but you'll just end up with a mess. Even if the composed work is done very well, the comments will have bad English, bad grammar, smilies, etc. I can guarantee it. And you do not want to have to moderate this board. If you moderate it so that all messages have to go through you first, people will complain about the long wait for their 2am message to show up. If you allow all messages and delete bad ones later, you'll end up with complaints about the quality of certain comments and how they aren't delete quickly enough. I understand you wanting to introduce technology into the classroom, but don't underestimate the value of hard copy essays, in-class discussion, and pen and paper reviews.
"Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose." --Douglas Adams
No, this sounds like the students had no idea why they were in school: if they wanted to IM each other, why pay huge quantities of money to ignore a professor while doing it?
There are two fundamentals that apply here:
1) Students must take responsibility for their own learning. It is not the job of the instructor to 'maintain the interest of the students'. It is the instructor's job to show them the path, to tell them where to go, and to try to instill enthusiasm for the subject. Note that 'enthusiasm' does not mean 'entertainment'! I can't "generate interest" in anybody.. all I can do is say, "this is cool, come study it with me".
This responsibility MIGHT include messaging other students, typing notes, passing notes, whatever, but..
2) students and instructors must also keep the environment as conducive to learning and to teaching as possible. Having a bunch of kids playing Quake in the lecture hall is will not result in good lectures. Having some dweeb in the next row IM you while you're taking notes isn't good either.
I think something to remember is that a _real_ classroom isn't like television: a proper lecture takes a great deal of concentration to understand, let alone absorb.
--Nathaniel
RE: Every student has their own
That should be "every student has his (or her) own".
I suggest that you actually learn English before teaching it.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
When I was at university, the subjects that I was taking were all on the Blackboard system. Granted, it's a commercial product, but the features I found invaluable are as follows: 1) A news button. Here the lecturers/tutors left instructions as to what you should be doing this week, how to contact relevant staff, notification of new assessments or lecture/tutorial notes. News items were in reverse chronological order, and had a date stamp. 2) A lecture notes button. The lecture notes were all here, in PDF/Word format, in chronological order. There was one PDF/Word file per week. 3) A tutorial exercies button. Here were PDF/Word files, in chronological order, that contained activities to do each week. One PDF/Word document per week. 4) An assessment button. Here were PDF/Word documents allowing downloads of assignment sheets, information on exams and a couple of practise exams. 5) A bulletin board for users to post questions/answers and help each other. The lecturers/tutors frequented these pages too. This format was so easy to understand - every student knew what was required of them. Such a product would only take 1-2 weeks to build in PHP/MySQL. Some of my subjects also had the ability to upload assignment files (usually Word documents, or source code) - although this might not be required for an English class. Some lecturers used software to check for cheating. Online learning is good when needed information is at the student's finger tips. They can fit their learning in around work/social committments. It shouldn't really be self paced, otherwise a back-log of work will build up.
seriously, computers are hard to schedule on a college campus and too many COMPUTER courses are forced out of their own building/computer labs because Liberal Arts ninny's needed to use word.
It is only right that you abdict this room in favor of students who need the computers for their major.
I thought it said "Freshman class at an English public university" instead of "Freshman English class at a public university".
All flames gratefully received.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
If we're gonna play the blame game, we can find lots of people to blame -- inept teacher, students who are just going through the motions, parents who push their kids on an ill-chosen academic route for purely social reasons... But let's not allow any of these culprits to pass the buck to computers. Face it, if somebody is playing Doom when they should be participating in class, something is fundamentally wrong. And that something is not likely to be fixed by banishing the computer from the classroom.
In Soviet Russia, papers grade YOU!
I taught first year composition last year, and I actually used slashdot journals to host the discussion portion of my class. You can also take a look at Kairosnews for some more ideas. In particular, check out the blogs and CMSs topic. Good luck!
ScienceSeeker.org
Perhaps I've just become somewhat biased from my college experience, but in a freshman english class I don't believe 95% of my classmates would have cared to read the others work. Even if they did, being an introductory english class, who are they to be offering criticism? :D
"I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it." -Voltaire
I realize your budget probably does not support it, but hey, maybe you are lucky, or very persuasive with the board. ;)
I used to teach some 1-on-1 classes, and to facilitate this I use a linux box with VMware installed. When booted, it goes straight into a minimal X, and runs VMware, which in turn boots the OS du jour.
This allows me to run virtual windows 95/98/2000/linuxes, or indeed to allow my pupils to mess with the installion (and destruction) of those OS'es. Since it has a 'discard changes made during session' option, the OS always rolls back to the known, safe, optimal & virus free state, unless specifically told not to (by me).
A small bash script watches over the vmware thread, and if it dies spawns a new one.
Count the amount of hours spent reinstalling/reconfiguring/rebooting, weigh it against the price of a VMware license.
YMMV
-- No Sig is a Good Sig
... don't you think?
My own freshman English intsructor took the liberty of setting up a {gasp} MSN message board for us. We could use {gasp} MSN's {poor} implementation of IRC in the room to laugh about the instructor, and each other, in class.
I read through the blog a bit and found that there are many pro's and con's that you will have to deal with, but ultimatly, depending on the type of teacher you are and how you gear interests towards people, it is a good idea. I remember that most of the people in this class, though only a couple of years ago, had no prior experience on the computer. This was their own way of being introduced to things like: typing.
"Oh Great", I can hear you say, but think of it like this: you allready have the right idea by trying to bring people together with machines {OS's} that seem to divide people, alienate them, or otherwise divert them from sociability. Whether your motivations or not I highly suggest you bog down a www.msn.com server with a whole chatroom and webboard for everyone to be able to interact through at _any_hour_of_the_day.
In the long run it will be well worth it because the first semester of bringing all of these things together is bound to be the hardest. By the time you get your syllabus down for next semester you will know what to do and not to do. Speaking of which...
1) Might want to keep the computers off when class starts.
2) Might want to conduct a quick survey to see how the class feels about it.
The class I remember was taught by the best instructor I've had so far. He kept us motivated enough to hit the webboard and chatroom at all hours even though the Admistration's choice of reading material was boring enough to knock out an elephant. At first I thought it was a crazy idea because of the lax network security around the campus, but in the end I'm sure his decision was only to improve on it. Oh, might want to check with the IT building and see if they can whip up a little php or something for you. It would only take a couple of the good ones a day or two for you to have a pretty and stable setup!
"You are about to give someone a piece of your mind, something which you can ill-affor".
You are about to give someone a piece of your mind, something which you can ill afford...
I'm sorry if this comes across as cynical but the only sugggestion I can make is to avoid including "cool" in your criterium of what to teach or how to teach it.
It's almost as undesirable as having to include a toy in every meal a child eats at a fast food restaurant.
Gratuitous use of technology will not win people over to the subject matter. Also, you'll drive a wedge through the class - those with computer skills will be at an advantage while those without (and possibly with more aptitude for the real subject of your class) may be left behind or hide their lights under a bushel.
Best of luck!
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
those students are tech saavy and use something like trillian that has built in 128 bit encryption...
of course they might stick out a bit too
(insert subversive evil cable-theft voice)
unless all the clients use encryption and then you'll never know muhaha
Moodle.org is an open source package that allows several features of what everyone has been mentioning here. A neat feature is the journal that allows the teacher to critique their writings privately. It also has forums, online quizes, etc.
What, me worry?
If you had said that you would be teaching a computer science class, a biology class, or any type of class other than English, I wouldn't have been such a picky bastard.
Sorry if this is long winded... But my masters thesis touched on this, as well as further research I have been doing over the last year.
I feel you should look into Professor (at Harvard) Howard Gardner's theories on Multiple Intelligences. It has everything to do with various learning styles your students will be exhibiting. Some of your students will be solely auditory in their learning. Some will be solely visual. Some will be tactile. Some will be mathmatical/technical. Some will be musical learners. Most, though, will be combinations of these learning styles, more abilities in some intelligences, less in others. The point I am making is that every one of your students will learn in different ways.
And then there are thinking skills. Some students (and it's been theorized that most teachers) are linear thinkers. Others tend to think at multiple levels. Perhaps the best analogy would be that some people think like books, where you go from the beginning to the end in one straight line. Some people think like the World Wide Web where the route you take from the beginning to the end is not always a straight line. These latter learners often tend to be the ones who do less well in school.
So, what does all this have to do with computers in the classroom? Well, for one thing, the computer is a device that can handle the needs of all these multiple intelligences and learning styles. Your job will be to figure out how to tap into these learning styles to help the students utilize their native intelligences, and compensate for the intelligences that are somewhat weak (imagine not having auditory or visual skills in most classrooms today!).
So what do you do with the computers? Musical learners would do will writing music and lyrics (as for studying, it's been shown that musical learners study bettter if there is music in the background... mp3s!). Tactile learners will do well in just about any computer lessons you choose (after they learn to type), but just let them get up and walk a bit when they need to! Auditory learners can use mics to speak out loud what they read. They can use the built in text readers to read back what they write.
Video production is a great group project (social intelligence is another of Howard Gardner's intelligences). The linear thinkers can provide great scripts while the mult-level thinkers will be great at setting up shooting schedules and editing (editing in video producation is done with non-linear editing software).
Most important, though, is reflection on the learning process. You are absolutely right that blogs (or forums as others have suggested) are a great tool.
Finally, typing training is a must. Studies have been done, dating back as far as the invention of the typewriter, and they have all shown that typing skills increase spelling skills. In every case, when a teacher takes a single spelling lesson out of the curriculum each week, and substitues a typing lesson instead, the average class spelling scores go up, as compared to a class that had more spelling lessons but no typing lessons. I suspect that this has to do with the tactile learners who are finally getting their lessons in a way that complements their learning style, but that's just a pet theory of mine.
These are just a few suggestions that come to mind off the top of my head. But do a Google search for Howard Gardner and multiple intelligences.
As I recall, the lecturer did say that he'd be grading all posts in the beginning of the semester, but later denied saying that; have a feeling he was trying to get everyone stick to good grammar. There was a penalty for not posting; we were allowed a maximum of six post-less classes (the course was for 12 weeks, twice a week) before we got penalised. It never got to that though; most people were too involved to not post. ;-)
I liked that system; personally, it taught me good learning habits such as reading up stuff before the class, not during or after. Also, it created a very conducive discussion-oriented learning environment, where even known introverts were somehow coaxed into vigorously taking part in the class.
More than mere navel gazing.
I'm fairly proficient with language. However, as I never took an *AP* course in HS, I've found myself plonked into many schools' variants of English 101.
The single *worst* experience I had involved an electronic-based course; in this case, it was hosted on an educational MOO. Much of the first week was spent on the basics of MOO navigation, and relatively little on the subject matter. Further, students were *asked* to critique eachothers' work, but the acceptable policy for criticism was never explicitly posted.
Now, in this case, English 101 was decided to be an 'expository writing' course, and I'll readily admit to being mediocre with narrative. What really made the class a nightmare was a tangled web of events. Here's what not to do:
1. Begin by assigning a personal narrative in a fictional space; we were asked to detail what 'we' would've done had we been trapped on the Titanic. It was unclear how 'personal' the narrative was meant to be. In my case, I was bent over my sexuality at the time, so I threw in a gratuitous reference to a keepsake from a boyfriend, while keeping the character vague. Oops, points off unless I wanted to stand up *during class* and out myself. Moral: If you *want* personal detail in a piece, phrase it explicitly, and provide concrete examples. [Note to fellow queers: You'll grow out of the phase soon enough. Keep work and love separate; this was an equally bad judgement call on my part.]
2. Create assignments that don't require a physical presence, then lord the attendance policy over your students. In this case, homework and lecture notes were published on the web, and assignments were submitted by it; there was literally no reason to attend what became an hour-long lesson in Word 2000 tech-support.
3. Use tools uniquely unsuited to the task. In this case, the MOO retained its equivalent of the 'spoof' command. I took advantage of it a single time, with a simple 'Woohoo!' upon connecting; the professor chose to take this personally, rather than with a civil reprimand. I know, I sound like annoying git, but the interpersonal situation that formed after three days of class really scared the crap out of me- don't invite your class to experiment if you don't expect at least one user to find such features.
4. Encourage your students to criticize, then take personal offense to their criticism. The one thing I *do* have a grasp of is basic spelling and grammar, and in the required peer-reviews, I'd offer such, *civilly,* through the blog-style interface. ["The professor has asked us not to worry about our grammar, but I can't help but notice '...;' to my eye, it seems it would flow much more easily as '...'" If you dig through the styleguide for the course, you can find an explanation under "Pronoun Reference."] I was later confronted -- again *during* class -- and accused of lording over the proceedings, when from my perspective, I was struggling for an A+ in participation, especially as the sociopolitical ramifications began weighing on my attendance grade.
Eventually, I became discouraged, and simply stopped showing up. In retrospect, I should've filed a grievance, but this would've required direct confrontation that I couldn't deal with at the time.
I'd suggest:
-Offering an after-hours (or online, IRC/IM-based) discussion group for the active portion of the class, *especially* if the main session degrades into support for the less technical users.
-Not focusing entirely on the writing task; apparently, the expository focus was *intended* to force the frosh to think creatively, but this didn't work out in my case. If the rules of curriculum don't allow a balance between authorship, analysis, and technical skill, fight to have them changed.
-Giving students a carrot to show up, rather than the stick of hard-copy submissions or class-only homework announcements. Perhaps daily labs should be optional, with an attendance grade hinging on end-of-week discussions, or other *useful* group act
I am currently in the process of founding a private secondary (grades 6-12) school, and have put a lot of thougth lately into how to integrate computers into teaching. The following ideas are desinged for younger students in what I suspect are much smaller (8-15 students) and more focused (ie, more teacher-led) environments. However, as I go, I'll make some suggestions for college use, and for english classes in particular.
1-If freshman are reuired to take an "intro to computing" class (at many universities they are) talk to the professor, and get a copy of the curriculum. That way, you have at least some idea of a lowest common denomenator for tech-literacy. (ie, don't require Word until the computer class has already taught it) This will save you at least a little time to teach enlgish instead of computer literacy. However, if there is not such a class, and the school as a whole decided to set you to teaching english inthe computer lab (as opposed to it being your idea, or the english departments) they may surreptitiously be trying to turn you into a computer teacher becasue they feel freshman comp is unecessary or inflated. complain loudly if you feel this is the case.
2-Post summaries of lectures in html, with links to a glossary and other useful side-notes. Make sure students can open the document and edit it, if they would like to take theri notes that way.
3-When you are speaking, make ABSOLUTELY sure that all the students can see you. Many students (especially the dyslexic ones, who likely are to be the ones who need yr class most) will not be able to follow a discussion without being able to see you. For this reason, it is not a good idea to require students to type and listen at the same time, as most students will need to look at either the keyboard or the screen as they type.
4-Try not to force students to read things form the screen. Instead, allow them to use printed copies if they can. Staring at a computer screen for extended periods of time is very bad for some peoples eyes, and can trigger migranes and even seizures in some people. (especially on low-quality moniters)
5-If the course is basically "how to write an essay" (which is what I understadn frshman englsih to be), your goal should be to help the students learn to use a computer as a tool to further that goal. However, some students will rpefer to use other means (I still write almost almost everyting out in compostition books, and then type it, and I'm a professional writer who reads slashdot)
6-Allow students to post theri writings for comment to a community forum, but do not require them to post "rough drafts". Many writeers do not really write rought drafts, but in fact kepp almost exactly theri original work thru to the final publication. Unless the function of the calss is to teach peer-review, getting comments form other 18 year olds can be an exceptionally cruel and emotionally traumatic thing to have to go thru, particularly if there is a wide skill-range of writers in the class.
I've never actually taken a compostiiton class (I went to Caltech, which didn't require one unless you couldn't test out of it. My grad school wanted me to take one, since i never had, but i managed to write my way into testing out of that as well.) However, I assume that most of class time is not actually spent on writing. for this reason, I do not think the computer lab setting is really very appropriate.
Good luck. Should you have any questions feel free to contact me.
sara at academy23.org
How about mirroring the chalkboard/whiteboard/overhead to the students' laptop display?
One of my worst memories of college was being stuck in the back of the class, where I couldn't see the board, because I couldn't get there 15 minutes early.
Go over to freshmeat for a copy of The Manhattan Project - a virtual classroom. Everything you want in one package.
"Straddling the sword of technology..."
This point is extremely true! I'm a CS student, but as electives, I've had some arts courses that try to incorporate web-based discussions which then have one group member submit a summary. While this is easier than trying to set up group meetings or taking away from class time, the technology is usually a HUGE issue.
I found it very convenient as I could think for quite some time between posts, post at 2am if I wanted, or whenever it was most convenient. However, in the first class one of my group members couldn't figure out how to even log on, let alone submit a file (it popped up a choose file window, with the browse option) when it was his turn to do the summary. A lot of people don't use this sort of thing regularly and they find it really confusing and difficult.
That disclaimer disclaimed, I think the online web discussion groups can be really nice. This term, I'm taking a film class where we discuss questions posted by the teacher in small groups. I appear to have got a competent group as there have been no problems for us. I really like that it doesn't take up class time, nor do I have to try to schedule a meeting IRL, which can be really hard when you have 5 people with 5 different schedules. If it is appropriate for the type of English course you are teaching I would recommend using discussion groups. However, the point of them is OUTSIDE the classroom. I don't really see what use you will get with the computers during class time... at university I would think this should be lecture time, especially for an English course.
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
There are tons of resources and organizations for technology use in education. A lot of these are for elementary and secondary education, so this is just a sample, but it gives you a good idea of things to try.
p ://tinyurl.com/f36q (this one is resources from GA Learning Connections website, if the tiny URL throws Slashdot off)r g/tech/
I mean, if there are programs and projects for ritalin-dependent rugrats, I think keeping frosh English majors engaged wouldn't be too much of a stretch.
Most states have their own laundry list of resources as well, so check with your local DOE website. (edit: Conn DOE site *sucks*)
Linky links
http://www.rtec.org/
http://www.iste.org/
htt
http://www.seirtec.org/
http://www.ncrel.o
http://www.itrc.ucf.edu/
I was in a course entitled Politics of the Internet and each student was required to post regularly to a weblog. Most of the students, all of the ones I talked to, hated the assignment. I felt like I had done so poorly it would affect my grade. I got an A in the course, so the overall quality of blogs must have been low.
See http://www.lamc.utexas.edu/polnet for course info.
I was recently I was tutoring a E-Commerce course at university for 2nd year students.Putting stuff online can increase the workload a lot.
For one assignment we gave them a Dreamweaver MX template with the subsection headings put in there so they couldn't change them and they could only write in small sections of the page. After opening this template up showing them what to do on the projector/big screen. We still got people who didn't understand and wanted walking through it step by step.
Then we wanted them to upload to a FTP server for marking. We used dreamweaver again to do this (as we had been teaching them Dreamweaver for the practical part of the course, building a web page). We provided them with a upload tutorial with images of each step and what to type into each box and which boxes/sections not to touch in setting up the site/ftp info. When then also showed them on the projector. And again people didn't get it and had to be walked through individually.
On due time people still emailed the course supervisor about how do they hand in their printed word document.
http://blog.karit.geek.nz/
http://plainblack.com
Content management system, slick, easy to install,
Open source, will even work with Windows.
Using it now for a collaborative website for the Computer Forensics Association. Handles the minutes, events, files, blog, message forum, has Karma.. Even has quiz modules, it is enterprize class, and open source priced (free)
We even used their demo-site to run a secret ballot election for association officers. Nice 10 day demo, and just the advisor had the admin to the site.
What more can you ask for?
I use it for my website, NO I don't work for them, and Yes I bought a support package from them.
i'm assuming you're teaching 105 or 109 (i went to uconn). in that case, i'd almost say that it's not really worth trying to use the comptuers since half your students will be hung over, drunk, or high. those classes are (as far as i'm concerned) nearly pointless. they did not help me write better (high school helped me write and i'm an excellent writer, even scientifically). the only thing i could think of is using a weblog for homework. it'd have to be protected for only that class (or at least only that class could post to it). i would say that you post the homework assignment or passage of whatever you're reading for that class as the "article" and the students reply to it with "comments" as their answers. they will all be able to view each others answers outside of class. you can even make it mandatory that they do so as it will be part of their class participation grade (and i know that counted for a fair amount in those classes since they were small). i'd leave out any sort of moderating system as grades should be anonymous and it could get ugly. or you could have other sections be the moderators, which could make it more interesting, and make sure that usernames are not known by anyone except those from the class and by you. that way no one can talk to their buddies in the other class and tell them to mod them up. and you can grade based on that. it'd be a fun idea. and in class you can have the students moderate the other sections and discuss why they're doing it that way. the only other thing i can suggest is for writing papers in word or something stupid like that, but that should be done in their own time. it could save paper in printing out drafts to be peer-reviewed.
please me, have no regrets.
A quick and shameless plug..... I'm the CEO for MainBrain School. It's not exactly relevent here, but we provide student information software that lets parents and teachers get online and see their child's grades, attendance, etc., as well as communicate with teachers over message boards. The software is deployed on linux, using perl and mysql. We're still proprietary for the moment, but actively considering open sourcing the software when I can be convinced it's a good business decision. As a final note, we're offering a grant program right now where we are selling the software at our cost to schools in the North Carolina area especially, but also throughout the country. If you're interested, check the website out. My contact info is on there.
The second year of my teaching career I had a principal who said that the teacher himself/herself was the curiculum. At the time I disagreed in that some classes necessitated the transference of knowledge regardless of who or what the teacher was.
Several years later I now see his point.
If the class is about computers and how to use them in a particular fashion then go for it. However, it is apparent that the class is about language and the use thereof to communicate. Typing on a computer is a slow means of communicating. It follows then that precious time can/might/will be lost via that means.
I have worked in several "paperless" classrooms (as a student); they have had varying degrees of success. The first non-technical class which worked in this way was a high-school art class. My school, in an attempt to render everything electronic, completely replaced traditional art with multimedia that year. We ended up with half the students there (who couldn't turn the boxen on, let alone make a cohesive art project in photoshop) negotiating with the teacher to be allowed to 'bend the rules' by drawing something. The multimedia art class was a good idea (I, for one, loved it), but sorely needed the availability of a traditional class to complement it.
One thing certainly stands: unless every student present is 100% dedicated to the subject at hand, an Internet connection will always win attention from a lecturer. Asking students not to log in until you've finished lecturing can help avoid this situation.
On top of that, there will be students who do NOT know how to use the computer, and that will eat up additional time. And most importantly, I hope YOU know computers (i assume you do since you are posting this on /.) because nothing is worse than a teacher I once had who had the majority of his classwork requiring the internet........and here he was trying to figure out how to get "onto the interweb" and get to a site called "goggle or google or something". Yeah.....we let him flounder for 5 minutes before one of us went over there and went to google for him.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I sift through countless resumes that are completely unintelligible. When I think I've found someone that can actually write, I hire him and find that [s]he cannot construct a coherent paragraph.
Kids today cannot write. They have difficulty constructing complete thoughts. They think in fragmented sentences, like they're in a chat room.
College graduates that can write a decent proposal straight out of school are few and far between, and are only becoming more scarce. When I find someone that can write - I hold onto them for dear life and compensate them well. I will give someone who can communicate clearly a raise twice as fast as someone with a higher degree.
I say get rid of the computers completely! Have the students turn in papers that are hand written. When you hand write a paragraph, you are forced to think of the entire paragraph you intend to write, before the pen is put to paper. It is too easy to write a fragment of a sentence with a computer, change your train of thought, and finish off somewhere else, then go back and reposition paragraphs and edit until it reads well. Kids today are not forced to think about their writing.
If you're teaching college freshmen in a public university, the average dropout rate is ~30%. This means for 30% of your students, this will be the only 'real' English class they will ever take. Don't waste this opportunity.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
"I even was more creative than most, since I SSHed to the university solaris server, which was an arguably legitimate use, only to then launch a black and white console IRC session. I didn't get caught, but several other students with IM clients or GUI-based IRC clients did. Nothing punitive came of it though, because there were no real enforcement policies. "
"Some (like my case) will always find a way though the campus network, but if it can be minimized, that's the only way it will work."
I feel like i'm @ a penis-measurment contest. give me a break.
First off you have to embrace computers and the internet if you intend to teach a class with a live internet connection.
By embrace I mean do not try and treat it like a regular classroom. Students WILL type constantly either on topic or off topic especially if they have a live internet connection and if that is disruptive to your method of instruction run far and run fast from the lab NOW !!! Seriously it will never work and even if it does all your going to do is frustrate the students sitting there with computers and not being able to use them. Quiet click keyboards would help immensly but boards in labs are generally loud clackers and the very lively accoustics of most rooms don't help.
My suggestion would be to not plan on Verbal lecturing at all, if you do need to have lectures schedule them in a room away from the computers if at all possible. I would suggest some sort of obvious progression where students read and post their thoughts as directed by your questions to answer or discuss etc.... Classtime can be used for class discussion thread style. I would set up some sort of scoring system with you as the score keeper... IE offtopic and flamebait takes points off, pertinent posts score according to some scale you have. Goal of students is to reach a passing point.
*** random idea which would need software that could handle it *** Student is given 5 posts per topic. Posts are rated by the teacher in say two or three categories ( say grammer, quality of content for starters ) score is on a 1-10 scale which can be multiplied by 2, added all together and divided by the number of categories for ye olde 100 point scale
At anyrate you get the idea. Instead of verbal lectures you outline the discussion in a written aggenda. I personally would say take the lecture notes, note the pertinent areas of discussion and link in the text to the appropriate place to post responses... In passage I want you to the consequences of actions. Then Repeat ad neaseum for all needed points of discussion. Include your lecture material in addition as well. Then spend the time during calss monitoring what is being added to the discussion and offering one on one feedback going around the room.... constant moving will also enable you to keep something of an eye on poor choices of web pages for information sources.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
If you are looking for additional information, you might try visiting kairosnews.org, reading through our blogs and cms's topic category, and posting your questions there. We are a Slashdot-like weblog community interested in rhetoric, technology and pedagogy. Many participants are college English teachers who teach in computer classrooms. Some of us, myself included, have been using weblogs already.
Randy Bass at Georgetown http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/ did several interesting investigations which used computers to improve learning in the classroom. I would recommend looking at his work. His work focuses more seriously on the scholarship of teaching and learning, but I think he managed to find some good lessons about dealing with new media in english classrooms.
I think you need to consider the question, "what exactly do you want to get out of this?" and you will have an easier time figuring out how computers will fit into the picture (if at all).
Others have mentioned wiki's and similar tools which create a wonderful collaborative environment, but may be less than useful if there is no real goal to their use.
Either way it is a mistake to just throw an english class into a computer lab without a definite goal.
A wiki might be interesting, if you could seperate the author's text from the wiki edited text. A wiki, by the way, is a web system where anyone can edit any page on a website, just by clicking an edit link on the page, which loads that page into a neat little form.... www.wikipedia.org, among others are neat to look at...
I like the rotisserie discussion that Harvard's open source software, H2O has developed. It assigns people posts to respond to automatically. /. posted the story . It is definitely worth checking out. You could certainly do blog-like things there.
As far as I can tell, from personal experience, /. gives mod points to anyone who's on a significant number of days in a row. But regardless of whether we agree that /. is fair or not, there are some seriously interesting pedagogical possibilities with mod and meta mod points. Students can practice critical thinking by evaluating posts, and through meta mods, can get some pretty serious feedback if they are being trolls, etc.
You can always assign mod points to everyone on a rotating basis, and use meta mods from all students on a rotating basis. By sharing the results, you can assign some participation points for doing the work, and a few for doing it well in the estimation of the class. Persumably you can add a few via estimation of the teacher if you really think it is necessary.
The first thing you need to do with a class like this is make it interactive to keep the students interested. Have them talk about their projects and critic each other in class.
Now that I've said that, on to some ideas. I've broken them down by whether the focus is on writing or literature.
Writing:
Have them pick a more advanced feature of one of the programs on the computer and write instructions about how to use it.
For creative writing have them try and trick the spell checker.
Literature:
Many classics are no longer copyrighted and hence are available free online which makes them rather accessible. You should also be able to find different translations of the same work (such as Dante's Divine Comedy.) Take advantage of these.
Combination:
There are many amatuer writing sites (mostly poetry). Have the students compare what's there to stuff that is commercially published.
There are many documents archived online from recent and not so recent language as well as many documents that us "IM speak." Students can research how the English language has changed over the years.
These are just some ideas. There are also many teacher resource sites. There is a collection of links here that is kept up to date. The other sites I can think of off hand are Marco Polo and Ask Eric. If you are intereseted in more let me know, I'm sure I can find more.
I took a class where we used something called a Wiki. The concept is simple. You have a community of people who all contribute to the content of the site and even have the power to create their own pages. In our case, we submitted our homework on it, and we could have other people review and edit it (and keep track of the changes). We had a glossary that we kept building, and we had our own journals, and it worked really well for us, until the end, when we had so much content that we actually slowed the server down.
The best part is that it's pretty easy to set up, really easy to use (once you get the hang of it), and really cool for everyone involved.
This is the site for it http://c2.com/cgi/wiki
Given it's English class and computer driven, you could teach them how to write for the web, and about web useability. No doubt a lot of them will be wanting to author their own websites in coming years, so get them educated about writing for screen reading instead of print.
Let's look at this piece by piece...
"You've just given a prime example of what's wrong with most debates about education. It's all idealogy, and no facts"
Okay, let's see your "facts"...
"You've got a lot of half-assed generalizations and pet theories. My lack of interest in these is extreme. Let's talk about real-world teachers. I've known good ones and bad ones. Good ones don't care about distractions -- they even use them. Bad ones blame their failures on distractions, immoral influences, "human nature" -- everything except their own lack of skill."
So, you're making a personal narrative on your own experiences. You reference teachers that you've known without even mentioning classes or names. Granted, I was a little vague, but the class that I mentioned was at least a Collegiate English class. It took place at ASU, in the fall of 1998, and was surprisingly taught by one of the more established professors, not by a graduate student.
You cite good teachers not caring about distractions, but I've not seen this myself, and you provide no data to back that up. So, again, it's your word against mine. I've found that good teachers do care about distractions, for they want to get the best out of every student in the class, and since different people have different attention spans, some teachers work to minimize the distractions.
And you're a bloody fool if you don't think about human nature. I, being a pessimist, prepare to be able to handle the worst-case scenario, even though the odds of it occurring are small, because sometimes those odds are met. In this instance, a teacher who goes in thinking that everything is bubbly great is going to be sorely disappointed when she or he has to curve a significant number of grades due to problems of low marks due to student distraction.
And as for "lack of skill", have you ever tried to teach a class? I sure as hell don't want to. I work in educational environments, and I see what teachers go through on a daily basis. I've seen teachers that are terrible, but by and large, they have a very tough job, especially in schools where students haven't been brought up to properly function in education.
"But I am grateful to you for one thing: you've made me invent a new epigram: Fascism is the last refuge of the inept."
You're truly amusing. I see that you've read "How to Win Arguments," by Dave Barry, but taken it a bit too literally. It was supposed to be a joke, after all.
State mandated education, for K-12, is facist, or at least dictatorial, since it is required. If you are required to do something, it may not be pleasant. Additionally, many colleges and universities are state funded, and have guidelines that they must follow from government to remain in operation. Private institutions, believe it or not, often have even stricter rules, and a student has little choice but to follow such rules if he or she wishes to remain enrolled.
Don't argue facts with me if you aren't going to produce any yourself.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Get a regular class room if you can... a bunch of internet connected computers for a _freshman_ english class with their screens all pointed away from you spells D I S T R A C T I O N. My computer classes had machines connected, that was hard enough keeping some people focused... oh, well, it's college, they have to learn responsibility sometime...
Honestly, a "Freshman English class" does not need computers or internet... the amount of time spent on the technical issues with the computers or any asignments related to them (besides word processing), especially during class, will be wasted time...
The thing I hated most in college was when a teacher had a "cool idea" that had nothing to do with specific course. No, offense, just a word to the wise. When I went to college I actually wanted to learn...
Your idea of peer review sounds cool, use forum software for it, but make it optional, certainly not during class though...
If you really want to teach them something, have everyone turn off their computers and pull out some paper, and say "today we are going to learn about English"
If need be, add a foot note "And fortunately, computers aren't needed to learn about English"
And if you really need to drill it in, "And in fact every minute spent messing with computers is a minute not spent on the English lessons in your book, which is why you are here."
I realize that this post is very late in the game, but I hope that at least someone finds it useful.
For almost the entire past school year my English 3 AP class participated in online discussions that I hosted with phpBB. It's still up for a few more days, so you are welcome to check out the kinds of discussions we had. It seems that EVERYONE found it useful and there are plans in motion to run one next year, but expand it to multiple AP English classes.
Take a look.
Back in my freshman year, I took the basic college level English classes that everyone is required to take to satisfy the general 4 year degree requirements. We did NOT use computers in the classroom, as there were none.
Rather, the professor spent one class period with us in the library, showing us the proper way to use online periodical databases to help in research for papers. This was far more useful then actually having computers in the classroom.
When we needed to get feedback on our papers, we'd simply pass a printed version around to a few classmates, and they would add in any necessary corrections. That seems far better to me than having to baby along the people that can't figure out how to use a message board or weblog (and there will be a few in every class).
I have noticed that in the classes I have taken with a computer at each desk, some students will *always* be distracted by them, no matter how good of a job the professor does. In one of my business classes, the professor actually had a switch on the wall that could turn off every monitor in the room. Very useful for keeping people from surfing the net when they're not supposed to.
I used to take "laptop" classes as a highschool freshman. However I promtly left the program because our teachers refused to let us use the computers like the program was intended. For example we would have to turn in an assignment at the end of class, but we did not have access to a printer, so we had to write it out on paper. Why not just email it to the teacher. If they don't want their boxes full, they should setup on for this.
My best peice of advice would be to listen to any input the students have.
-Scott Swezey
((I forgot my pass...))
I teach a class of high school students in a computer lab. Many of them are not particulary tech oriented. I use the class as a forum to introduce all kinds of ideas about the impact computers and technology are having on their world as subtext to the overall curiculum. I sometimes even assign slashdot as reading. Even tech competent people who can download mp3, surf the web, ftp, im, synch their pda whatever don't necessarily appreciate all of the other things that are available or involved. Things that apply directly to an english curriculum is the effect that e-mail and im has on language and language skills. How does cutting and pasting change the editing process from when you had to actually rewrite it each time. How do school policies on e-mail etc... affect free speech or anonymity which can directly affect or is it effect content. What is the impact of grammer and spell checkers on language skills. I talk about privacy and run ad-aware and show them the data miners that get downloaded onto the computers every day. I don't exclusively focus on any of this. Each day for the beginning of the class I spend 10min on a new topic, use the computers for examples, usually they have questions. When we went from handwritten to typewriters language and the process of writing changed. When we went from typewriters to computers everything about writing changed. Not only the process of writing but editing, research, publication, distribution, duplication, referencing etc... Some things got a lot easier some got harder partiularly learning the basics and not just shortcuts. While you are teaching those basics challenge them to see the good and the bad of how things are changing. Encourage them take an active role in choosing their relationship with technology and appreciate the implications of those choices.
Had an English class that decided to meet in one of the computer-equipped labs one day. In a few min we had all popped into AIM (I couldn't convince the others to IRC) and started chatting. A few minutes later we had the prof's pic posted on hotornot.com - we checked back later and he'd done pretty well.
If you absolutly have to allow computers, make sure that they are turned off when you are having classroom discussions.
via a wiki such as twiki. TWiki lets you edit web pages from any web browser, with a slew of features to let you review history and the like.
Well, I'll keep it short. I went to a University which had developed, as one of its founding principles, an online learning bent. We had what was called a Course Management System which was used to distribute course text (notes were online, text readings were online), had an integrated syllabus, could be used to submit homework, did contain instructor presentations, had asynchronous forums for every course and also provided many other things I don't recall. This dream system has since been replaced by something much better behaved cross-platform and which is also less effective. You may want to visit www.surrey.sfu.ca for more information - my university was subsumed into this one and is now a smaller satellite campus - of sorts.
:) Oh, and my university's name was the Technical University of British Columbia.
:)
Also, you may be able to find some further resources at http://www.netvironments.org/nne/ as this is also a tool which can be used to facilitate cooperative learning. I'm afraid I never explored this one to its true potential, so I'm not entirely aware as to what it's capable of - however, it does not seem to have any forums. On the other hand, users can produce their own "home pages" with which they could theoretically blog, and it does have a nice interface.
I've also participated in a number of forum-based classes. Here are some pointers:
You want a discussion facilitator - preferably more than one, really. I hesitate to say moderator, since their functions encompass far more than that.
If you set deadlines, some learners will post some short periods of time right before the deadline. Unfortunately, by that point much of the content has been rehased to some degree. This is less advice than an observation.
I can't think of anything else at the moment. If you ask me for more specifics, I'll be happy to provide.
If you want to ask some students about their experiences and such, feel free to visit http://www.tekbc.com
----- Wtcher Dragon, UDIC
I've taken a few online classes (one of them was English) in a college setting, and the number one bit of advice I could give is to be careful of "message board" type communication, namely because a lot of people are not very good at expressing themselves with words and things often come out sounding completely different from what the person meant to say. If people get over-emotional in this situation, things can get blown out of proportion, and it will make students decide to take a different class.
That's what happened with me anyway. Ignorant fucks! LOL
Introduce the open standard AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) to your students and let them create their own chat bot!
1 2d545e345254
Challenge them to compose a believable character and let the chat bots talk to each other.
Information about AIML can be found at: http://www.aiml.info
AIML interpreters can be downloaded from http://www.alicebot.org.
An example of a chat bot can be found at: http://www.pandorabots.com/pandora/talk?botid=9ba
...by design since they are not "multi-user". They are more like individual diaries. You would to give your users opportunity to interact with each other with some community software like Geeklog or OpenACS.
--
Let's see.....
the 4 tragedies= Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, and Othello?
but also....
Julius Ceasar
Titus Andronicus
Coriolanus
Timon of Athens
Romeo and Juliet
Antony and Cleopatra
Cymbeline,
and (maybe) Troilus and Cressia.
Maybe these are not the very most accessible; but, jeeze, they do *exist*....
Using the net can work to improve a persons writing, if these are highschool students, on the college level however, how is a person supposed to seriously learn writing by putting blogs on the internet?
This is the problem with current English classes, this isnt create writing, its English, we should focus on the technical aspects of writing. This means proper grammer, indent every 4-5 sentences, proper structure of a paper complete with coverpage, introduction, table of contents, as well as citing every source and properly following a strict format if its a scientific paper or if its not scientific it must be based on overall quality of grammar.
A person should get a grade based on how many errors they make. A paper should not get an A unless its technically perfect, meaning no spelling errors, no grammar mistakes, etc. This teaches a person how to write properly.
Blogging while it could be useful to a highschool student, for a college student you should focus on teaching them the technical writing skills they will need later on when it comes time to write their research papers.
Peer review is good, but you can peer review without blogs and without the internet, you can use blogs or not, it doesnt really matter. Second students must learn to write by writing alot of papers very often, over time they will become more accurate at writing, their spelling will improve, they'll learn to properly use word, and understand the formula involved in writing a good paper.
This means the best way to teach writing is to make them write a 10 page paper every week, they submit the draft at the end of the week, the teacher reviews the drafts gives it back and then they write it again for their grade.
Before anyone tells me that my grammar isnt perfect, this is slashdot, so dont even try it. Grammar is not important unless you are getting graded.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Yes I suppose a computer built into every desk, this is good and theres only benefits to this. As far as using this to actually using the internet to teach English, I think its a stupid idea.
Look, we should allow the internet in class, kids should be able to research via the net what the teacher is talking about in their lecture. We should also allow computers, we shouldnt use the internet to teach english. It doesnt make sense.
What advantage does the internet offer when teaching English? If you can name one, then I'll concede.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
ok please... turn it off at least until you speak (a good 20 minutes will be fine). After that people will get bored and start surfing the net, so let them do it for a while, then make a break and stop the internet connection again. finish your class with a new topic, try to forus people's attention on something new that you haven't said before.
and yes, walk trough the classe once in a while (not when you're not talking)
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
The average college class is a lecture, internet connections actually HELP the lecturer because someone can look up on the net something they dont understand, you can also give them URLs to websites which they can view in realtime.
This could actually help. Of course you have ignorant students who dont want to learn and who are lazy, who will be playing quake, who cares about them? Let them get an F so people like me stand out from the pack.
It sucks to have a bunch of lazy students who dont study get a grade as good or better than mine simply because they showed up to every class and I was late to each class, or because they have perfect attendence, or are friends with the teacher.
What the hell happened to people getting good grades because they write the best paper?
Some people do study harder than me, but its usually only one person in the class, usually someone older and more mature, the people my age seem to slack off in school.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Why not set a task for the class as a whole to produce a collaborative wiki-wiki 'document'. They decide the theme (within some broad limits) do the research and create the content. I would expect it to use appropriate language, correct spelling etc and to be a coherent work.
The best thing I like about it is our grades get posted on it, I also like the fact that things like the syllbus and notes from the teacher are posted up there.
I dont like when I lose a paper and have to struggle to get another copy of it, I dont like forgetting about a test. Blackboard will be very useful to me until I manage to get a PDA.
interactivity among students (and instructor) that can extend beyond class time.
This could be useful if we have a teacher who wants to teach beyond class time, most dont.
online exercises of various kinds that lead directly to reports.
Waste of time.
Do people "write better" when they use computers? Probably not. However, I'm not going to use a typewriter or pencil and paper because of the convenience of editing, revisiong, conflating files that computers make possible.
Its not the tool, its how you use it. Its alot faster to spellcheck from a program than to look through the dictionary and check every word you think might be spelled wrong (this could take hours). Its also easier to fix technical errors when you have a program to point it out for you, no more paying the english major $1 per page to fix your technical errors.
I'd suggest you go slow in trying new things in your new teaching environment. Too many new things at once can be confusing and exhausting. And the concern some posters expressed about your students adapting to the computers is good. How much will you have to teach the students so that they can use the technology? When I began using email in classes, I had to teach them how to use Elm and WordPerfect. Now they come into class with much more knowledge.
Your students were just slow, I mean really if someone cannot figure out Word Perfect in the year 2003 they must have been living in a Cave. In Japan middleschool kids are getting online with their little smartphones and emailing each other, hell most of them even know alittle about programming, you can only make so many excuses, if the japanese can do it, our kids can too, I dont see why we need some kinda buffer to allow our kids to slowly adapt when Japan can release something and within the same year everyones using it.
The way to do it is to just give kids an assignment, tell them they must write a certain paper, allow them to do it by computer or pen and paper, the kids who do the extra research it takes to learn how to properly use Word Perfect will get an A and the ones who are too lazy to do so will get a B, unless they are so good at writing with pen and paper or whatever method to not need computer software.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
If students want to play quake and touch the keyboard, why should the teacher treat them like a baby "Stop touching the keyboard! Bad!! BAD BOY!" nooo
its not the teachers job to do this, the teachers job is to lecture, give assignments, and review and grade our work. Discussions are also good.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
If the teacher cant give an interesting lecture the teacher shouldnt expect everyones attention, however if people dont pay attention and they get a bad grade the students shouldnt blame anyone but themselves.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Well if its for an English class, get them to do something interesting witht a wiki. Weblogs are all well and good but people get enough practice critiquing others work.
With a Wiki you could see how they go when they have to work together to get something done. Simple wiki software such as UseMod, might not cut the mustard but you could try setting up a PediaWiki based site for them to work with.
I'd imagine that there would be lessons in online anonymity to be learnt here as well....
I'm currently in an adult education scenario, learning software development in a paperless classroom. While I have found it advantageous to be able to look things up during a lecture, I've noted that many people get distracted by the availability of Internet access during class. It's not just a high school problem. The difference is that learning is the student's own responsibility, but in my experience, a lecturer who actively tries to keep the students' attention during a lecture will get better results from them than a lecturer who doesn't care.
J00 CAN L3A7N 2 Sp311 dA r3a1 way.
Note that teaching a course fully online is very different from using the Web to supplement a course being taught in person. I have found that the Web tools available make it easier to extend the scope of the course beyond the classroom, and to facilitate further dialogue and discussion.
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
You got classroom full of desktop machines ? Answer is obvious, you install Seti@Home to all of them ofcourse!
yush
ISDHO (In SlashDot's Humble Opinion), <br> approximately equals <p> anyway. If you'd prefixed your <blockquote>s with <p>s, your post would have been much easier to read. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
not sure what exactly you are wanting to do with the class, but Blackboard (http://www.blackboard.com) is something we are using at our university in almost every major. it's kind of a beefy program and needs a beefy server, but it might be something to check out. It something the IT department would have to roll out and it may be overkill for what you want. Hope this helps.
We tried this at a top-tier university (name withheld because
I'm up for tenure).
We had a special classroom wired with laptops, interactive
whiteboards, cameras, and all the latest toys. We found
that most of the time, students would use the computers
to IRC chat, check mail, post to newsgroups, and browse
the web. It was a complete distraction, and did not help
their in-class experience.
So, my advice would be to somehow gather information
about how your students use the computers. You could
do something as simple as giving them a weekly one-page
survey, or just having a dialog. I think you'll find that, unless
you've developed some computer content for your class,
the computer classroom will not be used effectively.
Now, it may be that without the computers, students would
be equally distracted--e.g., doodling in notepages, passing
notes or reading for other classes during lecture. It's
difficult to measure. But I'm certain that unstructured
access to computers during class merely creates a distraction.
You might try having students take notes for each class,
and immediately e-mailing you the completed notes for the
day. If you use a pass/fail system, you won't penalize
students who can't use the computers effectively. This
might provide an incentive for students to pay attention
and use the computers constructively. But many students
might not 'think' that way, and would find typing notes
a burden.
In any event, you'll need to find a way to compete for their attention. Unless you have developed computer content,
I'd recommend not using the computers. Perhaps one day
a week, you might have a 'computers in class' day where
you have some purposeful activity structured around the
computers.
Alternatively, you could show up in a clown suit and
juggle swords---anything to be more entertaining that
reading online music gossip sites or playing flash games.
This is almost always the best answer to this question. Don't ask "how can I use the computer". Ask "what does the computer make possible that was either impossible or impractical before", and then be sure to ask "and would that make my class better if we covered/did that?".
Anonymous peer editing/critique is posible with paper and pencil, too, but it's much harder to do. Enter teh computer.
But if you simply look for ways to use the computer, the overwhelming probability is that you will come up with some sort of extraneous add-on that doesn't really make sense in the big pigture. Which shouldn't be surprising, because you went out looking for an extraneous add-on, completely unmotivated by anything in the big picture.
Liberty uber alles.
I am a computer tech at the School of Business here at UConn. All of the professors here having been dealing heavily with technology in the classroom (all Business students will be required to have laptops this next semester), you should contact them about how they use it. We already have WebCT, essentially a website for online teaching available to all classes. Why not go paperless? I know some professors here who have managed to do it. But contact your coworkers at the University.
Ben Garrison, a mindless idiot who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
The lab's mission for the past decade or so has been to explore and facilitate the use of computers in a teaching environment, with a focus on teaching writing (since the lab is part of the English dept.). Not only should the web site have resources and advice you can use, but I'm sure that any of the people involved with the lab, whether graduate students or professors, would be glad to "talk" with you.
As part of my freshman year at UMASS Amherst, students were required to take a Freshman Writing requirement. The professor decided to make the class "technologically advanced" by making use of a blog style online diary. Each week, students were required to write 4 700 word entries. The teacher wanted us students to feel free to say what we wish, and thus allowed anything in the blog. After a few initial blogs of quality writing, it became an online flamefest. Anytime the teacher did something wrong, it showed up online. As a student, I felt as though the online aspect actually degraded my writing skills, due to the nature of the online writing. However, in my opinion, the use of computers in the classroom can be a distinct advantage. While the online blog may not be the best, students can use their computers to their advantage. For example, I feel completely uncomfortable writing on paper, and I prefer to type my ideas directly into a word processor. It just means less time I have to spend later, back in my dorm. Believe me, students love it when you give them time to work on stuff in the classroom. Props to you for checkin /. for suggestions.
How about letting the students teach the slashdot janitors how to spell?
I have taught freshman writing in a computer classroom, and while students are occassionally distracted and check their email or attempt to register for classes online, a combination of small class size, a well-designed classroom and focused prompt can make a ton of difference.
i ng s.htmlt tu.edu/kairos// coverweb.html
This is an ongoing debate and research on this issue in composition & rhetoric:
http://www.abacon.com/compsite/instructors/read
http://www.rhetcomp.com/
http://english.
http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/6.2
http://www.ncte.org/journals/
In the late 80's I took two college english courses at Michigan that used the CONFER II online system. (One of the earlier message board systems) I personally found the classes to be very enjoyable and very informative.
The classes met 3 times a week and one of those class times was designated as an online meeting where spontaneous discussions could occur.
We were also required to post our assignments on the board and review (and discuss) the work of other students. Instead of depriving us of face-time and limiting our normal interactions, the board system actually improved class discussions quite a bit. The system helped to quickly create a community within the classroom that translated into our face to face sessions.
It was also extremely helpful to be able to get feedback from many sources rather than just the professor. (He also responded with his comments not only on our assigned work, but also on our analysis of others work, thereby improving our editing and analytical skills.)
That is a very valid point.
Hey, he is right. I am perfectly happy helping you with your grammar from an anonymous standpoint. I wouldn't have done this if you knew who I was.
If you are teaching basic composition, avoid any technology that provides advanced formatting capabilities that tempt the author to spend time tinkering with appearance rather than the content. The most important thing in early writing classes is to have the students write, edit, and analyze their text. Font styles and sizes, bulleted and numbered lists, even italics and boldface, are all useful features but the text is fundamental. If the text is bad, no formatting can save it.
Actually, I think computers in the classroom are a bad idea. Computers are useful at home (or in the dorm) for gathering data, analyzing it, and preparing presentations from it, but in the classroom they are a distraction from the interaction between teacher and students that constitutes teaching.
In the end, I think you have it backwards. You should not look for ways that the computer can help you teach. Instead, you should look for the best ways to teach your class, then see if the computer might be helpful with any of them. If the computer doesn't help, then don't be afraid to just open the windows and use it as a paperweight.
It seems that any online collaboration system, for any purpose, is going to require a similar feature set. A system which allows students and teachers to collaborate online is going to be very similar to a system which allows software developers to collaborate online. What is needed is a generic online collaboration system that can be altered to fit the needs of it specific user set. Preferably, one that is not proprietary.
1. Cam yourself whenever you're teaching
2. Create an area where students can moderate-up sequences which you've defined as "units" of study.
3. After several years you will have a knowledge base which you can edit into a course. Until then, credit students for helping you teach; don't pass this activity off as being of some advantage over being in the classroom, it isn't.
4. The benefits of digitization are that it is searchably archived, available at any time, pace and place and hi-fi, multi-modal and hypertextually navigable. The advantage is that AFTER your course is completed THEN let it teach ALMOST AS efficiently as you would in person, but with no further work on your part.
Lots of good ideas here, but as one who has done it too (for an upper class computer science class) if the students have access to the Internet in general they'll abuse it.
Freshman will spend all their time AIMing their old high school buddies, checking out those sites that are blocked in the library, or messaging their classmates to do it. These are freshman who are having their first taste of freedom; not maybe motivated post-docs.
If Internet capabilities are a necessary part of your class, get the sysadmins to put that access at _your_ control. That way you can turn off all Internet access except when you want to illustrate some point.
Think about ways you can lead the students to see and do what _you_ think is important to the study of English in your class; but give them free rein and the CS majors in class will be re-writing your blog software for you. English will be the last thing they learn.
The easiest: ask for a room change and give them Internet related assignments.
I've had experience from both sides -- being a college student in a super-rich uni where profs could hire people to write and maintain awesome code, and being a high school teacher in a school that had an internet-wired lab.
By all means get a bulletin board running (or weblog) to allow students to continue discussions after class.
But when you're in seminar, or lecturing, keep computers at a distance (perhaps carry a strong magnet?) In the end, the classroom experience is about the unexpected, content-rich nature of face to face human contact, and you want to maximize this as much as possible.
If students are posting on the web instead of coming to section, or e-mailing instead of forming discussion groups outside of class, you have let computers subtract a huge amount from the educational experience.
Depending on the maturity of your students, bulletin boards can degenerate. Disallow anonymous posting except perhaps for a day or so at the beginning. If students don't feel "safe" enough to speak up in the classroom, *you*, as a teacher, have failed. There are no technological fixes for difficult students or difficult subject matter; there are powerful tools you can put at your students' disposal -- but they can become overwhelming.
In the end, the perfect classroom doesn't need computers in the slightest. CPUs are like ballpoint pens and trapper-keepers: useful, enabling, but subsidary to the main duties of the classroom. Keep this in mind when you're trying to "solve" problems using technology.
My freshman honors English class was held in a computer lab. We were supposed to use the computers for research and writing time in class. We actually did nothing but waste time with them. As much as I love computers (and hate write research papers), I really don't think they have a place in the classroom, and that we would have learned a lot more without the distraction.
Wiki's are great tools for colaberation.
You could structure it easly so everyone has there own "Free write" space and project space and mabe add a scratch board that everyone may take part adding to. build in a version tracker and you as well as talented students could be editors for "The project". yadda yadda I hated english, spell check is my freind. =P
If you're going to use the weblog for anything, use it for EVERYTHING. To have these sorts of things work, you need to have enough people actually critiquing -- that means everyone's got to be involved. I took an english class very similar to what you want to do. The prof. wasn't very strict about requiring people to use his web app, which led to there being very little content on the site.
The next thing you need to do is make sure that the page changes with the class. If it's exactly the same as when you handed out the syllabus, no one's going to want to check the page. Make sure you update the syllabus online with what is really going on in class -- your students will thank you for it.
Either REQUIRE them to use the computer, or don't use it at all. Anything inbetween will seem half-assed and won't yield any results.
First of all I want to applaude you. We need more teachers like you who are interested in creating a fun yet intellectual classroom. I don't really have any suggestions just make sure that the kids have a good time while learning. Computers are an essential tool now and if you can involve it in a way that the kids enjoy then I say go for it!!!
We had this setup in a highschool - the computers weren't really supposed to be part of hte class - the classroom was needed. The kids spent the class playing on the Internet. There wasn't much that could be done to prevent it, either.
--Brian Desmond